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Journal Articles by Lori Amy
UNYT Press, 2016
"Postmemory" describes the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal, collec... more "Postmemory" describes the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before (Hirsch 2008, 106
Studies of Transition States and Societies, 2013
Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authorita... more Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authoritarian despite the extensive development agendas promoted by many international organisations. This paper analyses the problems confronting civil society, one of the sacred pillars of democracy promotion, and the reasons it has been largely unable to facilitate early hopes of a democratic transformation. Three primary components converge to inhibit the impact civil society has so far been able to exercise on the political sphere: 1) The un-addressed legacy of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship; 2) the parallel, non-intersecting, distinctly gendered tracks along which civil society and government have developed; 3) the complicity of international structures in inhibiting the deeply analytical culture of knowledge production necessary to shift the relation of the individual to the state.
Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authorita... more Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authoritarian despite the extensive development agendas promoted by many international organisations. This paper analyses the problems confronting civil society, one of the sacred pillars of democracy promotion, and the reasons it has been largely unable to facilitate early hopes of a democratic transformation. Three primary components converge to inhibit the impact civil society has so far been able to exercise on the political sphere: 1) The un-addressed legacy of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship; 2) the parallel, non-intersecting, distinctly gendered tracks along which civil society and government have developed; 3) the complicity of international structures in inhibiting the deeply analytical culture of knowledge production necessary to shift the relation of the individual to the state.
The War Story: Cultural Amnesia and the Avenging Angel Fantasy
Journal of Politics and Culture, 2002
Womens Studies International Forum, 1999
Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, there has been a proliferation of texts claiming to "unveil," ge... more Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, there has been a proliferation of texts claiming to "unveil," get "behind the veil," and "expose" the "hidden world" of Islamic women. This renewed popular appeal of travel writing co-exists with American military actions in the Middle East and points to a troubling relationship between narratives stereotypically representing Muslim women and American foreign policy. Inheriting 19th-century travel writing's language of the civilizing mission, contemporary travel narratives represent Muslim women as in need of the West's governmental, military, and economic interventions. Like 19th-century narratives legitimating colonial rule, contemporary travel narratives enact a violence of penetration, a violence of representation, and a violence of cultural imposition.
A PEDAGOGY OF WITNESS: Encounter, Crisis, and Transformation in Women's Studies Classes
Transformations, Apr 1, 2006
Illicit sex and legitimate subjects : Victorian constructions of prostitution and the working-class family /
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 1996. Vita. Includes bibliographical referenc... more Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 1996. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-239).
The waves : an androgynous vision (seeing masculine and feminine as parts of a whole /
Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, Department of Literature, 1987. Includes bibl... more Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, Department of Literature, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-63). Photocopy.
Shaping the imaginary domain: strategies for tenure and promotion at one institution
Computers and Composition, 2000
This article examines one department in the midst of establishing an independent writing major an... more This article examines one department in the midst of establishing an independent writing major and program. The situational constraints are analyzed in the context of professional concerns regarding tenure, and in the context of current disciplinary concerns regarding the ...
Internet and Higher Education, 1998
Many universities are still struggling to put a technology infrastructure in place. This article ... more Many universities are still struggling to put a technology infrastructure in place. This article is particularly concerned with the means by which English teachers in institutions with technology infrastructures in their infancy can help students develop literacy skills for a digital culture. While our universities are building technology infrastructures, we can and should forge cross-departmental collaborations which allow us to incorporate low-end technology uses during the interim phase of technology development. Our interim technology initiatives should in turn become part of a long-term technology planning that builds upon a collaborative exchange between faculty and administration.
Books by Lori Amy
The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory
Talks by Lori Amy
Restoring the Social Fabric: Bearing Witness
TEDx, 2018
Media Transformation and Collective Memory in Albania, 2015
Book Reviews by Lori Amy
Review of Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Modern Albania
Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 2016
Book Chapters by Lori Amy
Conference Proceedings from "The Outcast From Power: The Eviction/Deportation System and the Use of Forced Labor in Albania 1945-1990, 2019
If heritage represents an inheritance from the past, then commemoration involves a response to th... more If heritage represents an inheritance from the past, then commemoration involves a response to the demands of the dead (Joost Fontein, The Politics of the Dead: Living Heritage, Bones and Commemoration in Zimbabwe). I want to think about the deportation system 1949-1955 through this lens of heritage and commemoration as a response to the demands of the dead. Why heritage, and why a response to the demands of the dead? First, heritage: The International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) defines cultural heritage as "an expression of the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation, including customs, practices, places, objects, artistic expressions and values" (ICOMOS, 2002). When we consider cultural heritage as "the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation," then we see that a half century of state terror in Albania did in fact create a culture-a culture of spying, imprisonment, torture, execution, forced labor, led by the paranoid egomaniacal fantasies of Enver Hoxha and enforced by his inner circle. So I want to start here: the specific traumas that people lived under communism were each part of a larger cultural fabric, every stitch of which was sewn with state terror. The people sent to the Gulags, the families living under the oppression of a bad biography, those expropriated, tortured and executed-these are the visible victims of state terror. But these specific violences could only occur by virtue of the brutal repression of dissent and the violent murder of all potential opposition carried out by the architects of state terror and agents of the state. This brutal repression in turn terrorized the rest of the population into becoming either complicit supporters of the regime or passively compliant in the hopes of protecting themselves. For the two generations born into this structure of state terror, then, and for the generation born into transition, this is the cultural heritage that we have to confront.
ALBANIA 1990- 2020”- LESSONS LEARNED IN TRANSITION, 2021
Psychocultural Trauma is the trauma that an entire society experiences as a result of state terro... more Psychocultural Trauma is the trauma that an entire society experiences as a result of state terror. It damages the entire social fabric, severely harming relationships between people and groups and distorting individual and collective thinking. For a half century, Enver Hoxha maintained power with a structure of state terror that has left the entire society with a pervasive fear and distrust, feeling isolated and disconnected. Until we address these traumatic legacies, the root problem structuring the social, cultural, political, and economic problems from which the people and country are suffering, we will change nothing.
The National Theater is both the symbolic beginning of the structure of state crime as well as a chilling example of how this crime continues today. Hoxha put the structures of state terror in place immediately after the second world war – with the first Soviet-style show trial, held in the historic National Theater. Subsequently, show trials became a standard feature of life under the dictatorship and were a primary vehicle for expropriating property.
The expropriation-gulag dyad continues today in illegal development. From the beginning of transition, state officials have been key players in property crime (with judges frequently working behind the scenes with lawyers, developers, and corrupt politicians to criminally change property titles and land surveys, falsify documents, issue illegal building permits, award building contracts for bribes and kickbacks, and launder money).
When, with an act of state violence worthy of the communist regime, the Albanian state destroyed the Historic National Theater, they destroyed the possibility of using the theater as a site of moral repair. For 2 and half years, activists and artists calling for the restoration of the theater were in fact calling for a moral repair that would allow people to regain self-respect, rebuild trust, learn to live without terror, and to feel safe from those who have harmed them.
An even worse fate is planned for the Pyramid. The Albanian American Development Foundation is working with the Albanian government to turn this monument into a slick, hip technology hub. Using in this way a monument created to idealize and idolize the dictator whose reign of terror wounded the psyche and soul of the country is a perversion that re-wounds the people. This is what Margaret Urban Walker calls normative abandonment. Normative abandonment tells the victims: you do not exist, you did not suffer; our dictator was good, you who reject him are contemptible.
In this cruel example of official state denial, Hoxha rises triumphantly over the victims of his dictatorship, who are left, unseen, unheard, unwitnessed. WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN! For the 30% of the population who were persecuted, the children and grandchildren still looking for the bodies of those the regime executed – buried in secret, dug up, and reburied again in even more secret locations – we are morally called to stop this perversion and to use the Pyramid as a site of moral reckoning for the country.
Rhetorical Violence and the Problematics of Power: A Notion of Community for the Digital Age Classroom
Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing, 2005
"Feminist Friendships and the Social Fabric of Democracy: The Dissidence of Daily Life” (with Eglantina Gjermeni).
Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity, 2016
The article complicates a reading of Western Imperialism and domination of the Other by weaving t... more The article complicates a reading of Western Imperialism and domination of the Other by weaving the voices of an Academic from the United States and a Member of Parliament for the Socialist Party in Albania in order to reflect on how our friendship both shapes our understanding of our respective political communities in our own countries and nourishes our shared commitment to global understanding and transnational relationships. We consider the trajectory of a friendship forged between two feminists from very different backgrounds -- a North American trauma theorist conducting research on traumatic memory and identity in Albania, and an Albanian social worker who moved from nongovernmental to the governmental sector – in order to reflect on how transnational relationships between women enrich and sustain academic and political work even as such friendships call into question our theoretical premises and interpretations of lived experience.
This friendship arose from a predictable alliance. Lori Amy, a U.S.-based academic, went to Albania on a research sabbatical in February 2009 to conduct research for a book project on gender violence and globalization. Like may North American feminists, she was outraged and heartbroken over the global destruction ensuing from the United States’ war on terror; her early research brought her into contact with Eglantina Gjermeni, who was at the time the Executive Director of the Gender Alliance for Development Center. Once in Albania, where weapons and munitions were being trafficked to Afghanistan and Iraq, she realized, in part through the access and insights gained from her friendship with Gjermeni, that her research needed to evolve. Amy saw in the landscape itself—the 700,000 bunkers in country of less than three million, for example—an unresearched connection between the cold war and the US war on terror. This became a starting point for a larger materialist-feminist analysis of the traumatic memory and identity in cold-war and post-communist Albania.
Between Amy’s 2009 research sabbatical and her 2009 -2010 Fulbright Scholars tenure, two radical shifts re-directed her research and shaped the nature of the friendship between Amy and Gjermeni. First, Amy began to notice among her Albanian female friends what she believed to be a culturally pervasive depressive affect - an emotion that seemed to have roots in the culturally un-addressed traumatic history of totalitarian repression and to be compounded by the social and economic ravages of the neoliberal capitalism undergirding “development” in what is euphemistically called a “transitional” economy. Second, Gjermeni – who for 10 years had been groomed by the international community to assume a role in the political sphere – was placed on the Socialist Party (SP) ticket for the 2009 general elections. After bitterly contested elections and unscrupulous political maneuvering, the ruling Democratic Party (PD) narrowly maintained a majority and control of government, and the Opposition SP launched a six-month boycott of Parliament. In this context, Gjermeni became the SP representative for the capital city, Tirana. Leaving her position as the head of one of the most important civil society organizations in the country for the political realm plunged Gjermeni into a highly contentious male-dominated sphere characterized by corruption, rhetorical (and sometimes physical) violence, and a daily confrontation with the despair of ever changing the political structure.
So, what began as a predictable working relation between two feminists, each concerned with the structural and cultural violences impacting women, turned into a strong emotional bond between women confronting, from different perspectives, the social, cultural, political, and economic ravages of “transition” in a post-communist country. As an American feminist with stakes in postcolonial and feminist psychoanalytic theory, Amy traced the political turmoil in which her friend was embroiled back to cold war politics – the capitalist carpet-bagging of transnational corporations looking to make a killing on the collapsing communist governments in Southeast Europe, neoliberal economic policies undergirding development agendas, a global war economy intertwining international security agendas, global finance and arms trading, and an NGO-ization that diverts the talents and resources of local communities into international agendas (Zarkov 2008). Gjermeni, on the other hand, was a direct beneficiary of the development agendas Amy critiqued. After fifty years of totalitarian repression in the most brutal dictatorship in Southeast Europe, Gjermeni was one of the first Albanians educated outside of the country in American universities. She credits her education abroad and her friendships with Americans and Europeans with opening her mind and developing her cultural sensitivity and empathy.
Paradoxically, while Amy’s materialist feminist critiques of Western neoimperialism were challenged by Gjermeni’s positive experience with International support that had been so vital to her work with women’s and human rights in a country struggling out of fifty years of isolation and brutal repression, Gjermeni’s perceptions of “American” were challenged by Amy’s open critique of United States militarism and its concomitant economic and foreign policy. While Gjermeni emphasizes that, without the help of the international community, there would have been no gender initiatives, no human rights initiatives, and no help for people like her or the work she was doing in civil society, Amy emphasizes the responsibility of Western governments, particularly the United States, in the social, economic, and political problems Albanian women like Gjermeni confront.
Amy’s shift in research focus from gender violence and globalization to traumatic memory and identity under communism and in transition paralleled Gjermeni’s move from civil society to government. While Gjermeni struggles with the seemingly hopeless quagmire of Albania’s political sphere, Amy is concerned with understanding the trajectory of cold war cultures, the politics of transition, and contemporary war on terror agendas that structure the political and economic problems plaguing Albania. The friendship is thus one in which emotional attachment and an empathic response to each other’s lived experience help both women re-envision their possibilities for transformative intellectual, academic, and political engagement.
Listening for the Elsewhere and the Not-Yet: Academic Labor as a Matter of Ethical Relation
I, IR: Autobiographical International Relation, 2011
“Listening for the Elsewhere and the Not-Yet: Academic Labor as a Matter of Ethical Relation.” In
Army Green and University: The After-Life of War Wounds
Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parent, 2005
UNYT Press, 2016
"Postmemory" describes the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal, collec... more "Postmemory" describes the relationship that the "generation after" bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before (Hirsch 2008, 106
Studies of Transition States and Societies, 2013
Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authorita... more Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authoritarian despite the extensive development agendas promoted by many international organisations. This paper analyses the problems confronting civil society, one of the sacred pillars of democracy promotion, and the reasons it has been largely unable to facilitate early hopes of a democratic transformation. Three primary components converge to inhibit the impact civil society has so far been able to exercise on the political sphere: 1) The un-addressed legacy of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship; 2) the parallel, non-intersecting, distinctly gendered tracks along which civil society and government have developed; 3) the complicity of international structures in inhibiting the deeply analytical culture of knowledge production necessary to shift the relation of the individual to the state.
Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authorita... more Twenty years after transition, the political sphere in Albania is becoming increasingly authoritarian despite the extensive development agendas promoted by many international organisations. This paper analyses the problems confronting civil society, one of the sacred pillars of democracy promotion, and the reasons it has been largely unable to facilitate early hopes of a democratic transformation. Three primary components converge to inhibit the impact civil society has so far been able to exercise on the political sphere: 1) The un-addressed legacy of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship; 2) the parallel, non-intersecting, distinctly gendered tracks along which civil society and government have developed; 3) the complicity of international structures in inhibiting the deeply analytical culture of knowledge production necessary to shift the relation of the individual to the state.
The War Story: Cultural Amnesia and the Avenging Angel Fantasy
Journal of Politics and Culture, 2002
Womens Studies International Forum, 1999
Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, there has been a proliferation of texts claiming to "unveil," ge... more Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, there has been a proliferation of texts claiming to "unveil," get "behind the veil," and "expose" the "hidden world" of Islamic women. This renewed popular appeal of travel writing co-exists with American military actions in the Middle East and points to a troubling relationship between narratives stereotypically representing Muslim women and American foreign policy. Inheriting 19th-century travel writing's language of the civilizing mission, contemporary travel narratives represent Muslim women as in need of the West's governmental, military, and economic interventions. Like 19th-century narratives legitimating colonial rule, contemporary travel narratives enact a violence of penetration, a violence of representation, and a violence of cultural imposition.
A PEDAGOGY OF WITNESS: Encounter, Crisis, and Transformation in Women's Studies Classes
Transformations, Apr 1, 2006
Illicit sex and legitimate subjects : Victorian constructions of prostitution and the working-class family /
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 1996. Vita. Includes bibliographical referenc... more Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 1996. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-239).
The waves : an androgynous vision (seeing masculine and feminine as parts of a whole /
Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, Department of Literature, 1987. Includes bibl... more Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, Department of Literature, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-63). Photocopy.
Shaping the imaginary domain: strategies for tenure and promotion at one institution
Computers and Composition, 2000
This article examines one department in the midst of establishing an independent writing major an... more This article examines one department in the midst of establishing an independent writing major and program. The situational constraints are analyzed in the context of professional concerns regarding tenure, and in the context of current disciplinary concerns regarding the ...
Internet and Higher Education, 1998
Many universities are still struggling to put a technology infrastructure in place. This article ... more Many universities are still struggling to put a technology infrastructure in place. This article is particularly concerned with the means by which English teachers in institutions with technology infrastructures in their infancy can help students develop literacy skills for a digital culture. While our universities are building technology infrastructures, we can and should forge cross-departmental collaborations which allow us to incorporate low-end technology uses during the interim phase of technology development. Our interim technology initiatives should in turn become part of a long-term technology planning that builds upon a collaborative exchange between faculty and administration.
The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory
Restoring the Social Fabric: Bearing Witness
TEDx, 2018
Media Transformation and Collective Memory in Albania, 2015
Review of Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Modern Albania
Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 2016
Conference Proceedings from "The Outcast From Power: The Eviction/Deportation System and the Use of Forced Labor in Albania 1945-1990, 2019
If heritage represents an inheritance from the past, then commemoration involves a response to th... more If heritage represents an inheritance from the past, then commemoration involves a response to the demands of the dead (Joost Fontein, The Politics of the Dead: Living Heritage, Bones and Commemoration in Zimbabwe). I want to think about the deportation system 1949-1955 through this lens of heritage and commemoration as a response to the demands of the dead. Why heritage, and why a response to the demands of the dead? First, heritage: The International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) defines cultural heritage as "an expression of the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation, including customs, practices, places, objects, artistic expressions and values" (ICOMOS, 2002). When we consider cultural heritage as "the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation," then we see that a half century of state terror in Albania did in fact create a culture-a culture of spying, imprisonment, torture, execution, forced labor, led by the paranoid egomaniacal fantasies of Enver Hoxha and enforced by his inner circle. So I want to start here: the specific traumas that people lived under communism were each part of a larger cultural fabric, every stitch of which was sewn with state terror. The people sent to the Gulags, the families living under the oppression of a bad biography, those expropriated, tortured and executed-these are the visible victims of state terror. But these specific violences could only occur by virtue of the brutal repression of dissent and the violent murder of all potential opposition carried out by the architects of state terror and agents of the state. This brutal repression in turn terrorized the rest of the population into becoming either complicit supporters of the regime or passively compliant in the hopes of protecting themselves. For the two generations born into this structure of state terror, then, and for the generation born into transition, this is the cultural heritage that we have to confront.
ALBANIA 1990- 2020”- LESSONS LEARNED IN TRANSITION, 2021
Psychocultural Trauma is the trauma that an entire society experiences as a result of state terro... more Psychocultural Trauma is the trauma that an entire society experiences as a result of state terror. It damages the entire social fabric, severely harming relationships between people and groups and distorting individual and collective thinking. For a half century, Enver Hoxha maintained power with a structure of state terror that has left the entire society with a pervasive fear and distrust, feeling isolated and disconnected. Until we address these traumatic legacies, the root problem structuring the social, cultural, political, and economic problems from which the people and country are suffering, we will change nothing.
The National Theater is both the symbolic beginning of the structure of state crime as well as a chilling example of how this crime continues today. Hoxha put the structures of state terror in place immediately after the second world war – with the first Soviet-style show trial, held in the historic National Theater. Subsequently, show trials became a standard feature of life under the dictatorship and were a primary vehicle for expropriating property.
The expropriation-gulag dyad continues today in illegal development. From the beginning of transition, state officials have been key players in property crime (with judges frequently working behind the scenes with lawyers, developers, and corrupt politicians to criminally change property titles and land surveys, falsify documents, issue illegal building permits, award building contracts for bribes and kickbacks, and launder money).
When, with an act of state violence worthy of the communist regime, the Albanian state destroyed the Historic National Theater, they destroyed the possibility of using the theater as a site of moral repair. For 2 and half years, activists and artists calling for the restoration of the theater were in fact calling for a moral repair that would allow people to regain self-respect, rebuild trust, learn to live without terror, and to feel safe from those who have harmed them.
An even worse fate is planned for the Pyramid. The Albanian American Development Foundation is working with the Albanian government to turn this monument into a slick, hip technology hub. Using in this way a monument created to idealize and idolize the dictator whose reign of terror wounded the psyche and soul of the country is a perversion that re-wounds the people. This is what Margaret Urban Walker calls normative abandonment. Normative abandonment tells the victims: you do not exist, you did not suffer; our dictator was good, you who reject him are contemptible.
In this cruel example of official state denial, Hoxha rises triumphantly over the victims of his dictatorship, who are left, unseen, unheard, unwitnessed. WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN! For the 30% of the population who were persecuted, the children and grandchildren still looking for the bodies of those the regime executed – buried in secret, dug up, and reburied again in even more secret locations – we are morally called to stop this perversion and to use the Pyramid as a site of moral reckoning for the country.
Rhetorical Violence and the Problematics of Power: A Notion of Community for the Digital Age Classroom
Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing, 2005
"Feminist Friendships and the Social Fabric of Democracy: The Dissidence of Daily Life” (with Eglantina Gjermeni).
Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity, 2016
The article complicates a reading of Western Imperialism and domination of the Other by weaving t... more The article complicates a reading of Western Imperialism and domination of the Other by weaving the voices of an Academic from the United States and a Member of Parliament for the Socialist Party in Albania in order to reflect on how our friendship both shapes our understanding of our respective political communities in our own countries and nourishes our shared commitment to global understanding and transnational relationships. We consider the trajectory of a friendship forged between two feminists from very different backgrounds -- a North American trauma theorist conducting research on traumatic memory and identity in Albania, and an Albanian social worker who moved from nongovernmental to the governmental sector – in order to reflect on how transnational relationships between women enrich and sustain academic and political work even as such friendships call into question our theoretical premises and interpretations of lived experience.
This friendship arose from a predictable alliance. Lori Amy, a U.S.-based academic, went to Albania on a research sabbatical in February 2009 to conduct research for a book project on gender violence and globalization. Like may North American feminists, she was outraged and heartbroken over the global destruction ensuing from the United States’ war on terror; her early research brought her into contact with Eglantina Gjermeni, who was at the time the Executive Director of the Gender Alliance for Development Center. Once in Albania, where weapons and munitions were being trafficked to Afghanistan and Iraq, she realized, in part through the access and insights gained from her friendship with Gjermeni, that her research needed to evolve. Amy saw in the landscape itself—the 700,000 bunkers in country of less than three million, for example—an unresearched connection between the cold war and the US war on terror. This became a starting point for a larger materialist-feminist analysis of the traumatic memory and identity in cold-war and post-communist Albania.
Between Amy’s 2009 research sabbatical and her 2009 -2010 Fulbright Scholars tenure, two radical shifts re-directed her research and shaped the nature of the friendship between Amy and Gjermeni. First, Amy began to notice among her Albanian female friends what she believed to be a culturally pervasive depressive affect - an emotion that seemed to have roots in the culturally un-addressed traumatic history of totalitarian repression and to be compounded by the social and economic ravages of the neoliberal capitalism undergirding “development” in what is euphemistically called a “transitional” economy. Second, Gjermeni – who for 10 years had been groomed by the international community to assume a role in the political sphere – was placed on the Socialist Party (SP) ticket for the 2009 general elections. After bitterly contested elections and unscrupulous political maneuvering, the ruling Democratic Party (PD) narrowly maintained a majority and control of government, and the Opposition SP launched a six-month boycott of Parliament. In this context, Gjermeni became the SP representative for the capital city, Tirana. Leaving her position as the head of one of the most important civil society organizations in the country for the political realm plunged Gjermeni into a highly contentious male-dominated sphere characterized by corruption, rhetorical (and sometimes physical) violence, and a daily confrontation with the despair of ever changing the political structure.
So, what began as a predictable working relation between two feminists, each concerned with the structural and cultural violences impacting women, turned into a strong emotional bond between women confronting, from different perspectives, the social, cultural, political, and economic ravages of “transition” in a post-communist country. As an American feminist with stakes in postcolonial and feminist psychoanalytic theory, Amy traced the political turmoil in which her friend was embroiled back to cold war politics – the capitalist carpet-bagging of transnational corporations looking to make a killing on the collapsing communist governments in Southeast Europe, neoliberal economic policies undergirding development agendas, a global war economy intertwining international security agendas, global finance and arms trading, and an NGO-ization that diverts the talents and resources of local communities into international agendas (Zarkov 2008). Gjermeni, on the other hand, was a direct beneficiary of the development agendas Amy critiqued. After fifty years of totalitarian repression in the most brutal dictatorship in Southeast Europe, Gjermeni was one of the first Albanians educated outside of the country in American universities. She credits her education abroad and her friendships with Americans and Europeans with opening her mind and developing her cultural sensitivity and empathy.
Paradoxically, while Amy’s materialist feminist critiques of Western neoimperialism were challenged by Gjermeni’s positive experience with International support that had been so vital to her work with women’s and human rights in a country struggling out of fifty years of isolation and brutal repression, Gjermeni’s perceptions of “American” were challenged by Amy’s open critique of United States militarism and its concomitant economic and foreign policy. While Gjermeni emphasizes that, without the help of the international community, there would have been no gender initiatives, no human rights initiatives, and no help for people like her or the work she was doing in civil society, Amy emphasizes the responsibility of Western governments, particularly the United States, in the social, economic, and political problems Albanian women like Gjermeni confront.
Amy’s shift in research focus from gender violence and globalization to traumatic memory and identity under communism and in transition paralleled Gjermeni’s move from civil society to government. While Gjermeni struggles with the seemingly hopeless quagmire of Albania’s political sphere, Amy is concerned with understanding the trajectory of cold war cultures, the politics of transition, and contemporary war on terror agendas that structure the political and economic problems plaguing Albania. The friendship is thus one in which emotional attachment and an empathic response to each other’s lived experience help both women re-envision their possibilities for transformative intellectual, academic, and political engagement.
Listening for the Elsewhere and the Not-Yet: Academic Labor as a Matter of Ethical Relation
I, IR: Autobiographical International Relation, 2011
“Listening for the Elsewhere and the Not-Yet: Academic Labor as a Matter of Ethical Relation.” In
Army Green and University: The After-Life of War Wounds
Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parent, 2005
Zeta Books, History of Communism in Europe, 2010
Albania represents perhaps the most extreme case of isolation and governmental oppression under c... more Albania represents perhaps the most extreme case of isolation and governmental oppression under communist dictatorship in southeastern Europe. Not surprisingly, the violence of transition in Albania both reflects and in significant ways differs from the violence of transition in other southeastern European countries. It's relation to the former Yugoslavia, for example -- where the Ethnic Albanian populations in Kosova and Macedonia complicate a politics of memory and national identity -- both imbricates and distances Albania from the Balkan wars. As a pivotal point in networks moving goods and people throughout the Balkans in the 90s and as a host country for refugee populations, Albania is intimately tied to the material conditions of the wars accompanying transition in the Balkans. Paradoxically, the fact that, within Albania, people do not follow the identity schisms mobilized in the wars remains a source of national pride. This paradox points to a complex nexus of issues surrounding individual and collective memory in post-communist Albania: on the one hand, Albanians retain a strong national identity that is fiercely proud and patriotic, and, on the other, this identity is fragmented, marked by internal conflicts, experienced episodically, lacking an organic structure for integrating experience into sustainable narratives through which the past can be remembered or the future imagined. These two paradoxes -- of the fragmentation of memory and identity that nevertheless has a nationalistic unifying core, and of the violence of transition which contextualizes memories of the past and imaginaries for the future -- frame the investigation of memory and identity in this paper. For our analysis, we draw on interviews with two age cohorts: women who were working adults with families under the Hoxha regime, and women who were in or about to enter college when the government collapsed. Following Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the body as a site of incorporated history and Iwona Irwin-Zarecka's delineation of the infrastructure of memory, we are especially interested in understanding how unarticulated, unanalyzed, and unresolved memory contests are manifesting in the culture and politics of transition. Our questions include: How are private memories retained in the face of state violence, and what are the limits of representation in a memory project that seeks to open the discursive space for articulating experiences that have remained unarticulated? Given the un-representability of deep memory (Friedlander), how do memory projects generate memory scaffolds that can bring the past into productive relation to the work of mapping a future? What are the processes through which fractured and fragmented (unarticulated) (oppressive) narratives and constructions of the past are integrated, or, at least, put into productive relation? This investigation of memory and identity is in the interests of understanding the "socially instituted limits of the ways of speaking, thinking, and acting" constraining Albanians working through this historical moment, and, through this understanding, to offer reflections of use to others similarly situated as they engage in the work imagining trajectories into the future (Bourdieu Language and symbolic power 31). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
