The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return.
Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Tangled Roots and New Genealogies
- 1. The Factness of Diaspora: The Social Sources of Genetic Genealogy
- 2. Jews—Lost and Found: Genetic History and the Evidentiary Terrain of Recognition
- 3. The Web and the Reunion
- 4. Queering Roots, Queering Diaspora
- 5. Indigenous Australian Arts of Return: Mediating Perverse Archives
- Part II Genres of Return
- 6. Memoirs of Return
- 7. Return to Half-Ruins: Fathers and Daughters, Memory and History in Palestine
- 8. Singing with the Taxi Driver: From Bollywood to Babylon
- 9. Off -Modern Homecoming in Art and Theory
- 10. Return to Nicaragua: The Aftermath of Hope
- Part III Rights of Return
- 11. Between Two Returns
- 12. Adoption and Return: Transnational Genealogies, Maternal Legacies
- 13. Foreign Correspondence
- 14. “O Give Me a Home”
- 15. The Politics of Return: When Rights Become Rites
- Part IV. Sites of Return and the New Tourism of Witness
- 16. Sites of Conscience: Lighting Up Dark Tourism
- 17. Kishinev Redux: Pogrom, Purim, Patrimony
- 18. Trauma as Durational Performance: A Return to Dark Sites
- 19. Pilgrimages, Reenactment, and Souvenirs: Modes of Memory Tourism
- Contributors
- Index
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Audio
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