Thank you to all the fantastic people for this panel. It was excellent!
Inspired by a question I asked last year: These panels are very powerful and deal with some intense emotions. How often did an emotion like Hope showed through in your fields? It must be hard at times to read or deal with this kind of material, but did it ever lead to happier emotions? Inspiration or anything?
I found all the papers on this panel interesting, especially with the variety of places and times discussed that still invoked similar themes.
My question for any of the panelists- we often try to sanitize the past or 'let's acknowledge bad things happened and move on quickly' but you all show the value of tackling tough subjects to teach us something. I'm curious how that intersects with the archive as a curated record/memory of the past that silences parts of history. Can you talk about the process of finding violence in the archive and to what extent you need to reconstruct elements of violence to getter a better sense of your subjects?
I'm going to cheat and ask a more general question. For all the panelist, is there somewhere we can read or see more of your work? Everyone was excellent and I'd like to learn more.
For u/aquatermain specifically, what were the motivations behind the dictatorship's making an enemy out of the working class?
That actually leads to a good question for everyone. Why would these various groups and places go after their own people? What was the motivation?
For either panelist, is there anything you'd like to add on that you didn't get time to discuss in the video?
How does political necessity play into how the victims portray what happened to them? As in do political, legal, or economic factors cause victims of atrocities to have to talk about things or portray things in certain ways?
Firstly I want to thank all of the panelists for their time and great effort in shedding some light on, in a number of ways, some really dark areas of history.
I have a few of questions for any/all of the panelists.
In your time examining violence as an historical phenomenon, what were some of your ethical concerns, and how did you approach and handle them?
What did you find were the most valuable and most interesting kinds of evidence to look at in your research respectively?
Where do you think people should go from here? Are there any places of particular interest or places you feel have a distinct lack of attention?
Cheers. =3
What was it like for you, the authors, researching such intense and emotional subjects?
How difficult can it trying to study these topics, when its essentially often a side line in a source? Or something that happens 'off screen" while all the focus is on the bigger powers. Do you have any suggestions on how to sort through all the 'noise' to focus on those particular aspects?
Welcome to the “Never Forgotten, Never Again: Recentering Narratives of Historical Violence” conference panel Q&A! This panel considers histories of violence in which the victims and stories have often remained hidden. Whether due to the innovative use of preexisting sources, new framings of long-known events, the peeling back of common narratives that have hidden the experiences of individuals or groups, or the rejection of the historical accounts of the perpetrators, these panelists explore violence in new ways. So often the voices of the most marginalized are hidden by the focus, intentional or not, on the narratives of the perpetrators or bystanders. These projects seek to give voice to these voiceless individuals and groups.
Moderated by Dr. Ryan Abt (u/Kugelfang52), it explores the concealed or overlooked incidents and trends in the racial violence perpetrated on or by children in the United States, the Roma community in Hungary during WWII, and the labor activists of Argentina.
It features:
Nkili Cooper (u/19thhistorian1865), presenting her paper “Dixie’s Children: The Role of Youth in Scholarship on Postbellum Racial Violence”.
When racial violence is discussed, few historians shy away from the example of Emmett Till whose death demonstrated the brutality that even black children could not escape. His murder is often used as an aberration—an example of the worst of Jim Crow. But for African-Americans in the South, this treatment towards black children came as no surprise. Most studies on racial violence focus on instances in which white men kill black adults. But, by predominantly centering narratives of racial violence on black adult victims—and one fourteen-year-old — scholars insinuate that white supremacists had some degree of humanity by not regularly targeting children. Children were not only victims, but they could also be participants in racial violence. Images of lynchings show that white children were present and engaged at these community-building events. White boys castrated black victims and white girls lit corpses on fire. While scholars are superficially familiar with the role of black children as victims and white children as audience members, young people are rarely central actors in these studies.
Morgan Lewin (u/aquatermain), presenting their paper, “Grandpa was not a Terrorist: Reterritorializing Union Activism during Argentina’s Last Military Dictatorship”.
On March 24th, 1976, Argentina’s democracy was toppled by the sixth coup d’état of the 20 th century, installing a dictatorship self-appointed as the “National Reorganization Process”. In the seven years the Juntas held de facto and unconstitutional control of the Argentine State, the military kidnapped, tortured and killed over thirty thousand people, many of whom continue to be missing: they are the Disappeared. This occurred in the context of a systematic State terrorism campaign which banned all forms of democratic process, and restricted political and civic liberties to a minimum, under the pretense of fighting a “Dirty War” against shadowy terrorist organizations.
On March 26th, the offices of the Public Entertainment Workers’ Union’s headquarters in San Rafael were stormed by a group of commandos. While his family was beaten unconscious and their home ransacked, the Union’s Secretary General was kidnapped, as so many of his peers had and would continue to be in the following years. He was taken to a police station and illegally held captive, beaten, starved, hooked to a metal bed frame and electrocuted. Like the over 30000 Disappeared, most of whom were unionists, university students, artists and human rights activists, my grandfather, Antonio Campos, was accused of being a terrorist and a public menace, simply because he believed in and fought for his fellow workers’ rights. He was one of the lucky few who were released instead of being executed. Instead of “taking the hint”, he continued to run the Union clandestinely, working towards a democratic future for Argentina, at the risk of being found out and disappeared permanently, even jeopardizing the safety of his family in the process, for the remainder of the dictatorship. This paper aims to reterritorialize the “Dirty War” narrative, by analyzing non-governmental political participation forcibly turned clandestine as activism, not terrorism.
Sean Remz (u/silverliningDebrecen) presenting his paper, “The Portrayal of Roma by Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust in Hungary”.
Across fifteen or so memoirs of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, I have noticed patterns of representation of Roma in pre-Holocaust narration, in both quasi-ethnographic and anecdotal terms. These can be divided into three categories: their occupation and status in the social order of rural Hungary, Transylvania / Maramuresh, and Eastern Czechoslovakia, the depictions of friendship between Jews and Roma, and the dual thread of appreciation and appropriation of music and names that speak to a complex relationship that resists essentializing binaries. Likewise, sentiments of sympathy and otherness manifest through these memoirs, reflecting both a common thread of xenophobia and diverging paths due to Habsburg policy in a previous generation (that allowed for Jewish incorporation into economy and society, while forcing Roma to remain nomadic).
In light of the shared subaltern status between Jews and Roma in the Holocaust, these portrayals historicize the complexity of victim status, and point at different threads of xenophobia that ultimately resulted in parallel fates at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Given that there are less published memoirs by Roma genocide (Pharrajimos) survivors, the accounts of Jewish Holocaust survivors can be used to fill a gap of public awareness on specific parts of their ordeals, particularly the horrific liquidation of the “Gypsy Family Camp” of Birkenau on August 2, 1944. This is one way of addressing the consistent epistemic violence directed against them – the historical and ongoing misrepresentation of Roma communities.
Matters of historical representation of Roma are of particular importance in the Hungarian context, since the Hungarian government (the Fidesz and Jobbik parties) for the past decade has promoted a sense of uncompromising nationalism that is foremost in its hostility to Roma, and seeks to whitewash Hungary’s genocidal collaboration with the Nazis and its independent initiative in the mass categorical violence against Roma.