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of its treatment of memory and the uses of the past. Here we shall be concerned with the way in which the film treats the question of spectacle and performance, and its relation to direct experience. Jacquot is a film obsessed with spectacle. From the credit sequence we are introduced into a theatrical world, albeit one which is turned on its head. The film begins with the final curtain of a play
. I take it as axiomatic that fictionalised cinematic representations of the past are less concerned with historical accuracy than with appropriating aspects of the past to serve the needs of the present. Whether based on memories of lived experiences or on the research and imagination of cultural entrepreneurs, they act as potential ‘vectors of memory’ (Wood 1999 : 6), fashioning popular understandings of history and thereby contributing to a sense of collective identity
This chapter strikes out on a pathway of charting how Freud considered memory, as one of the processes working through the subject, and I will do so through a specific ‘case-history’. Although Freud thought psychoanalysis was in the pursuit of truth, the speculative nature of his writing, and the different, irreconcilable models of thought, set side by side alongside each
The previous chapter explored the different ways in which death manifested itself in the mid to late eighteenth century. This was a period that was characterised by new ways of writing about death in which the role of memory was implicit. Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ (1751) was instructive in that regard as his narrator imaginatively
Debates on the relevance of repatriation of indigenous human remains are water under the bridge today. Yet, a genuine will for dialogue to work through colonial violence is found lacking in the European public sphere. Looking at local remembrance of the Majimaji War (1905–7) in the south of Tanzania and a German–Tanzanian theatre production, it seems that the spectre of colonial headhunting stands at the heart of claims for repatriation and acknowledgement of this anti-colonial movement. The missing head of Ngoni leader Songea Mbano haunts the future of German–Tanzanian relations in heritage and culture. By staging the act of post-mortem dismemberment and foregrounding the perspective of descendants, the theatre production Maji Maji Flava offers an honest proposal for dealing with stories of sheer colonial violence in transnational memory.
shock-waves rippling through the Empire, an event that has understandably been erased from the easy memory of the British and subsequent Afrikaner rulers of South Africa. II Charles Fripp, The Battle of Isandhlwana (1885
For the Irish emigrant, the home place is elsewhere; it is ‘imagined’ in terms of both the past and the future – the past as a form of cultural memory and the future as a desire to return to the homeland. – from The Irish Dancing by
identity is to have recourse to memory, particularly the memory of origins. In independent Algeria, official memory has remained fixated on the war against the French. This makes it all the more important to look beyond the anti-colonial struggle and the FLN’s mythologising of the Algerian revolution as the founding moment of national identity. While history seems to begin in 1954 for the FLN, the pre-colonial epoch may be excavated for a
the consequences of the fatal border by listening. In this chapter, we contribute to this alternative engagement with border deaths and argue that a key to critical knowledge is a careful and detailed telling and listening: the work of listening . For the Nobel literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich, who works with oral histories, history is found in little details, and the most interesting knowledge about life is in what she calls ‘mysteries’: the memories that appear when people speak to each other and tell stories of what has happened
1 Memories of protests past: the grande révolte of 1907 In 1948, as France’s post-war reconstruction took hold, a pamphlet was released by the winegrowers of the Minervois. In this heartland of robust wines in France’s south, they sought to stoke the embers of 1907, the memory of which remained potent. The final words of that pamphlet underlined its relevance: 1907 must remain a fixed point in the memory of all sons of the Midi. A mark that will make us proud. A mark that will exalt our strength. 1907? … In the past, a great memory. In the Present, in the Future