Between 9 August and 9 October 1793, the French city of Lyon was besieged by military forces of the central authority in Paris. Earlier that year, the Jacobin municipality at Lyon had been overthrown by a counter-revolutionary insurrection. Subsequently, the ville rebelle was besieged by the National Convention in Paris and ultimately defeated. The Hôtel-Dieu hospital at Lyon was reduced to ruins in the battle. Three years later, in 1796, Antoine Petit, a surgeon who was present during the siege, gave an account of that disturbing episode in
7 State violence and death politics in post-revolutionary Iran 1 Chowra Makaremi 2 From 9 January to 19 July 2012, the Iranian daily Gooya News, one of the Iranian diaspora’s main information sites, published a series of forty-one articles, entitled ‘Interviews with a torture and rape witness’. The tortures and rapes in question were from the period of violent state repression that gripped the Islamic Republic throughout the 1980s. The interviews give voice to the anonymous testimony of an official involved in the penitentiary and judicial sphere of that period
Artists, scholars, and popular media often describe James Baldwin as revolutionary, either for his written work or for his role in the civil rights movement. But what does it mean to be revolutionary? This article contends that thoughtlessly calling James Baldwin revolutionary obscures and erases the non-revolutionary strategies and approaches he employed in his contributions to the civil rights movement and to race relations as a whole. Frequent use of revolutionary as a synonym for “great” or “important” creates an association suggesting that all good things must be revolutionary, and that anything not revolutionary is insufficient, effectively erasing an entire spectrum of social and political engagement from view. Baldwin’s increasing relevance to our contemporary moment suggests that his non-revolutionary tactics are just as important as the revolutionary approaches employed by civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr.
This essay presents the idea of James Baldwin as a freedom writer, the organizing idea of my biography in progress. As a freedom writer, Baldwin was a revolutionary intellectual, an essayist and novelist committed unfailingly to the realization of racial justice, interracial political equality, and economic democracy. While the book is still in process, this short essay narrates autobiographically how I came to meet and know Baldwin’s work, explains in critical fashion my work in relation to existing biographies, and reflects interpretively my thoughts-in- progress on this fascinating and captivating figure of immense historical and social consequence.
This article compares the works of James Baldwin and Jean Améry, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. It attempts to unpack the ethical and political implications of their shared conception of the temporality of trauma. The experiences of the victim of anti-Semitism and the victim of anti-Black racism not only parallel one another, but their mutual incapacity to let go of the injustice of the past also generates a unique ethico-political response. The backward glance of the victim, the avowed incapacity to heal, as well as the phantasmatic desire to reverse time all guide this unique response. Instead of seeking forgiveness for the wrong done and declaring that all forms of resentment are illegitimate, Baldwin and Améry show us that channeling the revenge fantasy that so often attends the temporality of trauma is the material precondition of actually ending that trauma. This ultimately suggests that, for both thinkers, anything less than a new, revolutionary humanism equipped with an internationalist political project would betray the victims’ attempt to win back their dignity.
don’t have the power to make good on whatever has been agreed. And this is assuming major Western governments still believe it to be important to support relief agencies. The political landscape in which the humanitarian movement took current form has changed radically. Even a ‘centrist restoration’ in the US and Europe might not be enough to prevent this movement’s relative decline. In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard , one of the principle characters says of the revolutionary era in which the novel is set: ‘For things to remain the same
six months by the Guevarista Revolutionary Army guerrilla movement was unconditionally released on 30 January 2001 through the mediation of a third country involved in negotiations between armed Colombian groups and the government. MSF, which had confirmed the abduction of its employee in the media, played an active role encouraging the mediators to intervene and convincing the guerrillas and its allies of the benefit of an unconditional
). 16 See the CHA’s webinars: www.chaberlin.org/en/event/the-triple-nexus-threat-or-opportunity-for-humanitarian-principles/ (accessed 26 December 2020). Works Cited Davey , E. ( 2015 ), Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ). Desgrandchamps , M.-L. , Heerten , L. , Oko Omaka , A. , O’Sullivan , K. , and Taithe , B. ( 2020 ), ‘ Biafra, Humanitarian Intervention and History ’, Journal of Humanitarian
Chouliaraki , L. ( 2013 ), The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism ( Cambridge : Polity Press ). Davey , E. ( 2015 ), Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 ( Cambridge
, E. ( 2015 ), Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ). Duffield , M. ( 2018 ), Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World ( Cambridge : Polity