Tag Archives: memory

Number 68 (2019)DOI 10.18422/68-02, , ,

02
Why Study the Early American Women’s Rights Movement?

by Hélène Quanquin

Historians have been playing a central part in explaining Trump’s America. From the Muslim travel ban and debates over Confederate monuments, to migrant children being taken away from their families, parallels with past policies and practices such as the separation of enslaved families in the antebellum South and Japanese American internment camps during World War II are drawn in traditional and social media. What has been interpreted as Americans’ inability to come to terms with their past has also made historians’ intervention in the public debate, helped by social media, more visible in recent years for both political and economic reasons.

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Number 64 (2018)DOI 10.18422/64-03, , ,

03
“I don’t know about you, but it all goes through my skin”: War Trauma Writing by Lawrence Joseph

by Inès Latiri

The Arab American poet and professor of law, Lawrence Joseph (b. 1948 in Detroit), devotes a large part of his poetry to dwell on the pervading violence in Near and Middle East war situations, mainly in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. Large sections of his poetry in Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, Before Our Eyes (collected in the publication Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos) as well as Into It express the poet’s indignation at and his denunciation of the contemporary savagery. He laments that the “weight of violence/ is unparalleled in the history of species” (Into It 4) and that there is “a state of collectively accepted permanent war” (Game Changed 127). In his poetry, he declares the urgent need to condemn violence: “What needs to be said -/ why not say it?” (Into It 4).

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Number 63 (2017)DOI 10.18422/63-05, , ,

05
From Plain People to Plains People: Mennonite Literature from the Canadian Prairies

by Martin Kuester and Julia Michael

Mennonite writing has become an integral part of the Canadian literary mosaic. Writers such as Rudy Wiebe and Miriam Toews, who hail from the Canadian Prairies, are known even beyond the Canadian borders, and there is a distinct number of younger writers from a Mennonite background who have made their voices heard from the 1990s onwards. This recent growth may seem surprising when we look at the history of Mennonite Canadian writing in English. The first English-language publication by a Mennonite writer to be received by a large non-Mennonite readership was Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many, which was published as late as 1962. However, the flow of Mennonite fictional writing in English, especially from the Canadian Prairies, has not ceased since then. In our article we will briefly explore the development of Mennonite writing in English from the beginnings until now. As Mennonites developed as a separate (and separatist) group, willing to journey around the world for their freedom of faith, we want to ask how the writing of Canadian Mennonites reflects this traditional culture. Furthermore, we will analyze the specific cultural, linguistic, and narrative elements in modern Mennonite writing, especially that from the Canadian Prairies. The first part of our paper will deal with traditional Mennonite writing and memory culture, while the second part will study more recent trends towards experimentation and the deconstruction of the tradition.

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