Suchergebnisse

Alan Patten's social lineage account of cultural continuity is the most recent effort to provide multicultural theory with a non-essentialist concept of culture, its continuity and loss that meets broadly liberal normative desiderata. In this essay, I argue that it too fails to offer an alternative to essentialism, to meet standard liberal normative stipulations, and to construct a theory of continuity sufficient to underpin the present claims of involuntarily incorporated communities. That result is theoretically interesting for it shows the deep intractability of the problems at the core of liberal multiculturalism.

Alan Patten's social lineage account of cultural continuity is the most recent effort to provide multicultural theory with a non-essentialist concept of culture, its continuity and loss that meets broadly liberal normative desiderata. In this essay, I argue that it too fails to offer an alternative to essentialism, to meet standard liberal normative stipulations, and to construct a theory of continuity sufficient to underpin the present claims of involuntarily incorporated communities. That result is theoretically interesting for it shows the deep intractability of the problems at the core of liberal multiculturalism. Adapted from the source document.

Addressing historic injustice involves a struggle against absence. This article reflects on the foundations of that challenge, on absence and justice. I ask what it means to address the absent victims of deadly injustice given the distance of time and death that separates us from them. This topic embraces a wide swath of events of interest to students of politics. Some are as recent as the Rwandan genocide; others are by now historical: the Holocaust or slavery in antebellum America. All have in common that they and their victims are distant from us, a separation that makes doing them justice deeply perplexing. In response, I sketch an argument that the absent victims of injustice are not nullities but retain a status, a presence as claimants on justice that defines our efforts to address the wrongs done them.

In this article, I argue that an attention to the absent past, and its demands, is very much part of what we do when we do justice. I also urge that identity, the sense of a shared something, is dependent on memory as an ingathering of the past. Where the community sees grave injustice in that past, that too can come to be an active force in the present. The ways in which this often benign and familiar part of politics metamorphoses into memory-fueled political violence is at the centre of that analysis. My task here is not to judge that violence, either in general or in the particular (Northern Irish) illustrations I draw on. Rather, my goal is to move beyond a view of memory politics, including its violent dimensions, that sees it from the outset as a kind of profound irrationality or madness.

In this article, I am concerned with the relationship between the visibility of race as color, the memory of injustice, and American identity. The visibility of color would seem to make it a daily reminder of race and its history, and in this way to be intimately a part of American memory and identity. Yet the tie between memory and color is anything but certain or transparent. Rather, as I shall argue, it is a latticework composed of things remembered, forgotten, glossed, or idealized, and the traces they leave in our world, traces that keep that past from falling into the oblivion of forgetfulness. Finally, color, memory, and identity together belong to the struggle over racial justice in this country, a battle in part to recognize the past, of which color is the visible reminder, and to fashion an American identity that does not seek to render it invisible. Ralph Ellison's writings on memory and race, and particularly his defining work, the Invisible Man, map these issues and some of the ways of approaching them. The present essay is an exploration of those issues, conducted through an engagement with his work.

George J. Graham died on November 30, 2006, after a courageous battle
with cancer. He was 68 years old. George is survived by his daughter,
Carmen Michelle Graham Christgau of San Francisco and a sister, Joyce
Graham Johnson of Sarasota.

In Memoriam of George J. Graham, Jr.

Justice is, in part, a form of remembrance: memory occupies a vital place at the heart of justice & its struggle to keep the victims, crimes, & perpetrators among the unforgotten. I argue that this memory-justice at once informs core judicial practices & ranges beyond them in a manner that leaves judicial closure incomplete. It reminds us of a duty to keep crimes & their victims from the oblivion of forgetting, of a duty to restore, preserve, & acknowledge the just order of the world. Yet, in the shadow of remembrance, other human goods can wither, goods located in the temporal registers of present & future. This latter lesson is important, but it is one with which we are familiar. I emphasize another, with which we are perhaps less at home: the intimacy of memory's bond with justice, not as an obsession or as a syndrome, but as a face of justice itself. 125 References. Adapted from the source document.

I take up the question of political identity as the continuity of a community across time. In particular, I examine what it means to think of a political community as the subject of attribution across generations, that is, what is meant when it is made the bearer of responsibility for the past and a custodian of the future. In doing that, I focus on identity, memory, and responsibility and discuss that cluster of concepts using as an illustrative example the idea of constitutional patriotism and its relationship to the past.