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’ wartime experiences play a prominent role, as emblematic. By presenting his ‘story’ this way, he rendered his high-achieving, atypical family unremarkable: sharing the poignancy of loss that was common to so many families and communities. Examining the intimate ways in which siblings ‘kept’ the memory of brothers contributes to our understanding of how the war is remembered. 3 Revealing and recording love is one of the vital functions of war writing, states Kate McLoughlin. 4 Often these memories remained hidden from view, recorded in private letters and diaries
South Africa – Canada alone was considered to have achieved this level of maturity because it had established a national school of art. The Wembley exhibition has figured as an important moment in national art history only in Canada. 2 In this chapter I explore why that moment was identified by Canada as memorable, and as such written into the annals of national cultural history, whereas it was consigned to insignificance and erased from the collective memory by the other Dominions. I argue that where a nation was most successful
As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society, when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their ‘War of Independence’ and the Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse. This book explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel's war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, it makes a contribution to social memory studies through a critical evaluation of the co-memoration of the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli Jews. Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, the book's central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia which shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. The book theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing.
Legacies of colonial empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, and in other forms. Heroic men have not been forgotten but at the same time erstwhile insurgents rebelling against the colonial order are now celebrated as freedom fighters. Even commodities of daily life, such as coffee or rubber, bear the deep imprint of their colonial histories. This book presents imperial history as a history of interwoven, overlapping, partly contradictory memories in which non-European outlooks are considered on a more equal footing, alongside the recollections of former colonial masters. These include imperial architecture in nineteenth-century Algeria, the Koregaon obelisk in India, the Hungarian monument commemorating the thirteen martyrs of Arad, and Japan's twentieth-century post-war repositories of memories of war, empire, suffering and heroism. The heroes and villains of the imperial era include the Dutch colonial governor Jan Pietersz Coen; Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey; and the explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Other manifestations of memory include Imam Shamil who resisted the troops of Tsarist Russia. The book looks at the fragility and precariousness of repositories of imperial memory. It traces the cycles of obliviousness and remembrance, of suppression and political instrumentalisation that have accompanied the history of Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The history of Berlin's Botanical Garden is intimately intertwined with Germany's colonial endeavours but this important aspect of the institution's history has remained all but suppressed.
The imperial past is all around us. Decades have come and gone since the dissolution of Europe’s great colonial empires, but the footprints they have left in the realm of memory all over the world are plain to see. Legacies of empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture and urban topographies, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, on cinema
2 MEMORY AND THE INDIVIDUAL In everyday life, if not always in scholarly discourse, when we speak of memory and remembering, we tend to mean something that we take to be personal and attributable to individuals. We all know what it feels like to have a memory of something, to strive to remember, to be aware of having forgotten, and we regard these experiences as ones that are at once part of the common human condition and yet innate, for each of us, in our existence as separate and self-conscious individual beings. Our memories seem (in Fentress and Wickham
1 HISTORY AND MEMORY: AN IMAGINED RELATIONSHIP If social memory is the name we give to the processes by which knowledge and awareness of the social past are generated and maintained in human societies, then history, as an intellectual discipline geared to the production and extension of such a knowledge and such an awareness, is obviously part of social memory. And insofar as individual memory also contributes to social memory processes, history has an engagement with individual memory. But ‘memory’ can also be considered as a discursive term that has been
Chapter 5 Sharing seditious memories N ot all audiences were hostile to seditious memories. To assume so would be to presuppose the isolation of those who sympathised with Parliament and the Republic. In this chapter, I focus on expectations of a more favourable reception of seditious memories, highlighting thereby moments at which consensus was sought, and sometimes reached, about opposition and resistance in the 1640s and 1650s. Such an analysis entails examining the context and content of seditious and treasonable language to show that speakers or authors
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr’s Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.