Search

An investigation of the back-and-forth between advocates of a strong dollar and those of a weak one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the book Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature: Students in Community as Course Co‐Designers by Ricki Ginsberg (2022). Published amid increasingly contentious censoring of teachers' autonomy and students' rights to read in many districts across the United States, this book is a timely call for educators to rethink traditional curriculum choices and pedagogical approaches in the secondary literature classroom. Ginsberg makes a strong case for privileging engaging and relevant texts utilizing YA literature and centering students and their voices in communities of practice in the classroom. She offers a wide range of approaches to make this book relevant for teachers across the spectrum of autonomy, including impactful additions to existing curriculum for those in more constrained environments and a blueprint for a stand‐alone YA literature course for those with more flexibility. Geared toward an audience of secondary literature teachers with many practical pedagogical considerations and suggestions, the solid theoretical base makes this book a useful read for literacy researchers and administrators interested in promoting student‐centered pedagogical methods, leveraging meaningful communities of practice in classroom settings, and reaping the benefits of YA literature with secondary students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews three recent books on nationalism, each focusing on a different aspect of this multifaceted phenomenon. Mylonas and Radnitz's volume explores the relationships between nationalism and the politics of treason, Hadžidedic's book zooms in on the historical interdependence of capitalism and nationalism, while Maxwell's historical monograph explores nationalist habitus as a form of lived experience. These three insightful contributions show the diversity and plasticity of nationalist ideology and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jelena Subotić's Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism has already received such broad recognition and numerous awards that its invaluable contribution to memory studies likely does not need repeating. It is not only a study of Holocaust remembrance in particular, but contributes broadly to our understanding of memory appropriation by the state, through a careful and vivid analysis of its transformation over time in several Eastern and Central European countries. Subotić provides a study of how memory can serve as a strategic tool for reinforcing state interests. The central argument of the book is that the states in question – Croatia, Lithuania, and Serbia – engage in memory appropriation in order to qualify their ontological insecurities (14). The strategies include "memory inversion," appropriating the Holocaust to emphasize crimes against them (primarily in Serbia), "memory divergence," placing blame for the genocide on German Nazis (Croatia), or "memory conflation," wherein Holocaust memory is combined and equated with Communist crimes (Lithuania, 15). These appropriation strategies, which overlap and are combined in the various states, allow states to paint themselves as the ultimate victims, absolving them of responsibility for their role in Holocaust crimes. The danger, of course, is that this not only set ups the false equivalence between victims of Communism and of the Holocaust, allowing for the relativization of Nazi collaboration as anti-Communist resistance, but also because it banalizes and trivializes the specific suffering of the Jewish population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jelena Subotić's book is an important contribution to memory studies scholarship because it shows how the mechanism of memory appropriation connects state-led remembrance practices with the processes of national identity formation. Through the comparative analysis of Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, Subotić argues that Holocaust remembrance in these states is less about remembering the Holocaust – or acknowledging the states' own responsibilities for the forced displacement and mass killing of the Jewish population on their territories – and more about the political use of the memory of the Holocaust in the context of the postcommunist transition and national identity insecurities. Yellow Star, Red Star , and particularly its chapters on Serbia and Croatia, nicely complement the existing literature – such as the work of Keith Brown, Siniša Malešević, Vjekoslav Perica, Dejan Jović, Emil Kerenji, Vjeran Pavlaković, Jelena Đureinović, Tamara Banjeglav, and Ana Ljubojević, among others – analyzing linkages between nationalism and state-sponsored memorialization practices in the post-Yugoslav states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]