Thanks, Michael. I need theorists. I already have an Arab and a British poets. I need to theoretically frame their ideas on opposing the concept of Othering.

Interesting! I'll check it. Thank you, Professor Uebel.

Spaniards had a lot to forgive to themselves after one civil war + 40 years of severe dictatureship . After the coming back of democracy, in 1980, it was no riots, no troubles, no hatred, just re-encounters, sharing and parties and the firm refusal of any kind of violence. Article Perdón y reconciliación: una perspectiva psicosocial desde l...

hoping you can read Spanish... if not, google trad...

Thanks, Fred Romano. Unfortunately I'm not in Spanish! 40 years is a long time. I wounder how such a spirit or attitude to forgiveness can be fostered in society. How can the cycle of revenge and retaliation be broken in a war-torn country? Is man more like an animal that can be tamed by the governing institution? What if the institution itself is corrupt and seeking to eliminate the Other?

I realize these are very broad and country specific questions. However, I'm trying to focus on the role of literature and literary theory in answering these questions.

Thank you again!

If you're really interested with reconciliation, you should read the Spanish text in El Pais (one of the best European newspaper): an historian is coming back to the village where, during Civil War with 10 years old, he was terrified by fascist troops. A really beautiful text, very well written and emotive and human. If you don't speak Spanish, why don't you Google trad?

Fred Romano the link please. Looks very interesting indeed

Google translation for a literary text?! Not sure.

Ardian Muhaj the link about reconciliation (in Spanish) https://elpais.com/diario/2009/07/19/opinion/1247954411_850215.html

Few ideas have been generated but I can't understand exactly the theory by these discussion

Fred Romano

Muchissimas gracias. Muy interesante y de grande valor para muchos casos similares en el mundo de hoy.

Nothing better to understand the Spanish way of thinking than this cake, traditionally given from fathers to kids on December 28th. It represent a smiling human turd and the meaning is very clear: eat your own sheet, dear son, who knows who'll eat you. It's to celebrate Hérode's babies massacre. A way to remind the catholic official version is much too kind in comparison of life, which is also a critic towards the government, impossible to censor and very popular. Also an injunction to enjoy life here and now. Even though, it was weird to see bakeries full of chocolate-fig cakes disposed on newspaper with even fingerprints. Nowadays democracy came back, tradition have a more social aspect and the cake still makes a hit every December 28th, the only day in the year kids are recommended to eat shit. Add to the whole package Spanish is the only language in the world to have two verbs for "to be" (one long-term, other one short-term), so relativity is taught from the beginning. No doubt it was what allowed Spaniards to resist 500-years Catholic Inquisition.

Who is more prone to promote a discourse of reconciliation, the weak or the strong? The colonized or the colonizer?

I have in mind examples like Native Americans, Palestinians, WWI and WWII.

Maybe it's time to recognize there are never full-winners and full-losers. If some loose, we all loose. The worst thing about post colonization is a constant almost unconscious inferiority complex, that was implanted by colonizers and their mandatory schools. Maybe that's precisely that knowledge that have to be revised. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9-VTggwePA

Thanks, Fred Romano . An interesting song. I have rephrased my question. However, I believe it's the politically weaker side who is more prone to adopt an attitude of reconciliation; the one who undergoes an unbearable pressure, the one who is forced out of their homeland.

Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others is a great work in how she sees "othering" through historically disenfranchised groups is a good piece. Not long, but inviting.

Thanks, @Conrad! I'll check ut out.

This bibliography will be useful for you:

Adono, Theodor (1980). Reconciliation under duress. In Ernst Bloch (Ed.-). Aesthetics and politics. London: Verso

Augsburger, David W.: (1992): Conflict Mediation across Cultures: Pathways and Patterns. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press.

Barkan, Elazar (2000). Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: Norton & Company.

Bernasconi, Robert, & Wood, David (Eds.). (1988). The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other. London and New York: Routledge.

Bronkhorst, Daan (1995) Truth and Reconciliation: Obstacles and Opportunities for Human Rights. Amsterdam: Amnesty International Dutch Section.

Buber, Martin (1970). I and thou (W. Kaufm an. Trans.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Derrida, Jacques (1996) Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origins. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP.

Gilroy, Paul. (2002) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

—(2005) Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP.

Goldberg, David Theo (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Malden: Blackwell

- (2002) The Racial State. Malden:Blackwell Publishing.

Herman, Judith Lewis 1992: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Keen, Suzanne (2007) Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford UP.

Lederach, John Paul (1997) Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press.

- (1999) The Journey Towards Reconciliation. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1993) Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the Other. Trans. Michael B Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Colombia UP.

May, Larry (1992). Sharing responsibility. C hicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Meninger, William A. (1997) The Process o f Forgiveness. New York: Continuum.

Nussbaum , Martha (1995). Poetic justice: The literary im agination and public life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Tavuchis, Nicholas (1991). Mea culpa: A sociology of apology and reconciliation. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press.

Best wishes and a goog research!

@Francisca Noguerol, I cannot thank you enough!

Francisca: I'm curious, what data base did you use for getting this bibliography?

I use Proquest Search, DISSERTATIONS AND THESES.

Regards!

Reconciliation without justice is a very difficult, almost illusory task.

Ardian Muhaj, Is it?!

You mean justice in the sense of "fairness" or "law application"?

Don't you think that if reconciliation is desired by all involved parties then it entitles both the I and the Other to step down and forget about the past, especially with the passage of long time when different generations pass over the conflict. I'm curious to hear of more about this. Thanks, Professor!

Dear Professor. I mean in the sense of both fairness and law application. There is no true reconciliation without this kind of justice. I also think that we should not identify, instead keep well apart justice from vengeance. The aim of the justice is not to undo the past, but rather to prevent the repetition of the past. Thus, we can name it preventive justice.

The most difficult issues are the discourse of reconciliation or the Self vs. the Other relationship under the spread of hate speech and extremism. Tolerance and love others although I think the difficulty of applying this on the ground

Although the question of “fairness” and “justice” was not aimed at me, I needed to address some of the issues you both raise.

As an African American man from the South, fairness and justice do go hand in hand, but the past can never be forgotten nor should a polity push to make it so. One of my favorite writers Paula Gunn Allen, is Native American and says, “the root of all oppression is loss of memory.”

An example: There is a push for black Americans as Descendants of Slaves to seek reparations not only for harm done physically and psychologically for the years of enslavement in America, but the economic benefits that American is built upon and they never shared in. It should be granted but racism rears its ugly head not only through class but a meritocratic means and an extremely short memory cycle of white Americans in this country reinforced by capitalism.

Japanese Americans received reparations for internment camps during World War II. Blacks asking for the same for 200 years of enslavement are questioned even though it set us behind to even be able to catch up with a reasonable chance in so many aspects of viable community in this country. You cannot forget as the psycho-spiritual remnants of past hurt and communal devastation are passed along in story, policy, economics and such. Enslavement in America through the loop of the 13th Amendment took on enforced imprisonment of former slaves, there there was rape, lynching, sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, racist propaganda through science, literature and politics, segregation, domestic terrorism, police brutality, red lining of neighborhoods, denial of loans, slum conditions, denied access to jobs and education etc.

Poor whites during the economic collapse of the early 20th century in America were given free land, free education and land grant universities. For this, poor whites still got ahead of blacks who many publicly showed contempt for black Americans who they still saw through the lens of enslavement and still do. I think of Red Summer 1919. Whites feel disenfranchised and take it out on blacks and/or women or what is now called people of color. Build a wall the current American president says and keep out criminal brown people when the crime rates in this country are doing fine and high on their own.

There is no forgetting from the people who imposed oppression because oppressors use the same tactics over and over again to maintain power. Neither should the oppressed group forget either. Vengeance comes out of injustice that has gone on too long and is only a violent response to violent policies and disenfranchisement. Vengeance is always the groundwork of the oppressor not the oppressed whose vengeance is defensive.

The issues is those in oppressive power are going to have to give up or rearrange the power they got illicitly and illegally. How many will do this, giving up what they got in all the wrong ways. Moreover, the aim of justice is to “undo” the past. It must. But it does it in the present. The great great grandchildren are due what was denied the great great grandparents. This is undoing it.

Dear Conrad Pegues,

You and everyone else are welcomed into the discussion, that's what RG is all about, I guess, and thank your interesting feedback!

Yes, I agree. Justice, in both senses, is an integral part of the reconciliation project. You said that it is the oppressor who would seek revenge while the violance of the oppressed is only defensive. This could be true.

Rememerance and forgetting reminds me of Robert Frost's poetry which makes me wonder if this concept of forgetting and remembering is popularized in American culture to enhance the reconciliation discourse.

How about reconciliation, who tends to take its side the oppressed or the oppressor?

Can the call for reconciliation be a tactic used by the oppressor to contain the violant or what you called "defensive" reaction of the oppressed?

Yousif, you might want to have a look at Wilfred Owen's poem "Strange Meeting" which presents a very interesting perspective.

"I" am an "Other" in my enemy's eyes. So if I reject the Other I'm in a sense rejecting myself. Do you read Arabic? Have a look at Mahmood Darwish's poem "A Ready Scenario"; a great poem! Thank you.

I say the violence of the oppressed is existent because they have not got back what they lost. Some will walk away. Others will be presently traumatized and fight. Others will fight for what has happened to the community as a whole. Others will try to assimilate any way they can into the oppressors group which can be difficult if there is a difference of skin color, language, ethnic look etc. There isn’t a one size fits all response from the oppressed.

It is the oppressor who often resorts to violence as they have no intention of relinquishing one iota of power. The most “beneficent” oppressor may offer you an in to their power structure which must include memory loss so they can feel comfortable enough that you will not turn on them. It may also include the claiming of your body, your sex, your mind, your point of view. But you will still always be an outsider. And the “liberal” person to let you in too often will establish themselves in a paternalistic role. If you show any sense of autonomy in thought or presence you will be denigrated, ostracized and cast out.

Reconciliation too often comes from the side of the oppressed and that’s highly problematic. A young white supremacist in America walked into a black church in South Carolina, sat in the back and got up to shoot up the folks their having a church service. Slaughtered them Religion is also a tool to keep the oppressed in line. It was his hatred of black people, illogical, crazy etc, that led him to do this. It was the families of the black people he killed talking about forgiveness.

In that same city of Charleston, SC some 170 years prior that a black free man formed a revolt. It was put down because blacks told white masters what they were planning. Denmark Vessey was the free black’s name. He and his followers were lynched, shot, executed. Whites were stunned that blacks would want out of their role of enslavement and Vessey was a free man. It left some puzzled. Others were confirmed in the savagery of blacks but slavery went on. 300 recorded revolts in America during the period of enslavement.

The violence of the oppressor is to maintain the status quo. The violence of the oppressed is to stop the oppression but too often the oppressed have taken on the same power dynamic and ideals of the oppressor and only want to replace him instead of looking beyond him/her to the source of his destructiveness and critique the systems of his oppression as well as the oppressor.

Sometimes the oppressed buy into the system of oppression for survival, children, food, lovers, husbands and wives, some relief from the pressure of being the oppressed. Revolt or stay in the oppression, you’re bound to lose. The oppressed must first suffer from profound memory loss to accept their oppression, to survive.

Believe me, it is an extremely complex issue with no easy answers. There is a side of me that wonders if some larger force has to step in to balance out past and present.

Yes, Conrad. I can't agree more. Thank you again for the great discussion.

How do we differentiate between reconciliation and submission?