Landscape of Hope and Despair
Landscape of Hope and Despair

Author: Julie Peteet

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-06-03

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0812200314

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Nearly half of the world's eight million Palestinians are registered refugees, having faced partition and exile. Landscape of Hope and Despair examines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification. Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948, Landscape of Hope and Despair traces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history. The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.

Hope and Despair
Hope and Despair

Author: Roman Payne

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2008-03-16

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0615186505

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A feast of sensuality, Payne's third epic novel narrates the story of the beautiful young Nadja, and her brooding lover Nikolai, as the two come of age in a springtime garden. When their world of earthly delights fades with the dying season, the two are exiled from their pastoral romance into a fiery world of seedy urban haunts, intoxicated dreams and electric lights. When tragedy heralds the birth of a new day, light is shed on everyone's fate as the greatest adventure of all begins: a cunning swindler sets off on a heroic voyage to find the love of his youth. Through tears of hope and despair, the landscape of this novel unfolds before us in a vast panorama of poetic prose, delighting the senses and the imagination about what is possible, what is beautiful, and what is maddening about this world. ""Charged with passion, these pages sing to us their erotic melancholy; 'Hope and Despair' is both loving and frightening, a pleasure to read once and again!""

Kenya
Kenya

Author: Daniel Branch

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-11-15

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0300180640

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On December 12, 1963, people across Kenya joyfully celebrated independence from British colonial rule, anticipating a bright future of prosperity and social justice. As the nation approaches the fiftieth anniversary of its independence, however, the people's dream remains elusive. During its first five decades Kenya has experienced assassinations, riots, coup attempts, ethnic violence, and political corruption. The ranks of the disaffected, the unemployed, and the poor have multiplied. In this authoritative and insightful account of Kenya's history from 1963 to the present day, Daniel Branch sheds new light on the nation's struggles and the complicated causes behind them.Branch describes how Kenya constructed itself as a state and how ethnicity has proved a powerful force in national politics from the start, as have disorder and violence. He explores such divisive political issues as the needs of the landless poor, international relations with Britain and with the Cold War superpowers, and the direction of economic development. Tracing an escalation of government corruption over time, the author brings his discussion to the present, paying particular attention to the rigged election of 2007, the subsequent compromise government, and Kenya's prospects as a still-evolving independent state.

Landscapes of Hope
Landscapes of Hope

Author: Brian McCammack

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-10-16

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0674983084

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Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize “A major work of history that brings together African-American history and environmental studies in exciting ways.” —Davarian L. Baldwin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Between 1915 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural South to begin new lives in the urban North. In Chicago, the black population quintupled to more than 275,000. Most historians map the integration of southern and northern black culture by looking at labor, politics, and popular culture. An award-winning environmental historian, Brian McCammack charts a different course, considering instead how black Chicagoans forged material and imaginative connections to nature. The first major history to frame the Great Migration as an environmental experience, Landscapes of Hope takes us to Chicago’s parks and beaches as well as to the youth camps, vacation resorts, farms, and forests of the rural Midwest. Situated at the intersection of race and place in American history, it traces the contours of a black environmental consciousness that runs throughout the African American experience. “Uncovers the untold history of African Americans’ migration to Chicago as they constructed both material and immaterial connections to nature.” —Teona Williams, Black Perspectives “A beautifully written, smart, painstakingly researched account that adds nuance to the growing field of African American environmental history.” —Colin Fisher, American Historical Review “If in the South nature was associated with labor, for the inhabitants of the crowded tenements in Chicago, nature increasingly became a source of leisure.” —Reinier de Graaf, New York Review of Books

The Common Camp
The Common Camp

Author: Irit Katz

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 1452960801

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Seeing the camp as a persistent political instrument in Israel–Palestine and beyond The Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance. Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers, Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, Irit Katz demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum. Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well as those opposing them), Katz offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory. The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of modern societies and how they change and transform.

Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land
Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land

Author: Shudong Chen

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1666907634

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Based closely in spirit upon the most recent development in prosodic studies, Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land attempts another round of “philosophical investigation”. The book demonstrates how The Waste Land could be read afresh in terms of the hidden verbal transformation that reveals the overlooked performative and collaborative nature of language. This verbal transformation makes The Waste Land flow naturally as truly “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty” the way Poe defines poetry, especially through what Eliot calls “auditory imagination” or what Herder calls “intermediary sensation” that makes the poetry “the first language” of humanity or “the dictionary of the soul.” The verbal transformation also serendipitously makes sounds of despair the sounds of hope.

Refuge and Resistance
Refuge and Resistance

Author: Anne Irfan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-07-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0231554745

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In the decades after World War II, the United Nations established a global refugee regime that became central to the lives of displaced people around the world. This regime has exerted particular authority over Palestinian refugees, who are served by a specialized UN body, the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Formed shortly after the 1948 war, UNRWA continues to provide quasi-state services such as education and health care to Palestinian refugee communities in the Middle East today. This book is a groundbreaking international history of Palestinian refugee politics. Anne Irfan traces the history and politics of UNRWA’s interactions with Palestinian communities, particularly in the refugee camps where it functioned as a surrogate state. She shows how Palestinian refugees invoked internationalist norms to demand their political rights while resisting the UN’s categorization of their plight as an apolitical humanitarian issue. Refuge and Resistance foregrounds how nonelite activism shaped the Palestinian campaign for international recognition, showing that engagement with world politics was driven as much by the refugee grass roots as by the upper echelons of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It demonstrates that refugee groups are important actors in global politics, not simply aid recipients. Recasting modern Palestinian history through the lens of refugee camps and communities, Refuge and Resistance offers vital new perspectives for understanding politics beyond the nation-state.

The Making of the Modern Refugee
The Making of the Modern Refugee

Author: Peter Gatrell

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0191655694

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The Making of the Modern Refugee is a comprehensive history of global population displacement in the twentieth century. It takes a new approach to the subject, exploring its causes, consequences, and meanings. History, the author shows, provides important clues to understanding how the idea of refugees as a 'problem' embedded itself in the minds of policy-makers and the public, and poses a series of fundamental questions about the nature of enforced migration and how it has shaped society throughout the twentieth century across a broad geographical area - from Europe and the Middle East to South Asia, South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Wars, revolutions, and state formation are invoked as the main causal explanations of displacement, and are considered alongside the emergence of a twentieth-century refugee regime linking governmental practices, professional expertise, and humanitarian relief efforts. This new study rests upon scholarship from several disciplines and draws extensively upon oral testimony, eye-witness accounts, and film, as well as unpublished source material in the archives of governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. The Making of the Modern Refugee explores the significance that refugees attached to the places they left behind, to their journeys, and to their destinations - in short, how refugees helped to interpret and fashion their own history.