KEAN UNIVERSITY’S

FACULTY SEMINAR ON COMPARATIVE CULTURES

2005-06 Theme:

Representations of Genocide and Resistance

To mark the inauguration in 2005-06 of Kean University’s Master of Arts Degree program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Faculty Seminar will devote the 2005-06 academic year—its 7th—to exploring the selected theme, “Representations of Genocide and Resistance.” “Representations” include the communication of ideas in the classroom, which the following questions engage. (Adapted from remarks by Frank Conlon, University of Washington, posted on the H-Asia listserv.)

To explain or to condemn?

I have reflected back on 34 years of teaching on many topics including the 1857 mutinies and rebellions, the Amritsar Massacre, the 'communal riots', ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka, the Partition of the subcontinent, the Assam massacres against 'outsiders', the Bombay riots and the more recent Gujarat violence. I have always felt torn between my conviction that I have to put the events into context, that I have to offer some 'explanations' of terrible facts versus my sense that to not openly condemn evil when it presents itself in human affairs is to leave morality as an empty shell.

To avoid or engage controversy?

At times we have seen discussions of how modern day textbooks have been 'dumbed down' to overcome perceived student inability or disinterest in coming to terms with heavy reading loads and complex interpretations of complicated stories. In a time when so many media may provide near instant access to visual records of killings, riots, pogroms, terrorism, mayhem, what have you, perhaps we are also facing the dilemma of 'numbing down'. If our goal is to avoid controversy, then 'comfort women' or 'communal riots' perhaps should be avoided; but what is the use of that when these things occurred and shaped subsequent events?

The risks of stereotyping

As near as I can tell, thinking back to my own teaching, I knew that some students would interpret events in ways that I would not want them to do. On more than one occasion I learned later that my attempts to limn the awful violence of events in South Asia either introduced (or reinforced existing) stereotypes in some of my students of how 'those people' are fatalistic, fanatic, irrational, wicked, whatever.

Mass phenomena or individual agency?

My own approach to discussing 'mass' phenomena of violence or inhumanity is to try to get students to appreciate that 'communal riots' or comfort women' are merely labels that are applied to aggregated phenomena, and that at the time they occurred, they were not 'aggregated' but were experienced individually by the actors and by those acted upon. In short, I think it is important to bring individual agency into the comprehension, even if we rarely can provide documentary evidence that would meet a historian's professional standards.

Faculty Seminar Theme-1.doc