European Holocaust Studies (EHS) publishes key international research results on the murder of the European Jews and its wider contexts. In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung").

Violence against Jews, Roma, and other persecuted minorities in the multiethnic borderlands of Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe. Includes: Anca Filipovici: The Rise of Antisemitism in the Multiethnic Borderland of Bukovina: Student Movements and Interethnic Clashes at the University of Cernăuți (1922-1938) Doris Bergen: Saving Christianity, Killing Jews: German Religious Campaigns and the Holocaust in the Borderlands Linda Margittai: Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and Jews in Wartime Vojvodina: Patterns of Attitudes and Behaviors towards Jews in a Multiethnic Border Region of Hungary Goran Miljan: The "Ideal Nation-State" for the "Ideal New Croat": The Ustasha Youth and the Aryanization of Jewish Property in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945 Svetlana Suveica: Appropriation of Jewish Property in the Borderlands: Local Public Employees in Bessarabia during the Romanian Holocaust Anna Wylegała: Listening to Contradictory Voices: Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian Narratives on Jewish Property in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Galicia Miriam Schulz: Gornisht oyser verter?!: The Yiddish Language as a Mirror of Interethnic Relations and Dynamics of Violence in German-Occupied Eastern Europe

Previously published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice, this is the first book to link colonialism and genocide in a systematic way in the context of world history. It fills a significant gap in the current understanding on genocide and the Holocaust, which sees them overwhelmingly as twentieth century phenomena. This book publishes Lemkin’s account of the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanians for the first time and chapters cover: the exterminatory rhetoric of racist discourses before the ‘scientific racism’ of the mid-nineteenth century Charles Darwin’s preoccupation with the extinction of peoples in the face of European colonialism, a reconstruction of a virtually unknown case of ‘subaltern genocide’ global perspective on the links between modernity and the Holocaust Social theorists and historians alike will find this a must-read.

Mohammad Salama teaches Arabic in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at San Francisco State University. --Book Jacket.

Discipline and the Other Body reveals the intimate relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental power and the human rights discourses that critique it. The comparative essays brought together in this collection show how, in using physical violence to discipline and control colonial subjects, governments repeatedly found themselves enmeshed in a fundamental paradox: Colonialism was about the management of difference—the “civilized” ruling the “uncivilized”—but colonial violence seemed to many the antithesis of civility, threatening to undermine the very distinction that validated its use. Violation of the bodies of colonial subjects regularly generated scandals, and eventually led to humanitarian initiatives, ultimately changing conceptions of “the human” and helping to constitute modern forms of human rights discourse. Colonial violence and discipline also played a crucial role in hardening modern categories of difference—race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference. Contributors. Laura Bear, Yvette Christiansë, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward

During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today’s border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy—in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves—was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations? Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, Bergholz reveals how the upheavals wrought by local killing actually created dramatically new perceptions of ethnicity—of oneself, supposed "brothers," and those perceived as "others." As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected explosion of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. The story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly throughout the world.

The Swahili coast of Africa is often described as a paragon of transnational culture and racial fluidity. Yet, during a brief period in the 1960s, Zanzibar became deeply divided along racial lines as intellectuals and activists, engaged in bitter debates about their nation's future, ignited a deadly conflict that spread across the island. War of Words, War of Stones explores how violently enforced racial boundaries arose from Zanzibar's entangled history. Jonathon Glassman challenges explanations that assume racial thinking in the colonial world reflected only Western ideas. He shows how Africans crafted competing ways of categorizing race from local tradition and engagement with the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.