Primitive Pictures explores the relationship between early German cinema and anthropology's fascination with 'primitive' cultures. At the core of this study is a mythic first contact between the camera and the non-Western body. The term that binds the two is the 'Primitive', referring both to cultures ostensibly existing outside of modern Time and also to a way of seeing the world via the lens. Asseka Oksiloff examines how the movie camera, with its capacity to record reality in a supposedly direct fashion, is legitimated by the primitive body in the first decades of the twentieth century....

Can collective memories of the past shape the future? If one of the fears about a globalized society is the homogenization of culture, can it nevertheless be true that the homogenization of memory might have a positive impact on political and cultural norms? Originally published in Germany, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age examines the nature of collective memory in a globalized world, and how the memory of one particular event?the Holocaust?helped give rise to an emerging global consensus on human rights. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider show how memories of the Holocaust have been...

Examines the way the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel, and the US. This title shows how singular event has been detached from its precise context and instead used as a way of focusing abstract questions of good and evil, and how this use has given the Holocaust a resonance across the global stage.