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A Purple Heart is the token honor given to soldiers for their
wounds. It makes them heroes. It is the title that Nina Berman has
given to her photographs of American soldiers gravely wounded in
the Iraq war, who have returned home to face life away from the
waving flags and heroic send-offs. The images are accompanied by
first-person interviews with the soldiers, who discuss their lives,
reasons for enlisting, and experience in Iraq. They provide a
glimpse into the myths of warfare as glorious spectacle through the
minds of young men desperate to believe in the righteousness of
their actions. One soldier explains that he always wanted to be a
hero. He thought the military would be fun--he would jump out of
planes. He never imagined it could be ugly until he saw Saving
Private Ryan. He is now a cripple, doped up all day on pain
medications, flat broke, with one kid and another on the way.
Another soldier describes how he called a recruiting station after
watching an MTV-style commercial for the Army on TV. An immigrant
from Pakistan, he was given his citizenship following his injury.
It's a fair trade in his mind: a leg for an American passport.
Berman's photographs are accompanied by essays from Verlyn
Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorial page writer, and Tim
Origer, a Vietnam veteran and former Marine who fought in the Tet
offensive and returned at age 19, an amputee.
?????? Nina Berman was one of the first photographers in the US to
turn her lens towards her own country, whilst all eyes were on
Iraq. She was awarded international prizes in photojournalism from
World Press Photo (2005, 2007) and DAYS Japan (2005) for her work
on young American veterans coming back from war, widely exhibited
and published in the book 'Purple Hearts - Back from Iraq.' ??????
Nina Berman in 'Homeland' has captured further the unsettling and
surreal in her own country over recent years. She has witnessed the
rise of the 'super' churches, and photographed military demos,
recruitment centres and air fairs where you are never too young to
have your own gun. She has noticed spring up in towns across
America, emergency committees, uniformed and primed for action
against attack. ?????? Many feel secure in the shared safety under
the spangled banner of a flag. But underlying Berman's technicolour
images is a sense of fear under the guise of the banal. Surreal
images from the outside - the unsettling reality is that this is
now the norm for many. Even more disturbing, that these are parts
of the USA today. ?????? In 'Homeland' Berman is an American again
looking at America. She sees the growing elements of fanaticism and
faith in guns and God, creeping through a cross-section of American
society. "I've been a documentary photographer since 1987 working
in a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, India and
Vietnam. But most of my time has been spent traveling the USA
trying to understand the American Way of Life."
Diani, a coastal town on the Indian Ocean, is significantly defined
by a large European presence that has spurred economic development
and is also supported by close relationships between Kenyans and
European immigrants and tourists. Nina Berman looks carefully at
the repercussions that these economic and social interactions have
brought to life on the Kenyan coast. She explores what happens when
poorer and less powerful members of a community are forced to give
way to profit-based real estate development, what it means when
most of Diani's schools and water resources are supplied by funds
from immigrants, and what the impact of mixed marriages is on
notions of kinship and belonging as well as the economy. This
unique story about a small Kenyan town also recounts a wider tale
of opportunity, oppression, resilience, exploitation, domination,
and accommodation in a world of economic, political, and social
change.
Diani, a coastal town on the Indian Ocean, is significantly defined
by a large European presence that has spurred economic development
and is also supported by close relationships between Kenyans and
European immigrants and tourists. Nina Berman looks carefully at
the repercussions that these economic and social interactions have
brought to life on the Kenyan coast. She explores what happens when
poorer and less powerful members of a community are forced to give
way to profit-based real estate development, what it means when
most of Diani's schools and water resources are supplied by funds
from immigrants, and what the impact of mixed marriages is on
notions of kinship and belonging as well as the economy. This
unique story about a small Kenyan town also recounts a wider tale
of opportunity, oppression, resilience, exploitation, domination,
and accommodation in a world of economic, political, and social
change.
New essays by leading scholars re-examining major aspects of the
work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great Austrian poet and
dramatist. The Viennese poet, dramatist, and prose writer Hugo von
Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was among the most celebrated men of
letters in the German language at the turn of the 19th to the 20th
century. His early poems established his reputation as the `child
prodigy' of German letters, and a few remain among the most
anthologized in the German language. His early lyric dramas
prompted no less a judge than T. S. Eliot to pronounce him, along
with Yeats and Claudel,one of the three European writers who had
done the most to revive verse drama in modern times. His critical
essays attest to the subtle powers of discrimination that marked
him as one of the most discerning literary critics of the day. And
yet he underwent a crisis of cognition and language around 1900,
and from then on turned away from poetry and lyric drama almost
entirely, concentrating instead on more public forms of drama such
as the libretti for Richard Strauss's operas, the plays written for
the Salzburg Festival (of which he was a co-founder), and on
discursive and narrative prose. The body of work that Hofmannsthal
left behind at his premature death is matched in its variety,
breadth, and quality by that of only a handful of German writers.
And yet posterity has not been kind to his reputation: those who
admired the early work for its aesthetic refinement disdained his
turn to more popular forms,whereas many of those who might have
been receptive to the more committed and public stance of his later
work were put off by his conservative politics. This volume of new
essays by top Hofmannsthal scholars re-examines his extraordinarily
rich and complex body of work, assessing his stature in German and
world literature in the new century. Contributors: Katherine Arens,
Judith Beniston, Benjamin Bennett, Nina Berman, Joanna Bottenberg,
DouglasA. Joyce, Thomas A. Kovach, Ellen Ritter, Hinrich C. Seeba,
Andreas Thomasberger, W. Edgar Yates. Professor Thomas Kovach is
Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of
Arizona.
New, specially commissioned essays on representative works of
19th-century German realism. This volume of new essays by leading
scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose
from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the
German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar,
canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann
-- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently
omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise
Muhlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von Francois, Karl May, and
Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the
context of both German literary history and of developments in
other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical
studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the
following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism;
Muhlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional
histories as national history in Freytag's DieAhnen; gender and
nation in Louise von Francois's historical fiction; theory,
reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe
and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag,
Stifter, andRaabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels;
Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl
May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male
desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and
the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O.
Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John
Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum,Nina
Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is Professor
of German at the University of California, San Diego.
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American
warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is
ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we
lack a lived sense that "America" is at war. This paradox of
in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones
and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular
culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large
portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance.
For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have
disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images
of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought
without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the
normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly
visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated
culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public
sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in
films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the
Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
Disability in Africa has received significant attention as a
dimension of global development and humanitarian initiatives.
Little international attention is given, however, to the ways in
which disability is discussed and addressed in specific countries
in Africa. Little is known also about the ways in which persons
with disabilities have advocated for themselves over the past one
hundred years and how their needs were or were not met in locations
across the continent. Kenya has been on the forefront of disability
activism and disability rights since the middle of the twentieth
century. The country was among the first African states to create a
legal framework addressing the rights of persons with disabilities,
namely the Persons with Disabilities Act of 2003. Kenya, however,
has a much longer history of institutions and organizations that
are dedicated to addressing the specific needs of persons with
disabilities, and substantial developments have occurred since the
introduction of the legal framework in 2003. Disability and Social
Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in
Conversation is the first interdisciplinary and multivocal study of
its kind to review achievements and challenges related to the
situation of persons with disabilities in Kenya today, in light of
the country's longer history of disability and the wide range of
local practices and institutions. It brings together scholars,
activists, and policymakers who comment on topics including
education, the role of activism, the legal framework, culture, the
impact of the media, and the importance of families and the
community.
This study of the German presence in Africa in the modern period
exposes forms of cultural domination that derive from a philosophy
of progress and "good intentions." The humanitarian belief in
development, however, can ultimately lead to the same structural
imbalances that an overtly racist model of intervention produces.
Berman examines five case studies involving German individuals and
their respective "missions" in Africa: Max Eyth in Egypt, Albert
Schweitzer in Gabon, Ernst Udet in East Africa, Bodo Kirchoff in
Somalia, and modern-day tourists in Kenya. These engineers,
doctors, pilots, soldiers, and tourists believed that their
presence and actions would benefit the respective countries and
their inhabitants. Nevertheless, their interventions created
profound problems for Africans. Nina Berman describes the
structures of domination that date back to colonialism but did not
disappear with decolonization and are, in fact, integral to today's
global economy. She also critiques the avoidance of African
material reality in most of the analyses of European images of
Africa, which has led to a perpetuation of the old model of
Africanism. By highlighting patterns of domination that did not
disappear with decolonization, "Impossible Missions?" disputes
previous assumptions about why global inequality has not only
persisted but increased.
German Literature on the Middle East explores the dynamic between
German-speaking and Middle Eastern states and empires from the time
of the Crusades to the end of the Cold War. This insightful study
illuminates the complex relationships among literary and other
writings on the one hand, and economic, social, and political
processes and material dimensions on the other. Focusing on
German-language literary and nonfiction writings about the Middle
East (including historical documents, religious literature, travel
writing, essays, and scholarship), Nina Berman evaluates the
multiple layers of meaning contained in these works by emphasising
the importance of culture contact; a wide web of political,
economic, and social practices; and material dimensions as
indispensible factors for the interpretive process. This analysis
of literary and related writing reveals that German views about the
Middle East evolved over the centuries and that various forms of
action toward the Middle East differed substantially as well. Ideas
about religion, culture, race, humanism, nation, and modernity,
which emerged successively but remain operative to this day, have
fashioned Germany's changed attitudes toward the Middle East.
Exploring the interplay between textual discourses and social,
political, and economic practices and materiality, German
Literature on the Middle East offers insights that challenge
accepted approaches to the study of literature, particularly
approaches that insist on the centrality of the linguistic
construction of the world. In addition, Berman presents evidence
that the German encounter with the Middle East is at once distinct
and yet at the same time characterised by patterns shared with
other European countries. By addressing the individual nature of
the German encounter in the larger European context, this study
fills a considerable gap in current scholarship. The
interdisciplinary approach of German Literature on the Middle East
will be of interest to the humanities in general, and specifically
to scholars of German studies, comparative literature, Middle
Eastern studies, and history.
German Colonialism Revisited brings together military historians,
art historians, literary scholars, cultural theorists, and
linguists to address a range of issues surrounding colonised
African, Asian, and Oceanic people's creative reactions to and
interactions with German colonialism. This scholarship sheds new
light on local power dynamics; agency; and economic, cultural, and
social networks that preceded and, as some now argue, ultimately
structured German colonial rule. Going beyond issues of resistance,
these essays present colonialism as a shared event from which both
the colonised and the colonisers emerged changed. They contribute
to current debates on transnational and intercultural processes and
highlight the ways in which the legacy of the German colonial
period is embedded in the global expansion of capitalism,
technology, and the Western legal framework.
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