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      • Humanities & Social Sciences

        Joey Jacobson's War

        A Jewish Canadian Airman in the Second World War

        by Peter J. Usher

        In the spring of 1940 Canada sent hundreds of highly trained volunteers to serve in Britain's Royal Air Force as it began a concerted bombing campaign against Germany. Nearly half of them were killed or captured within a year. This is the story of one of those airmen, as told through his own letters and diaries as well as those of his family and friends. Joey Jacobson, a young Jewish man from Westmount on the Island of Montreal, trained as a navigator and bomb-aimer in Western Canada. On arriving in England he was assigned to No. 106 Squadron, a British unit tasked with the bombing of Germany. Joey Jacobson’s War tells, in his own words, why he enlisted, his understanding of strategy, tactics, and the effectiveness of the air war at its lowest point, how he responded to the inevitable battle stress, and how he became both a hopeful idealist and a seasoned airman. Jacobson's written legacy as a serviceman is impressive in scope and depth and provides a lively and intimate account of a Jewish Canadian's life in the air and on the ground, written in the intensity of the moment, unfiltered by the memoirist's reflection, revision, or hindsight. Accompanying excerpts from his father's diary show the maturation of the relationship between father and son in a dangerous time.

      • Social services & welfare, criminology

        Prison Life Writing

        Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System

        by Simon Rolston

        The first full-length study of prison life writing, this book shows how the autobiographical literature of incarcerated people is consistently based on a conversion narrative, the same narrative that underpins prison rehabilitation. By demonstrating how prison life writing interlocks with institutional power, the book challenges conventional preconceptions about writing behind bars. And yet, imprisoned people often use the conversion narrative like they repurpose other objects in prison: much like the radio motor retooled into a tattoo gun, the conversion narrative is often redefined to serve subversive purposes like questioning the supposed emancipatory role of prison writing, critiquing white supremacy, and reconfiguring what can be said in autobiographical discourse. An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most controversial literary genres.

      • Indigenous peoples

        Arts of Engagement

        Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

        by Dylan Robinson, Keavy Martin, editors

        Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the framework of “aesthetic action,” the essays expand the frame of aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics.This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing. These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of reconciliation as a form of resolution. This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed, and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to move beyond what many have identified as the TRC’s political limitations.

      • Cultural studies

        Wittgenstein's Ethics and Modern Warfare

        by Nil Santiáñez

        This original and insightful book establishes a reciprocal relationship between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ethics and the experience of war. It puts forth an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early moral philosophy that relates it to the philosopher’s own war experience and applies Wittgenstein’s ethics of silence to analyze the ethical dimension of literary and artistic representations of the Great War. In a compelling book-length essay, the author contends that the emphasis on “unsayability” in Wittgenstein’s concept of ethics is a valuable tool for studying the ethical silences embedded in key cultural works reflecting on the Great War produced by Mary Borden, Ellen N. La Motte, Georges Duhamel, Leonhard Frank, Ernst Friedrich, and Joe Sacco. Exploring their works through the lens of Wittgenstein’s moral philosophy, this book pays particular attention to their suggestion of an ethics of war and peace by indirect means, such as prose poetry, spatial form, collage, symbolism, and expressionism. This cultural study reveals new connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy, his experience during the First World War, and the cultural artifacts produced in its aftermath. By intertwining ethical reflection and textual analysis, Wittgenstein’s Ethics and Modern Warfare aspires to place Wittgenstein’s moral philosophy at the centre of discussions on war, literature, and the arts.

      • First World War

        A Township at War

        by Jonathan F. Vance

        A Township at War takes the reader from rural Canadian field and farm to the slopes of Vimy Ridge and the mud of Passchendaele, and shows how a tightly knit Ontario community was consumed and transformed by the trauma of war. In 1914, the southern Ontario township of East Flamborough was like a thousand other rural townships in Canada, broadly representative in its wartime experience. Author Jonathan Vance draws from rich narrative sources to reveal what rural people were like a century ago—how they saw the world, what they valued, and how they lived their lives. We see them coming to terms with global events that took their loved ones to distant battlefields, and dealing with the prosaic challenges of everyday life. Fall fairs, recruiting meetings, church services, school concerts—all are reimagined to understand how rural Canadians coped with war, modernism, and a world that was changing more quickly than they were. This is a story of resilience and idealism, of violence and small-mindedness, of a world that has long disappeared and one that remains with us to this day.

      • First World War

        Catastrophe

        Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion

        by T. Joseph Scanlon, Roger Sarty

        Catastrophe weaves together compelling stories and potent lessons learned from the calamitous Halifax explosion—the worst non-natural disaster in North America before 9/11. On December 6, 1917, the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was shattered when volatile cargo on the SS Mont-Blanc freighter exploded in the bustling wartime harbour. More than nineteen hundred people were killed and nine thousand injured. Across more than two square kilometres some 1200 homes, factories, schools and churches were obliterated or heavily damaged. Written from a scholarly perspective but in a journalistic style accessible to the general reader, this book explores how the explosion influenced later emergency planning and disaster theory. Rich in firsthand accounts gathered in decades of research in Canada, the US, the UK, France and Norway, the book examines the disaster from all angles. It delivers an inspiring message: the women and men at “ground zero” responded speedily, courageously, and effectively, fighting fires, rescuing the injured, and sheltering the homeless. The book also shows that the generous assistance that later came from central Canada and the US also brought some unhelpful intrusions by outside authorities. Unable to imagine the horror of the initial crisis, they ignored or even vilified a number of the first responders. This book will be of particular interest to disaster researchers and emergency planners along with journalists, and scholars of history, Maritime studies, and Canadian studies.

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