Category Archives: Human Rights Archive

Events, Human Rights Archive, Readings and Talks

Oblivion Receives WOLA-Duke Book Award

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Duke University have named Hector Abad’s book Oblivion, A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) as the winner of the 2012 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award. The award honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America.

Abad will receive the award on November 28 at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. The event will include a reading of Oblivion and a discussion of how the human rights situation in Colombia has evolved since the death of the author’s father 25 years ago. Abad will then travel to Durham, North Carolina, to do a reading on November 29 at 5:00pm in the Rare Book Room of Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.  For more information on the reading, contact Patrick Stawski at (919) 660-5823 or patrick.stawski@duke.edu.

Abad’s book begins with the author’s memories of his father, Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, who developed practical public health programs for the poor in Medellín, Colombia. The increasing violence and human rights abuses of the 1970s and 1980s led Gómez to fight for social justice in his community. As a physician, he recognized the violence as a societal sickness in need of a cure, but his political views put him at odds with those in power, and they labeled him as sympathetic to Colombia’s left-wing guerrilla groups. In Oblivion, twenty years after his father was killed by a right-wing death squad, Abad pays homage to the man who continues to inspire him, and he shows us the importance of standing up against injustice.

Judges for this year’s competition called Abad’s book “deeply moving,” “beautiful,” and “original,” recognizing it for painting a heartfelt picture of how damaging political violence is for victims and their families and for stressing the importance of fighting for social justice and the respect for human rights, despite staggering opposition.

Award judge Holly Ackerman described Oblivion’s main accomplishment as its ability to “make us deeply feel the value of every human life and the terrible consequences of political violence wherever it occurs. It is a universal vignette… The book sharpened and renewed my conviction that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.’”

According to Leonor Blum, the chair of this year’s award judging panel and emerita professor of history and political Science at Notre Dame of Maryland University, the book “is a sensitive portrayal of the multiple facets of this modern Don Quixote who is idealistic to a fault, who cares about ‘el pueblo,’ who lives a middle class life surrounded by a loving family with its laughs, quirks, and tragedies.”

“It kept me up at night and brought me to tears and will bring, at least in my mind, something like eternal life to the murdered Doctor Héctor Abad Gómez.” says journalist, writer, and  award judge Roger Atwood.

Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke Human Rights Center, explains that she chose this book “because it offers us something new and challenging, something surprising and hard—being an activist and making a difference can sometimes cost your life.”

Started in 2008, the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award is a joint venture of Duke University and WOLA, a leading advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Books are evaluated by a panel of expert judges drawn from academia, journalism, and public policy circles. The 2012 judging panel included Holly Ackerman, Librarian for Latin America and Iberia, Duke University; Roger Atwood, journalist, author, and former WOLA communications director; Leonor Blum, WOLA board member and emerita associate professor of history and political science at Notre Dame of Maryland University; and Robin Kirk, director, Duke Human Rights Center.

Previous WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award recipients include: Katherine Sikkink for The Justice Cascade in 2011; Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes, with Jorge Enrique Botero for Hostage Nation in 2010; Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz for The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet in 2009; and Francisco Goldman for The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? in 2008.

Events, Exhibits, Human Rights Archive

Opening Reception for Farmworkers and Food Exhibits

Date: Sept. 20, 2012
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Place: Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
Contact: Patrick Stawski, patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu

Three new library exhibitions at Duke explore the human experience of farmworkers and the history of a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving their lives.

For twenty years, Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) has worked to bring together students, community members, and farmworkers in the Southeast to work for justice in the agricultural system. What began as a small group of Duke Public Policy students documenting farmworker conditions has since grown to an independent nonprofit with a national impact. The organization’s papers are held by Duke’s Human Rights Archive in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The first of the exhibits, Student Action with Farmworkers: 20 Years of Growing Farmworker Activists, is located in the Perkins Library Gallery and features documentary photos, protest signs, campaign materials, and more items from SAF’s history. An adjacent exhibit on The Art of SAF demonstrates the organization’s use of creative arts in education and outreach. And in the nearby Rubenstein Library Photography Gallery, Documenting the Politics of Food features photographs of American agriculture and agricultural labor from the Rubenstein Library’s documentary photography collections.

All three exhibits reflect historical and contemporary concerns with student activism, access to safe and healthy food, organized labor, and immigration. The exhibits run through December 9, 2012.

An opening reception for the exhibits will be held at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 20, in the Rare Book Room of Duke’s Perkins Library on Duke’s West Campus. The reception, which will feature Latin American food and live music, is free and open to the public.

“Contrary to the perception of some, Duke students have a rich and impressive legacy of progressive activism,” said Robin Kirk, co-director of the Duke Human Rights Center. “No group symbolizes this more effectively than Student Action with Farmworkers. This feisty group has made a real difference in the lives of farmworkers, normally invisible and largely forgotten by all of us who benefit from their backbreaking work. The partnership between the Human Rights Archive and SAF brings this history into view at a time when the issues involved—fair wages, immigration, and safety for these important workers—are at the forefront of a presidential campaign.”

The exhibits are co-sponsored by SAF, the Duke University Libraries, the Center for Documentary Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute BorderWorks Lab, the Duke University Service Learning Program, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

These exhibits are part of a larger series of events around the state celebrating the 20th anniversary of Student Action with Farmworkers, including a portable mural display and oral history interviews with National Public Radio’s StoryCorps. More information can be found at www.saf-unite.org or http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/human-rights.

From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, New at the Rubenstein Library, Students and Interns

North Korean Propaganda in the Selig Harrison Papers

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The Selig Harrison Papers is a recent accession to the Center for International Policy (CIP) Records. Selig Harrison, the director of the CIP’s Asia Project, has specialized in South Asia and East Asia for fifty years as a journalist and scholar. These papers comprise a broad survey of the political and economic relations throughout Asia and between the U.S. and Asia, providing the birds-eye view from which Harrison’s research was conducted. They are concerned with public men and women – leaders and governments, the structures and organizations that most visibly influence the course of history. Likewise, these papers are very much bound up in the problem of representation, not only because they examine the institutions that are most often represented in the media and in political discourse, but because the project of the Center for International Policy is to shape the way such institutions get represented in the media and in political discourse. The Selig Harrison Papers offer a sense of the high stakes of the practice of representation, and at stake for Harrison is international policy and the course of history itself.  Thus, one aspect of these papers that struck me was the degree to which Harrison was and is invested in anticipating the behavior of political actors and the consequences of that behavior so as to affect it. Some of his original files were even labeled as questions (e.g. “Should Pakistan survive?” or “Is Musharraf backing down?”).

The Selig Harrison Papers most heavily focus on the Korean Peninsula, especially North Korea. The majority of these papers are dated from within the last 20 years, though the series contains a few documents as early as 1960. Particularly notable are some North Korean materials from 1965-1972 on women and children (see “Women and children in the DPRK” folder in the Geographic Subseries) and two North Korean children’s books from 1987 (see “Children’s tales – Pyongyang” folder in the Geographic Subseries).

“Statue of Premier Kim Il Sung,” from a North Korean pamphlet in the Selig Harrison Papers, Center for International Policy Records.

The material on women and children includes some fascinating propaganda from 1965, promoting Kim Il Sung’s affinity for and fostering of North Korea’s children. Kim Il Sung saw in children the continuance of revolutionary politics given that they were raised as revolutionaries (hence the importance of women in the DPRK).  The particular chapter, called “Give the Children the Best,” from this 1965 text begins,  “Children, to Comrade Kim Il Sung, are irreplaceable objects of love, for whom it is his basic and inviolable principle that they must have the best. His warm heart and deep care for the children are unlimited.” The sentimental language of love and the valorization of a particular politics of care that is often seen as distinguishing of communist governments (which should be further distinguished from communism as a political theory) is manifest in this passage and throughout the text. The child is representative because it comes to stand for the general relationship of the government to its people. This text asks us to think of love not as a private emotion but as a political concept, as an essential element for transforming the objectified child into a fully formed political subject, which is to say, a subject educated in the “revolutionary ideology and the indomitable fighting spirit of the working class.”

This propaganda reveals, more specifically, the orphan to be the national symbol of North Korea, the figure, it seems, most capable of being revolutionary.  After all, just as the orphan is a broken link in a chain, so revolutions seek to create a radical break with history. “None can call them orphans any longer,” the text reads. “Comrade Kim Il Sung is in truth a father to all those children who have lost their fathers and mothers.”

Children’s Palace and School, Pyongyang, from a North Korean pamphlet in the Selig Harrison Papers, Center for International Policy Records.

Kim Il Sung named the child “king of the land” and in 1963 built the Children’s Palace and School in Pyongyang. The Palace offers, according to the pamphlet from which the above photographs were borrowed, an education that incorporates the arts and crafts, such as sculpture, embroidery and drawing, history (according to the ideology of the Worker’s Party) and the sciences, as well as and perhaps most importantly engineering for the production of a population capable of (re)building a nation.

Reading about the palace in Pyongyang raised a few questions for me – what work is the language of sovereignty (the children as kings who attend school in a palace) doing within a communist regime devoted to the Workers’ Party? In other words, what valences does such language have within this seemingly counter ideology? The language of sovereignty seems as if it should be opposed to, not aligned with, the way the text writes of the child as not yet fully formed subjects but rather as objects of love and care. Instead, it is as if the language of the sovereign, here, is meant to denote the potential itself for a being objectified by care to become revolutionary and to care, finally not as kings but as political subjects, in turn.

Image from North Korean children’s book in the Selig Harrison Papers, Center for International Policy Records.

A second and related set of materials are the two childrens’ books, published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang in 1989, titled A Tale of Two Generals and A Winged Horse. These books, fairy tales “told by the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung,” are illustrated and were translated from North Korean. Both of these fairy tales are stories of militarization about defending the land from foreign invaders. Indeed, within both of these books there exists a constant threat of the foreign. The lessons of these books are consistent with those expressed in Kim Il Sung’s vision of the Children’s Palace and School – strength and courage for one’s country only bear value if matched by intelligence and a sentimental identification with the land. In A Winged Horse, the youngest son who has cultivated himself most roundly is the only son able to ride the winged horse that allows him to save his village from foreign invaders.

There isn’t anything exceptional in these lessons themselves; they are similar to the lessons many of us were given as children. But what interests me in both the propaganda material and the children’s stories is, first, that they are all highly invested in the problem and, more importantly, the stakes of self-representation, which seems to be essentially what Selig Harrison studies as a journalist and scholar.  Second, in both sets of materials the pervasive devastation of North Korea during the Korean War always shadows the representational figure of the child – the redeemer. Because the child is conceived of as the one who can redeem North Korea, Kim Il Sung wanted to call attention to his investments in children’s schools even in the midst of the wreckage of the Fatherland Liberation War (Korean War). These materials thus juxtapose the reality of famine and large-scale devastation with what is rendered as the comfort and even the luxuries provided to North Korean children as the nation anticipates the time of reconstruction.

Post contributed by Clare Callahan, graduate student assistant in Rubenstein Technical Services and the Human Rights Archive.

From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, New at the Rubenstein Library, News and Features

Duke Acquires Papers of Rabbi Heschel, Influential Religious Leader

The Rubenstein Library at Duke University will acquire the papers of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a scholar, writer and theologian who is widely recognized as one of the most influential religious leaders of the 20thcentury, the school announced Monday.

Photographs and other items from the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers.

Heschel was a highly visible and charismatic leader in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. He co-founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam and served as a Jewish liaison with the Vatican during the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II.

The collection, which has never before been available to scholars, consists of manuscripts, correspondence, publications, documents and photographs spanning five decades and at least four languages. Included among the papers are notes and drafts for nearly all of Heschel’s published works, as well as intimate and extensive correspondence with some of the leading religious figures of his time, including Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Reinhold Niebuhr. The papers also contain extensive documentation on Heschel’s life-long commitment to social justice, including planning documents, correspondence with organizers, speeches and even hate mail.

The archive will open for research after conservation review and archival processing are complete.

For more information, visit the full press release!

Early Manuscripts, Human Rights Archive, Manuscripts, New at the Rubenstein Library

New Acquisitions Week, Day Three: Calligraphic Devotion and Haitian Rights

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year with a week’s worth of new acquisitions from the first half of 2012.  Two newly acquired selections will be featured in a post every day this week.  All of these amazing resources are available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library!

  •  Kitab Dala’il al-Khairat wa Shawariq al-Anwar fi Dhikr al-Salah ‘ala al-Nabi al-Mukhtar [Guidebook of Benefits and Illuminations of Prayers to the Chosen Prophet].  The Dala’il al-Khairat of al-Jazuli (Al-Jazuli, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn Sulaymana, d. 1465) is one of the most popular devotional works in Islam, comprising a cycle of prayers to the prophet Muhammad.  The manuscript now at Duke is Arabic written in the Maghrebi script, and likely was created in North Africa in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  The manuscript also contains other prayers and devotional texts.  Its calligraphy and ornamentation are beautiful witnesses to a text of surpassing importance in the Muslim faith.
Opening from the newly acquired manuscript of the Dala’il al-Khayrat. Arabic in Maghrebi script.
  • National Coalition for Haitian Rights Records: This organization is dedicated to furthering the civil and international human rights of the Haitian community in the US and helping influence US policy over Haiti to support human rights.  In over 146 linear feet of material, the records document the activity of the Coalition from 1981 to 2003.  This adds to a growing collection of material in the Human Rights Archive related to human rights in Haiti; see the Human Rights Archive’s LibGuide for more information on other collections related to human rights in Latin America.

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From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive, New Finding Aids, Students and Interns, Technical Stuff

Haitian Children in Guantanamo

Boy with fish in Guantanamo Camp #9, ca. 1994-95. From the Americans for Immigrant Justice Records.

We recently completed processing the Americans for Immigrant Justice (AIJ) Records. Formerly the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC), AIJ is a not-for profit legal organization that advocates on behalf of immigrants and refugees, including those being held at various detention centers, such as Guantanamo, Krome and Turner Guilford Knight. The majority of the material in this collection deals with the Haitian refugee population in Florida. Two aspects of this collection struck me. First, while this collection contains material that addresses the Haitian refugee crises from a broader political and historical perspective, it is notable for the quantity of material it contains that focuses on the stories and testimonies of individual refugees, in their own words, in documents such as affidavits and correspondence.

The second aspect of this collection that struck me as particularly interesting is the amount of material it contains on children – child refugees and detainees, children seeking asylum, children stranded in Haiti, and especially unaccompanied minors. As I became more familiar with this collection, I became especially interested in the detained child as both a fact and an idea. Sifting through accounts both by and about children of their emotional, mental, and physical experiences in detention, I began to wonder how the search for asylum and subsequent detention is conceived of by children.

The reason why this subject fascinated me is because of the strong incongruity in the idea of the child, on the one hand, and the idea of imprisonment of any kind, on the other, an incongruity that suggested to me that accounts of children in detention might uniquely illuminate how we think about detention and refuge. We often associate children with places of refuge, with a powerful need for and unique faculty to find or construct places of refuge. One example of this faculty is play. As I looked through photographs of and read testimony by children detained at Guantanamo, I began to wonder what place “play” has in detention, in homelessness, and in lack of refuge.

Boy holding guitar in Guantanamo Camp #9, ca. 1994-95. From the Americans for Immigrant Justice Records.

The subset of documents about which I am writing are dated from around the early and mid-1990s, during and following the campaign of terror against Aristide supporters. One must bear in mind that the majority of Haitian refugees held at Guantanamo at this time were forcibly returned to Haiti where their lives were imperiled (5,000 Aristide supporters were estimated to be killed in 1993). In fact, many of the children detained at Guantanamo were unaccompanied for precisely this reason – their parents or caretakers had been killed in Haiti during this period. As the AIJ Records reveal, many of these children, upon repatriation, were thus compelled to eke out a living on the streets.

So, how does the child reconfigure the way we conceive of detention? Three photographs from the Photographic Materials Series caught my attention. After I selected them, I asked myself why I had been drawn to them, and I realized that in each, a child or children were holding some kind of object – a fish, makeshift drums, a guitar.

I considered these photographs against the written testimony about and by children detained at Guantanamo (information packets, emergency action requests related to medical conditions, correspondence, affidavits, reports, etc.). The written documentation described abuses, including rape, that were committed at Guantanamo against women and children. Child detainees, not surprisingly, wrote of their desperation and depression (their own words), and observers of these children offered similar accounts. Yet, these children not only subsist at Guantanamo but also, as the photographs above communicate, find ways to play. It is not difficult to perceive a form of resistance in their play, in their insistence upon occupying places that we cannot envision as inhabitable. I was likewise captivated by the photographs in which children are holding objects because they seem to me to manifest the construction of places of refuge within displacement and dispossession. The subjects in these photographs seek asylum in the objects themselves. There is something about gripping an object, possessing that object, that also solidifies the reality of oneself – and this in a place in which that very reality is relentlessly objected to – in abuse, obscurity, neglect, remaining unheard.

Boys playing drums in Guantanamo Camp #9, ca. 1994-95. From the Americans for Immigrant Justice Records.

Post contributed by Clare Callahan, graduate student assistant in Rubenstein Technical Services and the Human Rights Archive.

Bingham Center, Digital Collections, Do Your Research, Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, Hartman Center, Human Rights Archive, Manuscripts, News and Features, Research Tips, Technical Stuff

E-Records in the Reading Room

Special Collections Library reading rooms often require special equipment to view non-traditional record formats such as VHS players, cassette players, microfilm readers, etc. The Rubenstein Library recently welcomed a new piece to the set: a desktop computer.

Rubenstein Library Research Services staff check out the reading room's new e-records computer work station.
Rubenstein Library Research Services staff check out the reading room's new e-records computer work station.

Though public computers have been available in our reference room for a long time to assist in finding and requesting physical materials in the reading room this new machine has been designed to support providing local access to electronic records and audio/video materials.

Some of the materials you can explore on the computer include:

Visit the reading room today and start that e-research!

Post contributed by Seth Shaw, Electronic Records Archivist.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Events, Films, Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive

Rights! Camera! Action!: Wetback

Date: Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: The Garage, Smith Warehouse Bay 4, 114 S. Buchanan St. (map)
Contact information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu

Join Rights! Camera! Action! and our special co-sponsor Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) for a screening of Arturo Perez Torres’ “Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary,” winner of the 2005 Full Frame Spectrum Award. This screening is part of a year-long celebration of Student Action with Farmworkers’ 20th Anniversary.

Wetback follows undocumented migrant workers from their home in Nicaragua across Central America and Mexico to the U.S.-Mexican border, meeting many other migrants along the way. They encounter gangs, vigilantes, corrupt law enforcement, physical danger, and safe havens in their attempt to be among the 10% of migrants who actually make it all the way into North America. The migrants, those who aid them, and those who turn them back all give their own perspectives on how this vast, illegal system trafficking in cheap labor and dreams actually functions, and what its terrible costs and perils are.

Immediately following the screening join us for a panel discussion including North Carolina Rep. Paul Luebke (D), 2011 SAF Fellow Nandini Kumar, and SAF Advocacy and Organizing Director, Nadeen Bir.

The film is 92 minutes, in Spanish and English with English subtitles. This event is free and open to the public, with free drinks and popcorn and free parking.

Cosponsored by Student Action with Farmworkers.

About Rights! Camera! Action!:  Featuring award-winning documentaries about human rights themes from Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the series explores issues ranging from the immigration and refugee rights to the justice system and the environment. All films featured in the series are archived at the Duke Library and are part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials. Co-sponsors include Duke Library’s Human Rights Archive, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).

Digital Collections, Human Rights Archive

New Digital Collection: Marshall T. Meyer

Interview with Marshall Meyer published on 5 February 1984. From the Marshall T. Meyer Papers.

Duke University Libraries announces the publication of the Marshall T. Meyer digital collection (available at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/
meyermarshall/) which documents the human rights activism of the Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer in 1970’s and 1980’s Argentina.  The digital collection is a subset of the Marshall T. Meyer papers held at the Rubenstein Library.

Marshall Meyer was an activist rabbi who expounded a politically engaged Conservative Judaism. After being ordained rabbi in 1958, Meyer and his wife moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1959, where they were to stay until 1984. Meyer led the reinvigoration of Argentina’s Jewish community and lived and fought through the political upheavals and turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s, openly speaking out against the human rights abuses perpetrated under the rule of the military junta, and visiting and attempting to secure the release of prisoners who were unlawfully incarcerated. After the return of democracy to Argentina in 1983, Argentine President Raul Alfonsin recruited Meyer to serve on the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP in Spanish), which led a national investigation to establish the extent of the abuses suffered under the military junta.

Meyer returned to the United States in 1984 and took over the helm of congregation B’nai Jeshurun, reviving the decaying New York City synagogue and transforming it into a dynamic center for Judaism in the United States. Meyer advocated for inter-religious dialogue and peace efforts, the plight of marginalized groups within the United States, against human rights abuses in Central America (El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala), and for peace and respect for human rights in Israel and Palestine.

The items in the Marshall Meyer digital collection focus on his work in Argentina on behalf of human rights.  Approximately 6 linear feet of paper documents were digitized and individually cataloged. The digital collection contains 1,025 items including correspondence, project files, subject files, publications, and other documents.  The web portal allows researchers to access individual documents via subject, document type, date, language, and titles.  Future enhancements to the collection will include addition of archival descriptions and access and the addition of a/v material.

The Marshall Meyer digital collection is complimented by two other digital initiatives:  the on-line exhibit: “I Have No Right to Be Silent, The Human Rights Legacy of the Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer” ( http://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/ihavenorighttobesilent ) produced by The Duke Human Rights Archive in partnership with the Duke Human Rights Center and the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke, and the Fondo Marshall Meyer (http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/bases/opac/fondos/meyer/index.html ) produced by Memoria Abierta.

Post contributed by Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist.

Archive of Documentary Arts, Events, Films, From Our Collections, Human Rights Archive

Rights! Camera! Action!: Good Times

Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Franklin Humanities Institute Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse (map)
Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu, or Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Still from Good TimesJoin us for a screening of Good Times (31 minutes, Hebrew/ Arabic/ English with English subtitles), the second film in the 2011-2012 Rights! Camera! Action! series and the winner of the 2004 Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short.

Good Times was shot in Abu Dis, a small Palestinian village divided in two by a wall built by the Israeli government. The film follows the villagers’ lives before the wall was built and through the construction of a temporary, then a permanent, wall. Moving in colliding microcosms, the inhabitants of the village and the Israeli soldiers protecting the border create an absurd routine of mutual respect and resentment.

Following the film, students from Duke’s BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab will give a presentation on their work this semester.

The screening is free and open to the public, and free popcorn will be provided!

The Rights! Camera! Action! film series, which is sponsored by the Archive for Human Rights, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Screen/Society at Duke’s Arts of the Moving Image Program, features documentaries on human rights themes that were award winners at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The films are archived at the Rubenstein Library, where they form part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials. This screening is also co-sponsored by the BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute.