Based on survivors’ testimonies the article discusses the encounters of Holocaust survivors in Palestine/Israel between 1945 and 1955. After addressing the issues of the historiography of these Holocaust survivors and the value of using their testimonies, it examines the interactions of survivors with official authorities: work, housing, kibbutzim, education, and the pre-military/IDF. It sheds light on the meaning of silence and the manifestation of stereotyping for the survivors themselves, and it assesses the impact of families and creating families. The article also examines the validity of these testimonies by studying some testimonies of Holocaust survivors who emigrated from Israel and those who immigrated directly from Europe to North America. The study concludes that although contemporary collective views influenced survivors’ perceptions, cases of their ill-treatment were not isolated. They were more the result of the attitudes of individuals than the policy of the state. Veteran Israelis' insens...

Between reception and self-perception: testimonies of holocaust survivors in israel

Teaching Multicultural Literature

lhere is little doubt that multiculturalism has an important place in composition studies. From the proliferation of "multicultural" readers to the transformation of postcolonial, feminist, and ethnic theories into critical writing practices, it is clear that many compositionists have embraced a multicultural commitment to tolerance and difference, par ticularly with regard to race, gender, and class. This "ethical turn" in composition seems almost paradoxical, however, in the face of postmodern skepticism and its implications for the relativity of knowledge and ethics. At the heart of this problem of relativism for composition is whether the postmodern rejection of the notion of progress and lack of criteria to evaluate ethical worth undermine the most significant objectives of the multicultural perspective in composition: to eliminate oppression, pro mote equality and justice, respect cultural differences, and build a human community across cultural lines. That is, do the concepts of oppression, racism, sexism, liberty, compassion, and justice lose their ethical force if they are nothing more than constructions of a particular individual, community, or culture's contingent belief system? How do we reconcile multiculturalism's ethical aims with its apparently relativistic implica tions? In this article, I will argue for what I call just multiculturalism, which holds justice rather than tolerance or difference as multiculturalism's first principle, as one path to consider as a way out of the relativist trap. With justice as a first principle, egalitarianism and humanitarianism become central to the multicultural project, and there are no fundamental contra dictions, even if there are no easy answers. Just multiculturalism posits that there is no necessary contradiction between a genuine multiculturalism committed to both difference and shared humanity, an in-between space

"Just Multiculturalism": Teaching Writing as Critical and Ethical Practice

Although very few critics have ventured to analyze Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests owing to its apparent difficulty, yet those who have attempted simply see it as a metaphorical commentary of the sociopolitical situation in Nigeria. While their observations might be valid, taking into cognizance that the play was written in 1960 as part of the celebration of Nigeria’s independence, the problem with such readings is that it does not take into account the structure of the play in which Soyinka traces the past  to the present to forecast a dystopian future. While a utopic past and a dystopic present is often enacted as a narrative gesture that concomitantly leads to a utopian future, the reverse is the case in this play. What Wole Soyinka depicts is a dystopian past as well as a dystopian present and future. Therefore, my proposition in this paper is that more than being a work of post- independence disillusionment, Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests links the hopeless past with the fruitless present to project a bleak future. In this way, my point of departure in this essay is that while the writing of the play has been motivated by the betrayal of the common trust and hope as it relates to the Nigerian socio-political climate, the message of the play has a universal underpinning. In this respect, Soyinka insists that the atrocities that have so often characterized human interactions generally are unavoidable. Yet, by portraying the unavoidability of these human atrocities, Soyinka invariably quests for a futurity that  is utopian. My conclusion, therefore, is that within the aesthetic trajectory of Soyinka, the boundary between dystopian and utopian visions is not clear-cut: they are one and the same. Keywords: A Dance of the Forests, dystopia, Nigerian sociopolitical situation, utopia, Wole Soyinka.

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Wole Soyinka’s dystopian/utopian vision in A Dance of the Forests

ABSTRACT:After being a British protectorate for nearly sixty years, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence the same year A Dance of the Forests was published. The play, which expresses ambivalence toward radical changes with premonitions between its lines, has been regarded as one of the most challenging to understand. With an eye on the work's historical context, it is treated as a symptom of history that reveals its "political unconscious" based on Fredrick Jameson's ideas. Furthermore, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Gaps highlights "the ideological project" of the literary work by focusing on the "unsaid" in the text, which shapes its "speech." In conclusion, regarding the synthesis of Jameson and Macherey's ideas, which reveals and studies the correlation between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the central topic of the work and describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the service of the ideological project concerning its context.

A Loud Dance of Silence: The Unsaid of Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests

1 Although I am committed, through personal experience and conviction, to diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom, I have become increasingly concerned with how these concepts get translated into practice, particularly in the pedagogy of writing classes. I fear that postcolonial texts are frequently being used as litde more than a kind of multiculturalist mass tourism, what Stanley Fish has termed "boutique multiculturalism" (Fish 1997, 378).2 The student is taken on tours of other cultures-one class on a Chinese story, another on an Ugandan-tours which, like the network evening news, tame otherness and difference. And this taming dominates multicultural readers, where experience is interpreted in universalist terms, thus making us all, underneath, the same, except for some exotic surface differences.3 Exposed only to fragments of other cultures, the students' unconscious assumption of cultural superiority remains unchallenged, and their experience of multiculturalism becomes a confirmation of what they believe they already know. Like tourists on a twelve-day tour of ten countries, they may recognize quaint tourist sites, but they will have little sense of how life is lived in those "other" places, because we do not allow the central belief systems of these "other" cultures to confront our own. As Julie Drew has written: "Despite the good intentions of those who produce them, multicultural readers ... often promote a kind of `cultural tourism' that constructs students as free to travel, to observe, to remain removed from and unaffected" (1997, 298) by what they read of these other cultures. The stance toward other cultures encoded in multiculturalist readers, she continues, "does not compel students to negotiate or dialogue" (301) nor does it "require students to think through their own positions because theirs [is] . . 'natural' . . . [and] invisible" (301-02). These readers assume that "our" experience is the template against which all other cultures are measured, and another of the central governing assumptions of these textbooks is toleration-that all cultural differences must be tolerated because difference is merely a feature of the surface of things. These books, in Stanley Fish's terms, share the assumptions of a boutique multiculturalist who does not and cannot take seriously the core values of the cultures he tolerates. The reason that he cannot is that he does not see those values as truly "core" but as overlays on a substratum of essential humanity ... We may dress differently, speak differently, woo differently, worship or not worship differently, but underneath (so the argument goes) there is something we all share (or that shares us) and that something constitutes the core of our identities. (Fish 1997, 379) What I will try to argue for in this essay is a pedagogy that asks students to 11 take seriously the core values" of other cultures by using culturally resistant texts to make students confront their own Enlightenment assumptions about how experience can be universally construed. In critiquing this kind of boutique multiculturalism in writing courses, I am speaking in part from personal experience-from having lived for extended periods in Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Poland-and I bring that experience to our current debates over multiculturalism. My working hypothesis is that unless students are unsettled, that unless they begin to examine fundamental cultural issues, then multiculturalism, as a project, will fail, for as Thomas West has argued, we need a multicritical pedagogy, one "that realizes the transformative potential of the otherness of the other, of that which is neither always understandable or assimilable." (1998, 87). I realize that translating this agenda into pedagogy is quite challenging, especially because it relies on finding texts that are culturally resistant, ones which cannot be easily read in terms of the students' pre-existing cultural or aesthetic categories. …

Matthew Wilson

Papers

Writing the Postcolonial: The Example of Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests