Virtual Library

Congressman John Lewis (GA-5) is an American icon and key figure of the civil rights movement. His commitment to justice and nonviolence has taken him from an Alabama sharecropper's farm to the halls of Congress, from a segregated schoolroom to the 1963 March on Washington, and from receiving beatings from state troopers to receiving the Medal of Freedom from the first African-American president.

Now, to share his remarkable story with new generations, Lewis presents March, a graphic novel trilogy, in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and New York Times best-selling artist Nate Powell (winner of the Eisner Award and LA Times Book Prize finalist for Swallow Me Whole).

March is a vivid first-hand account of John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation. Rooted in Lewis' personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Book One spans John Lewis' youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.

Many years ago, John Lewis and other student activists drew inspiration from the 1958 comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. Now, his own comics bring those days to life for a new audience, testifying to a movement whose echoes will be heard for generations.

The theory of cultural trauma focuses on the relationship between shared suffering and collective identity: Events become traumatic when they threaten a group’s foundational self-understanding. As it stands, the theory has illuminated profound parallels in societal suffering across space and time. Yet focusing on identity alone cannot explain the considerable differences that scholars document in the outcomes of the trauma process. Namely, while some traumas become the basis for moral universalism, generating a capacity to forge connections between an in-group’s suffering and that of out-groups, others have the opposite effect, leading to particularism and closure. Returning to the interdisciplinary literature on trauma, I argue for incorporating temporality as a twin pillar of the trauma process, distinguishing between acting out (reexperiencing a past event as the present) and working through (situating a painful event within historical context). A comparison of three U.S. sites of memory dealing with terrorism illustrates the distinction.

This article explores the role slavery’s eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Atlantic archive plays alongside the digital humanities’ drive for data. It situates critiques of the digital humanities in relation to decades-old debates about slavery that have reemerged with efforts to enumerate and digitize early modern black diasporic life. The article engages those critiques in light of black diasporic communities’ battles for justice and redress and the forms these have taken online, such as Afrofuturism, eBlack Studies, and Digital Alchemy. It argues that, while digitizing the study of slavery threatens to replicate the death work of the slave ship register, black digital practice offers a way of thinking through black life by invoking what the #transformDH collective has described as the digital humanities’ potential for “social justice, accessibility, and inclusion.” It suggests that black digital practice is the interface by which slavery’s archive belies the presumed neutrality of the digital. Black digital practice is the revelation that black subjects have themselves taken up science, data, and coding, in other words, have commodified themselves and digitized and mediated their own black freedom dreams in order to hack their way into the system (modernity, science, the West), take root, and live where they were “never meant to survive.

The Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century and Khubilai Khan’s founding of the Yuan dynasty brought together under one government people of different languages, religions, and social customs. Chinese law evolved rapidly to accommodate these changes, as reflected in the great compendium Yuan dianzhang (Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty). The records of legal cases contained in this seminal text, Bettine Birge shows, paint a portrait of medieval Chinese family life—and the conflicts that arose from it—that is unmatched by any other historical source.

Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan reveals the complex, sometimes contradictory inner workings of the Mongol-Yuan legal system, seen through the prism of marriage disputes in chapter eighteen of the Yuan dianzhang, which has never before been translated into another language. Birge’s meticulously annotated translation clarifies the meaning of terms and passages, some in a hybrid Sino-Mongolian language, for specialists and general readers alike. The text includes court testimony—recorded in the vivid vernacular of people from all social classes—in lawsuits over adultery, divorce, rape, wife-selling, marriages of runaway slaves, and other conflicts. It brings us closer than any other source to the actual Mongolian speech of Khubilai and the great khans who succeeded him as they struggled to reconcile very different Mongol, Muslim, and Chinese legal traditions and confront the challenges of ruling a diverse polyethnic empire.

The growth of the human rights regime in the Palestinian occupied territories during the last two decades and the spread of visual media have had an extreme effect on the nature of Palestinian politics and society. They have transformed the way Palestinians represent themselves to each other and to the international community, whereby appeals to human rights help to constitute a human subject with certain kinds of rights that are seen to arise not from a political status but from the state of (human) nature. In this article, I explore the "politics of immediation" at work during the second Palestinian intifada, which began in 2000, to explain why social actors mobilize representations of people in states of acute physical and emotional distress as part of their political projects.

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases.

Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement. Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.

In Mozambique, where more than half of the national health care budget comes from foreign donors, NGOs and global health research projects have facilitated a dramatic expansion of medical services. At once temporary and unfolding over decades, these projects also enact deeply divergent understandings of what care means and who does it. In Medicine in the Meantime, Ramah McKay follows two medical projects in Mozambique through the day-to-day lives of patients and health care providers, showing how transnational medical resources and infrastructures give rise to diverse possibilities for work and care amid constraint. Paying careful attention to the specific postcolonial and postsocialist context of Mozambique, McKay considers how the presence of NGOs and the governing logics of the global health economy have transformed the relations—between and within bodies, medical technologies, friends, kin, and organizations—that care requires and how such transformations pose new challenges for ethnographic analysis and critique.

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.

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.

By taking migrants seriously as subjects of national and transnational memory, this essay picks up where Haacke’s project leaves off. It re-envisions the ‘population’ parallax as an active bearer of memory, rather than as merely a passive object of commemoration. Such a perspective uncovers the multidirectional and transcultural memory work of the population at large: it draws attention in particular to the formation of as-yet under-recognized archives of migrant engagement with the German national past, with a history and memory of which they are ostensibly not

a part and about which they are frequently said to be indifferent. In other words, DER BEVOLKERUNG, a performance of memory by a German artist who migrated out of Germany, constitutes only the tip of a rarely explored iceberg: the unavoidable conjunction in contemporary Europe of Holocaust remembrance and

migrant history. This conjunction offers an essential perspective on contemporary European society because the continent’s postwar unification – and especially Germany’s central role in that process – has taken place via the explicit rejection of the Nazi past and against the backdrop of demographic changes resulting from labour, postcolonial and post-Communist migrations. Collective memory of the Holocaust has functioned as a point of reference for a post-fascist Europe and the basis of a new human rights regime at the same time that migrations have

complicated the ‘unity’ of Europe’s population and posed challenges to Europe’s liberal model of rights.