The Genocidal Gaze

The Genocidal Gaze PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Baer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814343864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the “genocidal gaze,” an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust—concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endlösung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology—concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children—in both instances. While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer’s book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts—by German Uwe Timm, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, and installation artist William Kentridge of South Africa—that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Careful reading of texts and attention to the narrative deployment of the genocidal gaze—or the resistance to it—establishes discursive similarities in books written both during colonialism and in the post-Holocaust era. The Genocidal Gaze is an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. Moreover, Baer demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

The Genocidal Gaze

The Genocidal Gaze PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Baer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814343864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the “genocidal gaze,” an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust—concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endlösung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology—concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children—in both instances. While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer’s book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts—by German Uwe Timm, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, and installation artist William Kentridge of South Africa—that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Careful reading of texts and attention to the narrative deployment of the genocidal gaze—or the resistance to it—establishes discursive similarities in books written both during colonialism and in the post-Holocaust era. The Genocidal Gaze is an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. Moreover, Baer demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

The Genocidal Gaze

The Genocidal Gaze PDF Author: Elizabeth Roberts Baer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789991642406
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904-1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman--lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion--and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze," an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust--concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endlösung (final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology--concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children--in both instances. While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer's book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts--by German Uwe Timm, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, and installation artist William Kentridge of South Africa--that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Careful reading of texts and attention to the narrative deployment of the genocidal gaze--or the resistance to it--establishes discursive similarities in books written both during colonialism and in the post-Holocaust era. The Genocidal Gaze is an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. Moreover, Baer demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

The Genocidal Gaze

The Genocidal Gaze PDF Author: Elizabeth R. Baer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789991642406
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description


Annihilating Difference

Annihilating Difference PDF Author: Alexander Laban Hinton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520927575
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

Empire, Colony, Genocide

Empire, Colony, Genocide PDF Author: A. Dirk Moses
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782382143
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”

The Crime of All Crimes

The Crime of All Crimes PDF Author: Nicole Rafter
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479805963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Cambodia. Rwanda. Armenia. Nazi Germany. History remembers these places as the sites of unspeakable crimes against humanity, and indisputably, of genocide. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, the world has seen many instances of violence committed by states against certain groups within their borders—from the colonial ethnic cleansing the Germans committed against the Herero tribe in Africa, to the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which the Soviets shot over 20,000 Poles, to anti-communist mass murders in 1960s Indonesia. Are mass crimes against humanity like these still genocide? And how can an understanding of crime and criminals shed new light on how genocide—the “crime of all crimes”—transpires? In The Crime of All Crimes, criminologist Nicole Rafter takes an innovative approach to the study of genocide by comparing eight diverse genocides--large-scale and small; well-known and obscure—through the lens of criminal behavior. Rafter explores different models of genocidal activity, reflecting on the popular use of the Holocaust as a model for genocide and ways in which other genocides conform to different patterns. For instance, Rafter questions the assumption that only ethnic groups are targeted for genocidal “cleansing," and she also urges that actions such as genocidal rape be considered alongside traditional instances of genocidal violence. Further, by examining the causes of genocide on different levels, Rafter is able to construct profiles of typical victims and perpetrators and discuss means of preventing genocide, in addition to delving into the social psychology of genocidal behavior and the ways in which genocides are brought to an end. A sweeping and innovative investigation into the most tragic of events in the modern world, The Crime of All Crimes will fundamentally change how we think about genocide in the present day.

Hidden Genocides

Hidden Genocides PDF Author: Alexander Laban Hinton
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813561647
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust. The contributors to this collection look at these cases and others from a variety of perspectives. These essays cover the extent to which our biases, our ways of knowing, our patterns of definition, our assumptions about truth, and our processes of remembering and forgetting as well as the characteristics of generational transmission, the structures of power and state ideology, and diaspora have played a role in hiding some events and not others. Noteworthy among the collection’s coverage is whether the trade in African slaves was a form of genocide and a discussion not only of Hutus brutalizing Tutsi victims in Rwanda, but of the execution of moderate Hutus as well. Hidden Genocides is a significant contribution in terms of both descriptive narratives and interpretations to the emerging subfield of critical genocide studies. Contributors: Daniel Feierstein, Donna-Lee Frieze, Krista Hegburg, Alexander Laban Hinton, Adam Jones, A. Dirk Moses, Chris M. Nunpa, Walter Richmond, Hannibal Travis, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

The Tender Gaze

The Tender Gaze PDF Author: Muriel Cormican
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140743
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
By exploring the concept of the tender gaze in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors.

Aftermath

Aftermath PDF Author: Harald Jähner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593319745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The New York Times)—of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust. Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period. The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half the population was displaced; 10 million newly released forced laborers and several million prisoners of war returned to an uncertain existence. Cities lay in ruins—no mail, no trains, no traffic—with bodies yet to be found beneath the towering rubble. Aftermath received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019. It is the first history of Germany's national mentality in the immediate postwar years. Using major global political developments as a backdrop, Harald Jähner weaves a series of life stories into a nuanced panorama of a nation undergoing monumental change. Poised between two eras, this decade is portrayed by Jähner as a period that proved decisive for Germany's future—and one starkly different from how most of us imagine it today.

The Blessed Abyss

The Blessed Abyss PDF Author: Nanda Herbermann
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814329207
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
One woman's memories of her deportation to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women in July 1941.