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7 Memory In his fascinating and valuable study of manuscript transmission in the forty years or so either side of 1600, H. R. Woudhuysen issues a warning against trusting some manuscript texts too far. ‘There is always the possibility’, he writes that some poems in miscellanies may not have been copied from written or from printed texts, but were reconstructed from memory. It is reasonable to suggest that the degree of textual corruption sometimes encountered in miscellany texts arises not simply from a failure in ability to copy words from one piece of paper
This book explores the eight-month wave of mutinies in the French infantry and navy in 1919. This revolt stretched from France’s intervention against the Soviet Union through the Black Sea, into the Mediterranean and finally resulting in unrest in France’s naval ports. As a consequence, mutineers faced court martials, the threat of the death penalty and years of hard labour.
This research is the result of careful scrutiny of official records and, more importantly, the testimony of dozens of mutineers. It is the first study to try to understand the world of the mutineers, assessing their own words for the traces of their sensory perceptions, their emotions and their thought processes. It shows that the conventional understanding of the mutinies as simple war-weariness and low morale as inadequate. It demonstrates that an emotional gulf separated officers and the ranks, who simply did not speak the same language. It reveals the soundscape (its silences, shouts and songs) and visual aspect of the mutiny. The revolt entailed emotional sequences ending in a deep ambivalence and sense of despair or regret. It also considers how mutineer memories persisted after the events in the face of official censorship, repression and the French Communist Party’s co-option of the mutiny.
This text will interest students, general readers and scholars of the both Great War and its contentious aftermath. Setting the mutiny in the transnational context, it will contribute to the growing interest in 1919 as the twentieth century’s most unruly year.
2 Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? ... No ethical person would admonish Jews to forget the Holocaust ... yet in dialogue with Israelis ... Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to forget the past ... ironically Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day – whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel. (Bishara 2007) Introduction In ‘Categorial murder, or, how to remember the Holocaust’, Bauman (2004a) argues that
Memory is not commonly imagined as a site of possibility for progressive politics. More often, memory, particularly in the form of nostalgia, is condemned for its solipsistic nature, for its tendency to draw people into the past instead of the present. This is the case, for example, in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days , in which the use of memory – usually another
Chapter 4 Seditious memories: Contestation and cultural resistance T he first months of the Restoration saw the rapid seizure of the authority to speak for the past. The beneficiaries were a group of hard-line Royalists who had objected vocally to the conciliatory atmosphere that defined Charles II’s return to England. Through the passage of legislation that effectively supplanted the programme of oblivion and its clarion call for a process of forgetting, the aptly named Cavalier Parliament unleashed the systematic censure of their erstwhile enemies through
• 5 • Mobilising memory: reading the Second World War in children’s crime fiction of the 1990s and 2000s The 1990s and 2000s in France saw a number of memorial taboos surrounding the Second World War publicly overturned. The most symbolic of these acts occurred during the speech delivered by newly elected President Jacques Chirac on 16 July 1995 to mark the fifty-third anniversary of the rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver. For the first time in national history, a French head of state officially acknowledged the active support of the Vichy regime and its agents
Introduction In an increasingly mediated society, the importance of discovery and questioning of the mundane becomes vital to ground actions, individually and collectively, in alternative ways. Memory Work is an approach developed to help explore the mundane by problematising the things we take for granted. Through recalling and documenting stories of memories and experiences, participants, researchers and research-subjects are invited to look for variety – in one's own stories as well as in relation to the stories of the others – regarding
This book deals with history's relationship to memory. By individual memory, it means a memory that is located in the minds of individuals and through which those individuals have knowledge of things that fall within their personal experience. Memory of this kind is an integral part of the mental functioning of individuals and is closely linked to concepts of personality and selfhood. But, individual or personal memory is also a part of the mental equipment that allows human beings to function in social settings. Its forms are influenced by its social uses, and it makes a contribution to social knowledge and social understanding that can be explored from a social as well as an individual angle. The book explores how individual memory is a resource both for individuals within society and for societies themselves and how it is connected to larger social processes. The exploration of social memory begins as a facet of the discussion of the social dimensions of in individual; it is carried further through the discussion of the workings of memory in social groups. It is then completed by the discussion of the ways in which representations, understandings and senses of the past are produced within the larger society.
of the events are retellings, representations or fictional reinventions, which make the plot fiendishly complex. Almodóvar has spoken about the difficulties he had with the script, which went through twenty drafts (Almodóvar, quoted in Strauss, 2006 : 214). This complexity is not gratuitous, however; it partakes of an aesthetic common to Spanish films and literature about the repression of historical memory and the Spanish Transition. La mala educación is a film about the Transition that takes this aesthetic to breaking point. It harnesses it to place LGBTQ
5 Associational memory This chapter assesses the associational activity and the mnemonic practices of mutineers, as well as how these changed over time. Any event, not least one as significant for the participants as the mutinies of 1919, possesses an afterlife that unfolds in successive phases.1 Initially, the unofficial knowledge of the Black Sea Mutiny spread, inspiring collective action amongst the armed forces and in France’s port cities. This phase of collective action lasted until the autumn of 1919. Between then and 1923, the mutiny remained a matter of