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Category: Reviews

Old photograph of a boy, above it a rubber stamp.

Reviews

Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence

By Judith Sieber. With the thematic focus “Witnessing Witnessing”, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) 2025 took up the question of second degree witnessing “to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.” This text is not a review of the festival – both the plurality of approaches and the political discussions that took place were far too complex. Rather, it is an attempt to think along the line of three of the films shown and to try to explore the meaning of witnessing in the current moment. The author takes a look at three films – “Das falsche Wort” (English The Lie, 1987) by Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, “Empty Metal” (2018), a feature film directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, and “Vents Violents” (Two letters to Chantal Akerman) from 2025.

Prisma Ukraïna / Reviews / War, Migration and Memory

War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine

By Denys Shatalov. The monuments we encounter in a territory tell us not so much about its past as about present ideology. The new study by Mischa Gabowitsch and Mykola Homanyuk, “Monuments and Territory. War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine” explores the fate of war memorials in the Russian-occupied territories during the first year of the ongoing full-scale war. The authors focus on war memorials honouring different eras and conflicts, from the medieval battle of Kalka to the Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Anti-Terrorist Operation in Eastern Ukraine (2014–2022), erected in Soviet times or during Ukrainian independence.

MECAM / Reviews

Akouda 1943: A Voice from the Margins

By Cyrine Kortas. “Akouda 1943” is the third novel by Tunisian writer Houayda Ben Halima, published in 2017. The story takes place in the author’s hometown during World War II, when Tunisia was a battleground between Axis and Allied forces. Through her unique storytelling that merges history and fiction, Ben Halima informs readers about wartime politics while evoking deep emotional responses through well-developed characters and historical research to reflect on the human condition in times of conflict. For readers seeking a deep dive into the complexities of war through an engaging narrative lens, the novel offers a compelling experience that remains relevant today.

MECAM / Reviews

The Scopophilic Pleasure of the Gaze in Asfour Stah

By Najla Mosbahi. Asfour Stah (also known as Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces) is a film that explores the complexities of Tunisian society in the early 1990s. At this time, Tunisia was undergoing significant social change, grappling with the legacy of Habib Bourguiba’s progressive reforms that had improved women’s rights. However, despite these advancements, traditional gender roles remained deeply entrenched, creating a complex landscape for women. With the film, director Férid Boughedir aimed at revealing “the hidden struggles of women in a society that often silences their voices, showcasing their strength and resilience within the constraints imposed by tradition”.

MECAM / Reviews

A Political History of the Contemporary Maghreb: From the 1950s to the Present – Conversation with Nessim Znaien

Nessim Znaien is a Junior Professor at the University of Marburg, holding the (Post)colonial Maghreb Chair since April 2022. After studying history in Lyon and Paris, he defended a doctoral thesis at the University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne in September 2017, entitled “Les raisins de la domination. Histoire sociale de l’alcool dans la Tunisie du Protectorat (1881-1956)”. Nessim Znaien is one of the editors of the journal l’Année du Maghreb. He conducts research on the history of material culture in the colonial and post-colonial Maghreb, in particular on the history of food and cereals. A Conversation with Diana Abbani.

EUME / Reviews

The Questions that Remain: Conjectures on Cultivating a Relationship to the Published Book

By Maha AbdelMegeed. While the author’s relationship to their work in-progress is fluid with murky boundaries between what is intended and what is actually there, situating an author in position to their published work is just as tricky. Whenever I am asked to write or speak about my recently published first monograph Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (SUP, 2024), I take it as an invitation to cultivate a relationship to the work anew.

Conversations / Reviews

Dealing with National Diversity – Conversation with Börries Kuzmany

A historian and slavicist by training, Börries Kuzmany is an associate professor for Modern History of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Vienna. His research focus is on Central and Eastern Europe between the late 18th and the 20th Century, the Habsburg Empire, Poland, Ukraine and the Soviet Union in particular. He is interested in the history of nationalism, ethno-confessional diversity, borders, and languages, as well as in urban and Jewish history. He is the author of “Vom Umgang mit nationaler Vielfalt: Eine Geschichte der nicht-territorialen Autonomie in Europa.” A Conversation with Alex Favalli.

EUME / Reviews

In Search of an Exiled Past: A Review of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra

By Aaron Wander. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra: Tzefat Ve-HaTarbut Ha-Tzionit (Biblical Consciousness, Mishnah Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture) is an act of recollection. At the center of the book stands the 16th-century Kabbalistic community of Safed, with its poets, mystics, hermits, and halakhists. In Raz-Krakotzkin’s telling, historic Safed offers an alternative vision of Jewish living and flourishing in the land of Israel to that historically proposed by Zionism, shedding critical light on the cultural, moral, and political choices that Zionism has made. A review.

Conversations / Reviews

An Impossible Friendship – Conversation with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of “An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948” (Columbia University Press 2024). In it, she retraces the story of five friends, or a “small ecumenical circle”, who came together in Jerusalem before 1948 and parted ways after a historical caesura. A Conversation with Jacqueline Wagner.

Conversations / EUME / Reviews

“The story has not ended yet”: Home is Struggle and Achievement – A Conversation with Wendy Pearlman

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University where she specializes in Middle East politics, social movements, and narrative approaches to understanding conflict and displacement. She has been EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien during the summers of the years 2016-2018 and 2021-2022. She is the author of “The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora” (Liveright Books, 2024)