Song and Silence

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Katsuyoshi Fukui, John Markakis

Conflicts in the Horn have all too often dominated press coverage of Africa. This book exposes the subtle and ambiguous role ethnicity can play in social conflict - a role that is nowhere as simple and direct as commonly assumed. Social conflict is routinely attributed to ethnic differentiation because dividing lines between rival groups often follow ethnic contours; and cultural symbolism has proved a potent ideological weapon. The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of the bond linking ethnicity to conflict in a variety of circumstances. The diverse groups are involved in confrontations at different levels and of varying intensity, ranging from elemental struggles for physical survival of groups at the margin of society, to contests for state power and control of resources at the centre. The ten studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are based on primary research by anthropologists and historians who have long experience of the region. The insights gained from this comparative work help to refine common assumptions about conflict among ethnic groups.

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Tom Herron and John Lynch

"After Bloody Sunday examines the portrayals of the day and its devastating repercussions in photography, film, theatre, poetry, television documentary, art installations, murals, commemorative events and legal discourse. The authors consider these representations' veridicity, their mechanisms of authenticity and their assumption that a particular medium - be it film, language, or visual art - can somehow articulate the 'truth' of Bloody Sunday." "The authors place special emphasis on the commemorative events held each year in Derry in which the families of the victims have - over many years - remembered their dead and injured, while at the same time building a highly-effective campaign that resulted, finally, in the new Inquiry." "Drawing on their expertise in the fields of literature, cultural theory, media studies and visual art, the authors have produced a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach towards the many representations that claim, with varying degrees of confidence, to tell the story of 'what really happened' on the streets of the Bogside on the afternoon of 30 January 1972."--BOOK JACKET.

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Glenn Willmott

"Modernity in Canada, stretching from the turn of the century to the 1950s, is a period marked by unprecedented urban and industrial growth, by urban and rural immigration from around the world, and by unique changes in power between regions, classes, races, and sexes. At the same time it is a period profoundly aware of the colonial past and its persistence, for good or ill, in the fragile economy and volatile culture of a new nation. This diverse yet distinctive Canadian modernity is explored in Unreal Country. Referring to a wide range of novels and drawing on scholarship in geography, history, and cultural studies, Glenn Willmott argues that the postcolonial rhetoric of youth coincided with - and influenced - Canadian modernism's own uncertain identity within a post-traditional, globally migrant, and interdependent society."--BOOK JACKET.

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Philip Gourevitch

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title. With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa. Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.