Słowa kluczowe

First World War |Algeria |POW camp |Halbmondlager |conscript of moderni- ty |Mohammed Bencherif |French colonial ideology

Streszczenie

This article offers an analysis of the representation of captivity in Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier. The novel, published by Algerian writer Mohammed Bencherif in 1920, was partly inspired by his own experience as a prisoner of war during the First World War. Relying on historical, sociological and anthropological sources, the article focuses on the protagonist’s experience as a POW in German camps and in Switzerland. It also proposes a metaphorical interpretation of captivity in the colonial context, reading Ben Mostapha as a “conscript of modernity,” conditioned by French republican ideals. Fi- nally, it examines thought-provoking analogies between colony and camp in Bencherif’s novel.

Słowa kluczowe

World War II |Austrian literature |‘enemy alien’ internment Britain |fictional biography |Jewishness

Streszczenie

Winner of the Alfred Döblin Preis in 1999, the novel Die englischen Jahre by the Austrian novelist Norbert Gstrein deals with internment and exile in Britain dur- ing and after the Second World War. It centres on the (fictitious) character of Gabriel Hirschfelder, a writer and refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who is detained, with oth- er ‘enemy aliens,’ in a camp on the Isle of Man. There, Nazi sympathisers are interned together with Jewish and political refugees, and the central chapters in the novel depict the conditions and resulting conflicts in the internment camp. Hirschfelder dies in exile at Southend-on-Sea, having confessed shortly before his death that he killed a fellow inmate. This confession as well as reports of a transport of internees sunk off the coast of Scotland in 1940 incite a young Austrian woman to try to solve the mystery surrounding Hirschfelder and his allegedly lost autobiography The English Years. The paper discusses how Gstrein combines different genres like the historical novel/historiographic metafic- tion and the whodunit as well as using multiple narrative perspectives and refractions to pinpoint questions of shifting identities and allegiances, and of belonging and alienation in the wake of internment and exile.

Słowa kluczowe

human rights |discrimination |Japanese Canadian internment |redress |historic memory |state apologies for past wrongdoing |racism and race-related trauma |social justice

Streszczenie

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

Słowa kluczowe

trauma |Gene Oishi |Japanese American internment |Nisei |aesthetics of jazz |temporality

Streszczenie

Gene Oishi’s autobiographical and episodic novel Fox Drum Bebop (2014) will likely be one of the final novels published by someone who was an internee in the detention camps in which the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans during the Second World War. As such, it presents complicated questions about temporality, rep- resentation, and the processes of trauma. Through focusing on the protagonist Hiroshi Kono (largely, though not restrictively, based on Oishi’s own life experience) and his siblings who have distinct ideological reactions to their ethnic identity and their wartime experience, Oishi explores how internment at once lasted for a determinate period but continues to extend in space and dilate in time for as long as the memories of it endure. The novel uses the musical aesthetics of jazz as a correlate for this discontinuous process- ing of experience. Oishi’s narrative asks if those who suffer oppression and trauma can ever find peace, and how, if at all, having a long life and reflecting upon the past can alter one’s sense of what happened.

Słowa kluczowe

multiculturalism |White Australia |race fear |law in war |German Australian community |Australian citizenship |internment |ethnic cleansing

Streszczenie

During the First World War, the German Australian community, the largest non-Anglo-Celtic group, became the target of a relentless campaign of persecution, internment and deportation that resulted in its dismemberment and the destruction of its socio-cultural infrastructure. Under the country’s belligerent Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes, the machinery of government was used to suspend basic civil rights and the rule of law, while Australian civilians were called upon to participate in the “homefront war” against an imagined internal enemy. The government’s aim was to serve the cause of Im- perial Britain and its commercial supremacy, and to secure the future of White Australia as the home of an imaginary, exclusive “British race.”

Słowa kluczowe

haiku |postmemory |trauma |Australia |Richard Flanagan |POWs |affective remembering

Streszczenie

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

Słowa kluczowe

Australia |Manus Island |Behrouz Boochani |Pacific Solution |Immigration Detention Centres |deterrence systems |offshore regional processing

Streszczenie

This article focuses on the “Pacific Solution,” the Australian national policy of controlling illegal migration by detaining refugees in Immigrant Detention Centres in offshore Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru, and the human rights issues it raises. It refers to Behrouz Boochani’s prize-winning refugee memoir, No Friend but the Moun- tains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) as both a prison narrative of resilience and a politically resistant text, and it discusses Boochani’s representation of Manus Detention camp as “The Kyriarchal System” in terms of Foucault’s “monstrous heterotopia.” The ar- ticle emphasises the issues of accountability and responsibility in the bilateral governance arrangements of the Manus Detention Centre between Australia and Papua New Guinea, and considers the possibility of more humane detention practices in the future.