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Introduction: Global History Dialogues
No full textGlobal History Dialogues: Border-Crossing aims to provide a platform for showcasing the role that oral history can play in diversifying the vantage points from which, about which, and through which we approach global history. Border crossing is conceptualized as extending beyond the mere physical act of traversing administrative and political boundaries. It encompasses social and cultural, real and imagined, material and intellectual crossings, providing a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted nature of border dynamics.
This open access book pursues three goals. Firstly, it enables student-researchers from South America, Asia and Europe, to uncover microhistories that are close to their hearts and communities and yet resonate with global bordercrossings. Secondly it provides space for educators of oral global history to reflect on their practice in nontraditional classrooms. Thirdly, it holds space for guest contributors from the University of Potsdam, who share intimate reflections on displacement, emplacement and life across borders. These conversations generate innovative deliberations about the possibilities and limits of the nexus between oral history, global history, student-research, and pedagogy.
The linchpin bringing many of the authors together is the Global History Dialogues project of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge. This timely intervention contributes to rethinking the way we tell and teach global history and oral history and, in the process, invites the reader to consider multiple ways of negotiating, overcoming, and transforming borders
Teaching Oral History through Games and Simulations: From Word of Mouth to Hands-On Knowledge
No full textFindings from an Interview with my Grandmother: Emplacement as a Survival Strategy in Wartime
No full textThis paper connects the story of my grandmother, who fled the Berlin air attacks of 1943, and Pamela Ballinger’s concepts of ‘emplacement’ and ‘displacement’. I argue that through the airstrikes, the cities became borderlands and a new space developed between city borders and the battle frontier. Furthermore, building on the interview on which this essay is based, I discuss why an intergenerational exchange of war time experiences is so important. My grandmother agreed to make her story public, but I decided to leave her identity anonymous and to not share the full report of her story
Polemics, Change, Concealment
No full textIn the Essai sur l'origine des langues (1746), in the Traité des sensation (1754) but also in the Cours d'études 1775, in Logique ou l'art de penser (1780) and in Langue de calculs (1798), published posthumously by Pierre Laromiguière (1756-1837), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780) developed a coherent sensationist theory of language in which he attributed the development of complex ideas to the effect of arbitrary signs. He had developed a hypothetical model of the invention of language by humans and a nominalist explanation of the functioning of signs, and explained grammatical problems via the connection of ideas (liaison des idées). His theory of language attracted attention throughout Europe, but was rarely actually adopted. In France, Condillac was fiercely polemicised against, especially by conservatives such as Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald (1754-1840), while ideologues modified his teaching, thereby adapting it to restorative conditions. In Spain, Italy and Portugal, Condillac's linguistic theory was continued mainly in the form conveyed by the ideologues and was also applied in grammars, sometimes concealing the name of its author. The paper will first examine whether Condillac's linguistic theory really had the potential for polemics attributed to it by the conservatives. Then, the three patterns of reception - polemic, change, concealment - will be presented using examples from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain
Un-silencing the girls: critical classical reception in feminist retellings of Greek myths
No full textIn recent feminist retellings of Greek myths, the Trojan War has become the preferred mytho-historical setting for reexamining gender performativity in the ancient world. The Iliad and the Odyssey are foundational texts for how Western culture has historically characterized heroic masculinity, and, in contrast, tragic femininity. Modern novels such as Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls (2018), its sequel Women of Troy (2021), and Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019) turn the focus to the largely silent women of these epics. Through the voices of figures such as Briseis and Andromache, Barker and Haynes adopt a critical narrative of masculine ideals, including the glamorization of war and brutality, in order to highlight women’s endurance of sexual violence and victimization as a result of men’s pursuit of glory.
As this article explores, by enabling the once silenced women of Troy to voice their experiences of rape and enslavement, these three modern retellings challenge both ancient and contemporary notions of ideal masculinity while further highlighting the historical longevity of sexual violence against women as a consequence of men’s wars
Madeline Miller and the midcult
No full textMadeline Miller’s novels The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018) comprise fictional autobiographies of the figures of Patroclus and Circe, respectively, known from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Revolving around Homeric side characters and the themes of homosexuality as well as female agency in the traditionally heteronormative and patriarchal ancient world, they pose perfect examples of 21st century mythological retellings with their typical focus on characters and topics considered underrepresented. With recourse to the concept of ‘midcult’, i.e. literature that suggests high-cultural and social relevance while not living up to this claim, Miller’s novels will serve as exemplary cases demonstrating the chances and limitations of modern mythological retellings. Miller’s broad media presence will additionally allow for insights on her poetic selfconception and the role of public epitext in the process. Due to misrepresentations of the ancient tradition, untenable accusations against classical scholarship, and a rather narrow conception of homosexuality, The Song of Achilles will be revealed as midcult, whereas the variety of female topics and strong female characters, the skilful reworking of Odysseus and Circe’s encounter, and the intertextual play with Odyssean narrative techniques render Circe a successful balancing act of a modern approach to the ancient tradition
Ovid at Cair Paravel: Periodization and the ages of man in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia
No full textUnlike many fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia have an explicit beginning, middle, and an end – a chronology. A mainstay of children’s literature since their publication in the 1950s, the Chronicles have received a great deal of scholarly attention, but most of it directed to Christian allegorical themes. The way that Lewis composed his novels out of order, or the strategies with which he shaped the reader’s expectations by doing interesting things with time, has gone largely unnoticed. Yet, in recent years scholarly approaches to the Chronicles have expanded to consider questions of mythology, cosmology, environmentalism, ideology, and even politics. This paper adds to that expansion by turning to the classical elements in the Chronicles. By examining the ways in which C. S. Lewis uses narrative techniques borrowed from Ovid’s periodization in the Metamorphoses, this paper argues that Ovid was Lewis’s main source of inspiration for devising a chronology for Narnia, and moreover, that we should not be surprised to find such a presence in Lewis’s work. Although mostly remembered as a medievalist, Lewis wrote with a dizzying array of inspiration and influences, and to underplay his classical training is to obfuscate the subtlety in his compositional technique
