Virtual Library

En juin 2012, Samia Lakhdari, mon amie, ma sœur de combat, s’en est allée définitivement, comme elle a vécu: discrètement, sur la pointe des pieds. Je me suis rendue compte que j’enterrais dans les mêmes conditions une grande part, non seulement de moi-même, mais de nous-mêmes, génération née sous les ténèbres de l’occupation coloniale. J’eus l’impression d’enterrer aussi un pan fondamental de l’histoire de celles et ceux qui ont décidé de briser les chaînes cruellement oppressantes de la colonisation, payant de leur chair, de leur âme et de leur sang le tribut à la libération de notre peuple et à l’indépendance de notre pays. Je sais qu’il est de bon ton, aujourd’hui en 2013, de verser dans le révisionnisme, ne serait-ce qu’un soupçon, en adoptant une posture si appréciée par certains milieux français, qui consiste à regretter d’avoir déposé des bombes dans des lieux publics fréquentés par des civils européens. Posture à la faculté fondamentale d’occulter le problème central de la colonisation de peuplement et de faire passer les civils européens d’alors pour, au mieux des touristes de passage en Algérie et, au pire, des ayants droit “naturels” sur notre terre en lieu et place de ses enfants légitimes qu’étaient les indigènes. Mais je n’adopterai pas cette posture car j’ai horreur du mensonge et de son corollaire, le révisionnisme. Quels qu’ils soient et d’où qu’ils viennent. Je n’adopterai pas cette posture non plus car ni en 1956 ni en 1957 ni aujourd’hui ni jamais, nous n’avons regretté nos actes.

Born In 1934 in Tiaret, Zohra Drlf joined the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in Algiers during the war. After Algeria's independence, she became a lawyer and married FLN founding member Rabah Bitat (1925-2000), who was president of the National Popular Assembly from 1977 to 1990. Drif was a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1962 and, in 2002, was appointed vice-president of the Council of the Nation, which is the upper house of the Algerian parliament. Her memoir focuses on her youth, from her birth in a well-to-do, well­ educated Muslim family to her arrest in September 1957 during the Battle of Algiers. The publisher depicts Drif as a 'heroine of the war of national liberation' and highlights that she put a bomb in the Milk Bar, in the centre of Algiers, in September 1956. This terror attack killed four people and injured dozens of civilians.

How did a young Bundist activist fall so in love with France in the 1930s that she was willing to sacrifice her vocation as a painter, a student of Gromaire and familiar with Montparnasse, to share the life of her husband, a Russian emigrant who became a poultry farmer in the North? How, only just having been naturalized French, did she come to enlist at the start of the Second World War as a military nurse for the Red Cross to end up in the Camp d'Agde as an enemy alien? How did she come to take in a group of 44 Jewish children, organize their transfer to the Italian occupation zone, and build a home for them in Izieu? How did she become involved in the Resistance and ultimately assist returning deportees at the Hôtel Lutétia in Paris at the end of the war? And how, after all that, do she manage to rebuild your life as a painter?

Sabine Zlatin answers these question in her memoir. At the age of 85, she sat down to write her story from her pre-war life as a painter to the infamous events of April 6, 1944 when the Lyon Gestapo under the orders of Klaus Barbie raided the Izieu house arresting the 44 Jewish children and their carers, the majority of whom would be murdered in Auschwitz. The memoir also includes Zlatin's testimony from the Barbie trial and reflections from a former Izieu teacher and one student who survived.

Noted historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of the violent seventeenth-century conflict in northeastern America known as King Philip's War, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. DeLucia grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis, spanning the Northeast as well as the Atlantic world. She examines the war's effects on the everyday lives and collective mentalities of the region's diverse Native and Euro-American communities over the course of several centuries, focusing on persistent struggles over land and water, sovereignty, resistance, cultural memory, and intercultural interactions. An enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, this study reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.

Paris, octobre 1961 : à Richelieu-Drouot, la police s'oppose à des Algériens en colère. Thiraud, un petit prof d'histoire, a le tort de passer trop près de la manifestation qui fit des centaines de victimes. Cette mort ne serait jamais sortie de l'ombre si, vingt ans plus tard, un second Thiraud, le fils, ne s'était fait truffer de plomb, à Toulouse.

Minority Rules is an ethnography of a Chinese people known as the Miao, a group long consigned to the remote highlands and considered backward by other Chinese. Now the nation’s fifth largest minority, the Miao number nearly eight million people speaking various dialects and spread out over seven provinces. In a theoretically innovative work that combines methods from both anthropology and cultural studies, Louisa Schein examines the ways Miao ethnicity is constructed and reworked by the state, by non-state elites, and by the Miao themselves, all in the context of China’s postsocialist reforms and its increasing exchange and fascination with the West. She offers eloquently argued interventions into debates over nationalism, ethnic subjectivity, and the ethnography of the state.

Posing questions about gender, cultural politics, and identity, Schein examines how non-Miao people help to create Miao ethnicity by depicting them as both feminized keepers of Chinese tradition and as exotic others against which dominant groups can assert their own modernity. In representing and consuming aspects of their own culture, Miao distance themselves from the idea that they are less than modern. Thus, Schein explains, everyday practices, village rituals, journalistic encounters, and tourism events are not just moments of cultural production but also performances of modernity through which others are made primitive. Schein finds that these moments frequently highlight internal differences among the Miao and demonstrates how not only minorities but more generally peasants and women offer a valuable key to understanding China as it renegotiates its place in the global order.

Based on extensive, multisite fieldwork, this book will interest scholars of Asian studies, anthropology, gender studies, postcolonialism, ethnic studies, and cultural studies.

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever and malaria attacked newcomers to the region, which helped keep the Spanish Empire Spanish in the face of predatory rivals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, these diseases helped revolutions to succeed by decimating forces sent out from Europe to prevent them.

Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and to force them to abandon traditional modes of land use. After adopting ostensibly modern and ecologically sustainable livelihoods, the Pala’wan people have experienced drought and uncertain weather patterns, which they have blamed on their own failure to observe traditional social norms that are believed to regulate climate—norms that, like swidden agriculture, have been outlawed by the state.

In this ethnographic case study, Will Smith asks how those who have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation have come to position themselves as culpable for the devastating impacts of climate change, examining their statements about changing weather, processes of dispossession, and experiences of climate-driven hunger. By engaging both forest policy and local realities, he suggests that reckoning with these complexities requires reevaluating and questioning key wisdoms in global climate-change policy: What is indigenous knowledge, and who should it serve? Who is to blame for the vulnerability of the rural poor? What, and who, belongs in tropical forests?

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at first to have little to do with it. In particular, Multidirectional Memory highlights how ongoing processes of decolonization and movements for civil rights in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere unexpectedly galvanized memory of the Holocaust.

Rothberg engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers, including Hannah Arendt, Aimé Césaire, Charlotte Delbo, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marguerite Duras, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and William Gardner Smith.

Born into slavery in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped to freedom and became a passionate advocate for abolition and social change and the foremost spokesperson for the nation's enslaved African American population in the years preceding the Civil War. My Bondage and My Freedom is Douglass's masterful recounting of his remarkable life and a fiery condemnation of a political and social system that would reduce people to property and keep an entire race in chains.

My Own Words "showcases Ruth Ginsburg's astonishing intellectual range" (The New Republic). In this collection Justice Ginsburg discusses gender equality, the workings of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and the value of looking beyond US shores when interpreting the US Constitution. Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker. This book's sampling is selected by Justice Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, who introduce each chapter and provide biographical context and quotes gleaned from hundreds of interviews they have conducted.