Search

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2010.00561.x Byline: CAROLYN J. DEAN (1) Keywords: victim; minimalism; narrative; violence; Holocaust; testimony; historiography Abstract: ABSTRACT This essay renews a discussion of how historians do, and should, represent atrocity. It argues that the problems of representing extreme violence remain under-conceptualized; in this context it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of minimalism, a style prevalent both in historiography and in an intellectual culture that values understatement in approaches to violence. The essay traces the general cultural preference for minimalist narratives of suffering, which, it claims, is driven by the widespread conviction that experimental and exuberant narratives convert victims' suffering into kitsch. It then focuses on two works, by Saul Friedlander and by Jan Gross, on the history of Jewish victims during and after the Second World War in order to assess how each uses sophisticated minimalist understatement to represent suffering, but with radically different effects. Finally, it asks historians to reflect upon the representation of extreme events by focusing on narrative style, on questions of ethics, and on the cultural narratives within which their own work on suffering and violence is inevitably embedded-especially given that historians are paying increasing attention to violent events that generate tremendous difficulties in relation to the representation both of victims and perpetrators. Author Affiliation: (1)Brown University

This article analyzes how the perceived problem of a 'surfeit' of Jewish memory of the Holocaust in France has emerged in the context of a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism [...]

Michel Foucault's theory of the historical development of human sexuality assumes a prediscursive subject and that self-loss is always a self-possession. His theory need not be accepted or rejected automatically if his historical circumstances are considered because the theory was developed to explain post-Great War masculinity. Therefore, Foucault's theory must be considered a product of modern subjectivity and sexuality and its cultural limitations accepted.

This special feature presents curated excerpts from two virtual conversations that the editors (Liana Chua and Omri Grinberg) held with anthropologist and author Asale Angel-Ajani, historian Carolyn J. Dean and anthropologist and filmmaker Meg McLagan on the theme of witnessing. Beginning with the participants' reflexive discussions of how they came to work on witnessing, the conversations delve into several intertwined questions and debates. These include the politics and impacts of witnessing; the performativity of witnessing and the subjectivities involved; the evolving place and practice of witnessing in the contemporary post-truth, digitally saturated milieu; the 'dark side' and other problematics of witnessing; how different disciplines witness and represent witnessing; and the question of what scholars can do to witness or bear witness in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An investigation on how historians have sought to foster emphatic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry is conducted. It is argued that most historical narratives have failed to address the way graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims.

This essay engages with the work of the French anthropologist, sociologist and psychiatrist Didier Fassin on the proliferation of the language of trauma and suffering in the late twentieth century. It shows the benefit of taking a long historical view. It describes the fashioning of the ‘survivor-witness’ during the 1961 Eichmann trial and its symbolic connection to the humanitarian witness that emerged in the 1990s. By illustrating the historical processes by which each of these two figures became a ‘witness’, it reveals the conditions under which traumatized victims are assigned a negative or positive cultural valence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior to 1985, type 2 diabetes was a disease of adults. Simultaneously with the global epidemic of childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes has increased in children. Initially, the presentation of small case series of type 2 diabetes in children was met with skepticism. As the number and size of the case series grew and the first long-term outcomes of end-stage complications in young adults appeared in the literature, the international community took notice with guarded interest. Type 2 diabetes disproportionately affects the children of specific ethnic groups and from disadvantaged socioeconomic environments, especially Indigenous populations. The past decade has seen unprecedented intense global interest in the etiology, treatment, and prevention of type 2 diabetes in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians' extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners as a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then analyses how some historians have sought, successfully or not, to overcome this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]