William F. S. Miles

Auschwitz: museum interpretation and darker tourism.

In an era in which publics have become more demanding of their museological experiences, visual “interpretation” has emerged as a new framework for both museum curators and their scholarly critics (Noussia 1998). This trend towards a more relevant and interactive museum pedagogy has become so transformative that some have posited the “post-museum” as a successor form to the 19th century institution (Hooper-Greenhill 2000). This emphasis on museum interpretation is particularly sensitive when applied to “dark tourism.” The latter entails recreational visitation to sites “associated… with death, disaster, and depravity”, such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (Lennon and Foley 1999). However, there is a difference between sites associated with death, disaster, and depravity and sites of death, disaster, and depravity. If visitation to the former is rightfully characterized as “dark tourism,” then journey/excursion/pilgrimage to the latter constitutes a further degree of empathetic travel: “darker tourism.” Based on visits to the Washington museum and the (open-air) museum at the former concentration camp site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, this research note intends to underscore the significance of the distinction between “dark” and “darker” tourism (Miles 2000, 2001). Particularly with respect to authenticity, but also in terms of site interpretation, it is a distinction that needs to be recognized and internalized by those charged with commemorating the Shoah. Key to this interpretive function are the differing motivations for Holocaust memorial construction and visitation. Such a paradigm, sensitive to dimensions of authenticity and experience, may also help in assessing the varied reactions by those drawn to such sites. “Darker tourism” is conceptually and linguistically preferable to Young’s (1994) unintentionally reifying polarity between “memorials removed from the sites of destruction” and “sites of destruction” per se. By virtue of their opposite positions in the panoply of

Nationalism Versus Ethnic Identity in Sub-Saharan Africa

Part and parcel of the conventional wisdom about rural publics in Africa is that populations on the periphery will accord ethnic solidarity greater significance than national consciousness. A survey of neighboring Hausa villages on different sides of the Niger-Nigeria boundary counters this myth. Probing issues of self-identity and ethnic affinity, we found that most Hausa villagers on the frontier did not place their Hausan ethnic identity above their national one as citizens of Nigeria or Niger and expressed greater affinity for non-Hausa cocitizens than for foreign Hausas. However, expressed attachments to ethnic, national, and other social identifications (such as religion) varied according to village : citizenship does make a difference in the political consciousness of villagers on the geographic margins of the state. More survey research in other transborder regions should shed further light on processes of state penetration and national integration in developing countries

Third World views of the Holocaust1

For many observers, the United Nations Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held from August 31 to September 7, 2001 in Durban, South Africa, constituted a throwback to an earlier era of Third World, and not only Arab, antipathy towards the Jewish state. While Israel was not supposed to be a focus of UN and related NGO deliberations, and while other controversial issues also intruded on the anti-racism agenda (e.g. reparations for slavery, compensation for colonialism), concurrent violence between Israel and the Palestinians ensured that the very legitimacy of Zionism would again be open to debate. Given Israel’s international image as the successor state to the Nazi-targeted Jewish nation, ideological assaults on Zionism inevitably affect the framing of the role of the Holocaust in modern history. For sure, the Durban conference did not officially restore the “Zionism is Racism” 1976 proclamation of the General Assembly of the United Nations; yet anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) language in some working groups and among some official delegations was enough to occasion a walkout by both the Israeli and US delegations. Gauging among non-Western intellectuals objective, sober, or unpolemical sentiments with regards to the Shoah would appear a whimsical, naı̈ve, or illusory endeavor. Nevertheless, a more comprehensive treatment of perspectives on the Shoah emanating from the developing world, based on both scholarly literature and proceedings from the first conference convened specifically on this topic, reveals a more balanced, nuanced, and illuminating set of observations: (1) intellectual globalization includes the Shoah within the emerging universal consciousness of world history; (2) reparations claims for other people’s historical injustices derive their moral authority and tactical moorings from precedents established for Holocaust victims; (3) H/holocaust parallelism is a strategy employed by otherwise ignored groups under fire to gain support and sympathy from the West; (4) post-Shoah moral responsibility redounds upon an Israel whose overall legitimacy, despite criticism of certain policies, is respected; and (5) denial of Holocaust (along with fictionalization and self-suppression) is replicated in instances of Third World genocides. In short, the Third World indigenizes the Holocaust and its legacies in diverse manners.

Deploying Development to Counter Terrorism: Post-9/11 Transformation of U.S. Foreign Aid to Africa

Abstract: Since September 11, 2001, the aid component of American foreign policy toward Africa has undergone a significant evolution: U.S. security has come to rival development as an increasingly explicit rationale. Development programming and project implementation now contain a security dimension that is underpinned by Pentagon strategists working through AFRICOM as much as by USAID officers partnering with the State Department. This article argues that given the potential of terrorism for undermining development in Africa itself, soft counterterrorism should be envisioned as a strategic developmental defense activity. Making use of unpublished country risk assessments and the authors participant observation during USAID field mission consultancies in the Sahel, as well as the scholarly literature and relevant policy documents of the Bush and Obama administrations, this article explores the new agenda and grassroots dynamics of development projects as tools for terrorism prevention. It contends that policy and institutional responses to 9/11 have resulted in a greater convergence of operational goals among U.S. government agencies that in the past, at least according to publicly stated goals, had pursued distinctly different missions in Africa. Normative implications of this change are mixed. Because of differing expectations with respect to separation of powers, African public opinion, paradoxically, may be more sympathetic to U.S. military engagement with civilians for developmental purposes than American public opinion is.

Imperial burdens : countercolonialism in former French India

Explores the modern-day legacy of French colonialism in India. This work comes to the conclusion that the nature of the fledgling French decolonisation process, contrary to expectations, created a relationship whereby the former colonised are now exploiting the former colonisers.

Colonial Hausa Idioms: Toward a West African Ethno-Ethnohistory

Understanding how Westerners have been perceived by the African cultures they are ostensibly studying constitutes an instructive reversal of the classical subject-object relationship in Africanist research. By examining the perception of the White Man as embodied in Hausa folklore pertaining to the colonial era we gain a firmer grasp of the indigenous perspective on this period of Nigerien and Nigerian history and better appreciate the significance of clientship as a factor in the colonial relationship. We also find confirmation for the contrast school of colonial historiography which argues that the differences between French and British modes of administration were substantively important for the Africans directly affected by them. While specifically related to African-European relations during the colonial era, the lessons gleaned from an investigation of Hausa ethno-ethnohistory may be generally applicable to the even more ambivalent relationship between social scientist and host community in contemporary Africa. Western treatment of African history has evolved through several distinct phases. The first phase can be characterized as outright denial: Bereft of textual references to, or other corroborative documents from, the dark continent , the West generally denied that Africa had a history. This myth of a static, timeless, ahistorical Africa eventually gave way to the second, more substantive phase in which precolonial empire formation and dissolution was documented and archaeologically verified. African scholars, such as Diop, were instrumental in this renaissance of African historicism in the West.

Pigs, Politics and Social Change in Vanuatu

Pigs have long held great symbolic import for the people of Vanuatu, a sprawling archipelago 1,000 miles northeast of Australia. In most of the indigenous, small-scale communities which comprised traditional Vanuatu society, pig ownership and pig killing conveyed status, wealth, and informal power. Such rituals were the sole measure of social standing and political rank. In this study, I show how the cultural valuation of an animal, in this case the pig, can evolve as a society undergoes socio-economic development, and also how it can be used to foster nationalistic, partisan. and other political ends. I show how competing nationalist leaders used pig symbolism in their struggle to create a unified national identit_v,for-varying island groups, and how even today, local leaders derive their legitimacy through the manipulation of traditional animal rites.

Israel's religious vote in comparative perspective: an Africanist analysis

Invoking the framework of religion and politics, this article contrasts the explicitly Judaic dimension to the 2009 elections in Israel with the implicitly Muslim one in 2007 in Nigeria. It also highlights the organizational, political, and theological similarities between fundamentalist (qua haredi) Judaism in Israel and fundamentalist (qua Sufi) Islam in Nigeria. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between Israel and Nigeria in terms of demography, standard of living, and dominant religion, both are relatively young democracies in which religious belief, practice and identification occupy key roles in their respective political behaviour and electoral politics. Both polities have also experienced increasing politicization of religion since independence. Proponents of legislating sharia in Nigeria and halacha in Israel unwittingly share compatible policies. Similarities in the organization, leadership, and political functionality of ultra-Orthodox and Sufi religious brotherhoods in the Jewish state and northern Nigeria transcend creedal differences.

Francophonie in post‐colonial Vanuatu∗

THE FORMATION OF A COALITION GOVERNMENT IN VANUATU IN DECEMBER OF 1991 marked a significant shift in the cultural as well as political landscape of this South Pacific archipelago. For the first time since the former Anglo-French Con dominiums independence in 1980, Vanuatu was governed by a francophone, Prime Minister Maxime Korman (ne Carlot). The fact that Prime Minister Korman, as head of the Union of Moderate Parties (UMP), was compelled to form a coalition with his erstwhile rival, Father Walter lini of the National Unity Party (NUP, a splinter of the Vanuaaku Party which had ruled the country since independence), did little to dampen the optimism of the heart of the UMPs traditional constituency, Vanuatus French-speaking citizens. Indeed, sub sequent actions taken by the UMP to rehabilitate the French language and to strengthen Vanuatus ties with the government of France have raised hopes in some quarters of a veritable renaissance of francophonie in the former New Hebrides.

The rabbi's well: a case study in the micropolitics of foreign aid in Muslim West Africa

Abstract: A conventional distinction in the foreign aid literature contrasts relief aid (qua emergency help and charitable giving) with developmental assistance (for sustainable economic growth, capacity building, and equitable distribution). In practice, however, the distinction blurs, and in the field it can lead to micropolitical conflict. This point is illustrated by the ecumenical efforts on the part of a U.S. rabbi to assist a school in southcentral Niger. As illustrated by the history of this project, complexities of local administration, and tensions between the staff and principal of one school, crystallized and demonstrated conflicts between traditional authorities and those of the modern state.