Public history, private memories: Historical imagination in the new Italian cinema 1988-1999

The concern with the following arguments started during a study of national and international cinemas, from the desire to account for a cinema that internationally was doing well, but was undervalued domestically. The aims were to account for the renewal of Italian filmmaking from 1988, the New Italian cinema, and understand the conditions behind this renewal. The thesis identifies in the historical theme and in the recurrence of features from Italian cinema history elements of coherence with previous cinema production. The first consideration that emerges is that a triangulation between a new generation of filmmakers, their audience and recent history shaped the recovery of Italian cinema from 1988. A second consideration is that no discussion of Italian cinema can be separated from a discussion of that which it represents: Italian society and politics. This representation has not only addressed questions of identity for a cohort of spectators, but on occasions has captured the attention of the international audience. Thus the thesis follows a methodologic approach that positions texts in relation to certain traditions in Italian filmmaking and to the context by taking into consideration also industrial factors and social and historical changes. By drawing upon a range of disciplines, from political history to socio-psychological studies, the thesis has focussed on representation of history and memory in two periods of Italian film history: the first and the last decade of twentieth century. The concern has been not so much to interpret the films, but to understand the processes that made the films and how spectarors have applied their knowledge structures to make meaning of the films. Thus the thesis abstains from ascribing implicit meanings to films, but acknowledges how films project cultural contingencies. This is beacause film is shaped by production conditions and cultural and historical circumstances that make the film intelligible. As Bordwell stated in Making Meaning, "One can do other things with films besides 'reading' them" (1989, p. xiii). Within this framework, the thesis proposes a project that understands history films with the norms that govern Italian filmic output, those norms that regulate conditions of production and consumption and the relation between films from various traditions.

History in the Australian Curriculum F-10 : providing answers without asking questions

This paper examines the most recent version of the Australian Curriculum: History F-10. It does so in two ways. First, it explores some of the strengths and weaknesses of this curriculum with reference to the decision to frame aspects of Australian history within the context of a world history approach. Whilst the positioning of Indigenous Histories is applauded, the curriculum’s lack of attention to the significance of the recent history of Australia’s Asian neighbours, and Australia’s relationship with them, is critiqued. This part of the paper also emphasises the need for comparative approaches and calls for greater emphasis on providing students with opportunities to critique and contest the construction of narratives about the past. Second, the paper introduces four invited articles that examine different aspects of the Australian Curriculum: History. Collectively these papers reiterate the significance of the richness of integrated and child-centred approaches and the importance of developing historical thinking, empathy and the historical imagination in the classroom.

History in the Australian Curriculum F-10: Providing answers without asking questions

Thi paper writer examines the most recent version of the Australian Curriculum: History F-10. It does so in two ways. First, it explores some of the strengths and weaknesses of this curriculum with reference to the decision to frame aspects of Australian history within the context of a world history approach. Whilst the positioning of Indigenous Histories is applauded, the curriculum’s lack of attention to the significance of the recent history of Australia’s Asian neighbours, and Australia’s relationship with them, is critiqued. This part of the paper also emphasises the need for comparative approaches and calls for greater emphasis on providing students with opportunities to critique and contest the construction of narratives about the past. Second, the paper introduces four invited articles that examine different aspects of the Australian Curriculum: History. Collectively these papers reiterate the significance of the richness of integrated and child-centred approaches and the importance of developing historical thinking, empathy and the historical imagination in the classroom.

Switching on the chronometer of history : communism, postcommunism and heritage

The destruction of monuments accompanying the fall of Communism ignited debates about preservation of manifestations of a hated regime. While heritage professionals called for their preservation as ‘historical documents’, many monuments were destroyed or removed. Yampolsky sees anti-Communist iconoclasm as a rejection of the totalitarianism of time embodied in Communist monuments. These ‘intentional monuments’ were intended to ‘negate the march of time and oppose to it the permanence of human action’. They demonstrated the alleged end of history in a classless utopia.

Iconoclastic acts against these monuments involved the crossing of ‘the invisible boundaries of the sacral zone surrounding monuments, switching on the chronometer of history’. In doing so, iconoclasts provide the conditions for reassertion of heritage practices: heritage requires a sense of the flow of time, a difference between past, present and future.

Having restarted the chronometer of history, a society is forced to assess where it stands in relation to its past. Will it continue on a path of ‘wilful forgetting’, or seek to confront the past? The danger of wilful forgetting is the creation of nostalgia. Alternatively, preservation of places of memory helps processing of the past required for movement into the future. ‘One need only consider the way in which Berliners tore down the hated Berlin Wall in the aftermath of 1989’, Fulbrook writes, ‘to understand the desire to rid the landscape of a hated excrescence, a symbol of a rejected political past. But…for those who come after, the effort of historical imagination is all the greater for lack of a topography of experience’.

Heritage preservation can produce a ‘topography of experience’, through which the experience of Communism is examined. Reassertion of a humanistic historical time through heritage practices reveals the arrogant futility of utopian projects seeking to bring history to an end.

Identity, Philosophy, and the Problem of Armenian History in the Sixth Century

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East gathers together the work of distinguished historians and early career scholars with a broad range of expertise to investigate the significance of newly emerged, or recently resurrected, ethnic identities on the borders of the eastern Mediterranean world. It focuses on the "long late antiquity" from the eve of the Arab conquest of the Roman East to the formation of the Abbasid caliphate. The first half of the book offers papers on the Christian Orient on the cusp of the Islamic invasions. These papers discuss how Christians negotiated the end of Roman power, whether in the selective use of the patristic past to create confessional divisions or the emphasis of the shared philosophical legacy of the Greco-Roman world. The second half of the book considers Muslim attempts to negotiate the pasts of the conquered lands of the Near East, where the Christian histories of Hira or Egypt were used to create distinctive regional identities for Arab settlers. Like the first half, this section investigates the redeployment of a shared history, this time the historical imagination of the Qu'ran and the era of the first caliphs. All the papers in the volume bring together studies of the invention of the past across traditional divides between disciplines, placing the re-assessment of the past as a central feature of the long late antiquity. As a whole, History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East represents a distinctive contribution to recent writing on late antiquity, due to its cultural breadth, its interdisciplinary focus, and its novel definition of late antiquity itself.

Norm and Anomaly in the Jewish Life of Jesus (Toledot Yeshu)

The Toledoth Yeshu, the “Generation,” or “Life of Jesus,” have been described as an anti-Gospel, or a parody of the Gospel. This protean tradition, witnessed in more than hundred manuscripts and printed editions, offers a “counter-history” of the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity. According to this mischievous narrative Jesus was an illegitimate child turned charlatan, and his disciples a bunch of violent and senseless rogues who continued to stir up trouble in Israel even following their leader’s shameful hanging. The Toledoth Yeshu is the story of an anomaly (Jesus and the birth of Christianity). It is also a story about confusion: marital confusion, social confusion, and religious confusion. As an exercise in “historical imagination,” the Toledoth Yeshu offers a narrative of religions compared, and a reflection on social and religious borders, on their instability and fragility, and ultimately on their necessity. The present paper will explore the normative dimension of the Toledoth Yeshu tradition: the way the “disorder of things” the narrative relates also conveys a powerful discourse on social and religious norms. We will also seek to map this tradition in the broader context of medieval Jewish discussions on Jesus (particularly Maimonides) as a “case” in the religious history of mankind, addressing issues of false prophecy, religious deviation, transgression, and heresy.

La formación de competencias de pensamiento histórico

Este artículo presenta una propuesta para la formación de competencias de pensamiento histórico. 1) La conciencia histórica-temporal relacionada con la temporalidad humana, el cambio y el poder sobre el tiempo futuro. 2) La representación de la historia, como la narración y la explicación histórica, para la reconstrucción del pasado. 3) La imaginación histórica, como la empatía y la contextualización, unidas a la formación del pensamiento crítico y creativo, y el juicio moral en la historia. 4) La interpretación histórica basada en el análisis de les fuentes históricas, en la comparación o contraste de textos históricos, y en el conocimiento del proceso de trabajo de la ciencia histórica. Nuestra propuesta de formación del pensamiento histórico está relacionada con la formación democrática de la ciudadanía

La formación de competencias de pensamiento histórico

Este artículo presenta una propuesta para la formación de competencias de pensamiento histórico. 1) La conciencia histórica-temporal relacionada con la temporalidad humana, el cambio y el poder sobre el tiempo futuro. 2) La representación de la historia, como la narración y la explicación histórica, para la reconstrucción del pasado. 3) La imaginación histórica, como la empatía y la contextualización, unidas a la formación del pensamiento crítico y creativo, y el juicio moral en la historia. 4) La interpretación histórica basada en el análisis de les fuentes históricas, en la comparación o contraste de textos históricos, y en el conocimiento del proceso de trabajo de la ciencia histórica. Nuestra propuesta de formación del pensamiento histórico está relacionada con la formación democrática de la ciudadanía

La formación de competencias de pensamiento histórico

Este artículo presenta una propuesta para la formación de competencias de pensamiento histórico. 1) La conciencia histórica-temporal relacionada con la temporalidad humana, el cambio y el poder sobre el tiempo futuro. 2) La representación de la historia, como la narración y la explicación histórica, para la reconstrucción del pasado. 3) La imaginación histórica, como la empatía y la contextualización, unidas a la formación del pensamiento crítico y creativo, y el juicio moral en la historia. 4) La interpretación histórica basada en el análisis de les fuentes históricas, en la comparación o contraste de textos históricos, y en el conocimiento del proceso de trabajo de la ciencia histórica. Nuestra propuesta de formación del pensamiento histórico está relacionada con la formación democrática de la ciudadanía

Peter Brown's The 'rise of western christendom', second edition: A review essay

Peter Brown, perhaps the world's leading scholar in the field of late antiquity, has produced a substantially revised and expanded edition of one of his major books, drawing on the vast volume of recent work. This essay summarizes its central arguments, especially the significance it attributes to developments away from the Mediterranean and to the seventh century, which together allow the topic to be seen in a compelling new light. It applauds the sustained excellence of Brown's prose, as well as his frame of reference and historical imagination. Some questions are raised concerning his deployment of sources, the importance given to the north, the ability to make decisions that people are credited with, and the coming of Islam. That a scholar of Brown's eminence is able to relish and appropriate effectively work that appeared subsequent to the first edition of this book is a tribute to his stature.

Contar la crisis: materiales narrativos en la semántica social de la crisis

Basado en la evidencia proporcionada por 9 grupos de discusión, este trabajo aborda la semántica social de la crisis en el marco de la hipótesis propuesta por Janet Roitman. En consecuencia propone retratar distintas estrategias narrativas que permiten dar cuenta de la experiencia de la crisis según cuatro ejes de contraposiciones: agencia/paciencia, moralización/poder, coyuntura/cronicidad, destrucción/creación. En su parte final, propone fijar los rasgos fundamentales de los sujetos que aparecen en seno de las tramas narrativas propuestas.

Historical and Personal Perspectives on the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989: address to 20th anniversary forums.

The story of the fall of the Berlin Wall was an aspect of the “imagination gap” that we had to wrestle with as journalists covering the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in Europe. It was scarcely possible to believe what you found yourself reporting, and that work became a two-track process. On one hand a mass social movement was dictating the pace and direction of events; on the other, the institutional business of politics as usual, to provide a framework for all the change that was happening, had to be managed – and reported on. In later analyseds we could see, that crisis in the Soviet Union led to the crisis over the Berlin Wall; and from the fall of the Wall, came Germany’s reunification, and with that also, formation of the European Union as it is today. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany convinced its neighbours that a reunited Germany, within an expanded EU, would be a very acceptable “European Germany” -- not the leader of a “German Europe”. It committed itself financially, supporting the new Euro currency. The former communist states of Eastern Europe demanded to join and expand the EU; in order to remove themselves from the Soviet Union, enjoy human rights, and share in Western prosperity. So today, following on from the events of 1989, the European Union is an amalgam of 27 member countries, with close to 500 million citizens and accounting for 30 % of world Gross National Product.