Parallel Narratives? Photographs in Boer Women’s Wartime Testimonies
Discussion here draws on our wider joint research about women’s testimonies of the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 South African War.1 Our research has focused, amongst other things, on a network of women cultural entrepreneurs whose activities in ‘working up’ Boer women’s testimonies as ‘the facts’ played an important part in the politics of Afrikaner proto-nationalism until the late 1930s. The research shows that these Boer women’s testimonial narratives, while presented as entirely factual, cannot be classed straightforwardly as either fact or fiction, but instead inhabit an ‘in-between’ area, with their factual claims – claims which may but sometimes may not be ‘true facts’ – often supported by what Eakin (1985) calls fictive devices.
Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps
Few photographs have become as well known as those taken by British and American army photographers during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in what was then the German Reich in 1945. Wagons full of corpses in Dachau; half-dead and sick survivors in the small camp at Buchenwald; hundreds of dead bodies lined up in front of the ruined buildings at Nordhausen; open mass graves at Bergen-Belsen. The American writer Susan Sontag remembered her first encounter with this photographic inventory of ultimate horror as “negative epiphany,” “the prototypically modern revelation.” Ever since then it seemed plausible to her to divide her life into two parts: into the time before she saw those photographs at the age of twelve and the time after. Since they were taken and first published, these pictures have been reprinted countless times, and one receives the impression that the same photographs have been reproduced over and over again (although the archives contain numerous frames that are very little known to this day). The photographs of the liberation have long become part of the Western countries’ collective visual memory. They mostly impress themselves on our sentiments and conjure up a threatening, mute and nameless sense of “once upon a time.” Then as now they set off strong emotional reactions, of shock and terror, of compassion as well as rejection. Usually the pictures are accepted as straightforward and unambiguous reality, not as a specific photographic rendering of that reality open to analysis. More
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited