Rites of Return

A stellar cast of scholars, writers, engaged journalists, and public intellectuals explore some of the most pressing issues of our time. Writing (and speaking) in voices urgent and intimate, public and political, these contributors transport readers across generations and national borders to ask what it means to belong to a place or a people in an age of overlapping claims and occupied territories. -- Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization What most distinguishes this accomplished and thought-provoking volume is its textured conceptual approach and resistance to facile formulations of identity, identification, loss, and return. The essays individually and cumulatively wrestle with a complex, shifting set of competing claims and elusive legacies. However we define 'home' and 'origins', this collection reminds us that there is no overarching narrative that will satisfy all historical and political desires for recognition and recovery, and the experiences that shape us personally and familially have global implications. -- Bella Brodzki, Sarah Lawrence College

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University