Law Meets Literature: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide Studies
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Ruth Amir
Ruth Amir is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Yezreel Valley College. Her research and publications are focused on transitional justice, and genocidal forcible child transfers, and forced migration. She is the author of
Who is Afraid of Historical Redress: The Israeli Victim-Perpetrator Dichotomy, The politics of Victimhood: Historical Redress in Israel? (in Hebrew), co-editor ofCritical Insights: Anne Frank, the Diary of a Young Girl , and a forthcoming volume,Forcible child transfers in the twentieth Century: Killing them Softly .
Abstract
Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was a Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term genocide and worked tirelessly for its codification in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide as a crime under international law. Most of his writings on genocide were published around fifty years posthumously as the core of the field of genocide studies that emerged in the 1990s.
Bearing the sense of inseparability of Lemkin the author and his writings, this article concerns the death-of-the-author postulate amid the origin myth that surrounds him. It engages in his strategies for resisting his death as an author and with the multiple professional, political, and social languages that probe and transgress their respective genres. While genocide studies now seem to reluctantly critique Lemkin’s ideas, they nevertheless remain captivated by Lemkin the author and seem to be affected by his passion, multiple voices, languages, and genres. In this they tread in his footsteps in both form and content.
About the author
Ruth Amir is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Yezreel Valley College. Her research and publications are focused on transitional justice, and genocidal forcible child transfers, and forced migration. She is the author of Who is Afraid of Historical Redress: The Israeli Victim-Perpetrator Dichotomy, The politics of Victimhood: Historical Redress in Israel? (in Hebrew), co-editor of Critical Insights: Anne Frank, the Diary of a Young Girl, and a forthcoming volume, Forcible child transfers in the twentieth Century: Killing them Softly.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Law and Borders: Territory, Space and Time between Diversity and Protection
- The Law and the Line: The Literary Mirroring of a Paradigm
- Half of a Yellow Sun or the Quest for (and Repression of) New Boundaries in Post-Colonial Nigeria: An International Law Analysis
- Freedom’s Frontiers: The Travails of LGBT Travelers
- Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self
- Donʼt Ask Us for Lex. Body Exhibition and Forms of Exclusion
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Translation, Copyright & Authority
- Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons
- Tubal, Shylock, and the Myth of Venice
- Law Meets Literature: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide Studies
- Literature, Art and the Democracy to Come: A Legal Approach to The Danish Girl
- Book Reviews
- Dale Barleben: Staging the Trials of Modernism. Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness
- Lucky Belder Helle Porsdam: Negotiating Cultural Rights. Issues at Stake, Challenges and Recommendations
