Bar Beach Police Station

Qualitative Inquiry, 2006

European Journal of Life Writing, 2013

n/a

Intro: The retrospective gaze is a trap in which we are easily snared and from which it is often difficult to extract ourselves. A certain course of events seems necessarily to have flowed in the direction it did when, in fact, a plenitude of forces converge on each moment, each with its own momentum and its own trajectory. Properly speaking then, a person of the moment is not he who in retrospect embodies the "spirit of his time" as it is later construed. Rather, he is a chaotic and amorphous being, a sort of monstrosity bearing in himself the whole of his time in a manner that later seems impossible. While Zionism appears today as the dominant Jewish political ideology, a century ago it was but one of a great many competing ideologies. A man of that moment would not be one who chose a certain doctrine and consistently upheld it. Nor would he be one who passed "from Zionism to Socialism and Anarchism, from Hebraism to Yiddishism, from faith to heresy, from piety to libertinism." Rather, he would be one who "inhabited all these camps at once." Rabbi Yaakov Meir 1 Zalkind (1875-1938) is one such person, whose talent and audacity lead him to the center of each of these movements. The career of this fascinating individual has been summarized by Anna Torres in an article published by In geveb ; this translator has also produced a more detailed biography which should shortly appear elsewhere. The present selection from Alexander Mokdoni's memoirs duplicates some of the biographical details recorded in these studies; however, its primary value lies in the way that it offers us a glimpse-in many respects an unsympathetic, if ultimately respectful, one-into the personality of this now obscure figure and likewise into the sort of effect he had on others. This account is important not only because it gives us to understand how-beyond innate talent-Zalkind managed to assume so many positions of authority (he was a charismatic, but also domineering, person) but also because it dampens the heroic picture of the man that appears in his eulogies. It allows us to see a real person who crossed the social, cultural, and political boundaries of his day in an admirable and interesting way, but who was also deeply flawed and difficult to get along with. It is this sort of honest image of an author that grants some insight both into the person behind the text, and also into the causes underlying both his successes and his failures.

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2009

Laurence Cuelenaere, 2022

If the conflict between politics of documentation and aesthetics of expressions has long been the object of inquiry, it is time to let go of these debates to pursue forms of expression that do not seek to validate or invalidate documentations of events. Braided into camera/media narratives are reported facts and fictions, collective memories and individual testimonies, past and present, conservation and loss. In the field of photography, such notions have become a question of representation: a debate of form over content, of figuration over abstraction. My visual work interrogates these tensions, shifting boundaries, ambiguities, and affective spaces. "Journey to Amerika" presents migration to the United States with photographs that I have taken in Tapachula, which is known in Chiapas as "Prison City" (Mexico-Guatemala border), and in makeshift migrant camps in Reynosa on the Rio Grande (US-Mexico border). What pain and photography share, besides an incomplete reference to the world inside and outside of us, is their overwhelming immediacy, silence, and stillness. They both confront us with whom we are in our solitude. They are quiet, yet they demand a form of listening with our eyes. This has led me to raise the following questions regarding my own practice: How can I come to terms with my photography of people who are suffering, if the proliferations of representations of pain and suffering reproduce the same logic of violence they seek to disrupt? Is there a nonviolent way of looking at pain? Is there a way to interrupt and disrupt the circuity of representations of violence? And while there has been a shift of focus from the ethics of seeing (the gaze, voyeurism, witnessing) to an analysis of the social dynamics of the photographic event, my approach to photography offers a release from shame, bad consciousness, and guilt. As I am writing, an unprecedented number of migrants from Africa, Haiti, Cuba, and South and Central America are stranded in Mexico on their way to the United States. In fact, this is an historic displacement of people traveling to the United States. We all know that migration and displacement are structured by political corruption, white supremacy, and historical injustice. Yet life stands still for migrants who were deported or denied the legal process of seeking asylum in the United States under Title 42 (a public health measure introduced by President Donald Trump and continued by the Biden administration). The long migrant routes toward the United States are plagued by operating drug cartels, crime, kidnappers, guides, and human smugglers and continues to be extremely dangerous. Stories

Human Rights Review, 2009

(Read) International Conference «Intercultural Poetics. Literary Representations of ‘The Foreign Other’», 2015

By exploring the intercultural aspects of two geographically distinct literary works, Al Berto’s O Anjo Mudo and Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, this paper aims to analyse the pose of the foreigner when facing the other, who is often a mirroring of the self rather than a stereotypical reading of the stranger, as one looks at the outside while looking in. The process of travelling and other migratory movements are the core themes of the case studies, as their poetic voices (both nomads), meander through spaces which are not their own, crossing borders of several countries (Galgut) or borders of unspecified spaces that defy the borders of one’s own national identity and the limitations of the human body when within the borders of her/his ‘home’ (Al Berto). By exploring the concerns regarding journey, both collective and individual, as well as a shared sense of the link between space and the human body, one intends to bring together both literary works, by acknowledging their similarities on the understanding of the migrant as the central figure of the matrix of thought that dominates the contemporary intercultural and international relations of power and representation. Moreover, the need for a constant reshape, either of the borders of the geographical space or of the limits of the body is one of the major aspects of the case studies, for both are marked by the restless nature of the nomad, who can only find comfort on the road and in spaces of transit rather then at home, be it her/his country or her/his body. By exploring the nature of the migrant, one expects to critically question the other (the foreign space/individual), as identity seems to be established in places of intersection in dialogue with the stranger rather than within the walls of normative spaces.