Writing against Mourning: Memory in Assia Djebar’s Franco-graphie

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-29
Author(s):  
Brahim El Guabli
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  

In this article, I provide a new reading of Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie as being antimourning. I argue that in the face of institutionalized amnesia and excessive commemoration, Djebar’s refusal to mourn her dead friends institutes a politics of antimourning that seeks to reckon with the larger memory and history of silenced political murders in Algeria. Rejection of mourning enables remembering and empowers feminist engagements with the past. Rather than being another al-Khansā’—the Arab dirge poet who composed elegies for her slain brother, Ṣakhr—Djebar sees herself in Polybe’s footsteps. In offering this new argument, I aim to steer scholarly conversations to antimourning as a condition for healing in postcolonial contexts. Conscious of the centrality of language in Djebar’s writings and in her larger Maghrebi context, I have developed the undertheorized concept of Franco-graphie, which I propose opens up a new space to conceptualize violence and amnesia in writings that emerge from postcolonial, multilingual contexts, and their contested legacies.

Author(s):  
Allan Megill

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.


This book explores the history of health care in postcolonial state-making and the fragmentation of the health system in Syria during the conflict. It analyzes the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) in enabling attacks on health facilities and distinguishes the differences between humanitarian solutions and refugee populations’ expectations. It also describes the way in which humanitarian actors have fed the war economy. The book highlights the lived experience of siege in all its layers. It examines how humanitarian actors have become part of the information wars that have raged throughout the past ten years and how they have chosen to position themselves in the face of grave violations of IHL.


2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
Bolanle Adetoun ◽  
Maggie Tserere ◽  
Modupe Adewuyi ◽  
Titilola Akande ◽  
Williams Akande

How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale (DES) which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's (1984) seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. The findings further indicate that majority of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different innate and universal facial expressions. However, the construct requires revision so that it offers the examiner maximum flexibility in assessment at diverse levels, in terms of more extensive norming and programmatic replication. In brief, the DES potentially has much to offer provided that it is adequately developed for use in non-Western nations or contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Antônia Rosa Almeida ◽  
João Bartolomeu Rodrigues ◽  
Levi Leonido Fernandes da Silva ◽  
Elsa Maria Gabriel Morgado

Since man is a man, history has been responsible for showing the progress of life in society and, analyzing the foundations of education, one can understand the advances and setbacks in the segments that support it. One must remember the importance and meaning of education to realize it”s contribution to people in particular and to humanity in general. For women, education is a great example of building for citizenship. Female empowerment and its entire universe overlap with the history of education, with the infinite property through the consolidation of social struggles and female resistance to what was imposed by society. The march of women made the role of education multiply in the face of more varied realities, whether in the rural environment or in the urban environment, in the most different spaces. It is known that the motivation for the search for knowledge in the circumstances in which women lived in the past was decisive for being the provocateur of women's empowerment, because it is a right for all, in the journey of the whole social force, family, religion, politics, culture, and work. In what was proposed by the advent of the role in the life of women, it is perceived that the force linked to power, wanting to learn have become more accessible to women and this development throughout life marks the vicissitudes that education manifested in the life of each individual.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Suzannah Biernoff

The first facial transplant, using a donor’s nose, chin and mouth, was performed on Isabelle Dinoire in France in 2005, but the idea of removing or replacing the face – either with a mask, or with a living face – has been around for much longer. This article explores the cultural pre-history of face transplantation: its speculative existence in legend, literature and film before it became a medical possibility at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One of the questions posed here is: how (and for what purpose) do medical ‘firsts’ like Dinoire’s surgery acquire a history? The article begins by considering the uses of the past by transplant surgeons themselves, and by those who are concerned about the ethical or psychological implications of organ and face transplantation. Having considered these different investments in the past – one emphasising medical progress, the other highlighting enduring anxieties about medical experimentation – we turn to the first cinematic portrayal of face transplantation, in Georges Franju’s horror classic Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959). An exploration of Franju’s sources suggests a more complicated relationship between medical innovations and their cultural contexts and highlights the changing significance of the face as a site of medical and aesthetic intervention.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 266-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Navid Ezra ◽  
Joseph F. Greco ◽  
Jennifer C. Haley ◽  
Melvin W. Chiu

Background: Phymas are slowly progressive, disfiguring disorders of the face and ears that represent the end stage of rosacea. The most common phyma is rhinophyma, yet similar swellings may occur on the chin (gnatophyma), forehead (metophyma), one or both ears (otophyma), and eyelids (blepharophyma). Objective: Unlike rhinophyma, otophyma is rarely seen. We report two rare phymas: a case of gnatophyma and a case of otophyma. Methods: A 56-year-old African American man presented with a history of bumps on his chin that had begun about 7 years earlier. Physical examination was remarkable for lobulated plaques on the chin, coalescing into hypertrophic nodules and dilated pores. A 73-year-old African American male presented with bilateral cauliflower-like earlobe growths for the past 17 years. Results: A skin biopsy was performed for each patient demonstrating cystic follicular dilatation with keratin plugging, dermal scarring, psoriasiform epidermal hyperplasia, and chronic inflammation of some of the follicles. Conclusion: This case report describes a relatively rare gnatophyma and otophyma. Surgical management is well accepted as the best mode of therapy to treat rhinophyma and is becoming a first-line treatment for all phymas.


1953 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Jacobson

Almost every period of crisis and decision in American history has produced writers on political affairs who have championed a “realistic” approach to the study of human and social problems. Convinced that successful political action must proceed from man “as he is,” such writers have been persistently and profoundly suspicious of theories which, they believe, are based either upon faulty assessments of the actual nature of the individual or upon visionary estimates of his potentialities. It is the opinion of these analysts that the nature of man is irrevocably fixed in its partially depraved and partially irrational career—a constant, as it were, among the myriad imponderables entering into the social equation. Thus it has long been a significant part of their method to attempt to discover in the experience of the past a coherent theory of limits applicable to contemporary political society. Eager to profit from the experience of other generations with the perennial problems of government and politics, they have generally displayed little tolerance toward those who would flaunt rationally grounded political experiment in the face of the practical lessons of history. Such combination of pessimistic analysis and resort to the experience of the past—Political Realism —has played a crucial role in the history of political thought in America.


Race & Class ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Siddiqui

Two landmark books, originally published during the same era of struggle in the UK, have been republished in 2018: Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain and Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain. These books make the history of anti-racism in the UK – and the role of black and Asian women within this that is so often overlooked – accessible to a broad audience and give context to the gendered racism and racialised patriarchies that persist today. Reviewing these reissued texts, the author argues that the UK’s radical history is a powerful tool that can reactivate anti-racist feminism both locally and internationally, pointing to the continued fight to retain BAME domestic violence refuges in the face of austerity cuts in the UK and the unique global solidarity that is coming to the fore as an emboldened far Right attacks women’s rights internationally.


Antiquity ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 60 (229) ◽  
pp. 88-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. S. Smith ◽  
D. G. Jeffreys

The Egypt Exploration Society's Survey of Memphis was begun in 1982, the aim being to provide a full documentation for the past study of a much-neglected national capital of the ancient near east: indeed, as the authors of this article remark, ‘A history of ancient Egypt which omitted Memphis would be like a history of ancient Italy which omitted Rome’. The programme of investigation is being undertaken in the face of encroaching agricultural and residential development, and an ever-rising water table. Excavation may be regarded as auxiliary to broader survey and environmental questions. The authors are Professor Harry Smith, Edwards Professor of Egyptology, who has worked in Egypt for the last 30 years, including the groundwork for the Unesco-backed Nubian survey in the 1960s; and David Jeffreys (Research Assistant at UCL) who has worked for 16 years on sites in the UK, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.


The extinction of species of small invertebrates is difficult to recognize. However, in deposits that date from the past few million years, insect fossils are remarkably common and provide objective data on the history of the organisms that constitute the biotic communities of the present day. It might have been expected that the great climatic oscillations of the glacial-interglacial cycles should have caused widespread extinctions, if their effects on the large vertebrates is taken as our model. Yet the record of Quaternary fossil insects shows no high extinction rates during this period. Constancy of species and communities of species can be demonstrated to be the norm for at least the last million or so years (= generations). The enigma of how such constancy was sustained in the face of large-scale climatic fluctuations remains a puzzle though several possible solutions are suggested. These solutions carry implications for our estimates of present and future extinction rates.


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