Censorship Research Articles

Silence speaks volumes: Tanzanian artists and musicians are facing government censorship in a country where 64 new restrictions have just been introduced

Silence speaks volumes: Tanzanian artists and musicians are facing government censorship in a country where 64 new restrictions have just been introduced

Los subterfugios digitales de Jafar Panahi

espanolDos temas se encuentran en la aplaudida cinematografia de Jafar Panahi (1960): la exposicion de las contradicciones de la sociedad irani y el cuestionamiento del dispositivo cinematografico. El abordaje de ambas problematicas ha continuado en la ultima decada, a pesar de la prohibicion de dirigir impuesta por los ayatolas. Esto ha sido posible, en gran medida, por las oportunidades que supone la digitalizacion de las formas de registro y distribucion del material audiovisual. En largometrajes como Este no es un filme (2011) y Taxi (2015), Panahi continua con el examen de las convenciones cinematograficas que comenzo en El espejo (1997), e invita a ver un filme que “se hace solo”, es decir un dispositivo que funciona sin la participacion de un director o narrador consciente, sino por la simple actividad de un camarografo (que no acepta instrucciones) o la operacion de un artefacto (la camara en la cabina del taxi o en el telefono celular de uno de los pasajeros). De esta manera, Panahi elude la censura gubernamental, al mismo tiempo que hace evidentes ciertos rasgos de la narracion audiovisual en el contexto de la digitalizacion y las nuevas tecnologias. EnglishTwo themes can be found in Jafar Panahi’s acclaimed cinematography (1960): the exposition of contradictions within Iranian society and the questioning of the cinematographic device. Both issues have been continuously addressed in the last decade, despite the prohibition over film directing imposed by the ayatollahs. This has been possible, to a large extent, thanks to the opportunities offered by the digitalization of the recording and the distribution methods of audiovisual material. In films such as This is not a film (2011) and Taxi (2015), Panahi continues with the examination of cinematographic conventions that he began in The Mirror (1997), and invites to see a film that “is made by itself”, that is, a device that works without the involvement of a conscious director or narrator, but by the actions of a cameraman (who does not accept instructions) or the operation of an artifact (the camera in the cab of the taxi or in the cell phone of one of the passengers). In this way, Panahi avoids government censorship, while making evident certain features of audiovisual narration in the context of digitalization and new technologies.

An Investigation Into Response Inhibition in Distinct Clinical Groups Within Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Response inhibition has been frequently studied in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with mixed results. The inconsistent findings may stem in part from failure to consider the heterogeneity of the disorder. The authors examined behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) components (N2 and P3) during a simple response inhibition go/nogo task in a sample of patients with OCD (N=48) and control subjects (N=53). Comparisons in behavioral and electrophysiological measures were made between groups (OCD compared with control) and within the OCD group in terms of symptom clusters (symmetry, forbidden thoughts, and cleaning) and comorbidity status (OCD only and OCD with depression). In the OCD group, the N2 component appeared more frontally localized compared with the control group. Participants with OCD demonstrated longer N2 latency and a larger difference in N2 between the nogo and go conditions, suggesting slower but greater conflict monitoring. P3 had a larger amplitude in the OCD group compared with the control group, indicative of greater response inhibition, but was also reduced in the nogo compared with go condition, suggesting suppressed response inhibition. No significant differences were found between symptom clusters, but patients with OCD only made more omission errors compared with patients with OCD and comorbid depression. The latter cohort also had faster P3 latencies, which, combined with the behavioral data, indicates slightly improved response inhibition when comorbid depression is found. On the basis of these results, it would seem unlikely that symptom clusters have contributed to previous inconsistencies in the literature. Comorbid depression, which may have affected previous results, should be considered in future research.

Mind as text: Freud’s “typographical” model of the mind

ABSTRACTAll publications in Freud’s fin de siècle society were subject to strict governmental censorship specifically tasked with distinguishing “real” academic scholarship from subversive “fictions” masquerading as such. Cures that relied on suggestion also became a target of mistrust. This contextualization, alongside the examination of Freud’s literary references and a variety of other literary texts, encourages the conjecture that realistic concerns over the risks of censorship and obscenity charges informed a proto-model of the topographical model, in which Freud conceptualized the mind as a subversive “manuscript” that must undergo “censorship” before it can be “published”: a “typographical” model of the mind.

Filmless Festivals and Dragon Seals: Independent Cinema in China

Markus Nornes, who documented the Chinese independent film festival scene for Film Quarterly in 2009, returns with a report on the changes this sector has experienced in the intervening decade. Borrowing a metaphor from Beijing Film Academy professor Zhang Xianmin, he offers an “update from the ruins,” as government censorship and an absence of institutional support has taken a toll on what had been a thriving festival scene. Nornes reviews the challenges faced by the Beijing International Film Festival, and its innovative responses to them, and finds hope for the future at the Shanghai International Film Festival, the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, and the West Lake International Documentary Film Festival.

Why Have All Western Internet Firms (WIFs) Failed in China? A Phenomenon-Based Study

This paper uses phenomenon based research to examine why all western internet firms (WIFs) have failed in China. In contrast to western firms from other sectors which have all achieved different levels of success, no WIFs, from search engines, internet content providers, social networks, to e-commerce and sharing economy platforms, have been able to beat their Chinese competitors and achieve sustainable operational success in China. Government censorship and control and cultural differences between China and the West are often cited as main reasons for such failures, but similar conditions existed in other countries, such as Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, which did not prevent WIFs such as Google from dominating over 90% of their search markets. Existing international business theory, the Ownership-Location-Internalisation (OLI) Eclectic Paradigm, failed to offer plausible explanations. Using comprehensive empirical evidence gathered from two rounds of elite interviewing, this paper identifies the key factors and the prevailing narratives from both the inside view and outside view to explain why all WIFs have failed in China. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. Future research should examine the key factors that led to the systematic failure of WIFs in China, particularly by testing propositions and developing new theoretical frameworks.

Classics against the Regime. Piero Gobetti and Fascist Censorship in the wake of the Matteotti murder

Classics against the Regime. Piero Gobetti and Fascist Censorship in the wake of the Matteotti murder

Theories and practices of censorship: some reflections of a modernist

Theories and practices of censorship: some reflections of a modernist

Suppression and Censorship in Culture: Connection and Difference

Suppression and Censorship in Culture: Connection and Difference

The Censorship of Press in Petrograd: Transformations of Supervising Institutions in 1919

The Censorship of Press in Petrograd: Transformations of Supervising Institutions in 1919

The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory by Michael Lucken

Reviewed by: The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory by Michael Lucken Aaron William Moore The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory. By Michael Lucken. Translated by Karen Grimwade. Columbia University Press, 2017. 376 pages. Hardcover, $65.00/£50.00. This translation of the French work Le Japonais et la guerre by Michael Lucken presents a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of war experience and, more importantly, memorialization. The translation is fluent and very approachable for a general audience. Each chapter is split into small, digestible units focusing on specific issues, such as the imperial household and war responsibility, or the Allied Occupation and State Shinto. The book gives lucid insights into what Lucken defines as the second (1943–1952) and third (1952–present) stages of the transwar experience. Its greatest strength is, however, sometimes bedeviled by its narrative style—namely, its occasional representation of "Japan" as a singular protagonist, despite the powerful arguments the author himself makes about the pluralism of wartime experience and memory in Japan compared with other countries such as South Korea. One shortcoming of Lucken's approach is that the periodization he embraces artificially separates Japan from its empire, and more importantly from the war in China. For Lucken, the experience on the home front (Japan's main islands), which has dominated memory in Japan, is the most salient, because for many Japanese the war in China, for example, was a "serious but distant" event that they understood but poorly (p. 1). Certainly, Shanghai is far from a city like Akita or Miyazaki, but so is Tokyo; the "territories" may well have been a "land of fiction" dreamed up by tourism companies and professional writers (p. 28), but might we also not say the same about a supposedly timeless and traditional Kyoto, or even the putative hypermodernity of the metropole? Separating the home islands as a known space and the empire as an unknown one may create anachronistic discrepancies between wartime and postwar memory discourses. For example, why should the soldiers and civilians who periodically returned from Manchukuo to their families in Japan's northeast be less relevant to "Japanese" memory than children evacuated from Osaka, with whom the residents of other parts of Japan had little or no contact? Correspondence from China kept home front and battlefield linked, despite the censorship regime. Movement to and from Japanese enclaves in Southeast Asia and Latin America also destabilized notions of "Japan" that became more fixed in the postwar period.1 More importantly, I think it is becoming axiomatic in the historiography that the conflicts in China were the primary transformative factor, along with the Great Depression, in Japanese politics during the 1930s. Lucken argues that "memory in isolation from the events being remembered" is less productive than the discourses that "structure and predetermine" wartime experiences (p. xvi), but this claim is better served by integrating the empire and the China war with the home front experience, not isolating them—particularly with respect to his second stage of the transwar era. [End Page 316] Chapter 1 summarizes the process behind the conflicts in East and Southeast Asia that led to the Pacific War in 1941, analyzing state efforts to establish a national ideology; mobilize civilians; "repress and rehabilitate" dissenters; and "control" media, bodies, and time. As Lucken points out, as of 1937 Japanese authorities do not "appear to have had a long-term plan" for war in China, despite their attempts to organize nationally for war (pp. 9–10). He describes the subsequent period, in which the 1938 General Mobilization Law was enacted and crackdowns on intellectuals and dissident politicians intensified, as having mainly had an impact on the "middle classes," whereas for "the peasant families that still made up the majority of the population, war was a reality only in terms of their concern, tinged with pride, for the young men doing their duty on the battlefields" (p. 11). It is certainly true that conscription disproportionately affected rural families, but characterizing the changes in Japanese politics and culture of the time as a concern solely of the middle classes risks undermining the dire consequences of this systemic shift. Farmers were not subject...

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Tim Roberts Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, eds., Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2013. 196 pp. $39.50. One challenge instructors of Civil War history face is to complicate students’ assumptions that the war pitted “The North” against “The South.” Important books have appeared emphasizing the significance of regional differences in the Civil War South.1 Likewise, scholars have sought to rekindle interest, first emphasized by Frederick Jackson Turner, in American regional history.2 But until the appearance of the book under review and a few recent monographs, little Civil War scholarship has focused on what people called “the Northwestern United States,” meaning the antislavery states west of Pennsylvania (2).3 [End Page 173] Union Heartland begins to rectify the situation by presenting seven essays that seek to identify what may have been unique about the Civil War’s impact on the most agricultural part of the Union. An important essay by R. Douglas Hurt provides detailed evidence about the extent and variety of the war’s boon to midwestern agriculture. Military demands for horses, hogs, and grains encouraged farmers (male and female) to expand land development and invest in laborsaving technology; the Civil War spurred northern industrialization by first expanding farming output. Another valuable essay is Brett Barker’s study of local Republican efforts to squelch Democratic war dissent through boycotts and acts of violence against antiwar newspapers. Barker’s point is that while official actions by the Lincoln administration to suspend northerners’ civil liberties may have been measured, as previously argued by Mark E. Neely, unofficial or vigilante censorship of the Democratic press was perhaps widespread and warrants further study.4 Three of the book’s essays show a variety of midwestern women’s wartime experiences. Ginette Aley emphasizes women’s sense of alienation over the departure and uncertain fate of husbands and fathers. She notes that while gender norms of the day generally “defined a woman’s life almost entirely” in terms of her family, women in remote areas of the North were particularly affected (126). Nicole Etcheson and J. L. Anderson then show different outcomes of midwestern women’s sudden solitary circumstances. Etcheson studies how soldiers’ wives who moved in with or near their husbands’ in-laws effectively remained subordinated to their husbands as a result. Anderson, meanwhile, emphasizes women’s new expressions of autonomy in managing farms and family because of “the vacant chair” (148). The book’s other two essays reflect how not all midwesterners were consumed by the war’s sacrifices of family or civil liberties, or even economic windfalls. Michael P. Gray describes the circus-like atmosphere of civilians’ enthrallment with Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio. Julie A. Mujic, on the other hand, studies University of Michigan students’ class essays, debates, and newspapers to explain how the (male) students rationalized their failure to join the Union military. For these students, “staying in school became the equivalent of fighting the rebels,” and their classes, they asserted, prepared them to lead the country in the anticipated murky postwar era (58). Mujic’s essay could benefit from an epilogue to trace whether any of the students she studied actually played public roles during Reconstruction, but her work shows another layer of [End Page 174] midwesterners’ reactions to war, in addition to the other “battles” elucidated elsewhere in this diverse and welcome collection. Tim Roberts Western Illinois University Macomb, Illinois notes 1. William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014). 2. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). As Aley notes, however, this book omitted the Midwest as a significant American region. 3. Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the...

Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki

Reviewed by: Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost by Satoko Shimazaki William Lee (bio) Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost. By Satoko Shimazaki. Columbia University Press, New York, 2016. xiii, 372 pages. $60.00, cloth; $59.99, E-book. This fascinating book on historical kabuki is a must-read for students of that theatrical form and is recommended to anyone interested in the popular culture of Japan's Edo period (1603–1867). Using a variety of historical sources, Satoko Shimazaki contextualizes the production of the play at the center of the book's argument, Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost story of Yotsuya on the Tōkaidō Highway), written by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–1829) and first staged at the Nakamura-za in Edo in 1825. The date of this production places it squarely in the Kasei period (1804–30), a cultural epoch that saw the return of a thriving urban culture including publishing houses and kabuki theaters. Unlike that of the earlier Genroku era (1688–1704), the culture of this new golden age was centered in Edo, the seat of the shogun's government and the realm's largest metropolis, which also had usurped Kyoto's position as the country's cultural capital. By locating the genesis of the play in this context, and in an interconnected web of narratives and images, of kabuki conventions, acting traditions, and commercial pressures, Shimazaki strives not only to give the [End Page 222] reader a sense of how Nanboku's famous play might have appeared in its original performance but also to demonstrate that this performance was only a momentary event in an ongoing process. All kabuki plays have been subject to modification and revision over time. New plays, in particular, were inherently unstable. Although a plan for the whole was usually constructed in advance, often only a part of the play was presented on opening day. Over the course of the production, additional acts and scenes would be gradually added, while unsuccessful scenes might be reworked or abandoned. In the case of Yotsuya kaidan, it is uncertain which parts of the play were performed during its successful initial run (p. 5). This state of affairs Shimazaki contrasts with modern readings of the play based on the assumption of a complete and stable text. Only by acknowledging the gap between kabuki as a historical cultural practice and its modern reification in texts, she argues, "can we undertake a new exploration of the play and the broader history of Edo kabuki" (p. 275). While much of the book is thus devoted to an in-depth exploration of the play as a particular performance produced in a particular historical context, Shimazaki is also concerned, as her subtitle indicates, with the broader history. Following the introduction, the book is divided into three parts bearing the titles "The Birth of Edo Kabuki," "The Beginning of the End of Edo Kabuki," and "The Modern Rebirth of Kabuki," suggesting a dialectical historical process. The single chapter in part 1 shows how kabuki producers created "a cultural space in which the past, particularly the samurai past, could be infused into the present, instilling in audience members from all levels of society an awareness of the past as something that remained implicated in the here and now" (p. 41). This was largely achieved by employing the complementary structural devices of sekai ("world"; a familiar narrative drawn from history, legend, or literature together with its particular cast of characters) and shukō (new characters or twists in the plot), which allowed for the narrative to be brought into the present and into the world of the Edo theater audience. This explains why the presumably plebeian entertainment of kabuki served to glorify and transmit samurai values and ideology. Related to this is the function of government censorship. The popular conception, held also by many scholars, is that kabuki has always been "a sort of oppositional theater of the common people that subverted the interests of the ruling class" (p. 86). Shimazaki shows that the theater audience was more stratified than is commonly thought, and she examines...

Trawling the Wires: Mass Surveillance of Border-crossing Communication in Denmark during World War II.

The article examines government censorship and surveillance of transnational communication in times of war and crisis. At the center of analysis is the monitoring of border-crossing telephony in Denmark during World War II. The system expanded decidedly during the war, in terms of staff and equipment, bureaucratic record-keeping and the forms communication deemed eligible for monitoring. Communication across borders had been perceived as a potential security problem already before September 1939. Yet the context of war made the problem grow in gravity from potential to very real, and people who communicated across the national borders became suspicious through the very act of communicating. Thus, increasing amounts of information were accumulated in an increasingly complex collaborative project between the Danish P&T, the Foreign Ministry, and the German security service Abwehr-information on citizens, foreigners, firms, and news agencies, but also on capital flows, propaganda schemes, and tendencies in foreign media reporting.

HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

Reviewed by: HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen Richard Ashby Wilson (bio) Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018), ISBN: 9780190859121, 232 pages. Hate is trending. The sitting president of the United States regularly mobilizes his political constituency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as “criminals and rapists” who “infest” America, and by promoting a “zero tolerance” policy at the border that punitively separates children from their parents, including persons applying for asylum. There has been a resurgence in white nationalist ideology globally both in mainstream electoral politics and in ugly scenes on the streets of Charlottesville, Dresden, and Warsaw. In the United Kingdom, hate crimes spiked after the Brexit referendum and in the USA, there has been a steady rise in hate crimes against African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants and members of the LGBT community. Given this current paroxysm of populism, isn’t it high time we re-evaluated our commitment to freedom of expression and start contemplating new legislation to regulate discriminatory speech that targets vulnerable minorities? In HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship, Nadine Strossen, former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), offers a resounding defense of free speech and rejects attempts to suppress or ban speech that is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. Free speech is the lifeblood of democratic deliberation, argues Strossen, and much hate speech in the United States, while offensive, is protected speech and should remain so. Current US law only suppresses speech that intentionally advocates imminent lawless action that is likely to occur, and even then, the regulation of speech must occur in a way that is consistent with the viewpoint (or content) neutrality principle which inhibits the state from disfavoring some opinions simply because they are disagreeable. Strossen starts with the observation that there is no clear and consistent definition of “hate speech,” which she puts in scare quotations throughout the book. Hate speech is not a term of legal art and it is simply wrong to assert, as some liberal politicians have, that “hate speech is not free speech.” In Strossen’s view, “the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’ are simply deployed to demonize views people find offensive and to call for punishing a broad swathe of expression, including political discourse that is integral to our democracy.”1 Reviewing hate speech laws in the US and globally, Strossen concludes that it is simply not possible to draft hate speech laws that are not unduly vague, overbroad and counter-productive.2 Germany, France, and other European countries convict hundreds of defendants a year for offences as capacious as “incitement to hatred,” and Strossen documents a number of cases that seem disproportionately chilling of political [End Page 213] speech. They include the 2014 arrest of a British politician for publicly reading a Winston Churchill quote from 1899 that denounced the treatment of women in Muslim countries, and the conviction of a Danish man in 2016 who criticized “the ideology of Islam” on Facebook, and posted the statement, “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”3 She reminds us also of the long and repressive history of government censorship in the United States, including how, in the 1830s, Southern states banned abolitionist speech on the grounds that it had the potential to incite violence and rebellion. She observes that the Republican National Committee and some state legislatures have included the Black Lives Matter movement in resolutions condemning hate speech. HATE addresses the lively and fairly acrimonious campus hate speech debate currently taking place in the United States, and Strossen counsels faculty and students to confront provocative speakers at universities with “counterspeech” and vigorous opposing arguments, rather than to silence them with heckling and censorious campus hate speech codes.4 She points out that all the campus speech codes challenged in the courts by the ACLU have been struck down on First Amendment grounds and recommends that universities permit all speech that the government does not itself censor.5 Strossen does not countenance the view that merely being exposed to denigrating speech is in...

Friction, snake oil, and weird countries: Cybersecurity systems could deepen global inequality through regional blocking

In this moment of rising nationalism worldwide, governments, civil society groups, transnational companies, and web users all complain of increasing regional fragmentation online. While prior work in this area has primarily focused on issues of government censorship and regulatory compliance, we use an inductive and qualitative approach to examine targeted blocking by corporate entities of entire regions motivated by concerns about fraud, abuse, and theft. Through participant-observation at relevant events and intensive interviews with experts, we document the quest by professionals tasked with preserving online security to use new machine-learning based techniques to develop a “fairer” system to determine patterns of “good” and “bad” usage. However, we argue that without understanding the systematic social and political conditions that produce differential behaviors online, these systems may continue to embed unequal treatments, and troublingly may further disguise such discrimination behind more complex and less transparent automated assessment. In order to support this claim, we analyze how current forms of regional blocking incentivize users in blocked regions to behave in ways that are commonly flagged as problematic by dominant security and identification systems. To realize truly global, non-Eurocentric cybersecurity techniques would mean incorporating the ecosystems of service utilization developed by marginalized users rather than reasserting norms of an imagined (Western) user that casts aberrations as suspect.

Історичне минуле у візії Володимира Сосюри.

The complex analysis of V. Sosyura’s historical epic is given, based on the material of poems «Makhno» and «Mazepa» poems and the novel in the poems «Taras Tryasylo» as well. The reasons for V. Sosyura’s interest in the epic subject are clarified. There is evidence that the historical epic was a new concept in the V. Sosyura poetry. Attention is focused on the fact that in his youth, V. Sosyura was attracted to anarchist ideas, he was interested in the figure of Makhno as the leader of the peasant masses. In his lines directed to Makhno the author expresses condolences to his hero. V. Sosyura was interested in the traditional for foreign and Ukrainian writers is the image of Hetman Mazepa. Poem «Mazepa» is an epic work with a pronounced lyrical tone, which is a unique combination of historical events with romance of Mazepa’s love story. It is emphasized that first of all the author creates an artistic image of his hero and tries to reveal the psychology of a fighter for Ukraine. The tragedy of the poem hero and the tragedy of Ukraine are bound together. It is noted that V. Sosyura goes further than other authors in depicting forbidden topics, showing the role of Mazepa in the national historical process. A prominent place is given to the historical novel Taras Tryasylo among the other epic works. The reasons for V. Sosyura’s appeal to the Cossack leader’s figure are considered. The character’s formation and development are exposed. In the beginning of the work the author shows the social position of his hero and sympathizes him. Together with sympathy, V. Sosyura fills his life with charismatic and even fantastic features taken from folklore. The combination of two story lines is traced: the depiction of the liberation struggle in Ukraine and the tragedy of a woman who converted into the Tatar faith after being captured. It is concluded that the historical epic of V. Sosyura is an invaluable document from the witness of rough events.

"Truth as Accessible as Looking Out a Window": Unit 731 and the Ethics of Virtual Postwar Testimony

"Truth as Accessible as Looking Out a Window"Unit 731 and the Ethics of Virtual Postwar Testimony Patricia P. Chu Professor and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, creator of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, has drawn upon his own experiences in interviewing Holocaust survivors to construct a model for the interactive work of the interviewer. According to Laub, the interviewer in this delicate and unique situation must act as an analyst and create a steady, safe, and supportive environment, one in which Holocaust survivors can face their often vivid but fragmented memories and draw them into narrative form. In defending his procedure, in which the interviewer focuses on the survivor's memory and helps her articulate her own internal truths, Laub argues that the survivor's testimony should be valued for what it reveals about her psychological experiences rather than judged by its congruence with verified facts. In a series of essays about the interview process published from 1991 through 2018, Laub brackets the historiographic implications of these testimonies while foregrounding the psychological power and necessity of the listener's intervention. These essays emphasize a survivor's need for an active, empathetic, trustworthy, and deeply engaged listener to support her as she returns, in memory, to painful or traumatic events that she may have suppressed from conscious memory for decades. In the absence of the right listener, a hole or gap in a survivor's memory may mark something that has been forgotten and become unspeakable, but which may drive the survivor into unconscious reenactment or into involuntary recollections, and which may give rise to a deep urgency to testify and to bring into orderly narrative memories that may otherwise remain fragmentary. Testimony, for Laub, requires a collaboration between the survivor and her listener. This collaboration is needed to remedy historic wounds of silence and erasure. Laub has called the Holocaust an event without a witness, because the experience was too great and complex for survivors to [End Page 682] comprehend and verbalize in the moment, and because the survivors came to be silenced by the lack of a sympathetic listener or witness to their experiences. Here, I can't be sure, but Laub seems to refer both to a public erasure or denial of the events at the time, and to a private erasure of the voices of those persecuted, as they were forced internally to confront the lack of an Other who would acknowledge their suffering and their humanity, let alone their rights. The task of the interviewer is to counter this wounding by providing, for a limited time, a faithful and empathetic listener. For instance, the interviewer must sense, when a survivor pauses, whether she needs to be encouraged to continue or to be given space to retreat or rest internally in silence. Having once been traumatized or silenced, survivors are liable to experience similar events, such as the death of another family member, or the inability of family members to fully enter into their trauma-informed worldview, as repetitions of their initial wounds. The sense of being unrecognized and unheard—externally and internally—resonates with the tropes of silence, marginalization, and erasure in numerous Asian American texts. Through fiction, Asian American writers such as John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men), Nora Okja Keller, and Michael Ondaatje have given voice to the unheard victims of publicly sanctioned injustices from internment and slavelike labor conditions to actual enslavement and murder, while others such as Jung Yun, Kingston (The Woman Warrior), and Monique Truong have explored forbidden topics such as domestic abuse, rape, and invisibility as a gay son and colonial subject. In addition, Asian American scholars and memoir writers have discussed the silencing and shaming of parents not fluent in English, as well as the silences with which (immigrant or adoptive) parents reject transgender off-spring, deny the immigrant origins and losses of transracial adoptees, and seek to contain or forget traumatic historical experiences (David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation; Andrew X. Pham, Mandala and Catfish; Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood; and Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do). Thus Asian American writers often assume a role analogous to...

Cannibal Plants: Tropiques and Martinican Aesthetics

The "cultural journal" Tropiques was published on the island of Martinique during the regime of the collaborationist Vichy government. Contributors to this journal found themselves limited in the content they could publish by right-wing government censors whose official position encouraged the expression of a certain amount of "regionalism," as this was considered by the regime. One recurrent motif was the topic of plants—a seemingly benign topic, but one which, when read as a dialog between the contributors, both subverts tropes associated with flora and shows an emerging sense of what could be a Martinican or Antillean identity. This dialog consisted in texts ranging from botanical descriptions to probably the most well-known example: an article by Suzanne Césaire called "L'Homme plante," where she uses ethnographer Leo Frobenius's image of the "plant man" to describe the character of the Martinican people. This image seems to evoke passivity, but in the end, it is not only a complex metaphor for a model of autonomy and resistance for the individual Martinican, but also develops a sense of the emplacement of the population as a whole in the geography of the Antilles and it is a concrete emblem for the struggle for alimentary and economic autonomy exacerbated under the wartime blockade.

Género e receção mediática no Estado Novo

Baseado em testemunhos femininos relativos ao período entre as décadas de 1940 e 1960, este texto procura dar um contributo para a compreensão da forma como a receção mediática por parte das mulheres portuguesas foi obrigada a encontrar o seu espaço de articulação com a vida quotidiana no interior do contexto constrangedor e da cultura patriarcal no Portugal do Estado Novo, nos termos da sua hegemonia moral e das rígidas fronteiras que impunha aos papéis de género. Através de entrevistas biográficas com mulheres nascidas nas primeiras décadas do regime salazarista, abordamos alguns modos de receção da rádio e da televisão na medida em que eles configuravam uma adaptação dos então ‘novos media’ a regimes censórios profundamente interiorizados no que respeita a comportamentos e relações de género.