Nested assemblages: migrants,war heritage,informal learning and national identities

ABSTRACT

This article examines relations between Anzac heritage and Australian national identity, among migrant visitors to the Australian War Memorial (AWM). What meaning could a story derived from Australian involvement in the First World War have to migrants who moved to Australia after the Second World War? Participants in qualitative interviews were eleven first-generation Australians, whose countries of birth were England, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Philippines, Scotland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, with parental countries of birth extending to Austria, Germany, India and Japan. Drawing on sociomaterial assemblage theory, the findings illustrate the concept of nested assemblages. At increasing scalar levels, the migrants form visitor-AWM assemblages, they may (or may not) feel part of a national Anzac heritage assemblage, and as migrants they are entangled in multiple national assemblages concurrently. Assemblages pertaining to family, faith, learning and memorialising were additional networks at play. Mapping interrelations amongst these assemblages showed migrants as actively gathering and interpreting heritage, sometimes as the enactment of national identity and at other times as the performance of informal, lifelong learning. The findings have importance to institutions seeking to be responsive to diverse and changing populations, particularly those wrestling with tensions around national identity.     

Ber Borokhov

The task of this article is to pose the question: Can there be a principled anti-Zionism? That is, can there be an anti-Zionism that escapes the scourge of anti-Semitism? After suggesting criteria by which this may be possible, the article excavates a tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism (or Zionist agnosticism) in the past that can hardly be branded anti-Semitic. The first current of this tradition flows out of early-twentieth-century Germany, where Jewish thinkers, in conscious opposition to Zionists, envisaged a Judaism that did not submit to the contingencies of time or space. The second current, comprised of twentieth-century Orthodox Jews, similarly opposed Zionism for its attempt to return Jews to history and to their ancestral homeland. After following these overlapping currents, the article concludes by returning to the contemporary scene and inquiring whether a principled Jewish anti-Zionism is possible today.     

Geographical knowledge and scientific survey in the construction of Italian Libya

Studies of colonialism and imperial cultures have increasingly recognized the roles of geographical knowledges in European efforts to construct the colonial world materially and imaginatively. Simultaneously, the discipline of geography has undergone a thorough self-critique of its part in the constitution of colonial space. This article discusses the imbrication of geographical knowledges and colonialism in Italy, and especially how the production and circulation of geographical knowledges about Libya worked hand in hand with its territorial occupation and control. In particular, the article discusses the expeditions directed and co-ordinated by the Italian Geographical Society that were despatched into the Saharan interior in the early 1930s to produce 'scientific' representations of the region. The article examines the roles of geographical sciences in the construction of Italian Libya, but particularly how this performance of 'colonial science' surveyed Libya's populations and contributed to their classification as 'primitive' and 'Other'. These conclusions supported Italian authority in the region, but also reinforced the development of a 'colonial consciousness' among Italians as African space and peoples were rendered legible by European epistemologies.     

Book reviews

Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, eds., Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, London, Frank Cass, 1992, pp. xi, 424.

Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine 1945–1948 (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1996. 674 pp.; notes; bibliography; index.

Yoav Gelber, Jewish‐Transjordanian Relations, 1921–48, London: Frank Cass, 1997. 320 pp., glossary, sources and bibliography, index.

Moshe Shemesh, The Palestinian Entity, 1959–1974; Arab Politics and the PLO, Second (Revised) Edition, London: Frank Cass, 1996. xxiii, 433pp., bibliography, index.

Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, ed., Zwischen Moral und Realpolitik: Deutsch‐israelisch Bezeihungen 1945–1965: Eine Doku‐mentensammlung. Gelingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1997. 687 pp.

Angelika Timm, Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997, xi + 291pp.     

Scenarios for the digital age: Convergence,personalization, exclusion

The new media system that has emerged worldwide since the early 1990s is characterized by increasing use of digital technologies in every area and convergence between once distinct media. In Italy there have been a number of national variations on this global pattern: relative weakness of state regulation, a move away from the dominance of the system by 'generalist' television, a high rate of cellular phone use and a slower than average growth of Internet use. As far as consumption is concerned, the most common categories used to describe the emergent system—personalization of media, increased individual choice and mobility—do manage to capture some important aspects, in Italy as elsewhere, but they obscure others, notably the structural constraints limiting individual choice, the formation of new media microcommunities and, conversely, the exclusion of particular groups of citizens from full participation in the new system.     

Maggi's Croce,Sasso's Gentile and the riddles of twentieth-century Italian intellectual history

Claiming to occupy the forefront of modern thought, Croce and Gentile together dominated Italian intellectual life during the first half of the twentieth century. But though their intellectual interaction continued, they split definitively as Gentile embraced Fascism and Croce sought to recast liberalism in response to the Fascist challenge. Both then suffered eclipse as postwar Italians sought to embrace what seemed the wider western mainstream. Reflecting the recent Italian effort at reassessment, Sasso and Maggi offer major works focused, respectively, on the basis of Gentile's Fascism and the adequacy of Croce's response to his challenging era. Working through the limits of the two studies suggests how we might treat Croce and Gentile in tandem, as central to an innovative, sometimes troubling, distinctively Italian tradition that merits reconnection with the mainstream of western intellectual history, especially as we continue seeking to learn from the disastrous trajectories of Fascism and totalitarianism.     

‘It was a bit like the passover’: recollections of family mealtimes during twentieth century Irish childhoods

The article presents an in-depth qualitative analysis of experiences of childhood mealtimes amongst three cohorts of Irish people in different historical periods during the twentieth century. By analysing family mealtimes during respondents' childhoods, the article sheds light on change and continuity to family practices throughout twentieth century Ireland. The analysis shows that patterns of family eating respond to changes in the economy and employment patterns, technological innovation, as well as to shifting family arrangements and structures. But the popular idea that the family meal is in terminal decline is disputed: tendencies towards fragmentation of family mealtimes often meet counter-tendencies. These accounts are important as they problematize normative assumptions about the pivotal role shared family meals play in supporting family life.