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Over the last couple of decades, interest in memory and memorialisation has grown significantly among academics studying the social aspects of death, dying and bereavement (Woodthorpe, 2012 ). The popular understanding of memory, however, draws from the individual perspective of psychology, where it is conceptualised as a ‘body function … commonly characterized as a container wherein a lifetime of images, thoughts and experiences are archived’ (Green, 2008 : 156). Social theorists have sought to complicate the idea of memory as ‘storage
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
10 Andrea Reiter Memory and authenticity: the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski Binjamin Wilkomirski's camp memoir Fragments was, when it appeared in 1995, acclaimed as one of the most fascinating representations of the Holocaust since Primo Levi's IfThis Is a Man. The discovery and subsequent confirmation of the author's true identity in 1998 has, in its turn, exposed a story so bizarre that it probably made the book known even more widely. In the Anglo-American world, where the book had been hailed by scholars of Holocaust history and literature, two major
The policy responses of the American government to the horrors of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York still dominate news headlines and public debate. The destruction of the twin towers set forth vibrations that continue to radiate around the world. Catastrophes are ultimately defined by what is said about them, and - even with regard to the most radical of historical cataclysms - saying too much may produce hazards as compelling as those that result from saying too little. This book explores the themes of catastrophe, memory, and trauma through a chronologically ordered series of historical case studies. Inevitably, given the multifaceted character of these themes, the authors - historians, sociologists, and literary critics - deploy a variety of methodologies appropriate to their study. The approaches range from sharply focused investigations of the construction of official and unofficial memories contemporary with the event, through longitudinal studies of shifts in commemorative discourse and practice over decades or centuries, to detailed analysis of individual memorialising texts. The book presents longitudinal surveys, particularly developed in two essays tracing the shifting patterns of the memory of pre-twentieth-century catastrophes: the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil Wars, and the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. It also addresses the political instrumentalisation of memory in relation to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.
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.
Throughout this book we have engaged with legacies of violent and difficult pasts. Listening to stories of pain and spending time at sites of memory, we have been driven by a growing awareness that an analysis of memory politics enhances our understanding of the quality of peace. This process of analysis has allowed us to appreciate how the social fabric is moulded by competing
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
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