April 10, 2015

Daniel Feierstein, “Genocide as Social Practice” (Rutgers UP, 2014)

1 hour 6 minutes

So I should start out with a confession. I don’t know much about the history of Argentina (I said something similar about Guatemala a year or so ago on the program). And I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do a comparative study Argentina and Nazi Germany. Fortunately, Daniel Feierstein was more imaginative than I. The resulting study, recently translated into English as Genocide as Social Practice:Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (Rutgers UniversityPress, 2014), offers a provocative and insightful rethinking of the nature of genocide and genocidal regimes

Feierstein is a prominent member of the genocide studies community and currently serves as the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. But he also has a personal connection with his material, having participated in the demonstrations that brought Argentina’s junta down. Genocide as Social Practice is intellectually rigorous but informed by a deep personal passion for his subject. In the book, he offers an important expansion of our understanding of genocide, one which links seemingly disparate phenomenon and extends the concept into the period after physical destruction has ended. It’s an important observation, one which will challenge any reader to rethink his or her previous assumptions. That in itself makes it an worthwhile book. It goes without saying that it has also convinced me that I need to pay more attention to Latin American history.

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