1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION1

Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction.     

Taming Space: Drug use,HIV, and homemaking in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

This article explores ideas of home and place making that bear on the narrated realities of 14 women who are drug users living with HIV in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. ‘Taming Space’ refers to the negotiations, transgressions and accommodations they make within particular spatial regimes. As residents of a ‘skid row’ district, research participants work to reconcile personal identities within representations of stigmatized space. As the subjects of epidemiological enquiry, clients of public health services and recipients of harm reduction initiatives, women both resist and acquiesce to the parameters of medicalized space. Housing and social service policies further demarcate spatial orders, especially framing women's options for mobility and homemaking. Finally, as street-involved persons they are subject to the often contradictory socio-spatial codes of street drug sociality. Drawing on the concept of turning points, I analyze the diverse narratives of these women as they flesh out particular dynamics of space and identity within broader structural contexts of colonialism, public health and poverty.     

《孽海花》中异国故事的叙事学读解

本文以比较文学形象学理论为出发点,借用叙事学理论对晚清最重要的谴责小说《孽海花》中的异国想象图谱进行细读分析。分析发现,文本对日本、德国及俄国的想象性呈现,是以各不相同的叙事策略组织构建起来的。这些细微的差异在文本深层拓开了另一重空间,使我们得以窥见晚清中西文化碰撞中知识分子躁郁难安的心态,他们如何试图于本国文化传统与他者强势文化之间获得转圜余地,相应地确定自处的可能范围,同时借文本表述舒缓对他者的仰慕及憎厌交糅的复杂情感。     

What Is and Isn't in a Name

Although I remain sympathetic to the narrative behind the notion of “History of Knowledge,” I argue against redrawing the disciplinary boundaries around “knowledge,” as opposed to retaining the term “science.” This is not because I think there is no place for a “history of knowledge,” and not because I am concerned that such a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries would open the floodgates of “anything goes.” Rather, I am doubtful that problems of demarcation and exclusion can be resolved solely by changing a name. I draw on my personal experience as an East Asianist to suggest that the challenges I faced trying to fit into the community of historians of science and technology would not have been solved by renaming the discipline. At the same time, I also argue that changes can and do happen without a change of name. And finally, I maintain that the word “science” has important connotations that we do not want to give up.     

Stimulation and connection: science and theatrical experience in Complicite’s Mnemonic

First produced in 1999, Complicite’s Mnemonic is one of the best examples of plays to use the potential of the stage to convey complex scientific ideas. Complicite’s creative utilization of dramaturgical strategies and theatrical techniques enables the company to artistically enact the complex mechanism of simulation and connection on which the act of remembrance is based. However, performativity is not the only means by which Complicite transfers science from the laboratory to stage. The complex science behind the act of remembrance is also enacted on the stage via the play’s narrative structure and the internationalism that it advocates. The present study provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which science is presented in the play, by detecting and discussing the mnemonic devices that not only hold the play's narrative elements together but also expand the proscenium arch to involve the audience, via shared images of exile, immigration, and displacement.     

Exploring gender and fear retrospectively: stories of women’s fear during the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders

The murder of 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1979 by Peter Sutcliffe who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper can be viewed as a significant criminal event due to the level of fear generated and the impact on local communities more generally. Drawing upon oral history interviews carried out with individuals living in Leeds at the time of the murders, this article explores women’s accounts of their fears from the time. This offers the opportunity to explore the gender/fear nexus from the unique perspective of a clearly defined object of fear situated within a specific spatial and historical setting. Findings revealed a range of anticipated fear-related emotions and practices which confirm popular ‘high-fear’ motifs; however, narrative analysis of interviews also highlighted more nuanced articulations of resistance and fearlessness based upon class, place and biographies of violence, as well as the way in which women drew upon fear/fearlessness in their overall construction of self. It is argued that using narrative approaches is a valuable means of uncovering the complexity of fear of crime and more specifically provides renewed insight onto women’s fear.     

Immigrant hosts and intra-regional travel

ABSTRACT

A large number of tourism-related experiences involve a personal relationship between a visitor and resident host. As immigration continues to be an increasingly integral experience for many people and communities, and advances in technology make relationship maintenance more accessible, the traditional distinctions of travel types based on ‘pleasure’, ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR), and even ‘business’ become blurred and detrimental to conceptual understandings for large numbers of tourism experiences and their impacts. The purpose is to explore the experiences of immigrants with intra-regional travel when they host VFRs. Constructionism was used as a guiding epistemology in this narrative analysis. The research co-constructed narratives with nine participants in Toronto, Canada about their hosting and intra-regional travel. The hosting experience is powerful, linking old and new worlds, and challenging traditional discursive tourism binaries such as home and away. The experience of intra-regional communities through side-trips with VFR guests added additional context where the host was in a non-routine place on vacation, with a guest who brings expectations of participating in leisure, but in a place that has cultural links to the participant's ongoing integration and connection to the broader sense of Canadian culture. Hosting both inspired intra-regional travel, and enhanced the memorable co-construction of meaning associated with the experience as links and distinctions to the culture of origin were more easily made due to the co-presence of their guest. Implications for integration, place making and marketing are discussed.     

From the familiar to the extraordinary: local residents' perceptions of risk when living with nuclear power in the UK

Nearly two decades since the last nuclear power station was built and began operating in the UK, nuclear energy is firmly back on the political agenda domestically and elsewhere in the world. Yet since the 1980s, little research has investigated perceptions of nuclear power in the UK, particularly those of communities living in very close proximity to such facilities. Using biographical narrative interviews (n = 61), we explore how local residents living close to two nuclear power stations in the UK (Bradwell, Essex and Oldbury, South Gloucestershire) have come to view their local facility. We reveal how the power station is constructed through processes of familiarisation and/or the normalisation/normification of risk as part of everyday life; how this ordinariness is juxtaposed with moments of extraordinariness in which, due to direct and mediated events, the power station is reframed as a risk issue; and how risk awareness is associated with moments of anxiety which ebb and flow through our interviewees' lives. We conclude that biographical experiences dynamically unfolding through space and time can be interrupted by risk events (mediated and direct, real and symbolic, nuclear and non-nuclear) to disrupt the usually taken-for-granted ordinariness of a power station's presence in a particular locality. Our findings suggest that those involved in debate about new nuclear build must be sensitive to the heterogeneity of the extraordinary in nuclear affairs and the importance of socio-cultural histories of place.