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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
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
what he rejects in others. Indeed, if his ideas echo the sentiments that underwrote memories of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, they also share some qualities with the ones he reviles. One of the things that motivated Tacitus, and something of particular interest to Himmler and other Nazis, was a sense that Rome had become weak and debased. By imaginatively confederating a diverse group of tribes into the Germanic people, Tacitus could set them off as constitutionally different from the citizens of Rome. In effect, he imagined Germanic ethnicity and so allowed
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
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
5 Post-apartheid repertoires of memory Artists . . . are not agents of power, but campaigners for invisible values no human being can live without. (Brink, 1996: 58) I turn now from these performances of memory by state or cultural institutions to look at embodied repertoires in the public sphere and in theatres. While the TRC clearly attempted to hear hidden stories and renegotiate the perceptions and values of South Africans, its effect was limited because a state of mind, values, and peoples’ views cannot be easily changed. Thus the extent to which the
This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figure in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy, and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain’s noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine. The book’s approach to the Anglo-Scandinavian past addresses the specific impact of Nordic materials in framing conceptions of the English Middle Ages and positions the literature of medievalism less as the cause of modern Anglo-Nordic interests than as the recurrence of the same cultural concerns that animated early modern politics, science, and natural history. Emphasising multilingual non-literary traditions (such as travel writing and ethnography) and following four topics – natural history, ethnography, moral character, and literature – the focus of Northern Memories is on how texts, with or without any direct connections to one another, reproduced shared tropes and outlooks and on how this reproduction cumulatively furthered large cultural ideas.
This book explores the place of memory in post-apartheid South Africa by analysing state sanctioned-performances of the nation. It first explores how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) archive was created, and what it means to contemporary South Africa. The book then explores creative responses to the TRC. It examines individual narratives that have become iconic; asking why these have been chosen to represent the experiences of the broader majority. It analyses how contemporary cultural practitioners are particularly exploring various non-realistic, highly performative forms in conjunction with verbatim narratives to reflect on diverse lived realities in South Africa. The inherited apartheid archives embody particular narratives of South Africa, especially those that defined separate cultural identities, with their relative worth and histories. The way these archives of memory were constructed and controlled is important, especially insofar as they affected the social structure of the nation, beyond apartheid legislation. The book looks at how at moments of political crisis or transition, specific narratives of history, from particular cultural perspectives, have been performed in public spaces to define national identities. It also explores how Mbeki used the South Africa-Mali project, within the context of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) to extend the imagined boundaries of the nation. Finally, the book explores contemporary popular performance and theatrical engagements with history and memory.
Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting. ( South African Freedom Charter ) ‘The writer in Africa and other countries in the Third World, because of his nearness (remember: he is a member of the privileged élite) to the central questions of decision
Ogot, Miriam Tlali, Mariama Bâ and Buchi Emecheta deal with the past and the counter-discourse of memory to raise consciousness about the particular problems of gender, colonialism and history will be the focus of this chapter. While African women’s writing does not exclude the need to liberate African peoples from neo-colonialism and other forms of race and class oppression, there is the recognition that a