May 6, 2025

As academic interest in settler colonialism has increased, so have innovative studies. In her most recent book, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, Jodi Kim (Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth) takes on the topics of military and transpacific history, imperial conquest and neoimperialism, and how US outposts paradoxically reproduce liberation and domination.  Although this, at first glance, seems a lot to consider in one work, Kim’s brilliant study deftly interrogates the development of U.S. military imperialism in the transpacific as inextricable from debt imperialism and the neoliberal world order.

Cover of Jodi Kim’s Settler Garrison. Debt, Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries 

(Duke University Press, 2022)

Kim’s book opens with a wonderful analysis of the Oscar-winning South Korean movie Parasite as paralleling her work’s central concerns. Though the film is often understood by American audiences as simply a black comedy concerning South Korea’s class dynamics, Kim promotes a deeper understanding of the film’s symbolism as a critique of U.S. debt imperialism in one transpacific nation, in which Seoul is revealed as “the capital city of what is effectively a militarized US neocolony” (p. 2).  Subsequent chapters of Settler Garrison analyze transpacific spacial and temporal exemptions in which US occupation denies a county’s full sovereignty without offering US federal jurisdiction and statehood, with US presence in a territory creating a dominating metapolitical authority supplanting local autonomy and subjugating indigenous peoples.

In territories across the pacific, the US is both liberator and coercer, as Kim observes in chapters concerning spacial and temporal exemptions such as the military base/camptown, the POW camp, and Guam. Importantly, these exemptions involve both spacial and temporal structures and processes. The abstract social institutions and concrete sites all connect through land seizure and subsequent US metapolitical authority across the pacific, territory that US policy has conceptualized as an “American lake.”  In such areas, Kim finds that the US creates rules for others that it, conveniently, does not apply to itself. The current world order is based on strategic holdings, which must be reproduced through both military and extra-military dominance.

Ongoing military occupation, legal domination, and debt assignment, though, require continual shoring up.  Neocolonialism requires obfuscating the fancy footwork required to normalize it, and Kim goes on to carefully analyze cultural productions that “defamiliarize and estrange this naturalization by linking the land seizures of US settler colonialism to those of military empire” (p. 21).  Subsequent chapters in Kim’s book analyze a wealth of creative, indigenously-rooted cultural texts that expose and critique such domination so as to imagine different, better futures. The range of Kim’s cultural studies of creative works includes documentaries, short stories, novels, poetry, and stage productions. In them, she finds critical assessments of the various forms that neocolonial domination takes, including forms such as sexual exploitation, psychological warfare, and forced migration. Her analysis of such texts and their interconnected affinities allows Kim to find hope beyond current conditions.

For those uninitiated in the academic jargon of settler colonialism, Settler Garrison is dense. Though only 188 pages of text (not including notes), the writing, especially in the Introduction, can require considerable unpacking.  Regularly referencing a rich and diverse range of scholarship, Kim aims for an academic audience. Lay readers should keep Google handy for the at times dizzying array of concepts. For those willing to commit, though, Settler Garrison provides a deep and interconnected understanding of the mechanisms underlying US hegemony in the transpacific.

Baby Tooth Survey Pledge Card, Missouri Encyclopedia: https://missouriencyclopedia.org/groupsorganizations/baby-tooth-survey-st-louis  

From 1959-1970, the communities of Saint Louis, Missouri were tasked with a unique mission: sending in the teeth of children to a newly formed initiative called the Baby Tooth Survey. Founded by physicians Louise and Eric Reiss, this project was in collaboration with Saint Louis University and the Washington University of Dental Medicine with the primary goal of proving the traces of radioactive contamination within children’s bodies. This radiation was caused by hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the U.S. government in Nevada, New Mexico, and the Marshall Islands. Strontium-90, one particularly harmful radioactive isotope, was contaminating water and dairy in the United States, thereby polluting milk products being consumed by children which would be absorbed into bones and teeth. The indisputable findings of harmful radioactive levels in children documented by this initiative led President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned all nuclear tests except those detonated underground. This harrowing narrative led by housewives and mothers plays an important role in the history of anti-nuclear activism, which is captured by director Hideaki Ito in his documentary film Silent Fallout: Baby Teeth Speak (2023). 

Screened to an audience of students, faculty, and community members at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and sponsored by the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and History, Silent Fallout is split into four chapters: Omens, Ground Zero, Baby Teeth, and Silent Heroes. Each section builds upon the previous, gradually weaving together a story not just limited to the United States, but one global in its breadth. From Japan to the Marshall Islands to the United Kingdom, what Ito makes clear is that the American victims of nuclear testing are not alone in their struggles. Opening the film is activist Mary Dickson, born 1955, a downwinder from Salt Lake City, Utah. “Downwinder” refers to those who were exposed to fallout from nuclear tests, and although Salt Lake City is located miles northeast from the Nevada Test Site, there are many cases of health complications in those areas, including Mary Dickson herself, revealing the reach and dangers of nuclear fallout that spread across the United States. What she expresses in these opening scenes is her disillusionment and anger towards the U.S government as she witnessed herself and her community fall ill to radiation poisoning without adequate support nor acknowledgement from the United States. This sets the tone for the rest of the film as Ito interviews other downwinders who express similar sentiments. Although the film does capture a transnational nuclear history, it remains very much fixed within an American context. One focus of the film and a reason for its screenings across North America is to educate the American public on the violence perpetrated by the U.S. government on its own people. The anger being expressed towards the United States by white American interviewees works to destabilize an American pride and trust towards the government and question the conditions around freedom and protection.

The main protagonists of the film are the downwinders, the housewives, and the mothers who headed this movement against nuclear testing, organizing protests and anti-nuclear projects that led towards the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Louise Reiss herself received a personal phone call from President Kennedy at her home as her Baby Teeth Survey gained traction. This film inspires discussions of gendered social mobility that collapses the lines between the domestic and non-domestic realms and challenges the patriarchal legacies of nuclear science. Silent Fallout also invites us to ask: whose voices are heard? The film addresses the testing of nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands, a chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean, home to Indigenous Marshallese communities. From 1946 to 1958, the United States government conducted 67 nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands which relied upon the active displacement of Marshallese communities, the poisoning of their bodies, and the destruction of their land, the legacies of which endure to this day. The film notes that the fallout from these tests traveled as far as the United States. Only when these tests were a threat to the American public, however, did it become a point of contention, and even then, the safety and well-being of Marshallese communities was not at the forefront of public consideration. Nuclear violence relies upon hierarchical institutional power dynamics that renders redress and visibility uneven across communities with Indigenous sovereignty at the highest risk of violence. Questions located at the intersections of gender, Indigeneity, race, and class are vital to discussions of nuclear history and its ongoing processes. Silent Fallout provides insight into these histories, allowing viewers a foundation upon which to inquire about whose voices are listened to and whose bodies are protected. It is a powerful condemnation of nuclear power, not only for American audiences, but for the world. 

Nuclear fallout from nuclear testing 1951-1962

Source: Originally from Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing by Richard Miller, and featured in Silent Fallout 

Sarah Humiko Lam is a PhD student in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She specializes in the field of nuclear humanities and its intersections with gender studies and queer theory. While working closely with Japanese literature and culture she also writes about nuclear violence with a global approach that investigates solidarities across nation-state formations and overlapping systems of violence. 

Author bio:

Although recognized by several international organizations and several nations as genocide, including the United States since 1984, the Holodomor is still little understood, and even less taught in the U.S. In a survey CHGS conducted of educators, less than 6% of teachers had an understanding of the Holodomor, and even fewer included it in their classroom lessons. Much of the shroud surrounding the genocide can be attributed to secrecy implemented by the Soviet government; understanding and awareness were kept under wraps until the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

This veil of secrecy surrounding the Holodomor is the theme of a recent film, Mr. Jones, released in 2019. The movie, starring James Norton as the titular Gareth Jones, centers on a reporter’s efforts to share news of the famine outside the Soviet Union after using his connections in the British government to gain entry into the Soviet Union. Mr. Jones hadn’t intended to cover the famine, but a delayed train to Moscow led to a stop in a rural Ukrainian village. What Jones found shocks him, prompting him to abandon his plans to write about the successes of Stalin’s government and raise the call for humanitarian relief for the people of Ukraine. 

The narrative in Mr. Jones primarily focuses on the efforts of Jones to raise the alarm in the West and the security apparatus trying to stop him. As such, the film focuses less on the grisly images found in most genocide films, instead opting to tell the story of how the genocide was covered up. That’s not to say it’s not without brutality. In one particular scene, Jones comes across a village home, finding two small children without their parents. It’s not long before Jones realizes, to his horror, that children have taken to cannibalism when faced with starvation as a result of the famine. 

Like The Cut or The Promise, both films about the Armenian genocide, Mr. Jones uses its two-hour run time to educate its audience on the Holodomor, opting for a pseudo-historiagraphy rather than delving into artistic expression. The Hollywood treatment of genocide has come with heavy hitters; The Promise cast included Golden Globe winner Oscar Isaac and Oscar winner Christian Bale. For its part, in addition to James Norton, Mr. Jones includes Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard. The profile of its cast helped Mr. Jones garner wider attention, including its inclusion in this last summer’s virtual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. While the film itself is based on true events, it’s clear there is a certain degree of creative license being taken. Soon after its release, the family of Gareth Jones complained about certain scenes which they felt were exaggerated for dramatic effect. While this may be true, the film does an admirable job explaining how the orchestrated deaths of millions of Ukrainians could go largely unnoticed for decades. 

While Mr. Jones was screened as part of the 2021 MSPIFF, it is also available to stream on Hulu. 

Recently, the CHGS has also hosted several events focusing on the Holodomor, including a conversation with descendants of Holodomor survivors in 2020 and a commemorative lecture marking Holodomor Remembrance Day last year. In 2019, the Immigration History Research Archive added a collection of testimonies from survivors and their families of the Holodomor. 

Joe Eggers is the Assistant Director at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Curiously post-1945 programs for reconciliation, another “beautiful feeling,” among European formerly enemy nations, and which led to the establishment of the European Union (EU), have not inspired a Transeuropean literature. Robert Menasse’s widely translated novel Die Hauptstadt is an exception. 

The Austrian writer and enthusiastic supporter of European integration by his own admission, pens a darkly satirical tale in which self-centered EU bureaucrats invent a “Big Jubilee Project” around the theme of “Auschwitz” to mark the 50th anniversary of the EU Commission. Historical facts are wrong, this is, after all, fiction, but the novel provoked heated controversies in the German-speaking world. Critics felt that the novel “cheapened” the Holocaust by distorting its role in the foundation of the EU.

It may be that “beautiful feelings”make for good literature only when catastrophe is involved. But how to invoke empathy and peaceful conflict resolution in the midst of an ongoing catastrophe such as the Israel-Palestine conflict? 

Three recent and very different books provide a similar response: look to literature. The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History is an edited volume of social science;  Apeirogon and Rachel et les siens are novels based on historical facts.

Half of The Holocaust and the Nakba consists of comments on literary works, with pride of place given to Lebanese-born Elias Khoury searing novel Children of the Ghetto, the fictional memoir of Palestinian expatriate Adam Dannoun, who was born during the all too factual Lydda massacre of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Co-editors Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, who presented their book at CHGS in October 2020, acquaint their readers with a much lesser-known Jewish Israeli literature also, which reflected in the late 1940s and 1950s “the feeling that the plight of Palestinians refugees bore a remarkable resemblance to that of the European Jews.”Mendel Man’s An Abandoned Village (1956), written in Yiddish and published in Hebrew, exemplifies this feeling, which was not confined to radical left-wing Zionist publications.  

Metin Arditi’s novel Rachel et les siens (only available in French) offers a passionate and highly readable account of Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian’s intertwined fates under 70 years of Ottoman rule, the British mandate, and Israeli rule. Rachel, an Arab-speaking Sephardi Jew, grows up with her adopted Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi sister in a middle-class home shared with a Christian Arab family in Jaffa. Already as a child, Rachel writes a theater play, which highlights the growing rivalry over land between Arabs and Jews and pleads for cohabitation. Multilingualism is both a practical necessity and a norm to be cherished. In 1937 she loses her daughter and her husband, a philosopher trained by Martin Buber, to a terrorist attack committed by Arab Palestinians. 

To hide the identity of her second daughter’s father, she moves from Tel Aviv to Istanbul and then Paris, where her plays are staged to critical acclaim. But she scolds herself for her “lies.” Eventually, she returns to Israel to help raise a beloved handicapped grandson, whose genetic make-up includes Arab Palestinian and Jewish Israeli ancestry. The melodramatic plot stretches credibility at times, and yet self-reflective accounts of the protagonists compel the reader to identify with many Others.

Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is part novel and part factual account of two tragedies: Jewish Israeli Rami Elhanan lost his 13-year-old daughter Smadar to a Palestinian suicide bomber in Jerusalem in 1997 and Muslim Palestinian Bassam Aramin his ten-year daughter Abir in 2007 to an Israeli soldier’s bullet in front of her school. Rami and Bassam had become friends well before Abir’s death through the organization Combatants for Peace, and they have spoken together against the vicious cycle of occupation and revenge in Israel and across the world many times since. The book draws the reader into the lived experiences of Palestinians and Israelis powerfully, although its 1001 narrative sections, several of which have no obvious relation to the main story, weakens emotional connection with Bassam, Rami, and their families’ heart-rending stories occasionally.

Arditi, Bashir, Goldberg, and McCann refuse to recommend a specific political solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, be it a confederation, a federation, a one-state or two-state solution. Their books express, however, similar “beautiful feelings”: No, to nationalism and Occupation. Yes, to a binational solution for a joint Arab Israeli democratic dwelling. No, to the objectification of the other and silence. Yes, to speaking up authentically and listening. No, to conflating the Holocaust with the Nakba. Yes, to “empathic unsettlement,” which transforms “otherness” from a problem to be disposed of into a moral and emotional challenge. And yes to flawed political compromises and even reconciliation between the two peoples. 

Considering the tragic renewal of violence last May in Israel and the occupied territories, isn’t this all pie in the sky? Renowned Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron acknowledges that books have little immediate impact. “Changes are made slowly and by small bits.” His advice to the writing profession: Be humble and keep writing.  Arditi, Bashir, Goldberg, and McCann need not be reminded. 

Catherine Guisan is an independent scholar and Associate Professor affiliated with the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Her research interests include European politics, politics of reconciliation, social movements for democratization, political theory. To read more of her work see: Un sens à l’Europe: Gagner la Paix (1950-2003), A Political Theory of Identity in European Integration: Memory and Policies, “Of Political Resurrection and ‘Lost Treasures’ in Soviet and Russian Politics.”

In this 27 minute black and white short film, viewers are introduced to Keon, a young black photographer who spends the day in Minneapolis trying to acquire a new camera so that he may finish his portfolio — a necessary component of his college application. One becomes quickly enamored with the playful, joyous, and talented Keon as he spends the day taking photos of his brothers and friends in Minneapolis. 

Throughout the short film, however, viewers are exposed to the erasure of Black joy. Throughout the film, White men approach Keon asking him to stop taking photos and leave public areas. For example, Keon is asked to stop taking pictures on the metro, Keon and his friends are asked to leave a coffee shop, and Keon is even chased out of a yard — all by White men.

What viewers witness is the erasure of Black bodies from public spaces throughout the city, and simultaneously, they watch Keon’s spark diminish slightly each time he is asked to take his passion for photography elsewhere. The short ends abruptly and dramatically when two White police officers stop Keon and his brothers, walking through what appears to be a back alley in South Minneapolis. Keon slowly raises his hands at the law enforcement officers’ requests — showing a slight hesitancy as his camera is in his hands. But it is at that moment; the two officers mistake his camera for a gun — shooting Keon dead in the alley.

“Keon” is a powerful film. E.G. Bailey carefully crafts this important narrative– a narrative known all too well by Black Americans. But this film is not just about the current epidemic in this country of law enforcement officers killing Blacks. This film is about the erasure of Black joy and Black bodies from our public spaces. Throughout the film, viewers are struck by how often Keon and his friends are asked to vacate public spaces. They are seen as loud and unruly — despite the fact they are simply attempting to compile a college entrance portfolio.

Two other shorts only strengthen this underlying message about erasure found in “Keon” in the Activism category: “Never Turn Your Back to the Wave — The Travis Jordan Story” and “Ignited States.” These two films continue to document police killings of Black men in Minnesota. 

The first tells the story of Travis Jordan, who when two rookie White cops killed when they responded to a wellness call. The county has ruled the death justified. “Ignited States,” directed by Jud Nichols, continues the narrative of anti-Black violence in its documentation of the protests and speeches of politicians in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. It respectfully documents the South Minneapolis community’s confusion, grief, anger, and hope for change. It challenges the state’s response to protests, concluding with a simple message: “you can’t protect without love.”

Together, these activism shorts relay powerful messages about White violence against Blacks in America, specifically in Minnesota. While highlighting police brutality, these shorts illustrate the depth of the issue; violence against Black Americans does not just happen at the hands of the police; it occurs through everyday actions and attempts to remove Black joy from the public sphere. The impact of these films are especially poignant in the wake of last year’s recorded murder of George Floyd and the extrajudicial killing of Winston Smith earlier this year. These police killings and the films in which they tragically inspired have provoked difficult conversations about race, law enforcement, and justice in the Twin Cities.

As Darwin expresses, “In México, no one disappears. In México, people are disappeared.” Thus, his mission and his job are to make sure these events are never forgotten and that the fight of those who protest against the disappearances doesn’t go unnoticed. Johnson’s documentary, by focusing on the portrayal of Dalia and Darwin, also chases this purpose. Through the use of space, music, sound, testimonies, and intertextuality, Until We Find Them presents the spectator with two vast stages of the disappearance phenomenon.

The first stage is crude desolation; the documentary, through the testimonies of Dalia, Darwin, and the mothers of disappeared individuals, tries to explain the possible causes and consequences of the disappearances in México. In this landscape, for example, mothers explain how the criminalization of the victims has been used as a strategy by the government to justify the country’s militarization and silence the families of those who have disappeared. 

In the same manner, Dalia expresses the difficulty of finding justice in a sea of high impunity levels and a multiplicity of perpetrators (mainly organized crime and agents of the state) that act either independently or collude to execute these crimes against humanity. And, finally, through the presentation of the spaces of the Servicio Médico Forense (Medical Forensic Service, SEMEFO) and the cemetery, Darwin gives an account of another crisis that sprouted from the violence of The War: a forensic crisis with the flooding of 40,000 unidentified bodies in which the state is accused of disappearing the disappeared twice, by incinerating unidentified bodies that were not even DNA tested. Visually profound, Johnson’s creeping camera movements and voice-over testimonies create an emotional atmosphere that echoes the gravity of the words that are being said by the participants.

The second stage presented by Until We Find Them also comes from the disappearance phenomenon, but it provides the spectator with a different look. It proves as Darwin mentions, that “as journalists, we have to be able to acknowledge the horror of the war, but we also have to be able to acknowledge how hope and love grow even in the darkest of places.” This stage is led by the families of the disappeared and the networks of support that are built around the victims of disappearances in México. 

Through his lens, Johnson not only portrays these people and their daily struggle but through subtle yet precise close-ups, he emphasizes the importance of looking into the face of the families of the disappeared. He documents how mourning is shared through a hug, through contact with one another, and in the case of Darwin and Dalia, through journalistic articles that call for justice.

To understand how these support networks are created, the documentary makes heavy use of intertextuality. For example, by incorporating other perspectives the spectator gets to know one of Jalisco’s anti-monuments: The Glorieta de las y los desaparecidos (Roundabout for the Disappeared). The spectator also joins the mothers of the victims at the moment in which they, through their searches, find a bittersweet treasure: a person’s body. 

Undoubtedly, the main contribution is that through these testimonies and scenes, Until We Find Them shouts a message for the Mexican and foreign spectator to hear, so that the disappearance phenomenon in México may change, as Dalia words it: “What needs to change is the meaning we, as people…give to the life, the dignity, and the integrity of the other. We have to understand that if something happens to her, to him, to you, to them, to whomever, it is also happening to me.” 

If you wish to learn more about Until We Find Them or schedule a screening, visit: https://www.untilwefindthem.com/.

Olga Salazar Pozos is a Ph.D. Candidate of Hispanic Literature and Culture from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has collaborated with the Observatory on Disappearances and Impunity in Mexico, a research project of the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota And, currently, Salazar is working on her dissertation, which is titled: “Between the Erasure of Violence and the Political Force of Collective Mourning: Artistic Representations of Mexico’s War on Drugs.”

Harry Harootunian is a Detroit born Armenian-American distinguished historian of Japan and scholar of Marxist theory at the University of Chicago and New York University. Born to a family of Armenian Genocide survivors in 1929, Harootunian achieved renown in academia for his pathbreaking studies of early modern Japan and Japanese cultural and intellectual history. 

Not particularly known for his work on the Armenian Genocide, which he readily admits in his recently published memoir by Duke University Press, Professor Harootunian has nevertheless managed to produce a book of profound depth and beauty. It is equal parts a personal memoir, a sociological examination of the Armenian Genocide and its often unexamined psychological effects on survivors and their children, and a meditation of what it is to be a second-generation immigrant in a country ensconced in mythic self-glorification. 

Prompted by the 100^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Harootunian examines his roots and familial history. He tries to understand the silence of his parents about their life in the Armenian villages of the Anatolian hinterlands in the Ottoman Empire, and more importantly, about their hellish experiences as survivors of the Armenian Genocide. But it is there that our author encounters his biggest challenge, a challenge he comes close to resolving, but one that in the final analysis provides no more clarity than when he first set out on the road. By the close of the book, it still remains a kind of mysterium tremendum, equally unwieldy and fascinating. As he puts it, 

The decision to not share these memories and experiences with the children is still a mystery. It could have been the enormity of experiences, its virtual unbelievability, a negative fable from the Tales of the Arabian Nights, putting into question the credibility of occurrences that exceeded the capability of children and anything they might be able to grasp.

It is not to say, however, that we learn a precious little. It is a silence that speaks louder than many an uttered speech.

No less fascinating than the silence of his parents, which Harootunian attempts to unmute with elegance and certain poetic rhythm, is the process itself and the methodology employed. In a “normal” memoiristic enterprise, a writer’s source material would be the personal memories of the author, past correspondences, memories harvested from his siblings, relatives, and perhaps close friends and colleagues. 

Yet Harootunian is confronted with what can only be described as a persistent absence of evidence. His parents, now long deceased, had refused to deposit any sort of ‘remembrances of things past’ with their children, imagining these memories to be a burden the carrying of which was not to be outsourced to their unwitting progeny under any circumstance. What then the author is left with is an assemblage of fragmentary information, more often hearsay than solid fact. 

Confronted with this reality, Harootunian is left with no option but to employ the powers of his imagination to fill in gaps in order to achieve some semblance of coherence in an otherwise “splintered narrative.” Yet even after much reconstruction, the author remains agnostic, never entirely sure whether this imagination has yielded anything resembling the truth, even if faintly. 

The predicament of what we may call “unsure knowing” was especially the case with his mother, Vehanush. Having grown up in a German missionary run orphanage, she had adopted its rigid Protestant ethic and a corresponding detached emotional world that emphasized stoic perseverance, contributing to her silence. As Harootunian puts it: “What I have been able to piece together from disparate fragments of information and hearsay is not, by any means, her complete story and is at best an outline. For this reason alone, it must stand as much as a recomposed narrative as a verifiable account.” 

Her “disciplined silence,” as he calls it, refused to be probed and prodded. Similar is the story of the author’s father, Ohannes. Though less disciplined than Harootunian’s mother, Ohannes remained equally as silent on his life before the Genocide, only occasionally letting in his children on the carefully chosen episodes from a bygone era and land, if only because he did not reject these memories, cherishing them instead and treating them as something worthwhile. Yet, much like his wife, Ohannes would remain silent on the central formative event of his life, the Genocide.

Although the book is largely a memoir, it is also more than that. In trying to understand the heritage of silence he and his siblings had inherited from their parents, Harootunian attempts to understand the catastrophe that befell the Ottoman Armenians at the turn of the 20^th century. If he could not understand the impenetrable silence, he could at least try to understand what lay behind it.  

What we have as a result is a loosely Marxist interpretation of the Turkish destruction of its Armenian minority, which elevates economic and financial rationales over other traditionally accepted motivation; (organic nationalism, religious antagonisms, ancient hatreds, etc.). Though never dismissing these other factors in toto, Harootunian makes a powerful case by situating the Armenian Genocide as an example par excellence of what Karl Marx has called “primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation.”

In this framework, though Armenians were a hated minority, their wealth, real or imagined, was far more attractive to the Turkish ruling class than their blood. In the final analysis, it would be these two elements that would jumpstart the modern Turkish republic, its original sin being an original crime – genocide. In this respect, Harootunian’s book becomes a standing rejoinder against Turkish denialism and silence. He reminds us that not all silences are equal.

The silence of the criminal is much different from that of his victim. Both victim and criminal embrace silence for different reasons, but whereas the silence of the victim can contain seeds of redemption, the one embraced by the criminal only serves to compound his crime. More than anything else, it is his guilty verdict. 

Reading Harootunian’s book, I kept thinking how his attempts to recover the silence of his parents and make them speak resembled watching a silent movie. We see characters move and speak, but we are not entirely sure what it is that they are trying to communicate, if anything. In this regard, what the author is doing is akin to putting subtitles to the film — through an act of will, imagination, and yes, love. In his effort, the author assumes multiple roles: now he is a hard-nosed historian, now a Biblical prophet proclaiming timeless truths, now a poet, and in everything, a faithful son in search of the comforting voice of his parents in a grim shadowland. 

Artyom H. Tonoyan, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

To interpret images of genocide consequently involves a double competence, which puts genocide specialists (historians, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, among others) and image analysts (semiologists, film or photography historians, new media specialists) in a separately delicate situation. The task demands the command of theory and methods within multiple scholarly fields, including specific instruments for the analysis of visual texts. The question continues to be: what can the image contribute –as iconography and as a visual narrative– to the comprehension of genocide and mass violence that could not be gained from other available documents which were traditionally studied by the discipline of history. This is a far reaching and complex question, and therefore its answers must be both ambitious and open to discussion and contestation.

To probe this question my colleague Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, and I have curated a special issue of the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ journal dedicated to the exploration of images in genocide studies – with a special focus on memory – and its methodological considerations.

“You Could See Rage”: Visual Testimony in Post-genocide Guatemala by Lacey M. Schauwecker. The author analyses the link between narrative and audio-visual testimonies to study the Guatemalan genocide, using the notions of visuality and countervisuality. In this context, she examines how survivor Rigoberta Menchú and performance artist Regina José Galindo utilize the testimony to express rage. Thereby, Schauwecker associates this type of testimony with the witnesses’ right to testify on their own terms beyond institutional processes and imperatives.

Nineteen Minutes of Horror: Insights from the Scorpions Execution Video by Iva Vukušić is the third article. In there, the author notes that the video recorded by the Scorpion unit during the Srebrenica genocide in the summer of 1995, provides unique insights into the nature of the crime, as well as the behavior of the perpetrators, and it constitutes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the events.

Christophe Busch’s article focuses on photographs taken by Nazi perpetrators. In Bonding Images: Photography and Film as Acts of Perpetration the author analyses how photography is utilized to create an in-group, noting that, as images are performative, the imagery bound the in-group.

The figure of the perpetrator is also analyzed by Ana Laura Ros in her analysis of the documentary film El Mocito. In her article El Mocito:  A Study of Cruelty at the Intersection of Chile’s Military & Civil Society. The author argues that the film poses questions about responsibility for, and complicity with, the cruelty that took place during the military regime and beyond, which all members of Chilean society must consider.

In Vicente Sánchez-Biosca’s article, Challenging Old and New Images Representing the Cambodian Genocide: ‘The Missing Picture’, the author examines the film “L’image Manquante” by Rithy Panh to highlight the way in which the French-schooled Cambodian director approaches the classical question inherited from the Holocaust of the non-representability of a genocide.

In Cockroaches, Cows and “Canines of the Hebrew Faith”: Exploring Animal Imagery in Graphic Novels about Genocide, Deborah Mayersen suggests that graphic novels about genocide feature a surprisingly rich array of animal imagery. While there has been substantial analysis of the anthropomorphic animals in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Mayersen argues that the roles and functions of non-anthropomorphized animals have received scant attention. In this vein, in her article she carries out a comparative analysis of ten graphic novels about genocide to identify and elucidate the archetypical functions of nonanthropomorphized animals.

Nora Nunn’s article, The Unbribable Witness: Image, Word, and Testimony of Crimes against Humanity in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905), studies the crimes committed in the Belgian Congo Free State through the work of Mark Twain. The author suggests that this text aimed to evoke its Euro-American audience’s empathy by activating their imaginations. In this way, Nunn considers how the visual imagery in Twain’s text engenders questions about fact, testimony, and witnessing in the realm of human rights and mass violence

The final article, Memory and Distance: On Nobuhiro Suwa’s A Letter from Hiroshima byJessica Fernanda Conejo Muñoz, examines the short film’s various memory strategies regarding the atomic bombing in the Japanese city referenced in the title. Conejo Muñoz argues that this film is a reflective game whose approach to the past is based on distancing effects.

I encourage you to view the special issue of the journal and continue to explore the significance and role of images in genocide and mass violence studies. Our edited volume of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal was published last year, and is freely accessible through the International Association of Genocide Scholars website.

Lior Zylberman has a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (UBA), is a professor of Sociology (UBA) and a researcher at the CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council) and at the Center for Genocide Studies (UNTREF). His research topic is the representation of genocides in documentary film and he has published numerous articles on the subject.

It is precisely this concept of “race,” one that associates issues of blood purity with relatively recent conversion to Christianity, which was later applied to the classification of peoples in the Spanish colonies. This ordering was crucial for the correct organization of a colonial enterprise whose stated mission was to impose Christianity upon a population of pagans and heretics. The consequences of these developments went far beyond the already vast Spanish Empire. Indeed, it was through the repudiation of its ethnic diversity and the subsequent establishment on the American continent of systems of production based on the exploitation of ethnically differentiated groups that Spain established, more than five hundred years ago, the fundaments of globalized modernity.

It is against this background that Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries analyzes the place granted to Jews and Muslims in the construction of contemporary Spanish national identity. In the book, the focus is put on the transition from an exclusive, homogeneous sense of collective self toward a more pluralistic, open and tolerant one, in a European context. Given Spain’s crucial role at the genesis of the global hierarchization of the world population along “racial” lines that took place about five hundred years ago, the efforts undertaken by the end of the twentieth century to adopt the country’s structures to the increasing valorisation of diversity, borders permeability, and coexistence of minority cultures within the nation-state can be considered as paradigmatic of the reassessment of religious difference in late modernity. The book is the result of an original combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, approached from a rich trans-disciplinary analytical framework. In addition, the choice in favor of a comparative study of Muslims and Jews, uncommon in the context of studies of contemporary Spain, proves to be particularly fruitful and revealing.

The study approaches this process from different dimensions. At the national level, it analyzes the reflection of this process in nationalist historiography, the education system and the public debates on national identity. At the international level, it tackles the problem from the perspective of Spanish foreign policy towards Israel and the Arab-Muslim states in a changing global context. From the social-communicational point of view, the emphasis was put on the construction of the self–other (Jewish and Muslim) dichotomy as reflected in the three leading Spanish newspapers (El País, El Mundo and ABC). In addition, attention was paid to the changes undergone by the Jewish and Muslim local communities during the same period.

The work shows that since 1986, Spain experienced significant transformations at the social, cultural, and international levels. These changes affected the construction of Spanish contemporary identity directly, as the different national narratives were conveniently adapted to the circumstances. The images of Muslims and Jews generated in this context were often ambivalent, in correspondence with the intrinsically problematic attempt at avoiding any explicitly ethnocentric rhetoric while implicitly preserving it. Since then, this central contradiction permeated Spanish nationalist historiography, education system, and predominant national narratives.

There is an active line of continuity between the perceptions of Muslims prevalent at the birth of the Spanish empire, which according to Anibal Quijano laid the basis for the global structures of coloniality still commonplace in today’s world, and those widespread in today’s Spain. During the period under study, Muslim otherness had two main dimensions: the complementarity between their legal marginalization as immigrants and their incorporation into the economic system as underpaid laborers, on the one hand, and their construction as internal and external enemies, on the other.

In the case of Jews, the central role they have historically played in the construction of Spanish national identity and their small numeric presence in contemporary Spain make their difference more conceptual than practical. Unlike Muslims, Jews – even those coming from North Africa – are not “colored” in modern Spain. They are not assigned attributes of “racial” inferiority to justify economic exploitation and/or political paternalism. Instead, Jewish otherness is related to deeply rooted notions of extraordinary power and moral purity/impurity.

Martina L. Weisz is a Research Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA). She studied Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, holds an M.A. in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed her Ph.D. there as well. Her publications focus on human rights, foreign policy, racism and religious difference. Her book Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain: Redefining National Boundaries was published by DeGruyter Oldenbourg in 2019.

Teaching about Genocide (Volume I)

The necessity for such a work at this moment is clear. While the Holocaust, especially since the mid-1990s, has become a mainstay of American K-12 school curriculum, teaching about so-called “other” genocides or “genocides other than the Holocaust,” has become increasingly common across the country. Though, despite this trend, few resources exist for educators, who, are often left to teach such difficult topics with little content or pedagogical support.

Henry Friedlander, quoted in the introduction, writes: “The problem with too much being taught by too many without focus is that this poses the danger of destroying the subject matter through dilettantism. It is not enough for well-meaning teachers to feel a commitment to teach about [genocide] they also must know the subject.” This is particularly true of secondary educators who must be masters of, and adept at teaching, a huge breadth of content. Teaching about Genocide gives voice to those educators who have struggled to develop ways to teach about genocide in their classrooms to inspire their fellow educators.

The 22 chapters in the work are divided into two sections: “Insights and Advice from Secondary Level Teachers” and “Insights and Advice from College and University Professors.” Both sections begin with chapters providing general overviews and rationale for teaching about genocide before progressing to more-specific case studies. Minnesota high school teacher, and long-time collaborator with the CHGS, Nancy Ziemer’s, “Advice on Teaching About Genocide,” provides an overview and suggestions pulled from her 25 years of experience teaching about genocide, while my contribution, “Why Don’t We Talk About Rape?” offers rationale drawn from my classroom experience for teaching about sexualized violence in genocide. While the chapters don’t provide specific, structured lesson plans, authors pair descriptions of classroom experiences with resources, such as Gregory Stanton’s 10 Stages of Genocide, providing inspiration for teachers to create their own lessons suitable for their students and contexts. In short, both beginning and experienced teachers alike will find this book useful in their classroom practice.

The latter half of the book, devoted to advice from professors and university instructors, provides chapters from well know genocide scholars, such as Israel Charney, Ernesto Verdeja, and Kjell Anderson. Drawn from a number of academic fields and research/teaching contexts, these chapters extend and supplement earlier chapters, providing advice and insights that are equally appropriate and useful for secondary contexts. Indeed, Kimberley Ducey’s “Survivors of Sexual Violence in Rwanda Speak: A Letter-Writing Assignment to Combat Psychic Numbing” provides a lesson idea and classroom anecdotes that pairs with my chapter on teaching about sexual violence. This and many other chapters have already informed my own planning and found their way into my teaching. The book closes with an annotated bibliography, pulling together additional genocide education resources.

While the book’s focus on curricular and pedagogical insights for secondary and post-secondary educators seems a logical choice, as, in many cases, there is little intellectual or emotional divide between upper-level high school and college-level students, this work fails to address the growing need for resources at the elementary and middle school levels. While Totten and other scholars have written persuasively against teaching about the Holocaust and genocide to students in the elementary, A growing number of middle school students encounter such content each year, with states like New Jersey requiring Holocaust and genocide education for students in grades 5-8. Many of my colleagues have voiced the need for similar work addressing the specific pedagogical demands of teaching younger students.

Teaching about Genocide (Volume II) was also published in late 2018. The decision to publish a second volume in the series, thereby reducing the cost of both volumes, makes this an affordable book for educators.

George D. Dalbo is a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, comparative genocide, and human rights education in secondary schools. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5^th-12^th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.