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learning about intercultural histories, and the narratives of Japanese American settlement and internal migrations during the twentieth century. As museums, they can mediate learning between cultures, and between the present and past (Tan, 2019 : 2). As artworks, they can enrich culturally informed sensibilities, aesthetic knowledge, and culturally conditioned values. These gardens are lieux de mémoire , sites of memory (Boer, 2008 ; Assmann, 2011 ; Bublatzky, 2019 ), which sustain traces of the past that continue to condition appreciations of the present. Their
company’s catalogue system has become a marketplace for dealers, brokers and buyers in a commodification of a generation’s profound, deeply personal memories. While newly found items continue to appear online, often with uncertain authenticity, the genuine provenance of a second Omega auction by Hook in autumn 2021, putting this time his New Order collection under the hammer, only swelled more interest. Yet the marketplace for and fetishisation of Factory objects and paraphernalia has a deep irony. Factory was a
2 ‘A warmer memory’: speaking of Ireland 1 COLIN GRAHAM The colonized considers those venerable scholars relics and thinks of them as sleepwalkers who are living in an old dream. (Memmi 1990 [1957]: 172) [He] says that in the course of his labours it would happen that inspiration failed him: he then would go downstairs and out of his house, and enter a public urinal whose odor was suffocating. He breathed deeply, and having thus ‘approached as close as he could to the object of his horror’, he returned to his work. I cannot help recalling the author
4 Age, time and personal memory Though Marty’s Révolte was ostensibly an act of collective memory or even collective autobiography, he reduced the imagination of participants to a monological didacticism. A re-examination of the personal memories of mutineers allows Marty’s imposed uniformity to be unpicked. The mutiny, as Bakhtin might have put it, was dialogical: it entailed a multiplicity of subjectivities unevenly communing through collective action, everyday practices, song, symbolism and language.1 Overlapping with public commemorative practices, though
[I]t is not the truth which matters in Northern Ireland, but what people believe to be the truth. (Brian Faulkner, Irish Times , 5 January 1972) The Troubles in Northern Ireland produced huge social turmoil and political division that still structures and provides guidelines for that society. Much of its legacy is encapsulated in, and presented through, expressions and representations of collective memory. The
Part I Memory and history According to the philosopher Paul Ricœur, ‘narrative attains its full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (1984: 52). In stating this, Ricœur foregrounds the importance of history and memory, the two narrative routes that assist and orient our navigation through time. Unlike certain other philosophers, such as Hegel, Ricœur did not, in fact, see
On the basis of a body of reggae songs from the 1970s and late 1990s, this book offers a sociological analysis of memory, hope and redemption in reggae music. From Dennis Brown to Sizzla, the way in which reggae music constructs a musical, religious and socio-political memory in rupture with dominant models is illustrated by the lyrics themselves. How is the past remembered in the present? How does remembering the past allow for imagining the future? How does collective memory participate in the historical grounding of collective identity? What is the relationship between tradition and revolution, between the recollection of the past and the imagination of the future, between passivity and action? Ultimately, this case study of ‘memory at work’ opens up on a theoretical problem: the conceptualisation of time and its relationship with memory.
12 Rewriting the memory of immigration: Samuel Zaoui’s Saint Denis bout du monde Mireille Le Breton In the 1980s and 1990s, a movement erupted on the French literary scene: the descendants of first-generation Maghrebi immigrants started to write autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novels in order to voice their mal-être in a society that did not seem to acknowledge they were French, endowed with the same rights as any citizen living in the French Republic.1 Their narratives also incorporate stories of their parents’ generation, people who had left for
The development of the European Union as a community-based project of integration with decision-making powers outside the constitutional architecture of the nation-state is the most significant innovation in twentieth-century political organisation. It raises fundamental questions about our understanding of the state, sovereignty, citizenship, democracy, and the relationship between political power and economic forces. Despite its achievements, events at the start of the twenty-first century – including the political, economic, and financial crisis of the Eurozone, as well as Brexit and the rise of populism – pose an existential threat to the EU.
Memory and the future of Europe addresses the crisis of the EU by treating integration as a response to the rupture created by the continent’s experience of total war. It traces Europe’s existing pathologies to the project’s loss of its moral foundations rooted in collective memories of total war. As the generations with personal memories of the two world wars pass away, economic gain has become the EU’s sole raison d’être. If it is to survive its future challenges, the EU will have to create a new historical imaginary that relies not only on the lessons of the past, but also builds on Europe’s ability to protect its citizens by serving as a counterweight against the forces of globalisation. By framing its argument through the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Memory and the future of Europe will attract readers interested in political and social philosophy, collective memory studies, European studies, international relations, and contemporary politics.
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature explores intertextual memories of William Shakespeare in modern Irish writing. It proposes a new way of reading these memories through ‘dismemory’. Dismemory describes disruptive memories that are future oriented, demonstrating how Irish writers make use of Shakespeare to underwrite the Irish nation-state. The ghosts section foregrounds the father–son relation in Irish literature that is modelled on the ‘hauntological’ (Derrida, 1993) relation between Hamlet’s Ghost and his son. This relation is paradigmatic for Irish writers, evident through J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907), ‘Hades’ from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and John Banville’s Ghosts (1993). These examinations demonstrate how each adapts the father–son structure from Hamlet. The section on bodies thinks through Beckett’s Three Novels (1951–53) and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1960–86) and how they foreground the material body. These bodies are tied either to the antitheatrical discourse (Beckett) or to maternity discourses (O’Brien), and in both cases, the Irish writers manage to throw off the bodies’ burdens much as their early modern literary forebears did. Finally, the land section examines W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney – first Yeats’s concern with the surface of the land results in an ideal image of the dancer, as in As You Like It and Edmund Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Again; then, Heaney’s interest in the land’s depths. Heaney restores these unearthed Irish memories in his poetry, thereby creating a new Irish archive.