SIMIć, Olivera (2014) Surviving Peace. A political memoir

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 – A deeply human narrative set within the growing body of feminist writings on war – (Kathleen Barry)

How do you pick up the pieces after your life is shattered by war? How do you continue living when your country no longer exists, your language is no longer spoken and your family is divided, not just by distance but by politics too? What happens when your old identity is taken from you and a new one imposed, one that you never asked for?

When Olivera Simić was seven years old, President Tito died. Old divisions re-emerged as bitter ethnic conflicts unfolded. War arrived in 1992. People were no longer Yugoslavs but Serbs, Croatians, Bosniaks. Old friends became enemies overnight.

In this heartfelt account of life before, during and after the Bosnian War and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Simić talks of her transition from peace to war and back again. She shows how she found the determination to build a new life when the old one was irretrievable.

Traversing four continents, she takes us on her winding journey from Bosnia to Australia, revealing the complex challenges of adjusting to life in a new country and exposing the harsh reality of the post-traumatic stress that accompanies her.

Simić strives to find the balance between wanting to move on to a different future and a pressing need to look back at a past that won’t go away. The pull of her homeland remains irresistible despite it being ravaged by destruction, and her exposure of the war crimes that took place there means she is labelled both a ‘traitor’ and a ‘truth seeker’.

Surviving Peace is one woman’s story of courage that echoes the stories of millions of people whose lives have been displaced by war. As we still face a world rife with armed conflict, this book is a timely reminder that once the last gunshot has been fired and the last bomb dropped, the new challenge of surviving peace begins.

 

Olivera Simić:

Olivera Simić is a feminist, human rights activist and academic at the Griffith Law School, Australia. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Dr Simić has lived and studied in Eastern and Western Europe, the USA and South America. She has published one monograph and three co-edited collections, book chapters, journal articles and personal narratives. She completed a Doctorate of Law at the University of Melbourne in 2011. She now teaches international law and transitional justice at Griffith Law School and lives in Brisbane. In 2013 she was a nominee for the Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature and the Humanities, and won the Peace Women Award from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF, Australian branch).

Edited by SPINIFEX  PRESS 

See REVIEWS

PODCAST: Olivera in conversation at the Outspoken Literary Festival held at Maleny, NSW

 

Table of Contents: 

Acknowledgements ix

Map A Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) xi

Map B Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) xii

Preface The Past Lives On 1

Chapter One Journeying Through War and Peace 8

Chapter Two Traitor or Truth Seeker? 26

Moral Responsibility 35

The Masculinity of War 38

Truth Seekers 44

Paying a High Price 45

How to Face the Past? 52

Chapter Three Moving From War to Peace 59

The NATO Bombings 60

Life as a Refugee 65

Building Peace 70

Where are you From? 75

Chapter Four The Past is the Present 81

Chapter Five Victims and Survivors 97

From One Disaster to Another 103

Facing the Past Begins 113

Chapter Six Between Remembering and Forgetting 126

Minefields 134

Conflicting War Memories 138

Epilogue Troubled Homeland 148

Appendix Timeline of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration 161

Glossary 164

Bibliography 167

Index 178

 

 

 

The Memory of the Bones

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Script and filmmaking: Facundo Beraudi

“Hundreds of the victims’ relatives cling to hope by placing their trust in the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF “Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team”), which —for 30 years now— has been recovering and identifying the remains of disappeared people in Argentina and in more than thirty countries. This quest cannot be put at an end but by giving back the remains to the relatives, so they may try to close some open wounds.”

To know more 

 

Objetivo: Exhumar a Franco EITB

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Equipo de redacción – TV EITB
March 30, 2017

The program investigates the difficulties  of families to recover the bodies of their relatives from the Valle de los Caídos.

 

Objetivo: Exhumar a Franco

The Bones Reader II: The Civil War Graves

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“Bringing to light the bones that were below earth and closing the story of the people who disappeared during the Civil War is the goal of the program. The forensic anthroplogist Paco Etxeberria and the journalist Dani Álvarez go to the chasms of Gaztelu and Otsaportilo.”

 

The Bones Reader

CONGRAM, Derek (2016) Missing Persons Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Disappeared

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Overview

Uniting the voices of twenty-two experts from academic, government, and civil sectors who study and help search for missing persons in Canada and internationally, Derek Congram’s new collection responds to growing public awareness of persons who have disappeared due to armed conflict, repressive regimes, criminal behaviour, and racist and colonial policies towards Indigenous persons and minority populations.

 

Missing Persons centres its attention on the people who seek others, and explores how scientists, law-enforcement agents, and researchers serve and relate to those who miss. This multidisciplinary volume both attends to the varied circumstances of disappearance and illustrates how disparate contexts connect, making for a valuable comparative resource in criminology and forensic anthropology, science, and psychology classrooms.

 

Edited by: Canadian Scholars’ Press

Derek Congram

Derek Congram is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Toronto and an independent forensic consultant. As an anthropologist and archaeologist, he has worked in 20 countries for families of missing persons, universities, governments, and international organizations, including the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

 

 

 

HRISTOVA, Marije (2016) Reimagining Spain: Transnational Entanglements and Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War since 1989

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Since 1989, Spain has gone through a process of re-emergence of the memories of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francoism (1939-1975). These newly produced memories challenge the official reading of the civil war, as established during the transition to democracy, as a “collective insanity.” As part of this process, the last three decades have produced numerous novels, documentaries, and journalistic accounts that have brought to the fore the untold stories of the repression during the civil war and its aftermath.

This dissertation offers an analysis of the influence of transnational frameworks on the reconfiguration of the cultural memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. The selection of post-Cold War Spanish cultural texts – narrative fiction, documentary film, photography and journalism – being analyzed in this dissertation, is framed by three emblematic “spaces of transnational memory.” These are: the wars in former Yugoslavia; Forced Disappearance in the Southern Cone; and the remembrance of the Holocaust. Each of these spaces highlights a different contemporary site of agency in the production of memory, namely contemporary civil war, mass grave exhumations, and testimony. In addition, this dissertation posits affect and emotion as important mechanisms in the production of transnational memories.

This research argues that these transnational contexts of remembrance serve to reimagine Spain, proposing alternative and more “inclusive” forms of national memory and identity, often in opposition to the current Spanish “constitutional patriotism.” Transnational memory is located within the margins of the nation-state, a space of entanglement between the national and the transnational, and inhabited by those who were excluded from Spanish national identity through the forging of the Spanish nation-state.

 

Marije Hristova was a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University and a Marie Curie predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology of the Spanish National Research Council. Currently, she works as a lecturer of Dutch Studies at the University of Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria) and is a research fellow in the project “Below Ground,” led by Francisco Ferrándiz. .

 

Edited by Universitaire Pers Maastricht

 

HRISTOVA, Marije (2016) Reimagining Spain: Transnational Entanglements and Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War since 1989

/0 Comments

Since 1989, Spain has gone through a process of re-emergence of the memories of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francoism (1939-1975). These newly produced memories challenge the official reading of the civil war, as established during the transition to democracy, as a “collective insanity.” As part of this process, the last three decades have produced numerous novels, documentaries, and journalistic accounts that have brought to the fore the untold stories of the repression during the civil war and its aftermath.

This dissertation offers an analysis of the influence of transnational frameworks on the reconfiguration of the cultural memory narratives of the Spanish Civil War. The selection of post-Cold War Spanish cultural texts – narrative fiction, documentary film, photography and journalism – being analyzed in this dissertation, is framed by three emblematic “spaces of transnational memory.” These are: the wars in former Yugoslavia; Forced Disappearance in the Southern Cone; and the remembrance of the Holocaust. Each of these spaces highlights a different contemporary site of agency in the production of memory, namely contemporary civil war, mass grave exhumations, and testimony. In addition, this dissertation posits affect and emotion as important mechanisms in the production of transnational memories.

This research argues that these transnational contexts of remembrance serve to reimagine Spain, proposing alternative and more “inclusive” forms of national memory and identity, often in opposition to the current Spanish “constitutional patriotism.” Transnational memory is located within the margins of the nation-state, a space of entanglement between the national and the transnational, and inhabited by those who were excluded from Spanish national identity through the forging of the Spanish nation-state.

 

Marije Hristova was a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University and a Marie Curie predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology of the Spanish National Research Council. Currently, she works as a lecturer of Dutch Studies at the University of Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria) and is a research fellow in the project “Below Ground,” led by Francisco Ferrándiz. .

 

Edited by Universitaire Pers Maastricht

 

Documentary “España, la memoria enterrada”

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“On July 18, 1936, a coup d’état provoked the Spanish Civil War, followed by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Decades later, historians and victims denounce that Spain is the second country in the world with the largest number of disappeared people, and that there is no state policy facing the debts of the past. To the point that, while families ask for truth and reparation, it is the Argentinian justice that currently investigates Francoism’s crimes.”

With Francisco Ferrándiz y Francisco Etxeberria.

RT Documentary

“What Remains” directed by Lee Douglas reviewed in El Diagonal

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Journalist Jose Durán Rodríguez from the Madrid-based newspaper El Diagonal reviews the documentary “What Remains” and its premiere at Traficantes de Sueños. The film was produced and directed by project member Lee Douglas and doctoral candidate Jorge Moreno Andrés (UNED).

Read the review

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

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The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’s argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters—for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century.

The book draws on a vast range of sources—from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed—and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture.

A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

 

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books includeMaking Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Editado por Princeton University Press

 

PREMIOS:

One of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2015, selected by Alison Light
One of Flavorwire’s 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015
One of Flavorwire’s 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015

 

Disponible para su lectura: Introduction The Work of the Dead

Indice del libro