Rami Malek recently won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a drama series for his role in Mr. Robot, designating him as the first “non-white” actor to win this award in 18 years. Malek was born in the US to Coptic Christian-Egyptian parents, meaning that his win is widely celebrated amongst Arab, Egyptian, Coptic, and American communities. This win highlights the fluidity and complexity of identity, and particularly sheds light on debates about Copts as Egyptians, Copts as Arabs, and Middle Easterners and North Africans as non-white.

In Egypt, the state and some civilians have adopted a nationalist rhetoric of unity between Copts and Muslims as a way to overlook sectarian violence targeted against Copts. Recent incidents of religious strife–mainly occurring in upper Egypt–have included the stripping and dragging of an elderly Coptic women in the streets under allegations that her son was in a relationship with a Muslim woman, other incidents have involved the burning down of churches and attacks against Christian homes. President Sisi has continuously and publicly affirmed that all Egyptians are equal, which is also supported by Coptic Pope Tawadros II. The Church promotes this narrative as a way to ensure that a Coptic identity is recognized as being central to an Egyptian identity, while also pushing for Egypt to protect Copts under the law.

As the debate surrounding Copts being integral to Egypt is tied to contemporary politics, there is also a different ongoing debate about whether or not Copts are Arab. In my research, opinions varied greatly. On the one hand, there were those who refused to identify as Arab, referring to Arabs as invaders who destroyed Coptic culture and language. Instead, claims of being the modern sons of pharaohs and the indigenous people of Egypt are a great source of pride and honor. On the other hand, others believe that because they communicate in the Arabic language and live in the Middle East they are Arab.

In the US, as of 1944, people of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent are officially recognized as racially white. Before 1944, during the immigration process, MENA people would claim whiteness as a result of anti-black citizenship laws that lasted until 1952. Despite being officially considered to be white, MENA people do not reap all the benefits of white privilege and are exposed to heightened surveillance and increases in hate crimes, especially post 9/11. As a result of consistent lobbying and advocacy, the Census Bureau is exploring the possibility of adding a MENA box in the 2020 census, which will allow for more accurate data and therefore ensure better and more particular services for the MENA community.

Identity is fluid and shifts throughout time and space. It is also political, and in these cases closely tied to histories of violence and how conflict shapes group identification. Ultimately, however, as Khaled Beydoun writes, “Now whether Malek made “Arab-American” or “Egyptian-American” history ultimately hinges on how the Emmy winner identifies himself: picking one side of the Arab and Coptic divide, or choosing to embrace both. Whatever he chooses, everybody wins.”

Miray is a Ph.D. graduate student in Sociology with a focus on violence, collective memory, and the Middle East and North Africa. Miray’s current research is focused on how Copts in Kuwait, Egypt and the US make sense of their present-day experiences and historical memory. She is also the 2016-17 Badzin Fellow. 

As the academic year begins, there are four countries that I will largely be keeping an eye on.

The first country is Burundi, where extrajudicial killings have increased since the hostilities began last year. There still seems to a jarring lack of attention on this small East African nation that has had a long history of strife and atrocity.

Next is Zimbabwe, where tensions that began during the summer with a rallying call from a Zimbabwean pastor led to a one-day strike on the 6^th of July. This launched a movement called #ThisFlag, which has become a thorn in the government’s side. All of this is happening under the shadow of persistent rumors about president Mugabe’s failing health.

The third nation this column will focus on will be the West African nation of Gabon, where, following disputed election results, the nation has seen riots between supporters of president Bongo and Jean Ping. This particular election is all the more interesting considering that Jean Ping is the previous chairperson of the Commission of the African Union, yet he called for the United States rather than the African Union to intervene in the riots.

The last country that I want to draw your attention to this academic year is South Sudan. Even before the ink dried from the previous peace deal, conflict erupted in the country. Just this year the United Nations accused South Sudanese troops of raping young girls and women by the hundreds. As more refugees stream into Uganda, there are testimonies that armed actors are continually targeting young girls and women for sexual violence. Yet despite all of this, South Sudan poses unique challenges to both the United States and the United Nations. The United States finds itself in a precarious situation after an attack on U.S. diplomats by the South Sudanese presidential guard of Salva Kiir. The attack highlights the dangerous turn this conflict has taken; American diplomats are often viewed as the most protected diplomats around the world, yet these soldiers showed a brazenness that had hitherto been unseen. Despite this attack, there is still hesitation in enforcing an arms embargo on South Sudan. For the United Nations, South Sudan has highlighted all the things that several scholars of the global south have found frustrating, even annoying, about the United Nations. The greatest of which has always been the UN’s peacekeeping troops perceived incapability in actually helping to stop violence. It has come to light this summer that South Sudanese troops went on a four-hour rampage, raping several foreign aid workers, singling out Americans, and killing a South Sudanese journalist. All of this occurred in a compound that was less than a mile away from the UN peacekeeping forces. UN troops did not come to the aid of the workers despite desperate calls for help.

Five years after South Sudan’s independence, we find ourselves staring at a quagmire and wondering what could have been. This, coupled by the constant dithering by the UN and the US, is what frustrates me the most.

Wahutu Siguru is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

In March, Gender & Society published an article titled, Gender-Based Violence Against Men and Boys in Darfur: The Gender-Genocide Nexus. The paper, co-authored by Dr. Gabrielle Ferrales (Sociology, UMN), Dr. Hollie Nyseth-Brehm (Ohio State) and Suzy McElrath (Ph.D. Candidate, UMN), analyses gender-based violence against men and boys during mass atrocity. Demonstrating new theoretical connections between gender, violence, and hegemonic masculinity, this work significantly advances our understanding of how genocidal violence is gendered, but also more broadly how gender inequalities can be reproduced and maintained in diverse settings and social structures.

Wahutu Siguru:  What was the motivation behind this paper?

Dr. Ferrales: Though scholars have debated how gender facilitates and patterns violence, what is gendered about gender-based violence in any context remains understudied. Along this line more specifically, there is insufficient empirical work on gender-based violence against men and boys during mass atrocity. Yet, a more inclusive approach provides an opportunity to test, evaluate, and refine existing theory.
Current scholarship has also predominantly focused narrowly on rape by men against women. Yet, rape is but one form of gender-based violence perpetrated against men, boys, women, and girls during mass conflict. Drawing on the case of Darfur, we demonstrate how gender-based violence against men and boys constitutes an extensive range of physical and psychological actions, including acts of penetration, sexual assault, genital mutilation, forced nudity, culturally inappropriate actions that sexually harass or humiliate victims, as well as non-sexual acts perpetrated on the basis of gender, such as sex-selective killing. This expansive focus allows us to advance theoretical linkages between gender and genocide to illuminate why and how this violence occurs.

There appears to be a significant lack of scholarship on gendered violence against men during mass atrocity [your paper seems to add onto those by Charli Carpenter (2006) and Lisa Sharlach (1999)]. Why aren’t more scholars looking at this particular facet of mass atrocities?

This research is in its infancy and has faced several limitations, including limited sources of systematically collected data due to the underreporting of gender-based violence. This applies to victimization of men and boys, but also women and girls. Men specifically underreport due to shame and also significantly, their failure to conceptualize themselves as victims of gender-based violence. Work by professor Karen Weiss alerts us to the fact that when male victims do report gender-based violence, they frame their experiences in ways to reassert their masculinity, such as emphasizing how they vigorously fought back against their attacker. Similarly, international aid workers have lagged in recognizing men as victims, or potential victims, of forms of gender-based violence.

You state that both the body and gender become salient organizing principles of interaction. Would you expound on why and how?

This is a rather immense question, let me start with explaining why. Hegemonic masculinity or an emphasis on men’s physical strength, aggression, and sexuality patterns social interaction. It is omnipresent, not only in this context, but more broadly in social systems that construct men as heterosexual and dominant. Stated simply, specific norms about gender will pattern violence, where crime becomes a resource to invoke hyper-masculinity.

Gender-based violence manifests in multiple ways and contexts during mass atrocity. We identify a gender-genocide nexus where violence establishes, enforces, and reproduces gender-hierarchies within the broader social system. Candace West and Don Zimmerman originally coined the term doing gender illustrating how gender is a social construct or a product of social interaction between individuals, as well as social groups. In our case, we illustrate how dominant norms regarding gender influence forms of mass violence such as rape, genital mutilation and sex-selective killing. More specifically, doing gender through violence produces differences between groups along gender constructs that link heteronormativity, power, and ethnicity with the collective goal of eradicating the Darfuri enemy group. Specifically, we show how Darfuri men were systematically denied the attributes of dominant heterosexual masculinity and demarcated as outgroup members through four mechanisms of emasculation. Individual perpetrators, victims, and collective ethnic groups thus assume divergent yet interconnected roles of emasculators and emasculated. In this way, gender-based violence reaffirms the perpetrators own masculine dominance while simultaneously proclaiming power over the ethnic victim groups. Significantly, victimization of an individual is emblematic of the victimization of the entire community. Violence then is not only based on gender ideology but affects gender norms in cyclical, mutually reinforcing social processes that foster an exclusionary social order.

What, if any, was the most surprising finding for you as you wrote this paper?

How explicit norms regarding masculinity surfaced. For example, in one instance a perpetrator held a woman’s son hostage. He made her pay ransom in addition to forcing her to explicitly state that Arabs were the only “real” men. This strikingly illuminates how manhood is intimately linked with ethnicity. Another notable finding was the occurrence of post-mortem rape. This specific act not only emasculates the individual victim but brings shame to his family at large violating sacred burial norms and the victim’s standing in the afterlife.

What message do you hope the reader of this paper leaves with?

In order to theoretically advance our understandings of gender-based violence during mass atrocity, we need future research which examines the multiplicity of victimization of men, women, boys, and girls. While we caution that our findings reflect the Darfur case, they nevertheless highlight the importance of gendered analyses of mass violence and of uncovering the mechanisms through which gender inequalities are reproduced and become embedded in social structures. Specifically, we need more comparative work accounting for variation in extent and forms of gender-based violence across conflicts. There is also a need for both national and international courts to address both the scale and the nature of gender-based violence in mass atrocity.

Beyond this case, gender-based violence against men is not aberrant or confined to mass conflict but is prevalent in social systems that construct men as heterosexual and dominant. Gendered identities—typically masculine identities that emphasize strength, and courage—are privileged in settings ranging from the U.S. to Sudan. Following this line of inquiry, future research must further investigate how myriad forms of crime are linked to hegemonic masculinity.

Interview conducted by Wahutu Siguru, Ph.D. candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Sociology Department.

Dr. Barbara Weissberger is an emerita professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. Next month, she will be presenting her work at the Blood Libel Then & Now: The Enduring Impact of an Imaginary Event conference in New York City.  

The Edict of Expulsion of all unconverted Jews that Queen Isabel and King Fernando issued in April of 1492 ended more than a millennium of co-existence between Christians and Jews in the Spanish kingdoms. Between 1391 and 1413 that often fragile co-existence began to unravel when real and threatened violence against Jews caused a massive wave of conversion to Christianity, creating a diverse group known as conversos. Prior to the conversions, blood libel accusations against Jews in Spain, unlike in the rest of Europe, had been exceedingly rare.

The conversos varied widely in their religious beliefs and practices, from those who were devout Christians, to those who combined beliefs and practices of both Judaism and Christianity, to those who held no religious beliefs at all. But unlike Jews, conversos fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, instituted by Papal decree in 1478 to eradicate heresy. It quickly created a climate of fear and denunciation between so- called “Old” and “New” Christians that set the stage for the spectacular blood libel accusation that is the subject of my presentation: the case of the Santo Niño de La Guardia or Holy Child of La Guardia. In 1487-88, a group of Jewish and converso neighbors from two villages near Toledo were arrested by the Inquisition, accused of kidnapping, torturing, and crucifying a Christian boy. No child was ever reported missing; no body ever found. Nevertheless, after a long trial, six conversos and two Jews were found guilty and burned at the stake in an auto-de-fe on November 16, 1491. Modern scholars maintain that these events were instrumental in the royal decision just a few months later to expel Spain’s Jews. The testimony of the accused and other trial documents in this trumped-up case reveal both the complex daily interaction of Christians and Jews living under the scrutiny of the Inquisition and the Inquisition’s determination to read coexistence as a threat to the unity and security of the emerging nation. Isabel and Fernando, engaged in a long war of succession, were highly susceptible to the insistence of Inquisitor General Tomás de Torquemada that expelling the Jews would eliminate social and political tension by imposing religious unity. The political appropriation of the La Guardia myth persisted up to the twentieth century and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and his ideology of National Catholicism.

Barbara Weissberger has written extensively on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and sovereignty in Medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature, and is considered a leading feminist scholar in the field of Hispanomedievalism.  She is currently working on a book-project, entitled Anti-Semitism and Nationhood in Spain: 1490-1945.

J. Siguru Wahutu was born and raised in Kenya and moved to Minneapolis to pursue his undergraduate education. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BA in Sociology and Global Studies and a minor in Cultural Studies. He stayed in Minnesota to obtain his PhD in Sociology with a thematic focus on genocide, media and collective memory and a regional focus on Africa. Wahutu is broadly interested in how news organizations and journalists in Africa produce knowledge about genocide and mass atrocity in neighboring African countries. He was the 2013-2014 and the 2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He also writes for the CHGS blog on current events in Africa.

Wahutu’s current research focuses on how Africa’s media represented the violence in Darfur between 2003 and 2008 and compares this to how media from the global north portrayed events in Darfur during the same period. This research project aims to examine the process through which African news organizations frame atrocities and actors in atrocities for their national audiences. While much has been written about how the global north represents the global south during instances of mass violence, little is known about how Africa represents Africa. This is the gap in scholarship that Wahutu’s work fills. During the 2016-2017 academic year, Wahutu will be editing his dissertation and submitting research papers to academic journals.

On August 20^th, the Star Tribune published a story highlighting the incredible disparity between Native Americans and the rest of Minnesota in foster care placement. According to Stahl and Webster’s article, American Indian youth are ten times more likely to end up in foster care in comparison to the rest of the state. On average, two indigenous youth are sent to foster homes in Minnesota every day, the highest rate in the nation.

The sheer number of Native American children being sent to foster care in the United States is creating a significant problem. In 1978 Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). At the time, it was an attempt to keep Native American youth in tribal communities by placing them with Native foster families whenever possible. Now nearly thirty years later, Minnesota has a shortage of Native American foster homes to house the increasing number of children being taken from their home.

The ICWA was a response to the destructive policies of assimilation that were common place in the United States, like the boarding school system. These were deliberate attempts to force indigenous people into mainstream White society by stripping them of their cultural identity. Over the course of decades of implementation, forced assimilation policies created generations of disconnect between Native Americans and their heritage. It amounted to one of history’s most wide scale examples of cultural genocide.

Decades of substance abuse, poverty and violence in Native American communities, brought on as a sad legacy of past assimilation policies, is leading to an epidemic of children being removed from their homes. However, the ICWA, which was meant to protect Native youth, is causing division amongst communities. Some are calling it another example of youth being forcibly removed from their home. Other indigenous leaders point to the rates of domestic violence (the Star Tribune article says Native American youth are five times more likely to suffer abuse in the home) and addiction as reasons why the system is both necessary and a service to indigenous youth.

Across the country, issues surrounding foster care and the removal of indigenous youth are sparking controversy. Back in 2011, National Public Radio featured a series of stories on the effects of foster care in Native American communities in South Dakota. In March, a California court decision made headlines when it ruled a Choctaw girl should be sent back to her birth parents, despite pleas from the foster parents and the child herself.

It is clear there is immense distrust between indigenous communities and state institutions. There is increasing evidence that the centuries of destructive genocidal policies imposed against indigenous people in the United States has led to historical trauma, which is trauma that has been passed from generation to generation. This means that as a result of historical loss of land, culture, and population some Native Americans today are experiencing symptoms of loss, which is what contributes to disproportionately higher rates of poverty, violence and substance abuse. This is what the ICWA was intended to protect children from in the first place

Is the Indian Child Welfare Act an over correction, a way to remedy past wrongs that’s become a wrong itself? It’s unclear. Decades of forced assimilation policies have left many Native Americans justifiably weary of their youth being removed from their homes. The looming threat of cultural genocide, even a perceived threat, should be a very real concern for state policymakers. That should be reason enough for legislators, judges and social workers to consider new approaches to protecting indigenous youth while ensuring the protection of their cultural identity.

Joe Eggers is a 2016 graduate of the University of Minnesota. His master’s thesis explored the cultural genocide of indigenous people through the boarding school system. 

The semester is about to start and I find myself touching up syllabi and putting some order in my course material. While reviewing files, I came across a very helpful handout from a conference I attended at the University of Bayreuth in 2010. The topic from then is even more timely today: “Analyzing Right-Wing Populist Discourse across Europe.” In it, discourse analyst Ruth Wodak laid out the most salient features of Right Wing Populist rhetoric, which she identified in statements from political leaders across the old continent. Given the indisputable “toxicity” of this discourse, here we will label the following ten elements from Wodak’s handout as the “Acid Test” for Right Wing Populism:

1. Manichean division into “good” and “bad”
2. Shifting blame by scapegoating
3. Claiming to be honest by simply “Saying what comes to one’s mind”
4. Offending/insulting political opponents (ad hominem argumentation)
5. Adopting a “worms eye view” – looking up from below
6. Talking for “the people,” i.e. “We are one of you and for you” (ad populum argumentation)
7. Pathetic dramatization and emotionalization of issues
8. Insistent repetition of statements/claims
9. Exaggeration and trivialization (straw-man fallacy)
10. Promises of salvation and liberation

The beauty of Discourse Analysis is that it helps explain what is underlying particular instances of speech, text or visual communication. It allows us to “distill” its essence and identify the patterns, rules, and structures of such expressions. Moreover, Discourse Analysis allows us to illuminate the relationship between specific language and its broader social and historical context. Forms of discourse have objectives, and follow strategies and devices to pursue these objectives. For instance, negative and positive atributions are stressed through the continued use of topoi and fallacies. In-groups and out-groups are constructed by membership categorization using literary devices like metaphors or synechdoches (in which a part represents the whole).

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” is one of many recent manifestations of this Right Wing Populist discourse that most likely fell under Ruth Wodak’s sharply focused analytical radar.

The semester starts next week, and before it ends we will know who is the next US President. To my students, I will soon assign an exercise phrased as follows:

Listen to the following speech, and apply the ten point analysis grid. Does it pass the Right Wing Populism “Acid Test”?

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.

Genocide is a familiar topic to Germans. Today, it is almost impossible to visit Germany and not confront remnants of the darker chapters of the country’s history. Germans interact with and recognize a variety of tangible reminders of the crimes committed by the Third Reich. Countless memorials stand as physical evidence of a violent “past that will not go away”—a past that a majority of Germans publically acknowledge should not go away.[1]

But what about Germany’s other genocide? What place does its memory have in German society today? Between 1904 and 1908, German colonial soldiers carried out the first genocide of the twentieth century in what is now the present-day African state of Namibia (German Southwest Africa).[2] This systematic campaign against Herero and Namaqua peoples—regarded by some scholars as the “Kaiser’s Holocaust”—claimed the lives of over 100,000 men, women, and children through starvation, imprisonment, exile, and murder. German colonial leaders’ impetus for the genocide arose during the so-called Herero-Namaqua Aufstand (Herero-Namaqua Uprising), which began in January 1904 when Herero leaders revolted against the German administration in Southwest Africa. The Namaqua joined the campaign several months later.

In June 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed General Lothar von Trotha as commander of Germany’s small colonial Schutztruppe (protection force) and charged him to put an end to the rebellion. After a series of inconclusive military engagements throughout the summer, Trotha issued a proclamation in October 1904 that permitted German soldiers to kill Herero peoples indiscriminately. Today, according to the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Trotha’s order would constitute a declaration to commit genocide:

I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero people. Herero are no longer German subjects. They have murdered, stolen, cut off the ears and noses and other body parts from wounded soldiers, and now out of cowardice refuse to fight. . . . The Herero people must leave this land. If they do not, I will force them to do so by using the great gun [artillery]. Within the German border every male Herero, armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot to death. I will no longer receive women or children but will drive them back to their people or have them shot at. These are my words to the Herero people.

Historians often refer to Trotha’s declaration as the Vernichtungsbefehl (annihilation order). Over the next three years, German troops oversaw the extermination of approximately 85 percent of the Herero (over 100,000 people) and 20 percent (10,000 people) of the Namaqua populations. They also expropriated the Herero and Namaqua’s land for German settler-colonists, killed or forced their leaders into exile, and seized their cattle, which constituted their primary source of wealth. After the genocide, German colonial leaders created an apartheid state in Southwest Africa, passing bans on “mixed-marriages” and constructing Eingeborenenwerften (“native settlements”). The colonial administration also led efforts to increase the number of white women in the colony and to “racialize” migrating peoples from the British Cape Colony.

Though the Herero-Namaqua Genocide is well-known among historians of European colonialism and genocide studies, it is largely unfamiliar to many—perhaps even most—Germans today. While the Holocaust has become a distinct marker of German identity in the years since the Second World War, the Herero-Namaqua Genocide remains a minor chapter in the violent saga of European colonialism in Africa. The closest official acknowledgement of the massacres came twelve years ago, when Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s then development minister, apologized for the mass killings and called Trotha’s program an act of “genocide” while on a trip to Namibia in 2004. Though Wieczorek-Zeul’s remarks received considerable attention both in Germany and Namibia, the German government did not adopt her position.

Twelve years later, German leaders finally appear to be changing their stance. The Frankfurter Rundschau reported in July 2016 that an official document prepared by the German government “for the first time recognized the Herero and Nama massacre as a genocide.” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office also confirmed that Germany would formally apologize to Namibia and surviving descendants of the genocide. Sawsan Chebli, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry, added that “The federal government has been pursuing a dialogue with Namibia on this very painful history of the colonial era since 2012.” “We seek a common policy statement on the following elements: a common language on the historical events and a German apology and its acceptance by Namibia,” she concluded in the same interview.

Namibians have long called for an official apology from Germany. Since the country’s independence from South Africa in 1990, Namibia’s leaders have also sought reparations for decedents of Herero and Namaqua families affected by the genocide. In 2011, Namibians protested in large numbers outside Windhoek after Germany returned human remains that colonial officials had taken to conduct anthropological research in Leipzig and Berlin. German leaders had hoped that returning the skulls would send a positive signal of reconciliation. Instead, it only helped to remind Herero and Namaqua families that their demands for repartitions and land reclamation had largely fallen on deaf ears in Europe. Today, the Herero make up nearly 10 percent of Namibia’s total population. A sizable percentage are still trying to reclaim the land that German white farmers seized from their ancestors following the Herero-Namaqua Genocide.

The German government’s decision to identify General Trotha’s conduct in colonial Namibia as genocidal is both significant and long overdue. Though German officials confirmed that they will not pay any reparations to Namibian families, this pronouncement nevertheless represents an important first step toward confronting its colonial past. By commemorating the memory of those who perished at the hands of German soldiers in Namibia, Chancellor Merkel’s administration has started what one hopes will be an ongoing effort to teach people about the Herero-Namaqua Genocide and its on-going consequences in Namibia today. It also extends more public attention to a crime that has been in the shadows for too long outside of southern Africa.

The plight of peoples forced to live under the oppressive yoke of European colonial governments remains an untold story for a significant number of people in the Global North. This reality is perhaps even more pronounced in Germany, given the country’s violent history on the European continent during the first half of the twentieth century. While it is understandable that many Namibians would expect some measure of reparations, especially decedents of those families who were killed in the massacres, German leaders have at least helped bring more attention to the issue by calling the crime for what it is—genocide. As more people learn about Germany’s colonial history in Namibia, one can hope that Herero and Namaqua communities and their continued struggles will receive more international attention.

Few people today can argue that Germany has not confronted its Nazi past. Unlike the vast majority of capital cities in Europe and North America, Berlin’s central avenues, parks, and museums are filled with clear reminders of a time that most would understandably like to forget. Instead of trying to hide this history, however, German leaders long ago embraced the Holocaust as a means to prevent future acts of genocide around the world. By confronting its genocide in Namibia, Germany, finally, has opened the door for more dialogue, research, and reconciliation in the future.

[1] Ernst Nolte first used the phrase “the past that will not go away” in an effort to shift scholarly attention away from the Holocaust and Nazi era. See Ernst Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Go Away,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (6 June 1986).

[2] In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European imperial authorities called the Southwest Africa. After German colonization in 1884, the colony was recognized as German Southwest Africa.

 Adam Blackler is an Assistant Professor of History at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota. He recently finished his Ph.D. in the History Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His research explores how colonial encounters in colonial Namibia led Germans to fashion an imperial image of the Heimat ideal. He has presented his research at numerous national and international conferences, including the German Studies Association, the Freie Universität zu Berlin, and the Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar organized by the German Historical Institute.

Last week marked the 154^th anniversary of a conflict that would reverberate across the United States. Its history has been clouded by the American Civil War, leaving it often as a mere footnote in larger conflicts. Fighting in the Dakota Conflict unfolded over only six weeks, during which hundreds of Minnesota settlers were killed or displaced. However, it is the conflicts impact on the Dakota that has left the longest legacy. After the war, more than eight hundred Dakota men were sentenced to death and thirty-eight would be hung in Mankato in 1862 – still the largest mass execution in American history. More than 1,600 women, children and the elderly spent a winter interred on Pike Island on the Mississippi before being shipped to reservations in Nebraska. Disease and starvation was rampant. In another act of indignity, Congress passed legislation banning the Dakota from returning to Minnesota – a law that remains on the books more than a century and a half later.

Minnesota’s Dakota conflict has an undeniable place in American history. After many Dakota fled to the Dakota Territory, Henry Sibley (the first governor of Minnesota) led a military expedition to continue the fighting. The incursion has been called the opening of the infamous Plains Wars.

How have Minnesota and national newspapers portrayed this conflict and gauged its impact on the state and indigenous communities over the past 150 years?  What narrative frames, definitions and moral evaluations of the historical event can we find in them?  How has the representation of natives and the relationship between whites and natives shifted over time? A new research project at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies tries to respond to these questions.

In the first 25 years references to “savage uprisings” and “massacres by the red-man” are commonplace, even in newspapers as far away as New York City. What’s more astounding is the amount of news space dedicated to the conflict, even during the height of the Civil War. In more recent years derogatory language has diminished and responsibility for wrongdoings has tilted towards the mainstream white society, with some calling the Dakota conflict and the subsequent forced removal an act of genocide. Minneapolis and several other communities have recognized it as such. But have those new interpretative frames and labels increased awareness of those events and fostered reparative measures? Once completed, this project will help the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies better equip teachers in Minnesota to discuss the Dakota conflict and its legacies in classrooms, ultimately providing greater awareness to a genocide that occurred in our own backyard. The work with K-12 educators is aimed at exploring how we accept, interrogate or question available representations of White–Native relations in Minnesota. As an outcome we will develop specific teaching resources designed to unpack the social messaging (narratives structures, positioning, stands, etc.) embedded in different historical representations of the US-Dakota War, from its occurrence to our present.

Natan Sznaider, Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

This is the second half of Natan Sznaider’s critique of Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. You can find the first half here. 

Multiple Modernities and the Memory of the Holocaust

We do need to talk about modernity (the concept as such makes sociologically no sense), but about multiple modernities and multiple Enlightenments.  One of the clues is Arendt’s book “On Revolution” where she compares and contrasts the French and the Anglo-Saxon traditions of Enlightenment

When we look at the Scottish Enlightenment, for instance, it is grounded on the sentiments or a moral or common sense as a kind of intuitive judgment. Capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, exercising power of judgment, anchored in religion and balancing between morality and utility in the basis of a liberty seen as granted to all. Look at Adam Smith’s exploration of virtues like compassion and benevolence. Arendt was working in this tradition when she in her “On Revolution” takes side with the legacy of the American Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment against its French contender. Thus, in the French tradition (and we are talking caricatures) there is a strong opposition between reason and religion, while the Scots tried to reconcile reason and faith. I think these distinctions are important even though they do not play much or a role in Bauman’s text.

Bauman characterizes modernity as an overwhelming urge to replace spontaneity seen as meaningless by an order drawn by reason and constructed through a legislative and controlling effort. Does this mean that spontaneity is pre-modern or even pre-social as Bauman wants it to be? I’m not sure about that. This is a rather romantic point of view which refuses to see how “spontaneity” grew out of social structure. Then there is the bureaucratic argument and it is never actually clear with Bauman if he thinks that the Holocaust is inherent to bureaucratic culture or does it to its job prescribed by others. Don’t we have to take into account the Nazi’s fantastic vision or the ecstasy (as the historian Saul Friedlander has done in his work on Nazi Germany) of their doings?  Does the use of technology contradict the fact that the killing was done with passion?

Surely, there must be more than a cost-benefit analysis involved here. That is not Weber, but rather a caricature of Weber. There is no dialectic involved here, but a line heading directly from rationalization to genocide. Clearly, the setting was modern, but was modernity really the driving force? Yes, the Holocaust occurred in the modern age, but what does this actually tells us? If he tells us that the Holocaust was a possibility rooted in essential aspects of modernity itself, then he must allow for other possibilities of modernity.

Thus against the two principles which Bauman proposes: modernity as civilizing and modernity as barbarism, I would like to suggest a third option: the project of modernity is being defined as such as long that modernity can become conscious of its own potential of barbarity and tries to overcome it through a civilization process. In short, modernity is modern the moment it becomes self-reflexive.

What does that mean: if we look at phenomena which are, nasty, brutish and violent, we need a moral baseline to argue that and recognize it as such. We need an ideal of civility, and this ideal is the product of a historical and social process. The civilization process contains self-criticism – the self-criticism of modernity. Thus, we do not need to accept the equation that modernity equals barbarity, but that modernity is able to recognize barbarity in a self-reflexive process (human rights, for example). Thus, we should ask Bauman, what the origins of his own moral sensibilities are. I assume that as a sociologist he would be suspicious of thinking that he is a saint standing outside the social order.

Look at the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…

Now, we can dismiss this as ideological mumble jumble or as discourse of power, but we can also take this seriously as Bauman’s own Minima Moralia.

A society that is able to identify barbarity in its midst is a true modern society.

Finally, this brings me to my last point, which is Bauman’s sociology of morality.

Bauman looks at the individual as outside of society, even as opposed to society. This view is not only a-historical, overlooking the historical and structural pre-conditions for the emergence of individualism (as was done by Elias). This abstract relation to other is being confused by Bauman with an a-sociological point of view. Simmel, Mead and Elias knew otherwise.

To conclude, this despairing farewell to modernity doesn’t have to be the last word on the matter.  Present-day European pessimism forgets the break with the past that lies at the bottom of the post war European project.  In doing so, it produces an anti-modernism. It is in this elevation of pessimism to permanent despair that post-modernity joins hands with nationalistic Europe. Both deny the possibility of struggling against the horror of history by radicalizing the idea of modernity.  Nevertheless, Bauman has awakened us from our illusion that mass murder and racism can be conveniently outsourced to an “alien” nation.  This is his true challenge.

Natan Sznaider is professor of sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. His books include Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order(2011), Human Rights and Memory (with Daniel Levy) (2010), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (with Daniel Levy) (2005). His forthcoming book is titled Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era. The Ethics of Never Again (co-authored with Alejandro Baer) (Routledge, 2017).