Disaster And Memory

Download or read book The Unreality of Memory written by Elisa Gabbert and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Terror, disaster, memory, selfhood, happiness . . . leave it to a poet to tackle the unthinkable so wisely and so wittily."* A literary guide to life in the pre-apocalypse, The Unreality of Memory collects profound and prophetic essays on the Internet age’s media-saturated disaster coverage and our addiction to viewing and discussing the world’s ills. We stare at our phones. We keep multiple tabs open. Our chats and conversations are full of the phrase “Did you see?” The feeling that we’re living in the worst of times seems to be intensifying, alongside a desire to know precisely how bad things have gotten—and each new catastrophe distracts us from the last. The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. Can we avoid repeating history? Can we understand our moment from inside the moment? With The Unreality of Memory, Gabbert offers a hauntingly perceptive analysis of our new ways of being and a means of reconciling ourselves to this unreal new world. "A work of sheer brilliance, beauty and bravery.” *—Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less

Download or read book Lessons from Disaster written by Trevor A. Kletz and published by Gulf Professional Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is by avoiding accidents that the process industries will improve their public image. Lessons from Disaster focuses upon the apparent inability of organizations to learn, and retain in long-term, the lessons drawn from accidents. Incidents of a similar type continue to occur within companies repeatedly. Trevor Kletz illustrates this with detailed cases, which form a gold mine of experience and advice for every engineer. He offers, with his customary vision and imagination, his own advice on how to improve the corporate memory.

Download or read book Diagnosis for Disaster written by Claudette Wassil-Grimm and published by Overlook Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: False Memory Syndrome is a dangerous phenomenon that is gaining tremendous momentum in this country. Truth or Fantasy? is a powerful look at this shocking trend. The book tells the story of this crisis through the voices of retractors, backed up by psychiatrists, psychologists, and memory experts.

Download or read book Desire and Disaster in New Orleans written by Lynnell L. Thomas and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine, dance—while simultaneously targeting black people and their communities as sources and sites of political, social, and natural disaster. In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourism websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourism-focused businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations. Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial inequality and structural inequity.

Download or read book After the Tsunami written by Annemarie Samuels and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused immense destruction and over 170,000 deaths in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The disaster spurred large-scale social and political changes in Aceh, including the intensified implementation of shari‘a law and an end to the long separatist conflict. After the Tsunami explores Acehnese survivors’ experiences of the deadly waves and the subsequent reconstruction process through the stories they tell about the disaster. Narratives, author Annemarie Samuels argues, are both a window onto the process of remaking everyday life and an essential component of it. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Samuels shows how the everyday work of recovery is indispensable for any large-scale reconstruction effort to succeed. Recovery is an ambiguous process in which grief remains as life goes on, where optimism and disappointment, remembering and forgetting, structural poverty and the rhetoric of success are often intertwined in individual and social worlds. Such paradoxes are key and form a thread through the five chapters of the book. Addressing post-disaster reconstruction from the survivors’ perspectives opens up space for criticism of post-disaster governance without reducing the discussion of recovery to top-down interventions. Individual histories, emotions, creativity, and ways of being in the world, the author argues, inform the remaking of worlds as much as social, political, and cultural transformations do. After the Tsunami is a provocative and highly significant contribution to studies of humanitarian aid and disaster, psychological anthropology, narrative studies, and scholarly studies of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Its elegant style, pointed theorizing, and moving ethnographic descriptions will draw readers into Acehnese lifeworlds and politics. Its narratives attest to Acehnese ways of living with loss, within and across a history of colonial and postcolonial violence and suffering and a present of political uncertainty and hope.

Download or read book Death Tourism written by Brigitte Sion and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers presented at the Conference 'Death/Dark/Thanatourism' at New York University in April 2010.

Download or read book Witnessing the Disaster written by Michael Bernard-Donals and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2003-12-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witnessing the Disaster examines how histories, films, stories and novels, memorials and museums, and survivor testimonies involve problems of witnessing: how do those who survived, and those who lived long after the Holocaust, make clear to us what happened? How can we distinguish between more and less authentic accounts? Are histories more adequate descriptors of the horror than narrative? Does the susceptibility of survivor accounts to faulty memory and the vestiges of trauma make them any more or less useful as instruments of witness? And how do we authenticate their accuracy without giving those who deny the Holocaust a small but dangerous foothold? These essayists aim to move past the notion that the Holocaust as an event defies representation. They look at specific cases of Holocaust representation and consider their effect, their structure, their authenticity, and the kind of knowledge they produce. Taken together they consider the tension between history and memory, the vexed problem of eyewitness testimony and its status as evidence, and the ethical imperatives of Holocaust representation.