Raoul Peck's Lumumba and Lumumba: La mort du prophète: On Cultural Amnesia and Historical Erasure

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burlin Barr
Keyword(s):  
Historical Record ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Raoul Peck ◽  
Cultural Amnesia

Abstract:This article examines two films by Raoul Peck—Lumumba: La mort du prophèle (1992) and Lumumba (2000) that offer vastly divergent methods for remembering, memorializing, and meditating on the life and death of Patrice Lumumba. Peck succeeds in creating films that do more than preserve or resuscitate a historical record. The earlier film in particular performs analytic historical work as it delves into the conflicted historical record in which Lumumba is remembered. Peck uses an experimental and confrontational approach to reveal the ongoing forms of cultural censorship that have attempted to erase Lumumba and his legacy.

Community structure of Quaternary coral reefs compared with Recent life and death assemblages

Paleobiology ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan N. Edinger ◽  
John M. Pandolfi ◽  
Russell A. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Community Structure ◽  
Coral Reef ◽  
Reef Coral ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Taxonomic Composition ◽  
Time Averaging ◽  
Rare Taxa ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Death Assemblages

This paper assesses the reliability with which fossil reefs record the diversity and community structure of adjacent Recent reefs. The diversity and taxonomic composition of Holocene raised fossil reefs was compared with those of modern reef coral life and death assemblages in adjacent moderate and low-energy shallow reef habitats of Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea. Species richness per sample area and Shannon-Wiener diversity (H′) were highest in the fossil reefs, intermediate in the life assemblages, and lowest in the death assemblages. The taxonomic composition of the fossil reefs was most similar to the combination of the life and death assemblages from the modern reefs adjacent to the two fossil reefs. Depth zonation was recorded accurately in the fossil reefs. The Madang fossil reefs represent time-averaged composites of the combined life and death assemblages as they existed at the time the reef was uplifted.Because fossil reefs include overlapping cohorts from the life and death assemblages, lagoonal facies of fossil reefs are dominated by the dominant sediment-producing taxa, which are not necessarily the most abundant in the life assemblage. Rare or slow-growing taxa accumulate more slowly than the encasing sediments and are underrepresented in fossil reef lagoons. Time-averaging dilutes the contribution of rare taxa, rather than concentrating their contribution. Consequently, fidelity indices developed for mollusks in sediments yield low values in coral reef death and fossil assemblages. Branching corals dominate lagoonal facies of fossil reefs because they are abundant, they grow and produce sediment rapidly, and most of the sediment they produce is not exported.Fossil reefs distinguished kilometer-scale variations in community structure more clearly than did the modern life assemblages. This difference implies that fossil reefs may provide a better long-term record of community structure than modern reefs. This difference also suggests that modern kilometer-scale variation in coral reef community structure may have been reduced by anthropogenic degradation, even in the relatively unimpacted reefs of Madang Lagoon. Holocene and Pleistocene fossil reefs provide a time-integrated historical record of community composition and may be used as long-term benchmarks for comparison with modern, degraded, nearshore reefs. Comparisons between fossil reefs and degraded modern reefs display gross changes in community structure more effectively than they demonstrate local extinction of rare taxa.

High-precision dating the Akko 1 shipwreck, Israel: wiggle-matching the life and death of a ship into the historical record

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 772-783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brita Lorentzen ◽  
Sturt W. Manning ◽  
Deborah Cvikel ◽  
Yaacov Kahanov
Keyword(s):  
High Precision ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Life And Death

The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chika Unigwe
Keyword(s):  
Historical Record ◽  
First Century ◽  
Olaudah Equiano ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Dutch Translation ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The One

In this essay, Nigerian author Chika Unigwe discusses the challenges involved in writing the biographical novel The Black Messiah (currently published only in Dutch translation as De zwarte messias), which imaginatively retraces the life of Olaudah Equiano. Unigwe’s first attempt to reimagine Equiano took the form of a children’s book in the late 1990s. This project immediately drew her attention to the two primary, antithetical difficulties of writing biographical fiction: on the one hand, one needs to rely on historical information to recreate the past accurately but, on the other, fiction — being art — cannot impart a great deal of such information without becoming too didactic. Unigwe abandoned this early project but eventually took it up again in the form of an adult novel. Some of her creative choices in writing this book were guided by the imaginative spaces left in Equiano’s autobiography — for example, he hardly mentions his white wife and remains vague about his time as a plantation overseer. This prompted a series of questions for Unigwe to explore: how did a black man experience an interracial marriage in the eighteenth century? How did Equiano handle “stubborn” slaves as an overseer? How could a twenty-first century writer recreate Equiano’s state of mind without judging him by contemporary standards? There were additional challenges too. One pertained to the type of language to be used to recount Equiano’s story, another to the constraints involved in writing about a real figure, many aspects of whose life and death are on the historical record. Ultimately, Unigwe tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, history and imagination, so as to highlight the magnitude of Equiano’s accomplishments, while also exploring him as a human being whose story remains particularly relevant today.

Invulnerable Facts: Infant Mortality and Development in Nationalist Gansu

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-645
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Infant Mortality ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Infant Mortality Rate ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
High Infant Mortality ◽  
New Evidence

Abstract This article examines responses to high rates of infant mortality in China’s northwestern province of Gansu during the Nationalist decades (1927–1949). Based on public health reports for both government and popular audiences, this article argues that the problem of Gansu’s especially high infant mortality rate was constructed to serve a particular political and economic agenda, drawing heavily not only from fascist ideals but also the logic of foreign philanthropists and Nationalist technocrats. Once established, the facts of this problem and its cause remained stubbornly invulnerable to new evidence. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it brings to light actors and institutions largely absent in existing scholarship on medicine and public health in Republican China. Second, it cautions against treating infant mortality rates referenced in the historical record as dispassionate measures of life and death. Rather, these purported facts affirm the value ascribed to reproductive health and its relevance for particular political aims.

Friends in Life and Death

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard T. Vann ◽  
David Eversley
Keyword(s):  
Life And Death

Humanizing time, love, life, and death: An allegory set between the eternities.

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (35) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Farley ◽  
Debbie Joffe Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Life And Death ◽  
Love Life
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