Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Verschlagwortet: History

“I was intrigued by how a familiar space, when destroyed, reveals both its essence and the nature of the war” – 5in10 with Vadym Ilin    

Vadym Ilin’s project uses the destruction of Ukrainian late Soviet city districts during the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine as a means to explore the change of the concept of the ‘Soviet Man’s identity’. The research starts with an investigation of how the late Soviet urban landscape shaped Soviet identity and formed the so-called “civilization of panel high-rise buildings”.

“China – Norms, Ideas, Practices” conference 2022

China and the Chinese people are diverse and took shape through a historical process; an understanding of this process and diversity would help us to achieve more distinct analyses and to avoid drawing and spreading confused pictures of China. To shed light on the often-neglected topic of how to most accurately translate and convey the content, concepts and atmosphere of a historical Chinese oeuvre, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, together with the Max Weber Foundation and the Werner Reimers Foundation, has initiated the program “China – Norms, Ideas, Practices”.

Envisioning a Homoeroticized Cityscape Through Work

By Ezgi Sarıtaş. In this essay, the author explores how the illustrations in the Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (encyclopedia) bring together scattered pieces of a visual archive of the urban poor and their marginal labour, while concurrently adopting a voyeuristic interpretation of physical labour and young male bodies as objects of homoerotic desire.

War, Migration and Memory: An Introduction

By Viktoriya Sereda. The unprecedented Russian full-scale attack on Ukraine brought the recent conflicts over memory in East Central Europe and in Ukraine to the attention of an international audience. Mass displacement also exposed millions of Ukrainians to new challenges that triggered intensive reinterpretations of the past – both the distant and the very recent – and a reevaluation of their memory through new experiences.

Silence and Radical Rethinking in Syrian Theatre of the Long 1980s

By Friederike Pannewick. This essay focuses on a Syrian author who spent most of the 1980s in self-imposed silence: the dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997). This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose artistic self-understanding was strongly molded by the Palestine conflict. Deeply concerned about the political consequences of the Israel-Egypt unilateral peace treaty on Palestinians, Wannous stopped writing literature for a whole decade after Egyptian president Sadat’s visit to Israel in fall 1977.

Memory and the Repressed: The Possibility of Therapeutic Histories of the 1980s

By Idriss Jebari. In their hearts, historians are first storytellers who seek to offer intelligible narratives of the past. Ever since Hayden White’s Metahistory, the border between history and literature has become less meaningful. Yet, valid questions remain: can a passage from a novel be used with the same factual authority as, say, a newspaper clipping, a police report, or a population register? What about a personal diary or a set of exchanged letters?

Against Remembering: The Fictional Truth of a Massacre

By Samad Alavi. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthologizes poems that testify to some of the last century’s darkest political tragedies. In her introduction, Forché establishes her basic criteria for selection. First, she includes only poems, as she wishes to demonstrate that the old “arguments about poetry and politics ha[ve] been too narrowly defined” and that it is possible to understand poems as residing between the personal and the political.