This article analyses how coinciding anniversaries of the Sonderkommando revolt (7 October 1944) and the 7 October 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel shaped digital Holocaust memory. It contributes to the study of social media users’ reactions to the online commemorative efforts of Holocaust memory institutions. Adapting Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’, we code a small, yet rich set of X posts, comments, and quote reposts, focusing on social media users’ engagement with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’s X account during the anniversaries. We ask how did X social media users react to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’s commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the Sonderkommando revolt on the first anniversary of 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on the platform? And how can the concept of multidirectional memory be used to understand the comparative instrumentalization of Holocaust memory on social media? Our results demonstrate the utility of the multidirectional memory concept and four types of comparative instrumentalization (empathising commemoration, empathising contestation, polarising commemoration, and polarising contestation). They show that many X users reacted by highlighting the moral capacity of Holocaust memory, but that others flattened Holocaust memory or competitively equated it with or distinguished it from contemporary violence in the Middle East. The article highlights how anniversaries intensify the online entanglement of commemoration and contestation, often forcing Holocaust memory institutions into contested digital terrains where empathy, solidarity, polarisation, and competition intersect and exacerbate the ‘Catch-22’ situation they face: critiqued for drawing parallels with contemporary events or chastised for not.

This essay explores what it means to reckon with imperial violence decades after the Japanese Empire’s demise in 1945. Through legal, historical, and ethnographic analyses of civil lawsuits filed in courts across Japan since the 1990s by Chinese and South Korean victims seeking apologies and monetary compensation from the Japanese government and corporations involved in enslavement, I explore how the lawsuits exposed a politics of abandonment that left victims of imperial violence unredressable for decades. This evasion of imperial accountability, I argue, was etched into the legal, economic, and diplomatic structures of what I call the unmaking of empire—the entwined processes of de-imperialization and de-colonization. The move from empire to nation-state thus produced transitional injustice which calls for post-imperial reckoning: a double task of accounting for both the original imperial violence and the politics of abandonment after empire in perpetrator and victim nations. I show how new legal and moral landscapes for imperial reckoning are expanding the scope and agency of accountability, challenging accepted models of redress and raising the stakes for current generations to reckon with unaccounted-for pasts.

This article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites by exploring the trajectories of the members of the family configuration established by the matrimony formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira in the early 1590s. By analyzing the evolution of the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration between the 1590s and 1720s, the article probes how the early Luanda elites generated and mobilized social, economic, political, or symbolic resources that allowed them to establish ongoing partnerships with African, metropolitan, and Luso-Brazilian actors.

Este artículo plantea que Grrr (1969), el primer libro de artista de Guillermo Deisler, constituye una intervención poética sobre la relación entre los medios visuales y la guerra de Vietnam en el marco de la Guerra Fría. Frente a lecturas que lo han situado tan solo como un antecedente de la poesía visual chilena, argumento que el libro problematiza el papel de la televisión en la producción y el consumo de imágenes bélicas. Mediante procedimientos como el collage, el recorte, el troquelado y el montaje, Grrr hace de la materialidad del soporte un dispositivo crítico que fractura la ilusión de transparencia mediática. En ese proceso, Grrr vuelve legibles los marcos visuales que organizan la percepción pública e interroga las condiciones bajo las cuales la guerra deviene imagen.

En este artículo se examina la complejidad y los desafíos de la práctica del tequio y su representación en la novela bilingüe Laxdao yelazeralle/El corazón de los deseos del escritor zapoteco Javier Castellanos. Siguiendo de cerca la práctica y pensamiento de la comunalidad, en el artículo se analiza cómo Castellanos explora temas generalmente obviados, sin embargo, fundamentales para la literatura indígena, como la carga afectiva, física y económica que requiere el servicio y trabajo colectivo en comunidades comunales frente crecientes patrones de migración internacional. Como tal, el artículo inaugura un debate conexo al ya estudiado tema de la migración —el trabajo—, proponiendo que Castellanos advierte que la recuperación de la lengua, filosofía y protección del territorio no se limita a procesos de autonomía, emancipación epistémica y descoloniales. El artículo demuestra que Castellanos propone repensar cómo el deterioro de la ética de reciprocidad imbuida en las prácticas de tequio es, en gran medida, un síntoma del desequilibrio causado por dinámicas de trabajo asalariado que desembocan en la individualización de los comuneros y la desintegración del tejido comunitario. De este modo, el autor del artículo propone que la literatura indígena es también una literatura de trabajo: la recuperación y reivindicación de la dignidad del trabajo físico colectivo y no solo un proceso creativo, intelectual y epistémico.

Slack-water deposits are archives of paleoflood frequency, magnitude, and provenance. In the eastern Himalaya, deposits along the Siang River document Quaternary outburst megafloods originating from southeastern Tibet. Here we present new observations of slack-water deposits within aggradational terraces of the Siyom River, the Siang’s largest tributary. Terrace stratigraphy reveals distinct, regionally extensive sedimentary facies including laminated sands, clays, and detrital organic-rich deposits consistent with slack-water deposition from temporarily impounded waters. Radiocarbon dates from clay and organic horizons range from 34,020 to 10,630 cal yr BP, overlapping with age constraints for Tibetan paleolake deposits. Detrital zircon (U-Th)/Pb geochronology confirms a local source for the underlying fluvial facies, whereas event-deposit silts contain young zircons derived from Tibet, supporting their interpretation as megaflood deposits. This evidence, combined with the deposits’ temporal overlap with Tibetan paleolakes and distinctive slack-water sedimentology, demonstrates that event facies formed through megaflood backflooding sourced from southeastern Tibet. The results point to the likelihood of similar deposits in other tributaries, providing a framework for regional investigation. Our findings further show that megafloods in steep terrain can produce substantial deposition and terrace formation tens of kilometers upstream in tributaries—far beyond the main stem floodway—revealing an overlooked geomorphic imprint of extreme floods.