This essay analyses the literature on the foibe to illustrate a political use of human remains. The foibe are the deep karstic pits in Istria and around Trieste where Yugoslavian Communist troops disposed of Italians they executed en masse during World War II. By comparing contemporary literature on the foibe to a selection of archival reports of foibe exhumation processes it will be argued that the foibe literature popular in Italy today serves a political rather than informational purpose. Counterpublic theory will be applied to examine how the recent increase in popular foibe literature brought the identity of the esuli, one of Italy‘s subaltern counterpublics, to the national stage. The paper argues that by employing the narrative structure of the Holocaust, contemporary literature on the foibe attempts to recast Italy as a counterpublic in the wider European public sphere, presenting Italy as an unrecognised victim in World War II.
6 Claiming the dead, defining the nation: contested narratives of the independence struggle in post-conflict Timor-Leste1 Henri Myrttinen Introduction Timor-Leste’s struggle for independence (1975–99) cost the lives of more than 108,000 people, the majority of them unarmed civilians. Throughout the period of the Indonesian occupation, a small armed resistance movement, the Falintil (Forças Armadas de Libertação Nacional de Timor-Leste) fought militarily against the occupation forces, supported by a civilian resistance network. With independence, a new national
border during crossings and interviews about border crossings with a grounded, situated approach that enables an understanding of narratives and representations of border crossing in everyday life away from borders themselves. In this chapter, I draw on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Ukrainian– Romanian borderlands, which included more than 6 months of participant observation in Diyalivtsi, a village in the Chernivets’ka region of Ukraine, just 4 km from the main road between the region’s two main urban centres – Chernivtsi and Suceava. I begin this
is a tendency to divide what happened in the West into two master narratives: one emphasizes the unfortunate, unintentional result of diseases that shredded Native immune systems from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries throughout the Americas, what Tom Bender refers to as ‘the greatest human demographic disaster in the historical record’.7 The other narrative emphasizes the role of human agency in population reduction in the second half of the nineteenth century, variously attributed to policies of ‘extermination’, the discovery of lucrative natural
gestation of affectionate relationships between the workers/maids and their employer/masters ( patrones ). As we have seen, a common phrase among families of privileged sectors when referring to domestic workers is ‘but it is as if she were family’. With this, elites seek to build a narrative of affective closeness to their employees and thereby overshadow a reality plagued by hierarchies and inferiority. That speech may well have degrees of verisimilitude, especially because affection is part of any kind of
. I will show how the narrative and biographical movement through, and the shared knowledge of, the border region within different time-spaces is constitutive of the openness to diversity that characterises this northern Montenegrin–Albanian borderland in the Sarapa case. Furthermore, I will show how in the case of a particular inclusive kinship practice and genealogical representation, ethno-national and religious diversity – although prominently featured – are but two aspects of diversity understood in a multidimensional (Vertovec 2007, 2009) and intersectional (e
and hope. There is rage at continuing colonial dominance, albeit reformulated under the veil of republicanism, and the hope of a country longing for re-foundation. The Indian-stained gestation of a constituent moment contravenes the national narrative of the elites, recovering what has been erased and carving out spaces for the indigenous presence to find a place in a city and country that has been built for so many years from the perspective of whiteness. Today, at last, in Chile and Santiago, a space is
some prior knowledge about the interplay of melody and lexical tones. 5 Another objective was to investigate how this interplay was practised in the various performance templates. Other factors, such as thematics in narratives, intonation, and reduplication of syllables, had not been studied before. Different methods of description or transcription of performances have been employed in this study, depending on the aims of the analysis in question, but also in order to communicate detailed information in a way
have been excavated – have sparked social and political debates.4 In marked contrast, the response of the Malaysian general public has been largely muted, except in cases where the reinterment of remains has threatened state-sponsored dominant narratives. The reasons for this seeming ambivalence are manifold. In the first instance, the main ethnic groups in the territory – comprising indigenous Malay and migrant Chinese and Indian minorities – experienced the occupation differently. As such, there is no shared collective memory that 222 Frances Tay can be
aesthetic and ethical decisions are taken around the materiality of the site and its history, transforming a particular territory or place into the protagonist and catalyst for creation. Places are conceived as narratives and events performed and reproduced in a new light, recontextualised through the layers of their previous occupations (Pearson, Shanks 2001). This way of working defies common patterns of scenic or theatrical representations. Just as site-specific art was born as a movement that challenges