“Pages of dreamlike prose explore Estonia’s terrible Nazi-Soviet past, the trauma of dictatorship, and how memory processes that trauma.” —The Financial Times A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year Just like it was taken for granted that houses could be abandoned and slowly decay, so it was taken for granted that people died in prisons, and that it was possible that no-one would really ever know the cause of death. This is the nature of totalitarianism . . . In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, Sigrid Rausing completed her anthropological fieldwork on the peninsula of Noarootsi, a former Soviet border protection zone in Estonia. Abandoned watch towers dotted the coast line, and the huge fields of the Lenin collective farm were lying fallow, waiting for claims from former owners who had fled war and Soviet and Nazi occupation. Rausing’s conversations with the local people touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of western products, and the Swedish background of many of them. In Everything Is Wonderful Rausing reflects on history, political repression, and the story of the minority Swedes in the area. Here she tells her story of what she observed as she lived and worked among the villagers—witnessing their transition from repression to freedom, and from Soviet neglect to post-Soviet austerity. “A delicate, precise, and richly informative memoir of a forgotten Europe and a vanished world.” —Timothy Garton Ash
The Silent and the Lost Alex Salim McKensie, a war baby of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, is adopted by the McKensies, an American family that has lost their only son in Vietnam. Years later, Alex falls in love with Sangeeta Rai, but their happiness is threatened when the enigma of his birth casts a dark shadow over their relationship. The Silent and the Lost opens with the wedding of Alex and Sangeeta in Brentwood, California on a sunny Saturday in 1997, then travels back into the boiling cauldron of political clashes of East Pakistan in early 1971. Through the eyes of newlywed Nahar Sultana, her husband, student activist Rafique Chowdhury, and their friends we are immersed into the nine months of revolution that created Bangladesh. On March 25, 1971, Nahar, Rafique, Nazmul and the Rahmans find themselves in the center of Operation Searchlight at Dacca University. Miraculously surviving, they escape to Sheetalpur village. Longing for vengeance and freedom, Nazmul and Rafique leave for the Mukthi Bahini guerrilla camps in Agartala, India. In a twist of fate, in a brutal family betrayal, Nahar is captured by the Pakistani Army. Destitute and in utter despair, tortured and mad, Nahar grips desperately to her last scintilla of hope-Rafique's return. Two generations spread across two continents, thousands of miles apart, are brought jarringly together when Alex begins his search for answers to his beginnings. He discovers that his own struggle for happiness is inextricable from the history that he finds himself part of: the genocide that in 1971 ultimately created out of East Pakistan the new nation of Bangladesh. Set in a pivotal point of time, The Silent and the Lost powerfully chronicles the history of a revolutionary change in the socio-political landscape of the sub-continent, and takes us on a sinuous journey into a passionate and breathtaking untold account of heroism and betrayal, family and friendship, love and anguish-of the lives of the characters and millions of others swept up in the unfolding unrest, mayhem and suppressed genocide.
Illegalized immigration is a highly iconic topic. The public perception of the current regime for mobility is profoundly shaped by visual and verbal images. As the issue of illegalized immigration is gaining increasing political momentum, the authors feel it is a well-warranted undertaking to analyze the role of images in the creation of illegalization. Their aim is to trace the visual processes that produce these very categories. The authors aim to map out an iconography of illegalized immigration in relation to political, ethical, and aesthetic discourses. They discuss the need to project new images as well as the dangers of giving persons without legal papers an individual face. Illegalization is produced by law, but naturalized through the everyday use of images. The production of law, on the other hand, is also driven by both mental and materialized images. A critical iconology may help us to see these mechanisms.