From "Racial Paradise" to the Racist Anti-racism of Frente Negra Brasileira

Satty Flaherty-Echeverría, Ph.D Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese Studies
HGMV Workshop
Thursday, October 30, 3:00p.m. Room 710 Social Sciences Building



Due to the late abolition of slavery in Brazil, in 1888, the emancipatory movements that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century lacked the strength and the language to fight effectively for racial equality. A case in point is the Frente Negra Brasileira (FNB) [Brazilian Black Front], founded in 1931 and outlawed in 1937 by Getúlio Vargas' regime. The FNB had as its main purpose the "political and social union of the National Black People, to affirm their historical rights, in virtue of their material
and moral activity in the past and for the revindication of their social and political rights under Brazilian communion."
In this presentation, Flaherty-Echeverria will explore the possible reasons due to which the FNB failed to achieve its political goals. She will concentrate on identifying and analyzing what Celia M. Azevedo calls the "voice from within"1 that obstructed the Afro-centric imagination of Brazilian intellectuals of the time. Those intellectuals embraced the idea that Brazil was a "racial paradise" and, hence, an exceptional case when compared to race relations in the US.
Satty Flaherty-Echeverria is a Ph.D student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota writing her dissertation on the recovery of the construction of a Black experience expressed at the margins: in the Portuguese and Spanish languages. Focusing on the poetic and prose articulations connecting African and African diasporic intellectuals across the Atlantic, particularly in Portugal, Brazil and Cuba during the two world wars, who created a network mainly based on periodical publications and translations where their creative and critical work intersected and challenged the mainstream paradigms of Pan-Africanism and Negritude though remaining outside of the debate due to the language in which they were writing."
The HGMV workshop was founded to foster interdisciplinary conversations on the subject areas of Holocaust studies, genocide and memory, peace and conflict studies, human rights, nationalism and ethnic violence, representations of violence and trauma, conflict resolution, transitional justice, historical consciousness and collective memory. Support fellow scholars and provide feedback at various stages of the research process, and to engage in dialogue with invited scholars.
For more information contact Erma Nezirevic at nezir001@umn.edu.

Just A War Theory? American Public Attitudes on Proportionality and Distinction

A Lecture by Benjamin Valentino
Monday, November 3
1:30 p.m.
ROOM CHANGE
50B Humphrey School of Public Affairs

Dr. Benjamin Valentino is an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His research interests include the causes and consequences of violent conflict and American foreign and security policies, and the causes and prevention of genocide.

His book Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century won the Edgar S. Furniss Book Prize for an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security. His work appeared in outlets such as The American Political Science Review, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, Security Studies, and World Politics, as well as The New York Times and Foreign Affairs.
Sponsored by: the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, the Comparative Politics Colloquium, and the Center of Holocaust & Genocide Studies

Re/Imagining PTSD: Toward a Cripistemology of Trauma

Angela Carter, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
HGMV Workshop
Thursday, October 16, 3:00p.m. Room 710 Social Sciences Building



From news coverage to television dramas, American culture is saturated with representations of trauma. Moreover, global politics and economic policies all but ensure a future where a life structured by catastrophe can be expected.


Carter deconstructs the ubiquity of trauma discourse, arguing for a cripistemology of trauma as a way to reconceptualize PTSD in our neoliberal landscape. Whereas theorists such as Lauren Berlant have recently rejected trauma as an analytic framework - since, as it's argued, psychic catastrophe is something we'll all experience if we live long enough - she proposes a crip approach to trauma as a crucial lens into how suffering and "crisis ordinariness" are unevenly distributed, and dissimilarly experienced, among neoliberal subjects. By cripping PTSD, it becomes possible to reimagine an approach to suffering that makes life more livable.
Gesturing toward a larger dissertation project, she will outline three sites of inquiry within contemporary discourses of PTSD. First exploring how the post-9/11 framing of certain traumatized subjects as ideal citizen-patriots forcefully erases those that cannot be interpolated into rhetorics of U.S. exceptionalism. Secondly, examining how dominant methods of "curing" PTSD illuminate similar neoliberal undertones. Lastly, drawing on anti-psychology theorizing, offering beginning thoughts toward reimaging PTSD as an alternative, and queer, affective and temporal structure. In doing so, this paper proposes a crip way of understanding trauma - one that finds its political imperative in the pervasiveness of the discourse, and demands a theorization that imagines otherwise.
Angela Carter is a fifth year Ph.D Student in Feminist Studies. She came to the U after becoming a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at Truman State University, and the first person in her family to graduate from college. Her academic interests include: trauma theory, disability studies, queer theory, ethnography, and critical pedagogy. Broadly speaking, her dissertation work examines the intersections of contemporary feminist praxis and critical disability studies within the academy.
The HGMV workshop was founded to foster interdisciplinary conversations on the subject areas of Holocaust studies, genocide and memory, peace and conflict studies, human rights, nationalism and ethnic violence, representations of violence and trauma, conflict resolution, transitional justice, historical consciousness and collective memory. Support fellow scholars and provide feedback at various stages of the research process, and to engage in dialogue with invited scholars.
For more information contact Erma Nezirevic at nezir001@umn.edu.

Post-graduate Symposium on Occupation, Transitional Justice and Gender

Call for Papers and Posters
The Transitional Justice Institute (University of Ulster) and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (University of Ulster) invite proposals for a one-day postgraduate symposium on Occupation, Transitional Justice and Gender to be held on Friday, 8 May 2015.

This symposium seeks to explore the interface between occupation, transitional justice and gender. The starting point for exploration is based in feminist concerns that are broadly focused on issues of power, control and hierarchies. More specifically, feminist theorizing acknowledges that women's needs during times of occupation, conflict, and/or transition are often ignored, sidelined or essentialised; recent research is also looking into masculinities during these periods. While much research has explored transitional justice and gender, there has been limited research on the relationship and complexities of occupation and gender.
Furthermore, there is a dearth of research on how these three concepts intersect, inform and/or impact each other. Some questions to be explored during the symposium may include:
What might be the approach in exploring the interface between occupation and transitional justice while utilizing a gendered lens?
How does law capture modern instances of occupation that do not fit neatly into the existing legal coding?
Can transitional justice mechanisms be employed while there is an occupation and can such mechanisms take the gendered needs of the population into account?
Can the exceptionality of occupation reveal gender differences unapparent in normal settings and, if so, what are their implications for transitional justice theory and praxis?
We invite papers from postgraduate students (PhD and Masters) who are exploring the above-mentioned questions in any context and any time period; case studies and theoretical papers are also welcomed. We also invite poster proposals to be featured during a special poster session. For paper or poster proposals, please send a title, a 200-word abstract, and a short one-paragraph biography by 31 December 2014 to Rimona Afana (afana-r@email.ulster.ac.uk) and Stephanie Chaban (chaban-s@email.ulster.ac.uk). Acceptance of abstracts will be notified by 15 January 2015.
All submissions will be eligible for Best Paper and Best Poster awards. Papers will get substantive and thorough feedback from faculty with expertise in gender/transition and/or law of armed conflict. The organizers are exploring the possibility of publication for the best papers. The symposium will feature Professor Christine Chinkin, Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, as the keynote speaker. Gender experts from the Transitional Justice Institute and IRiSS will also participate. Furthermore, there will also be a praxis session involving domestic and international work related to women's grassroots involvement in transitional justice mechanisms. The full schedule will be announced shortly.
While there is no registration fee, we regret that we are unable to cover travel and accommodation costs for participants.
The symposium is sponsored by the Feminist & Women's Studies Association (FWSA): http://fwsablog.org.uk/
Further sponsorship is provided by the Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster, the Research Graduate School, University of Ulster, and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, University of Ulster.

The Aleph-bet as an Ontological Basis of Ethics?

Classical Rhetorics, Technical Communication, the Holocaust, and the Object Beyond
A conversation with Steven Katz, the R. Roy and Marnie Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, and Professor of English, at Clemson University.
Wednesday, October 22
125 Nolte Center
11:30 a.m.
Presented by the Department of Writing Studies

This presentation will entail discussions of rhetoric, Judaism, and philosophies of language and reality. Revisiting what he had considered to be a primary ethical problem rooted in classical Greek and Roman rhetoric, what he called "the ethic of expediency" first formalized in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Dr. Katz will touch on the apparent manifestation of this ethic in technical communication, and whether and to what degree the ethic of expediency was a major operant in the Holocaust.

Picking up the Jewish theme, Dr. Katz will summarize an ancient philosophy of the Hebrew aleph-bet, and briefly compare this philosophy to that of classical Greek rhetoric; he will argue, as he has done in publication, that this philosophy of the Hebrew aleph-bet seems to represent a somewhat unique strand of classical rhetoric. Dr. Katz will suggest ways this Jewish sophistic relates to technical communication, and how the rhetoric of the aleph-bet may harbor or at least hint at an ontological antidote to the ethic of expediency.

In the conclusion of his presentation, Dr. Katz will speculate about the epistemological implications of this orthographic ontology for mystical, magical, empirical, social-epistemic, deconstructive, object-oriented, and digital philosophies of communication and reality in a post-human age.

Lunch will follow this special event. Please RSVP to Kate Gobel (kdgobel@umn.edu.)
This lecture is sponsored by Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, The Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of English.

CHGS co-sponsoring 2 films at the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival

CHGS will co-sponsor The German Friend and 24 Days at the 2014 Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival on November first and second, both screenings will be at the Sabes Jewish Community Center.



The German Friend (Der Deutsche Freund)
Saturday, November 1
7:30 p.m.
Sabes Jewish Community Center
Tickets: $10 in advance; $14 same day
For more information or to purchase tickets click here.
The German Friend is the story of a German-Jewish girl and the son of an exiled Nazi form an enduring bond in Argentina. Through 30 years of personal and political postwar history, the film delivers an intimate examination of a guilt-ridden generation seeking to escape the legacy of their forbearers. Director Jeanine Meerapfel tells a story of a deep love in a time of political upheaval and historical change.
Directed by Jeanine Meerapfel; Argentina, Germany; 2012; German and Spanish with English subtitles; Adult, Nudity
24 Days (24 Jours: La Verite sur l'affaire Ilan Halimi)
November 2
4:00p.m.
Discussion to follow screening
Sabes Jewish Community Center
Tickets: $10 in advance; $14 same day

Sticking dangerously close to the real-life incident that inspired it, 24 Days offers up a white-knuckle dramatization of the nearly month-long kidnapping and torture of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, whose traumatic ordeal at the hands of the "Gang of Barbarians" prompted a massive police manhunt and, eventually, a national outcry against anti-Semitism in France.
Directed by Alexandre Arcady; France; 2014; English Subtitles; Mature Audiences, Content; 110 min

AGMI ANNOUNCES 2015 LEMKIN SCHOLARSHIP FOR FOREIGN STUDENTS

The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute announces 2015 LEMKIN SCHOLARSHIP program for foreign students and PhD candidates. Raphael Lemkin scholarship is intended to enable foreign students, who specialize in genocide studies, especially in the Armenian Genocide, to visit Armenia for a month to conduct research in local scientific institutions and libraries.



The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute will provide researchers possibility to carry out their research in AGMI, including necessary research materials and consultation.
The deadline for application is on 15 December, 2014. The winner will be selected by the Scientific Council of the AGMI on 25 December, 2014.
The beginning of the scholarship program is on 1 January, 2015. Winners are free to select a month within 2015 except January, February and December.
The duration of the scholarship is one month.
Winner of the Scholarship will provide article for International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies as a result of his/her research within 6 months from the end of visit to Armenia.
Financial support
The AGMI will cover all travel and accommodation expenses related to the nominee. A separate funding will be provided to cover some per diem and research expanses.
For complete details and application please click here.

A Cinematic Look at Political Violence in Latin America

Fridays, October and November 2014
2:00-4:00p.m.
Room 710 Social Sciences
Presented by Paula Cuellar, 2014-2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust & Genocide Studies



From the dictatorships of the Southern Cone to the civil wars that took place in Central America, the selected films will provide a lens into the systematic and widespread human rights violations that were perpetrated by state authorities during the last decades of the past century. By depicting the different situations lived in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, the viewers will be able to explore the darkest moments of the history of Latin America in the twentieth century through the arts. In addition to the films we will have discussions on the different implications that the particular forms of violence had for every country.



Friday, October 10: The Official Story (Argentina, 1985): The film deals with the story of an upper middle class couple who lives in Buenos Aires with an illegally adopted child. The mother comes to realize that her daughter may be the child of a desaparecido, a victim of the forced disappearances that occurred during Argentina's last military dictatorship. Director: Luis Puenzo.
Friday, October 17: Death and the Maiden (Chile, 1994): Paulina is a housewife married to a prominent lawyer in an unnamed South American country. One day a storm forces her husband Gerardo to ride home with a charming stranger. She is convinced that the stranger, Doctor Miranda, was part of the old fascist regime and that he tortured and raped her for weeks while she was blindfolded. Paulina takes him captive to determine the truth. Director: Roman Polanski.
Friday, October 24: The Fall of Fujimori (Peru, 2005): The Fall of Fujimori is a character-driven, political-thriller documentary that explores the volatile events that defined Alberto Fujimori's decade-long reign of Peru. In 2000 he fled the country for Japan to avoid facing 21 charges of corruption, murder and human rights abuses. Then, five years later, Fujimori flew into Chile and declared his intention of once again running for president in 2006. This is his story. Director: Ellen Perry.
Friday, October 31: When The Mountains Tremble (Guatemala, 1983): Documentary film produced by Skylight Pictures about the war between the Guatemalan Military and the Mayan Indigenous population of Guatemala. It narrates the story of the Guatemalan people at large, specifically the struggles of the poor and peaceful Indian population that came to be labeled "subversives" by a draconian government. Director: Pamela Yates.
Friday, November 7: Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero (El Salvador, 2011) In the 1970s, as El Salvador moved irrevocably closer to civil war, one man was known as the voice of the poor, the disenfranchised, the disappeared. Appointed Archbishop in 1977, Monseñor Oscar Romero worked tirelessly for peace, justice and human rights, while in constant personal peril. Using the power of the pulpit to denounce official corruption, he inspired millions with his nationally broadcast sermons, until in March of 1980; he was shot dead at the altar. Directors: Ana Carrigan and Juliet Weber.
Friday, November 14: Pictures from a Revolution (Nicaragua, 1991): In this lively, intellectually stimulating discourse on the power of images, a renowned photojournalist returns to the scenes of a revolution she witnessed and captured with her camera. Delving into the lives of guerrillas, Sandinistas, and bystanders, scattered from Miami to Managua, a decade after they faced off in a bloody struggle, this artful film finds both disappointment and modest pride amidst still fresh, stirring memories. Director: Susan Meiselas.
For more information please contact Paula Cuellar at cuell020@umn.edu.
Paula Cuellar is the 2014-2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is currently working towards a minor in Human Rights and an advanced degree in History at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on genocide of indigenous people in El Salvador and Paraguay in the 20th century. Cuellar's academic education includes a LL.B. Degree from the Central American University "José Simeón Cañas," a Master´s Degree in Human Rights and Education for Peace from the University of El Salvador and a LL.M. Degree in International Human Rights Law from Notre Dame. She also has a Postgraduate Diploma on Human Rights and Democratization´s Processes from the University of Chile and several diplomas on constitutional law and transitional justice courses.