Narrative Pasts

Narrative Pasts PDF Author: Jyoti Gulati Balachandran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190991968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This book explores the narrative power of texts in creating communities. Through an investigation of genealogical, historical, and biographical texts, it retrieves the social history of the Muslim community in Gujarat, a region with one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social, and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Jyoti Gulati Balachandran highlights the role of learned Muslim men in imparting a prominent regional and historical identity to Gujarat. The book reveals how distinct forms of community and association were created and shaped over time through architecture, shrine veneration, and most importantly, textual redefinition. Narrative Pasts demonstrates that Gujarat was not only an important hub of maritime Indian Ocean trade, but also an integral part of the historical and narrative processes that shaped medieval and early modern South Asia. Employing new and rarely used literary materials in Persian and Arabic, this book brings new life and vitality to the history of the region by integrating Gujarat’s sultanate and Mughal past with the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia.

Narrative Pasts

Narrative Pasts PDF Author: Jyoti Gulati Balachandran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190991968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the narrative power of texts in creating communities. Through an investigation of genealogical, historical, and biographical texts, it retrieves the social history of the Muslim community in Gujarat, a region with one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social, and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Jyoti Gulati Balachandran highlights the role of learned Muslim men in imparting a prominent regional and historical identity to Gujarat. The book reveals how distinct forms of community and association were created and shaped over time through architecture, shrine veneration, and most importantly, textual redefinition. Narrative Pasts demonstrates that Gujarat was not only an important hub of maritime Indian Ocean trade, but also an integral part of the historical and narrative processes that shaped medieval and early modern South Asia. Employing new and rarely used literary materials in Persian and Arabic, this book brings new life and vitality to the history of the region by integrating Gujarat’s sultanate and Mughal past with the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia.

Dark Pasts

Dark Pasts PDF Author: Jennifer M. Dixon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730266
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
In Dark Pasts, Jennifer M. Dixon asks why states deny past atrocities, and when and why they change the stories they tell about them. In recent decades, states have been called on to acknowledge and apologize for historic wrongs. Some have apologized, while others have silenced, denied, and relativized past crimes. Dark Pasts unravels the complex and fraught processes through which state narratives of past atrocities are constructed, contested, and defended. Focusing on Turkey's narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan's narrative of the Nanjing Massacre, Dixon shows that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in states' narratives of their own dark pasts, even as domestic considerations determine their content. Combining historical richness and analytical rigor, Dark Pasts is a revelatory study of the persistent presence of the past and the politics that shape narratives of state wrongdoing.

National Past-times

National Past-times PDF Author: Ann Anagnost
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Anthropologist Ann Anagnost explores the fashioning and refashioning of modern Chinese subjectivity as it relates to the body of the nation. Using interviews and participant observation as well as close readings of official documents and propaganda materials, and popular media, Anagnost notes discontinuities in the nation's self-description--as though redefined at critical junctures in recent history. Photos.

Working the Past

Working the Past PDF Author: Charlotte Linde
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019514029X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Stories told within institutions play a powerful role, helping to define not only the institution itself, but also its individual members. How do institutions use stories? How do those stories both preserve the past and shape the future? To what extent does narrative construct both collective and individual identity? Charlotte Linde's unique and far-reaching study addresses these questions by looking at the interplay of narratives, memory, and identity in a large insurance company. Her detailed ethnography looks at the role of stories within the institution and how they are employed by its members in both private and group settings. Analyzing the re-telling of certain key stories, she shows how the formation of "core" stories and their multiple re-tellings and modifications provide a means of formulating and promoting a cohesive group identity - which in turn shapes the stories and identities of the individuals within the collective. Linde also looks at silences, and how stories not told also convey their version of the past. Working the Past shows how stories that might otherwise be seen as part of mundane daily life are in fact utterly essential to the formation and maintenance of individual and group identity. Her original research will appeal to those interested in narrative studies, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and institutional memory.

Narrating Our Pasts

Narrating Our Pasts PDF Author: Elizabeth Tonkin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521484633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Elizabeth Tonkin investigates the construction and interpretation of oral histories.

Drawing on the Past

Drawing on the Past PDF Author: Birte Wege
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593440628
Category : History
Languages : de
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Lange wurden Comics als triviale Unterhaltung verpönt. Erst in den letzten Jahrzehnten hat sich das geändert. Immer häufiger sind sie zum Medium der Wahl für Künstlerinnen und Künstler geworden, die kritisieren wollen, wie die etablierten Medien mit politischen Fragen umgehen. Dieses Buch untersucht das Potenzial von dokumentarischen Comics im Kontext einer sich schnell verändernden und immer weiter entwickelnden visuellen Kultur. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei gerade auch die Darstellung historischer Ereignisse und die Auseinandersetzung mit Fotografie.

Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness

Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness PDF Author: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The United Nations’ declaration of 2009 as the International Year of Reconciliation is testimony to the growing use of historical commissions as instruments of reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Since the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has had a profound impact on international efforts to deal with the aftermath of mass violence and societal conflict, this is an appropriate time for scholars to debate and reflect on the work of the TRC and the wide-ranging scholarship it has inspired across disciplines. With a foreword by Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow, Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past offers readers a front-row seat where a team of scholars draw on both theoretical analysis and case studies from around the world to explore the themes of memory, narrative, forgiveness and apology, and how these themes often interact in either mutually supportive or unsettling ways. The book is a vibrant discussion by scholars in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalytic theory, history, literary theory, and Holocaust studies. The authors explore the complex, interconnected issues of trauma and narrative (testimonial and literary narrative and theatre as narrative), mourning and the potential of forgiveness to heal the enduring effects of mass trauma, and transgenerational trauma-memory as a basis for dialogue and reconciliation in divided societies. The authors go well beyond the South African TRC and address a wide range of historical events to explore the possibilities and the challenges that lie on the path of reconciliation and forgiveness between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders in societies with a history of violent conflict and unspeakable injustice. The book provides readers with a cohesive, theoretically well-grounded analysis of the impact of traumatic memories in the personal and communal lives of survivors of trauma. It explores how narrative may be creatively applied in processes of healing trauma, and how public testimony can often restore the moral balance of societies ravaged by trauma. The book deepens understanding of the ways in which lessons from the TRC might be developed and both usefully and cautiously applied in other post-conflict situations.

Present Pasts

Present Pasts PDF Author: Andreas Huyssen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745611
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

People and their Pasts

People and their Pasts PDF Author: P. Ashton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230234461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
In this innovative and original collection, people are seen as active agents in the development of new ways of understanding the past and creating histories for the present. Chapters explore forms of public history in which people's experience and understanding of their personal, national and local pasts are part of their current lives.

Re-forming the Past

Re-forming the Past PDF Author: A. Timothy Spaulding
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210066
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charles Johnson's Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative's reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.