Conference organizers: Lucy Bond, Rick Crownshaw and Jessica
Rapson (Goldsmiths); Katia Pizzi and Ricarda Vidal (Institute of Germanic
& Romance Studies).
Venue: Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London
Astrid Erll (University of Wuppertal), ‘Travelling Memory: Remediation across Time, Space and Cultures.'
abstract - video of the talk and response by Susannah Radstone
Andrew Hoskins (University of Warwick),‘Media and the End of Collective Memory: The New Memory Ecology’
abstract
Dirk Moses (University of Sydney), ‘Genocide and the Terror of History'
abstract
Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’
abstract
Discussant: Susannah Radstone (University of East London)
Programme
abstracts of keynotes
alphabetical list of speakers' abstracts
Fees:
| Standard rate: |
£55 per day/ £135 for all three days |
Concessionary rate: |
£25 per day/ £70 for all three days (students, retired, unwaged; staff in IGRS member-departments) |
Early Bird discount if you register before 4 February 2010
| Early Bird Standard rate: |
£40 per day/ £120 for all three days |
Early Bird Concessionary rate: |
£20 per day/ £60 for all three days (students, retired, unwaged; staff in IGRS member-departments) |
If you have a query about registration please contact Flo Austin or Angela Fattibene at igrs@sas.ac.uk
Accommodation
How to find us
About the conference
Skeptical reactions to the rise of memory studies have focused on the viability of concepts such as “collective” memory. Can societies really remember collectively? More to the point, can individuals really remember what they have not directly witnessed or experienced? Is to speak of collective memory simply to speak of ideology or political fantasy? The concept of cultural memory has overcome this binary opposition between the individual and the collective, attending to their reciprocal relationship and the cultural grounds on which their mediation takes place (Assman). How, though, does memory work when events are remembered across and between cultures? In an age of globalization, is it still possible to speak of local and national memory, or do the local and national always exist in implicit and explicit dialogue with the transnational? Holocaust- and memory studies have begun to address these questions in tracing the globalization of Holocaust memory as a trope by which other modern atrocities are shaped and remembered, and, of course, the Holocaust has been incorporated into national memories in order to forget indigenous genocides and shore up ideals of nation (Huyssen and Patraka). Conversely, theories of vicarious witnessing have posited an ethical dimension to the remembrance of events across cultural boundaries. The ideas of “prosthetic” and “post” memory conceive of the remembrance of events not witnessed by those born afterwards or elsewhere, and of mass- mediated memory as something that does not wholly belong to (and define) the familial, ethnic or national group (Hirsch and Landsberg). (The idea of witnessing across cultural borders has not been without controversy in the academy.) Recent innovations in comparative historiography (Moses, Stone, Moshman), laying vital groundwork for developments in memory studies, have sought to remove the “conceptual blockages” in comparing modern atrocities, moving beyond notions of the Holocaust’s uniqueness that might inscribe a hierarchy of suffering across modernity, eliciting the structural continuities and discontinuities between atrocious events – between genocide and colonialism. Just as Moses has configured modernity in terms of a racial century, so in sociology and literary studies race has constituted an overarching narrative that brings together diverse modern spheres of both culturally creative and violent activity and identification (Cheyette and Gilroy). In postcolonial studies, concepts such as trauma have enabled a spatial rather than linear approach to the experiences of colony and postcolony (Durrant). In philosophy, conceptions of ‘bare life’ have allowed an international consideration of state sovereignties and their biopolitical regimes (Agamben). In architectural and urban studies, city development and its architecture is found to articulate a globalised vernacular, which has implications for spaces and places of memory and memorialisation. All of these disciplines find that it is increasingly difficult and problematic to isolate representations of past, which in turn calls attention to the need for the comparative study of memory as it takes an increasingly transcultural form – as Rothberg’s recent ground-breaking work on the multi-directionality of memory has shown. The conference explores the subject of transcultural memory from across the disciplines – English and Comparative Literary Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Architectural Studies, Cultural Geography, Film Studies, Media Studies, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, the Visual Arts, etc.
Please direct any enquiries to transculturalmemory@gmail.com
Abstracts of Keynotes
Astrid Erll (University of Wuppertal), ‘Travelling Memory: Remediation across Time, Space and Cultures’
Recent studies on Holocaust memory have shown the extent to which not only contents, but also forms of remembrance move across the globe and gain momentum in specific local settings. Although processes such as these are certainly facilitated and accelerated by globalization, they are not specific to our times. In fact, viewed in an historical perspective, it seems that cultural memory is fundamentally a transcultural phenomenon, the effect of the 'travel' of representations across time, space and cultures. From the Persian influence on the Old Testament to the confluence of Greek, Roman, Christian and Islamic forms of knowledge in the Renaissance and to the French origins of the 'German fairy tale' – even the 'first memories' of a culture are often likely the product of what I call transcultural remediation.
In my lecture I will focus on the theoretical questions bound up with the notion of transcultural memory: the fundamental culturality and mediality of memory; concepts of the 'transcultural' and their implications for memory studies; and the various ways in which media representations move across time, space and cultures.
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Andrew Hoskins, University of Warwick, ‘Media and the End of Collective Memory: The New Memory Ecology’
A supremely significant and consequential shift for memory (individual, social and cultural) is embedded in the move from the broadcast to the post-broadcast age. Little of the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘when’ of remembering and forgetting, are untouched by the advent of digital media.
In this way, this presentation interrogates what I am calling the ‘connective turn’ in advanced Western societies (but also and unevenly elsewhere), notably, the massively increased abundance, ubiquity and accessibility of communication networks and nodes, and the paradoxical effects of the fluidity and fixity of digital media content. To this end, I am concerned with the simultaneous and paradigmatic shift in the fast-emergent ubiquity of both media and memory, so that we today live in a new memory ecology in which memory is ‘mediatized’.
However, these transformations operate not only at the levels of the individual and the social, but the connective turn also bridges and even fuses domains of memory sometimes seen as separate and distinct in that their study has often reflected and even reinforced their separation. So, whereas many explorations of the mediatized social and cultural dynamics, mechanisms and institutions of our shifting relationships with all-things-past are blinkered to the fact that remembering is as much shaped by psychological factors, such as cognition, it is crucial to treat memory as forged through the connectivity across and between these realms. In this way the connective turn demands an ‘epidemiological’ approach. It does so because comprehension of the new memory ecology must include the mind and body, as well as media. These elements do not exist as fixed relations to one another but rather dynamically and reflexively, in that there can be said to be a co-evolution between memory and technology. The individual and the social, the private and the public, the singular and the collective – all embedded in the rubric of memory studies – are increasingly permeable dimensions under such conditions.
This presentation develops a rationale for a model of the mediatization of memory through firstly indicting the two conceptual hangovers of media/memory studies of ‘collective memory’ and ‘mass media’, secondly, I identify some of the problems in dealing with the paradigmatic change of the connective turn, and thirdly, I probe the prospects for an epidemiology of media/memory.
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Dirk Moses, University of Sydney, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’
This conference’s Call for Papers asks whether In an age of globalization, it still possible to speak of local and national memory, or do the local and national always exist in implicit and explicit dialogue with thetransnational? In this paper, I will argue that collective memory and consciousness of collective identity was transnational well before the age of modern globalization. Underwritten by a biblical imaginary, group identity contained ethnic traces in which the rise and fall of nations and empires and the extermination of peoples, often with divine warrant, was at once normal and normative. Interpretations of group agency and fate ’in history’ are therefore often traumatic and catastrophic, inducing genocidal anxiety than can, in turn, lead to anticipatory and genocidal self-defence.
These patterns are necessarily colonial because as self/other relationships are cast in terms of the either/or couplets of native/non-native, indigene/settler so characteristic of colonialism’s Manichean logic. Ideologies of civilizing missions, sometimes neo-liberal, sometimes humanistic, induce equally resilient and, for many, compelling ideologies of resistance often all in the name of human rights. Embodied in the subjects of today’s most bloody and intractable conflicts, the political emotions Authochtonous group defence against external threat are not just discursive constructs, but usually reflect geopolitical constellations, though often tinged with paranoia. To a depressing extent, the discursive protective mechanisms that evolved to ensure group survival have congealed into hysterical and regressive psychic shields of the group ego ideal that are impervious to reality checking. All too often, the Holocaust is invoked as the ‘gold standard’ of evil that has to be brandishes, denied, or arrogated to one’s own identity agenda Group suffering and survival are asserted, hoping to elicit the sympathy of ‘world opinion.’ Yet what the Holocaust ‘is’ as an event, is open to contestation (when it is not denied).
What does an ‘ethics of memory’ demand in such an fractious and unstable discursive field? Does a chastened, postcolonial, and post-genocidal universal history of humanity need to be imagined? What role can scholars in the humanities play in posing and answering these questions?
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Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’
In my recently published book on Holocaust remembrance in the age of decolonization, I argue that public memory is structurally multidirectional—that is, always marked by transcultural borrowing, exchange, and adaptation. But such structural hybridity does not imply that the politics of memory comes with any guarantees. In order to continue the urgent task of mapping the political stakes of memory, this talk considers the deployment of the Warsaw Ghetto in struggles for decolonization past and present. Focusing especially on the role of Warsaw memory in the contemporary Israeli/Palestinian crisis, I argue that at stake in articulations of multidirectional memory are divergent conceptions of comparison, solidarity, justice, and political subjectivity.
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Alphabetical List of Abstracts
Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University
‘Challenges of the Study of Comparative Memory of Slavery in Brazil and Benin’
With the recent emergence of the memory of slavery, presentification of the past allows those who are or who claim to be descendents of slaves to legitimize their demand for recognition and for reparations for past wrongs. Some reparation claims encompass financial compensation, but very often they express the need for memorialization through public commemoration, museums, and monuments. In some contexts, presentification of the slave past has helped governments and the descendants of former masters and slave merchants to formulate public apologies. For some, expressing repentance is not only a means to erase guilt but also a way to gain political prestige.
Examining the multiple memories constructed by individuals and groups asserting themselves as descendants of slaves implies that we must deal with mediators. Although these memories are marked by gaps, many actors in West Africa and Brazil, especially, have developed strategies to overcome these ruptures, recreating, reinventing, and transforming their past through art, religion, culture, and heritage. The memory produced by these forms of mediation constitutes what Marianne Hirsch defined as “postmemory”. In this context of mediated memory, the notion of heritage, material or immaterial, is unavoidable, as heritage is an inheritance that actively participates in the transmission of identity.
By considering the challenges of comparatively examining the memory of slavery, this paper aims at investigating how Brazil and Benin, countries historically connected by the Atlantic slave trade, have been dealing with their slave past. In Benin, the emergence of the memory of slavery in the early 1990s, was marked by a large memorialization phenomenon, supported by UNESCO. This memorial wave gave origin to different official projects, including festivals, commemorative activities, monuments, museums and memorials. In Brazil, the public memory of slavery is constructed and renewed at different levels especially among those who identify themselves as Afro-Brazilians. The denunciation of the present social and racial inequalities, the fight against racism as well as the emergence of Afro-Brazilian claims for civil rights, have led to the development of different forms of cultural assertion. At the heart of this process, one sees the valorization of the bonds with Africa through dance, music, visual arts, and religion. However, the persistent obstacles in conferring permanent public spaces to the memory of slavery indicate how difficult is for the nation to deal with its slave past as the majority of the population of African descent still occupy the lower rankings of Brazilian society. Through the reinvention and the rebuilding of broken bonds between Brazil and Benin, on both sides of the Atlantic cultural assertion supports the construction of a positive image of slavery’s heirs.
Silke Arnolde de-Simine, Birkbeck College UL
‘The Memory Museum’
In the last twenty years the museum as institution has gone through a period of redefining its role and its function in society. Controversies have arisen regarding the representation of history in museums and the clash between personal experiences, on the one hand, and national histories on the other. One of the results is a new type of history museum which could be more aptly described as a “memory museum”. Susan Sontag used this as a generic term for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (1993), the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001) and Yad Vashem (revamped in 2005). However, it should be noted that the globalization of Holocaust memory means that museum practices developed in these museums have been used as templates for a diverse range of museums which engage with modern atrocities on the basis of collective mourning. This ethical dimension of the museum blurs the distinction between the museum and the memorial. Paul Williams therefore coined the term “memorial museum” for museums commemorating violent histories that led to mass suffering such as war, dictatorship, annihilation and displacement.
Memory Museums have proliferated over the last fifteen years as a globally successful type of history museum and have diversified into a range of ‘sub-genres’ which can be seen to address a range of very different historical events and periods. They form part of an international debate about human rights, restitution, and justice. That does not mean that they necessarily transcend national perspectives and contribute to transcultural or transnational understanding. Memory museums claim to democratise the authoritative master narratives and presciptive vantage points of historiography by providing access to a range of diverse memories. However, most of them are still producing master narratives which are an integral part of identity politics.
In this talk I will attempt to problematise the appropriation of the Holocaust iconography and exhibition practices by looking at examples of “memory museums” in Germany and the UK such as the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester (2002) and the GDR Museum, Berlin (2006), the Liverpool International Slavery Museum (2007) and the German Emigration Centre, Bremerhaven (2005).
Marie-Aude Baronian and Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam
‘Film, Justice and Transcultural Memory’
From the first international tribunal in Nuremberg to the permanent International Criminal Court in the Hague, audiovisual media have been part of the process of adjudicating severe crimes, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Besides informing an international audience about these manifestations of transnational justice, the audio, film and video recordings of these trials also form a historical record of bringing the perpetrators of severe crimes to justice. The live streaming of the hearings in the Miloševiç case at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Serbia and the reuse of this material in news programs and documentaries all over the world influences the way this trial, and the conflict it relates to, will be remembered. Besides the primary aim of these tribunals to bring to justice persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law, they thus also build archives that are important for historical accountability and the memory of the victims and survivors, their relatives, and others who must individually confront the truth of what transpired. At the same time, this institutionalised form of transnational justice is heavily debated. For example, the ICTY is situated in the Hague and uses English and French as the official languages. It is thus far removed from the region where the conflict took place, both in a physical, geographical sense and in a cultural sense. Moreover, the specific legal framework is limited in its capacity to do justice to the conflict and its aftermaths, in particular to the experience of individual victims of these crimes.
This paper aims at interrogating the relation between justice and transcultural memory by looking at visual testimony, not in the transnational legal setting but as it occurs in film. We would like to reflect on the possible alternative forms of justice that emanate from film as visual testimony. More specifically, we will study one particular case, the documentary film Good Husband, Dear Son (2001), by the Peruvian-Dutch documentary filmmaker Heddy Honigmann. In this film, Honigmann portrays the inhabitants of the village Ahatovici in Bosnia, near Sarajevo, where in 1992 eighty percent of the male inhabitants was murdered. The men are brought back to live through the stories of their wives and mothers invoked by specific objects that belonged to them. As Elsaesser points out, the ‘outsider’s gaze’ of the filmmaker here allows for the active construction of a different topography of memory, creating room for an alternative kind of justice ‘of which the foreign gaze becomes a temporary placeholder.’1 The discussion of this case serves to investigate the ability of film to function as an alternative, transcultural mnemonic form of justice in the context of severe mass violence.
Laura Basu, Utrecht University
‘Transcultural Remembrance and Forgetting: the case of Ned Kelly’
Recently, those interested in cultural memory have been exploring the relationships between remembrance and forgetting, recognising that these two processes are necessarily imbricated in each other. Luisa Passerini wrote in 2003 “that silences, oblivions and memories are aspects of the same process, and the art of memory cannot but also be an art of forgetting”. Johannes Fabian (2007) tells us that remembering “has to be carried out in a field of tensions between positing and negating.”
Using the case of 19th Century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and his remembrance between 1960 and 1990, I would like to show how transcultural remembrance and forgetting can be essential to establishing and policing the borders of national identity.
Although a controversial figure, Kelly has become a national hero for Australia. His story has been represented in every conceivable medium. Over the decades the identities invested in Ned have become synonymous with those invested in the nation – the identities of Ned and of the nation fuse into and strengthen each other, and the history of Kelly becomes the history of Australia.
The period between 1960 and 1990 saw the emergence of a postcolonial discourse in Australia, as one of the off-shoots of the counter culture. At this time the memory of Kelly became a lens through which to explore Australia’s colonial past and to renegotiate the present national identity in the process. This rise in (post)colonial remembrance was necessarily transnational. Almost all the Ned Kelly representations from this period focussed explicitly, if not obsessively, on Kelly’s Irish ancestry and the evils of British Imperialism in Ireland, which were seen to produce Kelly’s outlawry in Australia. A radically inflected and anti Imperialist version of ‘Irishness’ was thereby incorporated at that time into the Australian national identity.
However, this excessive transcultural remembrance of British Imperialism in Ireland was to the neglect of the invasion of actual Australia, and the genocides and colonisation of the people living there. This fact becomes even more astonishing when we consider that Indigenous Australians were a crucial part of the historical events of the Kelly affair, as ‘black trackers’, Aboriginal police who were employed in pursuit of the outlaws. The memory of Australia’s colonial past is thus marked by a kind of ‘cultural aphasia’ (Ann Laura Stoler), a mis-remembrance or partial remembrance in which Imperialism in Ireland is remembered as a way of forgetting Imperialism in Australia, a dynamic which reinforces the whiteness of Australian identity.
It is argued, therefore, that transcultural remembrance can function to shore up national identity by helping to screen or forget other identities existing within the nation. In this way I hope to further explore some of the complex and contradictory relationships within the matrix of the cultural and transcultural, remembering and forgetting.
Melissa Batchelor Warnke, University of Virginia
‘Deconstructing the Memorial Museum: A Critical Analysis of the Intersection of Global Conventions and Local Healing in Post-Genocide Rwanda’
This paper examines the competing practices of memorialization of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that have emerged in the past fourteen years. The Rwandan people have chosen to remember these traumatic and divisive events in myriad complex ways, from preserving sites of mass killing as they were at the end of the genocide, bodies still where they fell, to holding commemoration ceremonies, whether annually in the national soccer stadium or weekly in local churches, to sharing testimonies. At the same time, the international community has also become involved in the memorialization process in much more abstracted and alien ways. As Rwanda’s economy and infrastructure were devastated by the genocide, external donors were invited in to assist with the completion of these “national” memorials. The resulting global memorials, copied and pasted from a UK-based Holocaust structure, fail in several ways to recognize how memory is processed and maintained on the ground in Rwanda.
Using primary research based on personal visits to dozens of locally-constructed and maintained genocide memorials, I will outline the local paths for remembrance in this wounded political community. I will then move to a critical analysis of the international design process and implementation of the Kigali Memorial Centre and, to a lesser extent, the Murambi Centre. This section of the paper will focus upon how a standardized “international memorial museum” has emerged and what it looks like, complete with weekly survivor testimonies, symbolic gardens and naming walls, personal in styling but conventional and didactic in effect.
While the processes surrounding memorialization are rife with conflict, these local memorials are largely focused upon physical suffering and the preservation of ruined buildings and muitilated bodies as they were at the end of genocide. The fear present in these spaces recreates what it was to be in Rwanda at that time. To this end, the “education” they provide about genocide is embodied and experiential, inherently personal; they are whatever the visitor or survivor makes of them. The international productions at Murambi and in the Gisozi district of Kigali, alternately, tell the story of genocide in Rwanda linearly, using the organized information to come to standardized conclusions about abstracted humanistic values. They build bridges between what happened in Rwanda and genocides in other countries, sketching out a legal conception and framework of “genocide” as a crime against humanity, condemned and actionable under international law. That is to say, they focus not upon the land and people as sources of memory in and of themselves but frequently, in an attempt to use the museum as a tool for reconciliation, appropriate the trauma as representative of a larger sociopolitical problem to be solved.
Memory, truth and politics are not separate phenomena but are intricately intertwined and frequently appropriated for each others’ purposes, relative and circular elements. I argue that the way in which these global conventional memorials reproduce an abstracted construct for the relation of traumatic memory creates a forum for reconciliation and remembrance that is, at worst, irrelevant to the community in which this trauma was experienced and, at best, reduces the depth of their experience. Having problematized several of the current avenues for memory that exist in Rwanda, I will recognize the successful aspects of both local and global memorials and examine how these might be integrated and enhanced as the Rwandan people seek to simultaneously acknowledgeand reconcilethe loss they have experienced.
Stéphanie Benzaquen, Erasmus University
‘Great Picture! Digital Sharing and Trans-cultural memory of the Cambodian Genocide: VisitingTuol Sleng Museum on Flickr’
When anthropologist Rachel Hughes conducted in 2000 interviews with Western tourists at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, she “was surprised by the significant number of tourists who professed a familiarity with the S-21 prisoner photographs. [They] were adamant that their contact with the images had occurred prior to their arrival in Cambodia”.
Almost ten years later, such familiarity is hardly a surprise. The black-and-white mug shots of S-21 victims as well as Tuol Sleng facilities and permanent display (building, cells, paintings of survivor Vann Nath, torture instruments) have become iconic images of the Khmer Rouge-led Cambodian genocide. Remediated in a variety of settings -from television and printed news to artworks, from book covers to weblogs- they have been, and are being, circulated across borders.
Drawing on the Cambodian genocide case, my paper asks how electronic connectivity contributes to the trans-cultural memorialisation of historical traumatic events. It focuses on the representation of Tuol Sleng on a specific instance of web memorial mediation: Flickr, the well-known online photo management and sharing application for amateur and professional photographers.
My paper examines to which extent the aesthetics produced and conveyed through such digital sharing reflects new forms of identification and formation of communities. Visual archive in progress, Flickr proves a realm where documentary and aesthetic functions, tropes for memory and tropes for photography, individual and collective perceptions are articulated anew. To understand how these articulations are performed, my paper looks at the representational patterns in picture-making; the textual content (captioning and comments); the interfaces (photostream, tags, pools) through which Tuol Sleng is inserted into other constellations of meaning.
Referring to the concept of “prosthetic memory”, the last part of my paper reflects upon the relationship between the actual and digital Tuol Sleng. Can we ‘visit’ Tuol Sleng, as site of mass death and memorial museum, via Flickr? Is it possible to digitally render the physical, ‘authentic’, bodily experienced encounter with the place? Does Flickr de-materialize Tuol Sleng, fragment the memory embodied in the buildings and artefacts? My paper looks at trans-cultural memorialization as both contribution and challenge to the commodification of Tuol Sleng within the context of “dark tourism”.
Lucy Bond, Goldsmiths UL
'(Ground) Zero-Sum Memory: Banking on the Past at Sites of Former Atrocity'
This paper will consider the way in which sites of former atrocity have been assimilated into the symbolic-socio sphere (Zizek 2002) of global capitalism, and remarketed as icons of the corporate economy. Focusing on the redevelopment of spaces situated within three prominent Western financial centres, I will argue that the corporatisation of memory at once appropriates and dehistoricises the complexities of a site’s past in order to incorporate it into a discourse that validates globalised capitalism as the only viable master-narrative for the present.
Drawing upon the work of Lefebvre (1991), I hope to demonstrate how a politico-economic hegemonic nexus functions to homogenise spatial narratives, eliminating the complexities of a site’s past in the creation of a so-called ‘abstract space’ of little or no symbolic definition. What remains of ‘memory value’ (Ward 2005) in such sites must only be traces that serve the official discourse of the market. Here, corporate imperialism is made to serve as the arbiter of both economic and psychical recovery, overcoming the traumas of the past to make way for the brighter, profitable future. Memory thus becomes part of the system of exchange itself.
In this way, local or national memories are translated into triumphal moments in a global capitalist discourse, as historical events are transformed from deadly acts of protest into the affirmation of the so-called ‘free market’. Long periods of complex ideological conflict may thus be reinscribed as victories for globalisation. Read in this way, the redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and the former Baltic Exchange in London may be seen as the final respective routings of the dual spectres of Communism and the IRA. Whilst the contentious War on Terror cannot yet be claimed to be over (despite George W. Bush’s premature announcement of ‘victory’ in Iraq in May 2003), the regeneration of the World Trade Center site may at least be said to be a significant step towards a proclamation of ideological conquest.
Although this appears to be an inherently ideological utilisation of the past, I wish finally to argue that this process aims at depoliticising memory. That is, the incorporation of troubling incidents into the sphere of corporate capitalism desires to neuter and deproblematise troubling images of the past. In contrast to normative modes of national commemorative practice at sites such as the Washington Mall and Parliament Square, this movement aims not to inscribe a chosen image of the past onto the urban imaginary, but to erase the evidence of moments that might be seen as a crisis of capitalism. Thus, the absorption of these historical traces into abstract space must be seen as an anti-memorial act, orchestrated by an increasingly standardised team of architectural visionaries (chief among them Norman Foster), whose recurrent designs at such sites seem to designate them as specialist architects of amnesia.
Rebecca Brammall, University of Brighton
‘Memory, Historicity and Green Nationalism’
Climate change is regularly presented as a global problem, for which transnational solutions are required. It is also often imagined as a radically new challenge, as a set of circumstances without precedent. Yet in recent years, and particularly since the onset of the global recession, a wide range of social actors in the UK have been turning to British history, and to British nationalism, in the search for resources through which to communicate and perpetuate environmental initiatives.
World War II, and more specifically the kind of practices that we think ordinary people were engaged in during the ‘austerity’ years, has emerged as a favoured point of reference. The state-orchestrated campaigns of the Home Front, including ‘dig for victory’ and ‘make do and mend’, are widely perceived to hold lessons for our recession-stricken, climate change-threatened times: museums have reconstructed ‘victory gardens’, local councils are offering advice about mending and repairs, and a wealth of publications explain how to live a more ‘thrifty’, less wasteful existence. All of these initiatives depend to some degree on the compelling nature of the figuration of the national-global provided by the myth of the Home Front. Some indication of the persuasive force such imagery is thought to exert was provided, for instance, by the recent spat between energy companies following the French state-owned company EDF’s use of a green patchwork Union Jack logo to publicise its ‘Green Britain Day’ (Guardian, 10 July 2009).
Since these ideas have clearly found the most purchase with that generation of consumers who have no individual memory of the wartime years, the discourses associated with the idea that we are living in a ‘new age of austerity’ clearly resonate in and through cultural understandings of the past, and specifically in relation to dominant-hegemonic histories of WWII. At the same time, similar interventions have been evident in North America, which has its own history of wartime operations. This paper proposes that manifestations of ‘green nationalism’ raise questions about the role of both historicity and figurations of the national-global in environmental and anti-consumerist politics, and explores some of the methodological challenges associated with evaluating these developments.
Lars Breuer, Centre for Interdisciplinary Memory Research, KWI, Germany
‘‘Vernacular memory' in Germany and Poland’
The question of a shared European memory points at one of the key questions of current memory studies, namely the relationship between national and non-national (i.e. local, European, global) forms of collective memory. Previous empirical studies on European memory primarily employ deductive approaches and focus on publicly available records of memory (mass media, parliamentary debates, etc.). However, recent research has shown significant disparities between different levels of memory, both in terms of content and structure. Therefore, my ongoing Ph.D. research, which I would like to present in my paper, concentrates on what I defined as ‘vernacular memory’, i.e. memories which are casually passed on via daily face-to-face communication, often unintentionally, and in smaller memory communities (like families, peer groups, etc.).
My empirical basis are forty group discussions with members of different social groups (e.g. pensioners, students, NGOs, teachers) in Germany and Poland. Presupposing that World War II and its aftermath is still a crucial point of reference; the two countries were chosen because of their extremely different wartime experiences, and for their strikingly divergent ways of dealing with this past. In my research, I first analyzed the memory narratives that took shape in the group discussions and examined how they relate to public memory narratives. Then I tried to determine how these recollections of the past are linked to the articulation of collective forms of self-understanding. In doing so, I focus on the interrelation between national and transnational memory narratives.
My preliminary results first of all indicate a variety of diverse memory narratives even within national frameworks, which confronts the account of nationally homogenous memory cultures sometimes prevailing in studies confined to official or public memory. Second, national memory narratives are constantly challenged by European tropes on various levels. Thereby, Europe represents both a normative aim and a potential threat for the national perspective. In this dialectical process, which I refer to as Europeanization of memory, the national is not abandoned or overcome, but rather reconfigured by references to the European. As an effect, multiple cross-country congruencies of memory narratives in Germany and Poland occur, but not so much in terms of their content, but rather in terms of similar mnemonic practices.
Peter Carrier and Kobi Kabalek, George Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and University of Virginia
‘Cultural Memory and Memory Culture: Do these concepts predetermine thinking about memory?’
The concept “cultural memory” has gained a status in recent years as part of the growing interdisciplinary interest in questions of memory. But what does this concept presuppose, and what is its relationship to other concepts commonly used in the study of memory? The answers to these questions are not clear. The plural and underdefined character of both “memory” and “culture”, and the dependence of their definitions on disciplinary discourses, continues when they are lumped together, thus making the meaning of “cultural memory” (or “memory culture”) decipherable only when we examine the actual usage of each concept in specific cases.
The aim of our paper is to illustrate the conceptual tensions, relationships, and inconsistencies within and between studies that refer to “cultural memory” or “memory culture” in different countries. In the first part, we will survey a number of basic understandings of the concepts “memory” and “culture” as used by scholars from a number of disciplines and countries today (Germany, UK, USA, France, and Israel). Do these concepts, and those of “cultural memory” and “memory culture”, reveal national particularities?
The second part of the paper will focus on one such national context, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of “cultural memory”. In Germany, the Assmanns’ writings on memory have become canonised texts to which different scholars turn in their discussions of memory, and they are gradually extending their influence beyond German academia. Here we will identify their assumptions regarding “culture” and “memory” and examine how these assumptions shape their conceptualisation of kulturelles Gedächtnis and Erinnerungskultur. Can the Assmanns’ theory of memory, which is embedded in a national understanding of culture, be applied to the study of transnational cultural memory? If not, which alternative concepts might offer a more open, if not universal basis with which to study transcultural memory?
Karine Chevalier, Roehampton University/University of Westminster
‘Black Mask, White Skin: The African Mask in Cinematic Memory’
The African mask has been the subject of many studies during and after colonisation. It has been an object of fascination displayed in western museums. It offers fascinating insight as a symbol of postcolonial memory, projection and desire of the black continent. Divorced from its collective ritual, used by surrealists artists, and mass-produced for the tourist trade, it has been re-evaluated by film-makers such as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker in Les statues meurent aussi (1953). This documentary, banned for years by the French government, is a study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with western civilization. The commentary tends to valorise this art and to translate its language for westerners so that it can be understood and appreciated more. We propose to analyse how the modern way of editing challenges museums and questions the colonial use of the black mask. Did this documentary give back to the black mask its place as a memorial object or reflect only subjective views of the film-makers?
A few years later, Sembene Ousmane, in La noire de … (1966), the first feature film ever released by a sub-Saharan African director, addresses the effects of colonisation through the recurring appearance of an African mask. Through this film he criticises the many ways the mask is used by westerners as well as Africans. In an echo of Frantz Fanon and his Black skin, White Masks (1952), the black-and-white cinematography allows the formal and semantic basis of the film to reveal the paradoxical relationship to this object. This film offers meaningful insights into Sembene’s representation of Africa’s struggle with neo-colonialism and for identity. The black mask becomes the symbol for a unified Africa, beyond the cultural differences and uses of masks, knowing that Africa has lost some of its tribal identity and culture with the result that masking ceremonies are no longer commonplace there.
Nowadays, black masks are still exhibited in Parisian museums: for example, as part of the collections of the new Quai Branly museum and its controversial use of an exotic mise en scène, which is decontextualised, using new media, visual appeal and theatrics. There are still temporary exhibitions such as “Persona: Ritual Masks and Contemporary Art” at Tervuren, le Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale (Brussels) that features thousands of masks juxtaposed with works by contemporary artists, encouraging dialogue in Europe between museums and the diaspora whose cultures are represented in the collection. From Nigeria and England, Yinka Shonibare, for example, who considers himself “truly bi-cultural”, challenges the representation of the stereotypically western gaze in the traditional categorisation of ‘African art’. In his film Un ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) (2004), he uses western theatrical language to deconstruct the ideology of the mask and its lies to underline the ambiguity of identity. Does this masquerade allow a black person to create fantasies of empowerment in relation to white society, playing with white masks and thus inverting the traditional use of masks?
Eleanor Chiari, IGRS UL
‘Mourning in Cyberspace: Explorations into the Afterlife of Virtual Identities’ (Abstract TBC)
Nadiya Chushak, University of Melbourne
‘Yugonostalgia – New Media’
With the proliferation of new media technologies the access to processes of articulation of the past and creation of different versions of memory has been democratized. This raises questions about who and how is using these media and which memories/versions of the past are being offered with which aims.
In my paper I shall focus on the case of specific version of memory about former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, known under the name “yugonostalgia”. The ways Internet was used in debates about Yugoslav past has been already discussed in academia, but, unfortunately, attention was mostly paid to its role in promoting exclusivist nationalistic versions of the past and, consequently, increasing inter-ethnic tensions (focus on the conflict is the predominant feature of the academic literature written about Yugoslavia, its dissolution and aftermaths, which contributes to the stigmatization of the topic).
Recently, however, more attention is being paid to the alternative memories of Yugoslavia, with aforementioned yugonostalgia being one of them. When thinking about yugonostalgia it is important to realize that it tells us much more about the specific present circumstances in which it was articulated then about the past it is supposedly referring to. During 1990ies yugonostalgia served as a tool of criticism of the nationalizing politics of the newly independent states (cf. Jansen, 2005, Volcic, 2007) and therefore was marginalized by the dominant historic narratives, supported and propagated by those countries. Although the situation throughout the region is considered to be ostensibly more or lass stable nowadays, yugonostalgia is still dismissed as dangerously untrue version of the past. It finds its refuge in the new media, with electronic encyclopedia of the Yugoslav popular culture being created, personal web-pages of deceased SFRY’s president Josip Broz Tito popping up and virtual embassies of the SFRY offering virtual passports of the country. Some studies of these phenomena already exist (cf. Lindstrom, 2005, Mikula 2003), but the prevailing trend is to criticize similar manifestations for, purportedly, avoiding the reckoning with the past through the capitalist commodification of its elements. By focusing on the ways young people without any substantial “real” memory of Yugoslavia use the web-resources - blogs, forums, Youtube, Facebook – I will illuminate some of the ways this “prosthetic” nostalgia for Yugoslavia is being formed and functions, and, furthermore, how it can serve as the basis of progressive thinking and action, helping to develop the critical attitude towards the dominant nationalist/ neo-liberal discourses and motivating to engage in the creation of the better future.
Marguerite Corporaal, Radboud University of Nijmegen
‘Black Patches and Rotting weeds: The grat famine as transcultural figure of memory in Irish (diaspora) fiction, 1860-1880’
As a “portable monument” that can be passed among different generations and circulate in various geographical contexts (Rigney 2004: 386), literature can play a pivotal role in the transmission of an ethnic group’s shared past. The Great Famine (1845-50), a collective trauma of hunger, eviction and mass emigration, has certainly been recollected in fiction by those who experienced the dark years as well as by descendants who never witnessed the event, and whose memory is therefore “prosthetic” (Landsberg 65). However, the cultural memory of the Great Hunger was not only relocated over time, but also in space, in diaspora, as many Irish migrated to Britian, its colonies and the United States during the mid 1840s and their immediate aftermath (Fanning 6; Kenny 104). As a result, the Famine has become part of a transcultural memory in fiction written on both sides of the Atlantic.
I will examine this mediation of the Great Hunger in fiction as a transcultural phenomenon, comparing and contrasting novels written in Ireland and by Irish-American immigrants during the 1860s and 1870s. In so doing, I will focus on the recollections of landscape. Images of wastelands are prominent “figures of memory” (Assman 1995: 129) in the literature that remembers the trials of starvation, but the question remains whether the Famine-stricken landscape is recalled similarly among cultural communities in the homeland or in diaspora. When looking at the performance of the Famine past in Irish-American fiction, can we still speak of common ground with recollections of the Famine in literature written in the homeland from the same time frame? Or is this mediated remembrance informed by a diasporic consciousness, even if colonisation and diaspora can be compared as experiences of displacement (Bammer 1994: xi-xii)?
These are revelant issues, as Irish immigrants often encountered opposition by the Nativist party in the United States (Miller 323), and therefore stuck together in close communities promoting an essential Irish-American identity rooted in the homeland. As I hope to demonstrate, while we can speak of a shared cultural memory with regard to the Famine, Irish-American literature is also distinct from fiction written in the homeland in that it looks back to an idealized, pastoral Irish past which represses the painful recollections of infertile land. These pastoral landscapes are “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 12) that remind Irish-American immigrants of a distinct ethnic identity that contrasts with the hostile, assimiliationist urban American culture. ~
Rick Crownshaw, Goldsmiths UL (TBC)
'Transcultural Figures of Perpetration'
Nevena Dakovic, University of Arts, Belgrade
‘A Tale of Balkan Metropolis: Belgrade in/as Transcultural Memory’
The concern of this paper is to explore twofold construction of transcultural memory of Belgrade in the chosen film texts, dealing with city’s life, identity, development, culture, past. It analyzes the ways transcultural memory is written into the cinematic cityscape (Nora, 1986-92) and structured as melodrama that both narrativizes and historicizes the past, cultures, identities-turning them into memory narrative. The main case studies – texts of cinematically mediated past - are films: Something in Between/Nesto izmedju (1982, S. Karanovic), Premeditated murder /Ubistvo s predumisljajem (1996, G. Stojanovic) and Here and There/Tamo I Ovde (2009, D. Longulov) that form the loose chronicle of the post-socialist era -from the last days of Tito`s epoch to democratic post 2000 - skilfully evoking broader national film and literary heritage.
The transcultural memory narrativizes and reconstructs the city’s turbulent history recognised as the string of never-ending conflicts of different cultural (understood in the broadest sense) identities. The conflicts are materialised through permanent dialogue of different parties - local, national/international, rural/urban, urbicide/urbanisation, Orient/Occident (Assman, 1992) - or in contemporary politically operative terms Balkanisation/Europeanization. The structured dialogue relies upon production of “other” spanning across different cultures (ethnicities, classes…) that remember the events “across and between them”; it (de)constructs tensions of “”othering” (among and between arrivists, old bourgeoisie, Serbs, ex Yugoslavs, Jews, White Russians, Tzintzars, Turks, rare Europeans and Americans) spontaneously (re)articulating past into transcultural memory narrative.
Belgrade is chosen as the paradigmatic metropolis due to its typical and regionally shared pattern of historical development and its representations as moving between ghetto on the European periphery and “New York of the Balkans”. The chosen genre of melodrama make (public, collective) city’s history meet personal (hi)stories of the romantic couple (Lanzmann, 2009) and allow the versions made by different cultural optiques, under foreign and local gazes, to coalesce into singular memory narrative of trans and multicultural tones. Simultaneously, memory is made visible through cinematic mapping of the city (i.e. semantic sketches/Ricoeur, 1975; spatialised semiosis), its projection onto the cityscape and cultural specific sites. It finds its metaphorical embodiments in the spaces like bridges (Here and There, Something in Between), labyrinths, borders (Premeditated Murder), crossroads or general “topographical correlatives” - parts of the city with recognisable cultural/ethnic identity (oriental Dorcol, westernised New Belgrade, III world ghetto, I world residential areas).
Thomas Duncan and Noel McCauley, Duncan McCauley Studio for Architecture and Digital Media [Untitled]
This paper explores narrative structure and the representation of memories in the museum environment through the analysis of ourcreative approach inrecent projects. We will focus In particular on the usage of digital media and architecture to achieve a sensory narrative environment. The projects that we shall illustrate demonstrate our approach to working with subjects about the Holocaust and its effects on society. We shall illustrate our approach at creating appropriate environments and the presentation of the exhibition content.
Our story telling method is based on exploring the relationship between architecture and film, tracing the connections between the narrative structure of film and the interpretation of space. The museum experience is a journey. As the visitor moves through the exhibition they assemble fragments of information into a story. In a similar way the spectator of cinema traverses the spaces of the film using their imagination and memory to connect the different scenes into a story.
We shall present three projects, two exhibitions and an architectural project. The exhibition „Children became letters” traces the memories of eleven children who escaped from Germany between 1933 and 1938. The characters reflect on their loss of parents and home. The exhibition reveals a personal dimension of the story and expresses a relationship between collective and individual memory of the Holocaust.
“Jewish Players in German Football” tells the story from the beginning of German football up to the rise of the Nazis to power. Five prominent Jewish players and their teams, including Walther Bensemann, testify to this history. The architectural project „Topography of Terrors“ was a competition entry for a documentation centre on the site of the former Nazi Police head quarters in Berlin. The journey the visitor takes through the building interweaves the new architecture with the existing site. The narrative created is a witness to the traces of the past.
We propose an associative and haptic approach to the design of the exhibition environment, which addresses the visitor’s emotions and allows for an individual interpretation of the narrative. The combination of digital media and architecture creates environments, which challenge the visitor’s perception and stimulate their imagination merging the boundaries of physical and implied space.
Robert Eaglestone, RHUL
‘The Memory of form: Imre Kertesz’
The aim of this paper is to look at the ways in which 'transcultural memory' is encoded in aesthetic form -- here, in prose - by looking in detail at the work of Nobel Laureate and Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz. Of course, 'memory' is encoded in facts, opinions, practices, performances and in the content of narratives. However, and perhaps both more powerfully and subtly it is encoded in form. This paper, then, looks at the form of Kertesz's writing and suggests that the ideas and memories encoded there underlie his approach to the Holocaust and to the post-war history of Hungary. I will also suggest that it is the ideas encoded in the form of his work that explain his lack of popularity in the Anglophone world.
Doris Einsiedel, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Memory MigrationsRemembering Time Travel and Postcolonial Diasporas
In recent years, a number of intercultural British and American narratives, concerned with migration from India, have appeared which address colonialism as an intergenerational memory that travels. These texts portray the agency of migrations from India as related to Western colonialism and its imperialistic extensions and thus to processes originating within the receiving regions of represented contemporary migrations. This view of migration, as portrayed in fiction though not theoretically analyzed up to this point, challenges the understanding of migration as a phenomenon, originating elsewhere which would suggest that receiving societies have little to do with migration, except to regulate and manage adjustment. Instead of continuing this limiting interpretation of migratory movement, in this paper I will devote attention to the new linkage between colonialism and migration, based on its exemplifications in a number of literary texts. I will argue that the theoretical link between colonialism and migration is deployed in the imagery of the texts rather than in the plotlines: neither characters nor narrators address the similarities between the colonial past of the characters’ former homeland and their immigration experience in a different country in direct comparisons. Instead, it is, in the first place, the composition of texts in which both themes appear that suggests a link between colonialism and migration. The texts’ imagery plays an important role in confirming and developing this link: aspects of colonialism are turned into metaphors that comment on the immigration experience, while the portrayal of colonialism often focuses on metaphoric and actual removals. While the relationship between migration and the colonial past does not necessarily constitute the main theme of the plot, the narratives’ imagery establishes a strong symbolic congruence between these two modes of intercultural contact: aspects of colonialism, such as shifting value systems, westernization and language confusion reappear in the migration process. The fact that the sources deploy this symbolic congruence through imagery rather than plot, suggests that the narratives are overlaid by the visual impact of the past that keeps intruding into the performance of contemporary migration.
Shirli Gilbert, University of Southampton
‘Holocaust Memory in Apartheid South Africa’
As South Africa negotiated its transition to democracy in the early 1990s, one of the historical analogies most frequently invoked was between the ‘twin atrocities’ of apartheid and the Holocaust. The genocide of European Jewry, and particularly the Nazi regime that perpetrated it, was perceived as perhaps the most obvious and potent historical benchmark for understanding what had happened in South Africa, for envisioning justice and reconciliation, and for thinking about how apartheid might be historicized and commemorated.
The larger research project from which this paper is drawn explores the ways in which the Holocaust shaped understandings of and responses to apartheid for a broad range of groups both during the apartheid period (1948-1994) and after the transition to a non-racial democracy. Memory of Nazi Germany and the genocide was regularly invoked under apartheid, but different groups drew starkly different conclusions about the implications of the connection. For Jews, the Holocaust was powerful currency in the debate about whether or not to be involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, and how to relate to racially-motivated human rights abuses. Both mainstream and leftist Jewish positions were nourished by Holocaust memory, but in each case that memory had widely divergent implications and forms. A broad range of non-Jewish anti-racist activists also identified obvious parallels between Nazism and local practices—‘The life of a Non-European is very cheap in South Africa. As cheap as the life of a Jew in Nazi Germany’—and the parallel became a potent symbol for explaining to the international community both the nature of apartheid and the increasingly violent resistance struggle against it. The Afrikaner National Party government, by contrast, consistently and strenuously denied any Nazi connections, despite its considerable association during the 1930s and 1940s with pro-Nazi groups and the presence of several radical right-wing figures in the cabinet.
This paper will focus on the period from the war years themselves until roughly 1960, a formative phase during which these various groups adapted to the new regime and memory narratives began to be fashioned and crystallized. Shifting patterns of discourse during the 1940s and 1950s reveal, on one end of the spectrum, a gradual rapprochement between Jews and Afrikaners based in part on a willful amnesia about the Nazi period; and on the other an anti-racist movement beginning to identify itself as ‘the most important moral battle in the world since the defeat of Nazism’.
Dirk Göttsche, University of Nottingham
‘Memory of Colonialism and it's Shifting Cross-cultural Memoryscapes’
As discussed widely in Postcolonial Theory, colonialism developed a transnational and cross-cultural dynamic, which transformed both the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. Memory of colonialism (in both hemispheres) is thus by definition transcultural, and even more so in the context of postcolonial migration, globalisation and growing transnational interaction. Building on my previous work on discourses about Africa in German literature, on contemporary historical novels about colonialism, and on African migrants’ writing in German, this paper will explore how contemporary literature in German engages with the transcultural nature of postcolonial memory. Such engagement differs according to perspective (e.g. African vs. European), generation and discursive context. The paper will therefore provide a comparative reading of the memory of colonialism in German mainstream literature and African diasporic writing, note shifts in the themes and functions of postcolonial memory since the 1980s, and highlight links between postcolonial memory and other memory discourses (National Socialism, the ‘Wende’, traumatic experience of African civil war/child soldiers, female genital mutilation), which are themselves the subject of transnational debate.
Literature arguably plays a key role in reflecting, promoting and critiquing cultural memory. African diasporic writing in German is intrinsically transnational, reminding Germany of its implication in the cross-cultural dynamic of colonialism and its legacies. At the same time, both African migrants’ writing in German and Black German literature have seen significant development since their beginnings in the 1980s. Early works (Kum’a Ndumbe III, El Loko, Chima Oji; May Ayim, the anthology Farbe bekennen, Gerunde etc.) draw on anti-colonial theory and African-American discourses to place the memory and critique of colonialism and German racism at the heart of diasporic self-assertion, while more recent texts by younger African authors recontextualize the (post-) memory of colonialism in the light of transcultural experience in postcolonial migration and traumatizing violence in Africa (Kwalanda, Abdi, Korn, Mehari etc.), or move beyond postcolonial debate, integrating the memory of colonialism in wider visions of transnational lives and transcultural identities in Africa and/or Germany (Asserate, Degla, Ekama, Atyame etc.). Similar shifts can be seen in Black German writing of the past ten years, combining postcolonial memory with established German memory discourses (National Socialism, ‘Wende’).
The paper will combine a summary of these developments (with some examples) with concise discussion of selected German (mainstream) historical novels about (German and European) colonialism since Uwe Timm’s seminal Morenga (1978). The popularity of this sub-genre (in the wake of the centenary of Germany’s colonial war in South-West Africa in 2004) testifies to the emergence of German postcolonial memory, but there is also a disconcerting fascination with exoticist re-enactments of colonial lives and myths (Seyfried, Ackermann, Müller, Hilliges, Czernin etc.). While Timm deliberately chose not to voice the African other, more recent authors develop the transcultural dimension of postcolonial memory by cross-mapping African and European experiences of colonialism (Buch’s Sansibar Blues, 2008), using cross-cultural experience in the colonial world to challenge European narratives of colonialism (Schulz, Kramer, Stangl), trying to reconstruct the African experience of colonialism (Hoffmann), or contextualizing German and other colonialisms (Capus). Narrative techniques which link the colonial past to National Socialism (Wackwitz) and the present (Buch, Capus, Hamann, Beil, Paluch/Habeck) place such postcolonial narratives firmly in the context of German cultural memory debates.
Christine Gundermann, Freie Universität Berlin
‘Commemoration as border case: Cultures of Remembrance in the Dutch German EUREGIO between 1945 and 1995’
For more than 50 years the Dutch – German relation has been determined politically and culturally by the Second World War. The memory the Second World War imparted in this relationship has, on both sides, been shaped not only through national processes. To equate a grand narrative of a nation with the complex process of coming to terms with the past istherefore too short-sighted. For a more complete understanding of the history of thisinternational relationship, it is necessary to examine the civil society’s coping with the past. In my paper, I take the transcultural and transnational perspective of the conference spatially and focus the border-region of the two nations. By analyzing the remembrance culture within the EUREGIO, a cross-border association at the Dutch-German border, the manifold forms of commemoration and hence narratives become apparent. The EUREGIO was established in 1958 as the first of five amalgamations of communities at the border. By the idealistic and ambitious work of such citizens as Alfred Mozer, in the 1970s the EUREGIOestablished a rich and profound offer of trans-border contacts between scholars, students,families, and pensioners. Dutch-German town twinning as well as many personal contacts emerged through these contacts. Within all those encounters, the Second World War was a more or less communicated dark chapter of shared history.
I will present three examples of a local and transnational coping with the national socialist crimes in the EUREGIO. First, an investigation of the memorial landscapes of the Dutch city Enschede and the German city Gronau can show a specific local remembrance within a “grand national narrative” in the first decades after the war. Secondly, the EUREGIO itself offered in the 1980s a transregional narrative of the Second World War through lecture notes for history lessons in Dutch and German secondary schools. Also, a few EUREGIOmembers tried to initiate a common “dodenherdenking”, a shared commemoration of the dead and the liberation in May 1985. They were not successful. Third, in 1995 the first crossborder and therefore transcultural commemoration took place in the EUREGIO. Although it was not possible to arrange such a commemoration through the EUREGIO institutions, a few citizens of the twin towns Nordhorn and Denekamp fought successfully for a “grenzoverschrijdend” remembrance.
While on both sides the victimization of the citizens became a connecting moment and a foundation of common (European?) remembrance culture, the memorization of the Shoah – in both nations an utterly important chapter of the Second World War – stayed within the national borders and was not embedded in the transcultural remembrance culture. Within such a confined perspective as the EUREGIO, the connections between the nation’s grand narratives, local remembrance cultures and civil remembering becomes evident.
Yifat Gutman, New School for Social Research
Transcultural Memory in Conflict: The Israeli Palestinian Case
Truth and reconciliation institutions, in which commemoration of past atrocities attempts to guarantee that the past will not come to haunt present attempts to institute a better society, have been well researched around the world. However, examining the application of post-conflict language and models for reconciliation in the midst of a prolonged national conflict reveals limitations and potentialities that challenge some of the basic assumptions of these models of change and reveal the complex dynamics of their distribution and impact around the world.
This paper studies a new memory practice in Israel that encapsulates the promise of reconciliation outside the purview of official politics, diplomacy and the state. Against the background of rival national historical narratives, Israeli and Palestinian, each infused with memories of “its own” victims and heroes, three non-profit associations in Israel are unique for their reenactment not of Jewish-Israeli memories, but of Palestinian memories – memories of “the enemy.” Their memory enactment consists of tours to pre-Israel Palestinian villages and recorded interviews with their former inhabitants which are collected in archives. They produce and use new information about the past and make it present in the national landscape around the country. What renders these activities especially interesting is that, unlike other truth and reconciliation efforts, these efforts in Israel take place before a transition, as the peace process has largely been stalled and the war is still a reality.
However, many of the basic assumptions that transcultural models tie to memory as a path for reconciliation brake down when implemented to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The limitations that the studied “memory activists” in Israel face in implementing transnational post-conflict language and practices in their local reality, as well as the potential for conflict resolution that these encapsulates, reveal more of the dynamics of transcultural memory and how it is used when there is no (or very little) other available language for political intervention in a national conflict.
Leslie Hakim-Dowek, University of Portsmouth
‘Beirut’
Leslie Hakim-Dowek will address her own photo-text series, which attempts to map out a personal ‘archaeology’ encompassing the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and exile. A parallel is drawn between a personal tale and the many transformations of Beirut from a magical place to a war-torn no-man’s land and finally to become a totally sanitised urban space. A process of mental mapping is delineated marking the sites of violence, personal trauma and the ever-shifting boundaries in a city seen in a constant process of erosion and dissolution. The foundation of Leslie Hakim-Dowek’s practice stems from an engagement with issues of loss, conflict and the environment. Previous series focused on themes of migrancy, memory and identity including several relating to The Lebanon, her place of birth, and its history of conflicts.
Dirk t. D. Heldt, Connecticut College
‘Memory, Culture and Hellenism’
European globalized memory was made possible in the 18th century, as Mary Louise Pratt demonstrated some years ago, through a "planetary consciousness" built on the twin foundations of natural science and European imperialism. A new global scale meaning (Pratt) obliterated the local by forcing on it the timeless present of scientific and historical (European) comprehension. The new epistemological regime found its legitimacy when European autochthony was created out of a newly imagined Hellenic past.
The paper will explore whether the capture beginning in the 18th century of a re-imagined Greek antiquity for the mainstream of European modernity provides an example of memno-history in the making. In this instance, the focal point was not a text or monument but an entire culture. Certainly the process illustrates how "the past as it is remembered" (in J. Assman's phrase) was made.
That imagined past lingers in modern historical memory, at least on occasions demanding high rhetorical style. In the 1980's a Foreign Office minister could claim that Greek entry into the EC was repayment by Europe of a three thousand year old cultural and political debt to its Greek heritage; Giscard d'Estaing could call France the daughter of Greece (not specifying that this was the rationalized ideal of classical Greece imposed by other Europeans on Greece's modern inhabitants); and François Mitterand could say that Europe was returning in its history like one returning home.
Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference quotes Benjamin to the effect that history is 'time filled by the presence of now' and adds that the imaginary entity called Europe is defined by reason and universals.
The paper will illustrate how Europe usurped 'the modern' for itself through transcultural memory of Greek antiquity.
Andrew Hennlich
‘The Shadows of History: Photography and Colonialism in William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre’
South African artist William Kentridge is known for his animations, in which he draws a frame, photographs it, erases and redraws on the same sheet of paper leaving behind ghostly traces. While staging Mozart’s Magic Flute, an opera about light overcoming darkness, holding the enlightenment at its core, Kentridge undertook a related project Black Box/Chambre Noir examining the shadows of enlightenment. Black Box starting point is the Herero revolt in South West Africa (now Namibia). During this revolt, the German suppression of the tribe and internment in labour camps killed 3/4ths of the population, marking the first genocide of the 20th century. Additionally, the skulls of several Herero were cleaned and sent back to Germany for phrenological studies, Kentridge notes that the foundations of National Socialist eugenic projects lie here.
Using his animations, found film footage, and robotic shadow puppets Kentridgeinterrogates witnessing and recording memories through the metaphor of a black box: the camera, the inside of a theatrical space, and the airplane’s black box data recorder. Heavily indebted to Freud’s concept of trauerarbeit or “grief work” which makes several explicit appearances within the installation, Black Box explicitly links grief and labor together, two central themes the artist works with in his earlier animations.
Examining Germany’s links with its African other, Kentridge reveals a shattered and unstable dialectic between Europe and Africa. This paper engages Kentridge’s Black Box, as a way of exploring memory through the traditional photographic and forensic methods (suggested by the camera and flight data recorder). However, unlike the official nature of these devices, Black Box in its fragmented torn paper puppets, erasure traced animation, and film appropriation constructs a collage of history that resonanates and becomes its most useful in its intercultural exchange. Magic Flute uses the 1938 score performed at the Berlin Opera for the Nazi party, linking enlightenment politics to National Socialism. To get at this link Kentridge takes us to enlightenment’s dark other, Africa, binding the two histories together. This pairing of light and shadow together helps us to understand the links between cultures of violence; we move from colonial Namibia to Nazi Germany, and back to apartheid South Africa (who ruled Namibia until 1990). Conceived through the aesthetic, Kentridge is able to trace histories whose links are forgotten, whilst being cognizant of the instability of its own writing.
Nicola Henry, La Trobe University
‘Wartime Rape and the Power of Memory: Politics, Gender and Law’
During the 1990s, wartime rape received long overdue international attention. For the first time in international history, victims appeared as witnesses in international courts; perpetrators, both direct and indirect, were successfully prosecuted; and rape was tried as a crime of genocide, war crime and crime against humanity. These past two decades can be starkly contrasted to the silence and neglect that has previously encumbered the issue of wartime rape since – and long before – the end of the Second World War. Two pivotal events are credited to this momentous shift. First, the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 was in part a response to the mass rapes that occurred during the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But even earlier, in 1991, former sex slaves from World War II – euphemistically known as “comfort women” – began to tell of their experiences within the public domain, leading to the celebration of women’s lost and silenced voices, but also inadvertently to forms of historical denialism and voracious debate. Despite the growing attention to wartime sexual violence and the codification of rape as a serious violation of international criminal law, rape remains an “unspeakable” crime of war. Victim accounts of rape have not featured prominently in post-conflict collective memory and yet, paradoxically rape has been manipulated by and through political debates that have pitted nations against each other. Thus when wartime rape is “remembered”, it is often the subject of political controversy and heated debate, and victims are often caught in the crossfire of these debates.
In this paper, I look at the power of memory, both social and interpersonal, and the relationship between the two. I ask two key questions. First, how is memory used as a tool of power in the discourse on wartime rape? And second, does a collective memory of wartime rape even exist, and if so, why and how does law play a pivotal role in its formation? The paper is concerned with the political currents of memory, gender and law, as well as the internationalisation of memory. I argue that although greater recognition of wartime rape should be celebrated, we should be wary about whose interests are being served. I thus examine the ways in which memory contributes to both empowerment and marginalisation in the aftermath of armed conflict.
Renaud Hourcade, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Rennes
‘The Transcultural Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Coping with Guilt in Former Slave Trade Cities’
For now a couple of decades, the memory of transatlantic slavery has become a subject of social practices and political debate in former European slave trade cities. Memory claims involving ethnic or racial communities have met a growing success in cities such as Nantes and Bordeaux in France or Liverpool in the UK, making it quite compulsory for any former European port of the slave triangle to publicly recognize not only its participation in the trade but also the often important impact slavery and slave trade had on the city's economic growth. As a result, public policies of memory have become common in such cities, ranging from public speeches at remembrance day events to the foundation of memorials and museums.
From an ethnic perspective, the memory of transatlantic slavery is obviously very significant for Caribbean identities, having given their very specific roots to Creole cultures. This memory is also at the core of Black mobilization and struggle where it grounds thinking on the sense and origin of blackness and racism. But while ethnic and racial minorities build a part of their particular identity on the memory of the transatlantic slave trade, local public authorities have to speak in the name of the whole local community. In that circumstance, how do these authorities manage to respond the demands of "acknowledgement" made by ethnic and racial groups in the city? Do their memory policies put forward a transcultural approach of the memory of slave trade?
We argue that memory policies in former slave trade cities try to encompass both the transatlantic memory of ethnic and racial groups in the city and their own perspective as a collective heir to the perpetrators. In this process, notions of responsibility, guilt ans debt are focal points, albeit differently in each city. First, giving central place to the perspective of victims gives more strength to the official discourse on a newly assumed responsibility. Thus, it somehow favours the metamorphosis of shame for the past into pride for its acknowledgement. Secondly, the discourse on responsibility, guilt and debt allows public authorities to emphasize the link between past and present, making both local identity and citizenship the main sites of permanent transfer and overlapping between the racial, ethnic and the "perpetrators" cultural memories of transatlantic slavery. By doing so, local public policies finally participate in the framing of a transcultural memory of transatlantic slavery.
Ferdinand de Jong, University of East Anglia
‘The Slave House at Goree Island: A Pan African Screen Memory’
In 1973 Gorée Island, situated just off the African continent, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. At this island the Slave House is the principal destination for all international pilgrims and tourists. The maison des esclaves – or Slave House – is a reconstructed building that serves as a memorial to the triangular slave trade. The curators represent the house as one of historic slave traders and present a narrative – in which they claim that millions have transited through this house as slaves – that has been contested by historians. The Senegalese curators nevertheless continue to present the Slave House as one of the most important gateways of the slave trade.
While presenting a black-and-white history of the slave trade in which whites are represented as perpetrators and blacks as victims, the curators ignore the historical complexities of the trade – in particular, the existence of a class of creoles critically involved in the trade of slaves. This paper examines how and why the narratives presented at the Slave House remember the triangular slave trade in racial dichotomies and presents an Afro-nationalist account in which Africans can only be conceived as victims. This paper examines the moralities of this representation and critiques the Slave House as a ‘screen memory’. I will suggest that the Afro-nationalist narrative is adopted not only because it is the most appropriate discourse to denounce today’s racial inequalities, but primarily because it diverts attention from the continued existence of domestic slavery.
This case thus exemplifies the tension noted in the CFP, between local and translocal memories. While the Slave House caters to an international audience of white tourists and African American pilgrims, it remains a site that most Senegalese never visit. In as far as they identify with the Slave House, it is as a site of the transatlantic slave trade. That domestic slavery was practised at this house – and remains a continuing practice in today’s Senegal – is completely ignored. This paper argues that the Pan-African narrative told at the Slave House caters to the needs of a transnational memoryscape (including African American and white visitors), as well as a local, national memoryscape, situating as it does the tragedy of slave trade in an abstract Pan-African space, rather than Senegal. The Slave House remembers the transatlantic slave trade in order to forget domestic slavery.
Matthew Gumpert, Kadir Has University
‘Impossible Parthenon: Turkish Classicism at Anit-Kabir’
On the summit of Ankara’s Rasattepe Hill stands Atatürk’s mausoleum, Anıt-Kabir. It is not difficult to understand why this temple to Turkey’s founding father became one of modern Turkey’s sacred venues. What is less immediately intelligible is why it should have been designed as an imitation of the Athenian Parthenon.
The creation of the new Turkish nation-state depended on an idea of modernization inseparable from Westernization. Modernization inevitably meant catching up to the West (identified as progress itself, the embodiment of the future), and leaving the past (marked as Eastern, Ottoman, and Islamic) behind. This was an intensely traumatic affair: an experiment in willed amnesia on a collective scale. But by recasting the move towards an indefinite future as a return to a forgotten origin, that loss is effectively erased in the Turkish collective memory. If Turkey can remember itself as a classical (as opposed to an Eastern, Ottoman, or Islamic) culture, if classicism itself is an Anatolian phenomenon, an autochthonous culture born in the territorial crucible of the nation, then Turkey (so the logic goes) has been part of the West all along.
And so at Anıt-Kabir, (as in the young republic’s train stations and administrative offices), classical architecture is enlisted, paradoxically, as a signifier of modernity for the new Turkish republic. Indeed modernity, both at Anıt-Kabir and more generally, can be approached as a form of cultural identity generated through the recollection of the classical past. This paper will focus on the strategies employed at Anıt-Kabir to recuperate the Parthenon as an emblematic piece of modern Turkish architecture; for Anıt-Kabir is a Parthenon repackaged, or recollected, as an indigenous, Anatolian product. Seen in this light, Anıt-Kabir reminds us that the classical has always been a remarkably fungible set of signs whose return is an indice of the new. By remembering the classical, in other words, we forget our anteriority, our inescapable ties to the past, and thereby affirm our modernity.
Klas-Göran Karlsson, Lund University
‘The Holocaust in European Historical Cultures’
Rather than being explained and understood in terms of collective memory, the recent intense interest all over Europe in the Holocaust, and in genocides in general, should in my mind be connected to concepts such as historical consciousness, historical culture and uses of history. The most basic of them, historical consciousness, developed from a hermeneutical German tradition of historical thinking, concerns human needs of temporal orientation in terms of on the one hand memories and experiences of the past, on the other expectations and fears for the future. Such needs are not related to superficial historical facts, but to fundamental dimensions of human existence such as life and death, right and wrong, and we and they. Consequently, our historical consciousness is triggered by historical events such as genocides that compel us to ask time-transcending questions of existence, identity, moral and responsibility. Drawing on and developing these theoretical ideas, the paper aims at analysing comparatively how the Holocaust has been interpreted, represented and used in various European states and societies in recent decades.
The basis of the paper is the large research project The Holocaust in European Historical Culture, conducted at Lund University in Sweden since 2001 and chaired by the present author. Within this research project, several works have been produced, among them Echoes of the Holocaust. Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe (2003), Holocaust Heritage. Inquiries into European Historical Cultures (2005), and The Holocaust on Postwar Battlefields. Genocide as Historical Culture (2006).
Tamar Katriel, University of Haifa
‘Speaking Out: Transcultural Memory and Cultural Dissent’
This paper combines an interest in testimonial studies and in the perspectives of perpetrators on the experience of military violence. It draws on self-narrations by Israeli and American soldiers, whose military rounds involved them in the control of civilian populations in the Palestinian territories and in Iraq, respectively. The study draws on a testimonial project of moral-political protest, modeled on the Vietnam-era American "Winter Soldier" testimonial project, which was initiated in 2004 by a group of Israeli veteran-activists under the title of "Breaking the Silence" (BTS); on autobiographical accounts by American soldiers who came to oppose the Iraq war found in Joshua Key's The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from Iraq (2007) and in the set of American soldiers' testimonies included in a forthcoming book by Guttman & Lutz (2010). In both cases, dissenting soldiers produced a variety of cultural texts whose goal was to inscribe and authenticate their distinctive perspectives in popular memory. In this way they sought to counter official and hegemonic discourses about these wars of occupation and to question the legitimacy of the domination regimes these wars entailed.
Viewed within a historical trajectory, these soldiers' accounts will be argued to represent a particular, post-modernist kind of disillusionment with martial action (Harari 2005) that takes the form of a de-stabilizing and self-fracturing moral predicament. This state of affairs becomes redeemable through a shared commitment to what Foucault (2001) has termed "fearless speech" - speech employed as a personal-political strategy of reclaiming agency in the public sphere (parhesia). In thus speaking out, soldiers testify to transgressive acts they witnessed and performed and trace the internal journey that has made them re-evaluate the significance of being implicated in this web of martial activities. In so doing, they point to moments of moral awakening in which they were jolted out of the usual state of moral disengagement (Bandura 1999) that characterized their military routine and recovered their moral footing. These narrated moments involve imaginative empathic leaps that allow the soldiers to transcend situational and cultural differences and momentarily suspend the us/them polarity that usually sustains official states of enmity. The paper thus offers the beginning of a transculturally oriented account of soldierly protest that is grounded in the potential of the memory of moments of transcultural recognition for shaking well-entrenched lines between friend and foe.
R.J.A. Kilbourn, Wilfred Laurier University
‘Cinema as Transcultural Memory’
For Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “the transnational comprises both globalization – in cinematic terms, Hollywood’s domination of world film markets – and the counter-hegemonic responses of filmmakers from former colonial and Third World countries” (1). The ‘migratory potential’ characteristic of the transnational film manifests not only on the level of diegetic theme, but is “apparent…in the very fact of the greater availability of a wider range of films to a wider range of audiences” (7). Taking into account theories of postmodern ‘prosthetic’ memory (e.g. Hirsch and Landsberg), this paper begins with the circumvention of the latter’s overly utopian privileging of capitalist-consumerist pop culture. Such an approach does little or nothing to get us beyond the ethico-political contradictions of a culture in which the visual image is the ultimate commodity form, whose transcultural ‘consumability’ may mask its complexity and its resistance to facile interpretation. What is memory in a contemporary transnational context? How is it constituted? What does it look like? What is its territory? Is it always somehow extra-territorial (trans-national)? How has the cinematic representation of memory changed since WWII? Since 1968? Or 9/11? Cinema as cultural memory is not a new idea, but what does it really mean to think of cinema as a kind of global memory system; as both source of and storehouse for ‘our’ collectively most cherished – or traumatic – memories, irrespective of geographic or linguistic borders? This leads to the more general question of cinema’s transcultural legibility, its status as global lingua franca, not to speak of the status of the ‘we’ that claims to ‘own’ or determine the meaning of such a thing as memory, recognized – like ‘History’ – to be inextricable from the discourses and media in which it is constituted. To think of film in these terms is obviously problematic, especially since, as Ezra and Rowden argue, levels of ‘cineliteracy’ worldwide are higher than ever before (3). These questions are explored through brief comparative analyses of a selection of films drawn from both the classical (and post-classical) Hollywood and the international art film traditions, in order to generate a better understanding of the contemporary transnational scene. The point in the brief time allotted is to provide a theoretical framework for a multi-faceted argument about the irreducibly exteriorized, ethically charged, and eminently cinematic nature of postmodern memory and thus of identity, both individual and collective.
J. Olaf Kleist,
‘Transcultural Memory and Social Faultlines: Remembering Migration in Australia and Germany’
In recent years, the relationship between social memories and migration has gained increased attention all over Europe, particularly in Germany. In classic immigrant countries however, the relevance of migrant memories has long been recognised and institutionalised. In Adelaide, South Australia, the world’s oldest Migration Museum opened in 1986 and similar institutions followed in Melbourne and Sydney thereafter. Of course, each country incorporates transcultural memories of migrants differently – and each country encounters specific problems in constructing an inclusive past. The historical combination of social memory and migration, not just in museums, illustrates attempts of incorporating fringes of national belonging. In this paper, by analysing the cases of Australia and Germany, I argue that a country’s memories of migration reveal the lynchpin of social conflict and cohesion or, what I consider its social faultlines.
The paper is divided into three sections. In the first part, I will show the changing role of social memories for migrant incorporation in Australia. I begin with a brief overview of the development of migration museums since the 1980’s, the problems they encountered in integrating multicultural migrant memories and the way they moved on to a family-based and finally to a civic model of remembering migration. Working backwards, I then argue that in the 1970s a major transformation of social cohesion paved the way for the establishment of migration museums. To illustrate this point, I show how memories were used in the 1950s and 1960s to promote citizenship and cultural assimilation. Consequently, memories attained the role of providing cultural heritage as a form of social belonging, underpinning the policy of multiculturalism and the incorporation of transcultural memories. Civic cohesion was thereby, transformed into cultural belonging.
In the case of Germany, I contend that while the transformation of social cohesion and memories was similar, the incorporation of migrant memories differed decisively. In the 1950s and 1960s memories of migration focused on the incorporation of German expellees into one national narrative. Since the 1980s, though national conflicts over Germany’s past created diverse cultural memories they excluded immigrants’ transcultural memories. Only in relation to German émigrés did migration and memories converge. Since Germany’s partial abolishment of its ius sanguinis citizenship law in 1999, I suggest, memories of immigration have become more relevant in the public realm.
Finally, I claim that the national developments of memories of migration disclose how and to what effect the national and the transnational meet in a country’s political culture. They highlight the social faultlines of belonging: in Australia civic and cultural belonging are strictly divided while in Germany’s ius sanguinis they are merged. Transcultural memories figure as a seismograph which displays raptures in society.
Wendy Koenig, North Central College:
‘Motion and Sound: Investigating the New Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Centre’
In the preliminary discussions surrounding the construction of a Holocaust museum, no matter how large or small, typically a great deal of attention is paid not only to the architectural design, in terms of the impact of the building itself as well as the interior spaces, but also to the layout and historical parameters of the permanent exhibition. The experience of the visitor is often carefully scripted and it is expected that the encounter will be transformative. There are two aspects, however, of Holocaust museum design, specifically within the United States, that deserve more attention: the first being the “processional” aspects of the museum visit, in some cases evoking the Christian phenomenon of the Stations of the Cross; the second being acoustic design (or lack thereof). Historian Peter Novick, among others, has noted the tendency of museums, most notably the U.S. Holocaust Museum Memorial in Washington, D.C, to “Christianize” the Holocaust encounter by instructing visitors to make various “stops” along the way, echoing Christ’s journey on the Via Dolorosa. Part of my investigation of the new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, opened in Skokie, Illinois in 2009, will be a consideration of its “processional” approach as compared to that of the U.S. Holocaust Museum Memorial. Regarding the aspect of sound, I will draw from pioneering works on acoustic design, such as R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, and more recent works on “aural architecture,” including Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter’s Spaces Speak: Are You Listening?, as I consider the conscious use of sound within the museum, such as self-guided tour narrations or recordings of survivor testimonies, as well as the impact made on the visitor by the (presumably) unplanned “aural architecture” of the museum; that is, the properties of a space that can experienced by listening. The results of this exploration should point to ways that museum designers and curators can incorporate “motion and sound” into their overall approach to Holocaust museums and memorials.
Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck College UL
‘Istanbul/Nicosia’
Gabriel Koureas will discuss the possibilities of transcultural memories in two cities, Istanbul and Nicosia by addressing Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City (2005). The book is an interrogation of memory and in particular the clash between western and eastern ideas of cultural memory but also an investigation of the lost cosmopolitanism that the Ottoman Empire allowed to exist. One can also claim that a sense of nostalgia for the loss of the Ottoman Empire runs throughout the book. However, Pamuk’s nostalgia is politically motivated and brings to the surface a number of sensitive issues in Turkey and in particular, genocide, atrocities and force expulsion of populations. The aim of the paper is to question Pamuk’s use of the memory of Istanbul’s Ottoman past in order to address Ottoman memories in another city, Nicosia, Cyprus.
Branislava Kuburovic and Almir Koldzig, Roehampton University
‘Creating Spaces for Polyphonic Memory’
This paper is meant to act as a work in progress that would introduce in the context of the conference the project we are working on at the moment that will bring together artists and art institutions in the Balkan region to discuss the practices and possibilities of creating alternative strategies of dealing with the often highly conflicted memories of the recent past in the region, above all the memory of the wars in former Yugoslavia.
As the wars themselves, the memory narratives being created in the new states formed on the territory of former Yugoslavia remain controversial and are often perceived as irreconcilable. Our project aims to challenge this perception of perpetual conflict to suggest that what is happening instead is a certain monopolization of memory by the power structures in the newly formed states and dominant media. Just as the war narratives were formed by blocking alternative views from reaching public domain (but for small and thus irrelevant pockets of free-thinking individuals and organizations), so that even today the multitude of memories linked to these tragic events rarely reach the wider pubic domain.
The project seeks to identify specific creative and political vocabularies and strategies that would be able to tackle the present predominant lack of spaces/contexts for bringing individual stories and memories of the people from these regions into the public realm. The notion of polyphonic history coined by the Greek-American anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis is taken as the starting point for thinking through the possibilities for such vocabularies and strategies able to resist the present aspirations for fixing and monumentalizing the recent past; instead, these strategies seek to open up the space for what David L. Eng and David Kazanjian have described as ‘melancholic excess – an abundance implicit in the very notion of remains’ (in Loss: The Politics of Mourning). They suggest melancholia not as a ‘“grasping” or “holding” on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains,’ a relation that is creative, unpredictable, and that has strong political potential.
We started from the notion of the anti-monument but are now also looking into creative licensing and possibilities to open certain archives to artists in order to enable them to work with communities and facilitate alternative readings of archives by communities.
Monique Laney, University of Kansas
‘Negotiating Cultural Memories : Integrating German Immigrants in Huntsville, Alabama after 1945’
Based on my dissertation on the integration of the German rocket specialists and their families associated with Wernher von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama, this presentation discusses how these immigrants and their neighbors negotiated their different cultural memories to form a common group identity that informs evaluations of the team members’ pasts in Nazi Germany.
When Wernher von Braun and his team members, who had developed the legendary V-2 rocket for the Nazi regime, were invited to work for the U.S. Army under Project Paperclip, both the U.S. government and military were aware of the reactions this act might provoke among the American public. The army kept the rocket experts’ move to Ft. Bliss, Texas, a secret as long as possible and carefully managed the release of information in December 1946. The decision to bring the German specialists to the United States seemed to be justified by the events that followed—the intensifying Cold War and their successes for the U.S. rocket development programs. By 1950, when most of them moved to Huntsville, Alabama, with their families, there was very little protest or antagonism towards the new neighbors.
In the 1980s, the German specialists’ expertise had helped send the first American satellite into orbit and the first man to the moon. They had become American citizens, contributed significantly to Huntsville’s cultural and economic growth, and most had retired in the early to mid 1970s. Many Americans celebrated them as national and local heroes. In the meantime, the U.S. political landscape had changed dramatically and the team members found themselves increasingly defending their pasts in Nazi Germany to a growing number of publications focusing on their close affiliations with the Nazi government and association with war crimes. While supporters and fans would like to dismiss their pasts in Germany as no longer relevant in light of the team’s accomplishments for the United States, others find the uncritical celebration of the team problematic, if not insulting to victims of the V-2 bombings, survivors of the Holocaust, and those who died as slave laborers while building the V-2 weapons under hellish conditions.
This paper discusses the results of my research based primarily on oral histories conducted with members of the German rocket team, their family members, and other Huntsville residents, including members of the African-American and Jewish communities.
Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhaus University
‘Globalised Memories: Fact or Fiction?’
Hannah Arendt wrote in a festschrift to Kars Jaspers in 1957 on world citizenship that such a collective identity would deprive us all of our shared memories. In contrast, the two Caribbean writers Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant explained in the 1980’ies that localities once touched by colonialism, which basically comprise all localities whether central or peripheral, from then on are inextricably blended with the translocal world, and that this blend of broken memories is the foundation of shared local memories. Who is right? – do translocal realities entail a loss of local memory or will they produce new kinds of equally authentic but broken local memories? Literary works firmly side with Glissant and Walcott, and provide local memory with a translocal perspective a double meaning: 1) as a formal process unfolded throughout the history of literatures. Here, motifs, genres, metaphors, symbols, plots, characters travel across cultural boundaries in order for any local literature to come into being, and in this multidimensional process they are constantly reshaped and reinterpreted. And 2) as a content based process in an ongoing set of negotiations (cf. Maurice Halbwachs) inside a language community where this literature is written, translated, interacting with other media when it circulates in that community as part of a set of canons or as part of the unformal more or less conscious everyday uses of meanings and references. The two keywords are travelling and negotiation for memories to occur and work in a culture. One may say that those are the facts of memorial processes as expressed by fiction. – An example of travelling will be Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros (1990) where the use of various aesthetic forms and devices opens a locally manifested memory on the individual, communicative and collective level (with Assmann’s terms) to a larger world, and an example of negotiation will be Imre Kertész’ brief essay Who Owns Auschwitz? (2001), concerned with the effect of the alternating attempts to hide, forget or remember particular events.
Stephanie Marlin-Curiel
‘Beyond Cultural Memory: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Transatlantic Circuits of Testimony’
In this paper, I will argue for the uniqueness of the South African transition to democracy whose defining event was the national ritual known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC serves as an exemplary case of transcultural memory, in which previous assumptions about memory as a connected to identity, nationhood, trauma, testimony, embodiment, and subversive politics, break down and become entangled with categories of global capitalism, simulation, media publics, and citizenship. The TRC has inspired works of art and performance by South Africans on all sides of the struggle. Cultural (re) productions of the TRC have not only traveled beyond South Africa’s borders but have taken root in the States, inspiring even those artists with no previous connection to South Africa. In my paper, I will refer particularly to Salt/Chocolate, a dance work exploring the Truth Commission with overtones of the American slave experience produced by a white American choreographer Gabrielle Lansner; and Truth in Translation, a play conceived and directed by Jewish director Michael Lessac, from New York City. The proliferation of representations that have followed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, begs immediate comparison to cultural production following the Holocaust. The claims to unprecedented “uniqueness” and the imperative to remember motivated many a work of Holocaust theatre and art. By contrast, the uniqueness of the South African transition was that it had so many non-unique resonances with European and particularly American political histories, cultural symbolics, technological means of production and branding strategies. Owing to the ubiquity of media broadcasts and images from the TRC, including those of secondary witnesses who spoke for those who could not, and audio testimony told through translators, the TRC became in Diana Taylor’s terms, both archive and repertoire (2003). The overlapping resonances of apartheid with slavery and racial segregation in the United States, and the Holocaust experience also ingrained in the American consciousness, awakened a return of the repressed, or in more contemporary trauma studies terms, a traumatic repetition and a chance to bear witness not only to South Africa’s victims, but to the events that have haunted second and third generation Americans. Finally, the inclusive branding strategies of the TRC which included the Christian narrative of forgiveness, the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and the Rainbow nation ideology, as well as contemporary globalized consumptive practices helped make the TRC a successful cultural export and secure a place for South African transcultural memory on the global stage.
Joseph Maslen, University of Manchester
‘Jewish Memory and Communist Memory in Post-war Britain’
The trans-cultural relationship between Jewish memory and communist memory in post-war British society raises the question not only of individuals ‘remembering’ a collective memory, but also of the valence between different collective memories in the memory of an individual. Collective memory arises through, and in, individual memories, and multiple collective memories take place in a single recollection. In post-war Britain, Jewish communists/communist Jews remembered across and between two cultures within their local communities, within Britain, and transnationally from Britain to other countries.
The personal testimony of Oscar Lewenstein (1917-1997), a theatre manager and film producer, and Alexander Baron (1917-1999), a novelist, illustrates these questions. Each grew up in the south of England as a member of two collective groups, the British Communist Party and the Russian Jewish diaspora, and each pursued occupations that intertwined the individualistic with the collective. Their crafts involved the re-writing of experience: partly through the cultural memory of events beyond their personal experience, and partly through the translation of personal memory into fictional representations. Both men, in different ways, played with the fantasy and reality of individual and collective memory. Each crossed the boundaries between personal memory and cultural memory in a creative process of recollection.
In the 1980s, their recollection of their youth took place within a culture of communist memory. Both took part in Margot Kettle’s ‘Recollections of a Younger World’, a project which Kettle (1916-95) had organised to recover the political memories of her peers in the British communist movement. For both Lewenstein and Baron, this storytelling necessitated an engagement with their collective memory as Jews. Jewish memory had a different status from communist memory in their recollections. Whereas their ‘Jewishness’ worked itself out in the intensity of their familial memories, and in the history of their family’s forced emigration to Britain, the resonance of their ensuing lifetimes of political commitment appears to be less visible in their testimonies. Jewish memory resides on an explicit level within the interior dimensions of the home: its trans-cultural relationship with communist memory in post-war Britain has to be explicated from the cultural grounds, or structures of feeling, upon which the recollection took place.
Robert Mason, University of Southern Queensland
‘ Importing Subversion: Hispanic Identities and Transnational Communities of Discourse in Australia’
Cultural landscapes of memory have become central to research of Australian migration, but there has been little exploration of how migrants’ political memories affected civic society. This paper demonstrates the transcultural framework formed by remembered political experiences prior to migration, the perceived politics of foreign spaces, and migrants’ political participation in Australia.
Many Australian migrants had lived in areas where social support for a workers’ revolution frequently went unquestioned, and where inhabitants readily thought of themselves as members of the international proletariat. These political experiences conditioned migrants’ perception of their status in their new homes. Yet, Anglo-Australian society thought of immigrants as an ethnic minority that would assume British norms of public political behaviour. Migrants’ responses to this tension had a lasting, and hitherto unrecognised, impact on Australia’s political heritage and civic society.
This paper investigates the Hispanic communities of Australia in the period from Federation to the Cold War. The groups never exceeded several thousand in number, and settled predominantly in the dispersed rural townships of northern Australia. They were highly politicised members of their communities, engaging in industrial sabotage, violent strikes and revolutionary bodies. Their role in the radical Left has gone largely unnoticed, since they appeared to conform to Anglo-Celtic society as successfully assimilated migrants.
Informed by the on-going political trauma in the cultural landscapes of their youth, Hispanic migrants sought political continuity in their new surroundings. Erudite and literate, they participated in global networks of socialist discourse. From isolated farms in virgin rainforest, they received and sent correspondence to radical Hispanic contacts in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The remembered lessons of pre-migration experiences, reinforced by information from the transnational community, were applied in Australia. Migrants moved between multiple communities of discourse, negotiating roles as ethnic minorities and radical agitators, as both local and transnational memories and contexts intersected.
Franziska Meyer, University of Nottingham
‘German writers remember 9/11: Katharina Hacker's The Have-Nots (2008)’
If there is one recent event which was immediately articulated and interpreted within a transnational framework of remembrance then it is ‘9/11’. Attempts to comprehend what happened reach from the application of First and Second World War terminology that invokes the assassination of Franz Ferdinand or Pearl Harbor, to comparisons with the Holocaust. Other voices, trying to counterbalance a hegemonic media, remembered the Chilean Military Putsch on 9/11 1973. These few examples show that the 'cosmopolisation of memory culture' (Levy/Sznaider) and the new narratives it births are no less conflictuous and contested than any national or local memory discourse.
Several German and Austrian novelists refused and challenged the rhetoric of ‘nothing will ever be the same'. My paper will explore one of their novels to show what a distinctly European – and German - perspective on 9/11 looks like. It will show how Katharina Hacker's award-winning Die Habenichtse intervenes in and offers a countermemory to supposedly global versions and memories of 9/11. In refusing tropes of caesura and the singularity of THE event, the novel insists on the historicization of catastrophes, while cutting through several European (hi)stories and individuals' presence. The novel’s repertoire of tropes which relate to the Holocaust and Jewish life after 1945 also challenges strategies of public forgetting.
Set in Berlin and London, Hacker’s novel refuses to enter New York at all. The text follows a young, middle-class couple to the UK, unfolding a palimpsest of individual stories which touch upon Germany's history and the lives of British and Hungarian Jews. 9/11 is at best tangible at the narrative’s margins. In contrasting the couple’s everyday life with their impoverished North London neighbourhood, Hacker slowly unwraps the listless attitudes of her prosperous protagonists. These wealthy but empty Have-Nots refuse, in Benjamin’s sense, the attentiveness for the broken and violated biographies that surround them. Against the background of not one but many atrocious events, including memory of the Holocaust and the neighbourhood’s sexual violence, Hacker's text confronts the reader with the social and human cost of lives built on neglect and indifference. In redirecting attention to ‘others’, insisting on the interconnectedness of simultaneous realities, and refusing totalising reflexes of a collective ‘We’, this literary response to 9/11 tries to remember differently. Its repudiation of complicity with rhetorical constructions of ‘turning points in history’ or a cultural-historical caesura suggests radically different ways of remembering the catastrophic transnational event that opened the century.
Zoë Norridge, Oxford University
‘Murambi: Aesthetic Responses to Human Remains on Display’
Murambi, one of the most prominent memorial sites in contemporary Rwanda, was the location of the massacre of up to 50,000 people during the genocide in 1994. Constructed to function as a technical school, in practice the buildings never held classes and are now home to the remains of hundreds of people. Mass killings took place across Rwanda in public buildings including schools, churches and hospitals. However, Murambi is unique in terms of memorials to genocide because the bodies of those who died there, having initially been buried in mass graves with lime, were subsequently exhumed and placed on display in the 24 classrooms. Unlike the landscapes of bones that greet visitors to other sites such as Ntarama or Nyamata, in Murambi the viewer sees human bodies with the skin still intact, deceased individuals whose facial expressions, size, position and manner of death is apparent.
The immediacy and graphic nature of the bodies exhibited in Murambi have prompted aesthetic responses from varied viewers, ranging from the blogs and photo archives of tourists and volunteers to literary and cinematic explorations of the meaning of such a memorial. Most well-known and critically discussed are the narratives written under the auspices of the Fest’Africa project, including Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements, Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana and Abdourahman Waberi’s Moisson de cranes. Cinematic responses encompass both films which reflect directly on Murambi as a place of memory, such as Sam Kauffman’s Massacre at Murambi and Eric Kabera’s Keepers of Memory, and those more indirectly influenced – Terry George cites a visit to Murambi as a motivating factor in finding funding for Hotel Rwanda.
This paper will explore the reasons why Murambi has stimulated such varied aesthetic responses to suffering amongst local and international visitors, paying particular attention to the physicality and recognisably human nature of those people preserved on tables. Such analysis will be grounded in theory about the specularity of pain (Sontag), the role of memorials in fixing and interpreting memory (Young) and melancholic scarring in postcolonial cultures (Durrant). I will then move on to ask how the biologically evolving nature of this site affects the legacy of cultural responses to the past – what are the implications for memorialisation as the bodies at Murambi continue to decompose? This discussion will be supported by literary citations, film excerpts and material from fieldwork research undertaken in Rwanda in July and December 2009.
Jennifer Pahmeyer, University of Sheffield
‘Memory of the German Colonial Past in Today's Namibia’
Within my proposed paper I will be seeking to analyse the effect that the memory of the German colonial period (between 1884 and 1918) has had on modern-day Namibia. I will attempt to engage with which memories are most prominent within different communities, and attempt to ascertain why this is the case. Influences by Assmann (Halbwachs) I approach this work on the assumption that memory is always embedded within a context of the recent collective and interests. The relationship between ‘historical facts’ and memory has been much discussed and has, at times, proved controversial. But as a matter of fact the perspective on history has changed through memory. In my PhD project I am trying to find traces of the past in the present, and to do this I will engage with the impact which the genocidal atrocities of 1904-1908 have had in present-day Namibia.
The majority of my data was collected first hand, in Namibia, where I was able to conduct a series of in-depth interviews. The research is only partially completed though, as I intend to go there again after evaluating the first series of interviews. My preferred methodology throughout this process has been that which is a conventional interpretation of oral history. This approach generally entails one open, almost biographical, question which is of course connected to the main focus of the colonial past. This method is used as it is the hope that the interviewee will reveal as much as possible with relation to the focus, whilst at the same time expressing their own priorities. It should be noted here that there are no longer any first-hand witnesses to German colonial rule left in Namibia today.
As a result out of the so-called Berlin Conference of 1884, the German ‘Kaiserreich’ received German South West Africa officially as a colony and it soon became the most important Germany’s most important colonial possession. With traders, soldiers etc soon massing in the central and Southern regions of the country, the local people repeatedly attempted to resist colonial expansion. This resistance swelled to all-out rebellion in 1904, when General Lothar von Trotha was in power. The German response was brutal and soldiers were ordered by the German Kaiserreich to put down the rebellion by any means necessary. In the resulting campaign around 100,000 – not only Herero - people were shot or forcefully displaced into the Omaheke desert, with the latter process leading to many deaths from starvation and exposure. In addition to direct violence, many of the survivors were detained in concentration camps. By the end of the campaign in 1908, some 80% of the Herero and up to 50% of the Nama population had been eliminated.
This is today known as the first genocide of the 20th century. In addition, before, during, and after the genocide, people were used as forced labour. Racial laws were put in place, people were evicted from their homes and restricted to bounded areas, and land and cattle were expropriated.
All different population groups have decisive roles in the colonial period, suffering to different degrees, and therefore memorize things in various ways. For example, the Herero, who suffered ‘the most’ as a collective and rebuild their identity on their trauma, adopted certain German words, uniforms and ‘norms’. The Nama have been long neglected and it is only in recent years that their own suffering has come to be appreciated. Something similar could be said about the Damara and Himba groups.
The German-speaking decedents of the ‘perpetrators’ and the group with the highest living standard worldwide, also provide an interesting perspective on things. So too do the Buren, whites who migrated from South Africa; and the Basters, the decedents of ‘interracial’ relationships. Each group have different stories, poems and rituals, but there are also similar themes which run through the varying perspectives.
There is indeed seen to be a number of differences between these aforementioned groups within a modern-Namibian context, but there is also an interaction with national, African and global narratives as well. It is about this interfering remembrance between individuals, families, communities, population groups in relation to different places that I am interested in. In my paper I would try to cover all of these different groups in Namibia, comparing the similarities within their various memorial narratives, whilst also contrasting their differences. Through this I am looking to define collective memory and illustrate how it is highly contextualised by societal factors.
Andy Pearce, Holocaust Educational Trust
‘Britain and the Formation of Contemporary Holocaust Consciousness: A Product of Europeanization, or Exercise in Triangulation?’
As Europe enters its second decade of the new millennium and a new round of commemorative anniversaries marking the Second World War, the omnipresence of the Holocaust in contemporary European culture and society shows no sign of abating. Instead the reverse is very much the case, for as statesmen affirmed at the recent Holocaust Era Assets Conference in the Czech Republic last year, the ‘the legacy of Holocaust and Nazi injustice’ is not only of ‘crucial importance’ to an ever-expanding European Union but is coupled with an apparent resolve among member-states to ‘make every effort and create a more effective European approach’ to Holocaust memorialisation. Thus the “Europeanization” of Holocaust memory which sees the Nazi genocide employed in Klas-Göran Karlsson’s words as ‘a backbone of a European cultural integration’, seems destined in the immediate future to only continue apace.
Whilst there may be a general consensus that memories of the Holocaust have acquired transcultural dynamics, commentators examining this phenomenon within the European context have nonetheless recognised the continuing influence of national frameworks in shaping the content and form that remembrance takes. It is the contention of this paper that the formation of contemporary Holocaust consciousness in Britain can be forwarded as the case study par excellence of how the transnationalisation of Holocaust memory must still be approached through the filter of the nation-state. Far from being the mere product of “Europeanization”, Holocaust consciousness in Britain has emerged incrementally during the course of the past generation and passed through various peaks and troughs to gain form as a complex, multifaceted collation of memories whose character cannot be captured by simple definition and whose occurrence resists monocausal explanation. Factors which have influenced this can be seen to be not only Britain’s unique wartime experience and reversion to exclusivist memories, but also its geographical detachment from the continental mainland. As such, British Holocaust memory has been conditioned and shaped by its own postwar history of imperial decline and search for world standing, but in the face of globalization its island status has not left it impermeable to external influences. Indeed, there is much to suggest that Britain has been at the intersection of both “Americanized” and “Europeanized” memories, but it would be erroneous to view Britain as a passive recipient in this process of triangulation; indeed, this paper will argue that through the example of Holocaust Memorial Day one can see that Britain’s recent enthusiasm for promoting Holocaust remembrance means that the United Kingdom should be regarded as one of the driving forces behind the “Europeanization” of Holocaust memory at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Davidson College
‘Genocide and Cultural Memory: Protest Movements, Depictions of Mass Murder, and the Transformation of Memory Cultures in 1960s West Germany and the United States’
From the onset of their protests in the mid-1960s, student movement and New Left campaigners in West Germany adamantly moved the confrontation with the recent past, especially the Nazi regime, to the center of their political work. Activists in and outside the German Socialist Student Union (SDS) evoked memories of Hitler Germany’s mass crimes and appropriated new terminologies of genocide to attack what they perceived as purposeful silences, past complicities, and continuities of fascism in West German society. At the same time, members of the American civil rights and Black Power movements integrated narratives of mass lynching and murder of African Americans into their struggles against racial oppression. Black Panther Party activists repeatedly drew on the lingo of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention and repeatedly employed references to the Hitler regime’s genocidal practices against the European Jews to strengthen their representation of the Black community’s past and present suffering.
This paper illuminates how 1960s protest movements in West Germany and the United States approached mass crimes, employed categories of genocide, and challenged their societies’ memory cultures. In these processes, movement participants relied on “webs” of transnational communication and interaction (Ute Frevert) based on ongoing personal contacts and the transatlantic circulation of discourses, goods, and ideas. In fact, these transnational interactions between German and American activists, as my talk demonstrates, were pivotal to their endeavors and reshaped these activists’ political practices, understanding and memory of mass crimes. In developing this argumentation, my paper offers close readings of movement publications such as Agit 833 and The Black Panther, performance of memory at rallies including the 1968 Vietnam Congress in Berlin, and the changing memorialization of past mass crimes in mainstream television news programs. Furthermore, it employs and tests concepts of cultural memory conceptualized by Jan Assmann and refines them further by thinking through their transnational dimensions. Indeed, transnational and transcultural interactions at the protest movement level reshaped the appropriation and eventually transformation of “figures of memory” of Auschwitz and slavery in West German and American society’s “organized ceremonial communication.”
By illuminating West German and American protest movements’ naming practices and transformation of memory, my work contributes to the new transatlantic studies and dialogues that have begun to replace the narrow national narratives of the American civil rights movement or Western European links of German student protesters. The paper also critically evaluates attempts by German scholars such as Götz Aly who questioned the emancipatory nature of protesters’ projects and characterized them as trying to “escape” the slowly emerging societal discussions of Nazi crimes, offering a more nuanced reading of the movements’ impact on their societies’ shifting memory cultures.
Benjamin Pohl, Bamburg/Leeds
‘Medieval Mnemonic Networks and their media: The transmission of cultural memory in the monastic world of Orderic Vitalis’
For all the progress and reassessment that the study of cultural memory has lately provoked within various academic fields, and justifiably so, its general popularity among medievalists is still surprisingly humble. Being treated as a Johnny-come-lately amidst the long-standing departments of history, language and literature studies, theology, anthropology or philosophy– to name but a few disciplines which traditionally constitute the select and elitist corpus of medievalists working at European universities – the vital perspectives and approaches that are offered by cultural memory studies still are, however, notoriously neglected, if not entirely ignored, by many scholars of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, disciplinary boundaries as well as methodological conservatism often seem to frustrate regular co-operation between cultural memory scholars and medievalists, thus creating a conspicuous lack of theoretical principles by means of which collective memories could be assessed in the period c.500-1500.
Consequently, this paper will do some pioneering work by deliberately employing contemporary theories developed within the field of cultural memory studies in order to identify and characterise the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities throughout the Anglo-Norman world of the later 11th and early 12th centuries. Drawing upon the seminal works of Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Paul Ricoer, and also considering more recent views advanced especially by Jan and Aleida Assmann, Astrid Erll, and Ansgar and Vera Nünning, I hope to show that the period under consideration, that is, the years c.1066-1142, played a decisive role in the formation and transmission of cultural memory among the members of the Norman people, the so-called gens Normannorum. The history of the Anglo-Normans during the central Middle Ages is one of constant conquest and migration – I shall in fact call it a Norman diaspora. Rapidly expanding their dominion far beyond the borders of Normandy, the Norman conquerors before long established new kingdoms and lordships at the margins of medieval Europe, be it in England, southern Italy, or even in the Holy Land.
While initially memories of these conquests and migrations were circulating primarily within the realm of everyday communication, which marks the communicative memory, they soon required the more permanent modes of preservation and codification provided by the active and archival functions of cultural memory. I will argue that the monastic chroniclers of the second generation within the Norman diaspora – represented most prominently by the Benedictine monk Orderic Vitalis, *1075/†c.1142 – were particularly qualified, not to say predestined, to mediate cultural memories between the centre and peripheries of the expanding Norman realm. Their literary activity was seminal to the collective self-perception of the gens Normannorum, for they were writing at a specific stage in time when memoirs of the great Norman conquests of the 11th century had not yet vanished from the realm of active communication, but were already well-engaged in the complex formation of transcultural identities – and memories – amongst the heirs of the conquerors. In other words, it was the creation of a unique and far-ranging mnemonic network, established mainly through thefoundation of and interaction between monastic communities throughout the Anglo-Norman world, that allowed writers like Orderic Vitalis to become the mediators of memory.
Anca Pop, UCL
‘The Semantics of the Past in Post-Communist East-European Cinema and Postwar Fictional Imagery of Fascism’
The demise of communism in Eastern Europe has occasioned the advent of an extensive area of self-reflexive exploration of communism by artists and intellectuals of the region. The concept of “cultural memory” has demonstrated its particular usefulness in investigating the extent and nature of the relation between western scholarship on, and artistic and cultural covering of East –European communism. Consequently, the application of the concept of “cultural memory” to such transcultural influences has enriched the complex apparatus of ideas and methods defined by the concept, attesting, in this way, to its validity as a research tool and, also, inviting to further investigations in the burgeoning area of transculturalism.
Within the research context configured by these approaches, this paper sets out to explore the possibility of “testing” the concept in a transcultural space created by the intersection of fictional representations of the two phenomena linked to the notion of “totalitarianism” in contemporary European history, Fascism, respectively, Communism. More precisely, this paper will observe whether and to what extent post-communist East-European cinema has been influenced in its choice of tropes and images describing the communist past, by postwar cinematic representations of fascism in countries such as Germany, Italy or Spain. Given the extensive scholarship on post-communist representations of the “past”, produced by both Western and Eastern scholars and the abundant corpus of literature on aesthetic representations of fascism, my study will draw on findings elicited by these research fields, with the purpose of exploring whether a relation of causality could exist between these two processes of “construction” of the “controversial past”, consisting in that East-European film-makers could have been influenced in their depictions of communism, by the already existing and, arguably, compelling, cinematic imagery of various aspects of fascism.
In tackling with this task, I am planning to undertake a comparative treatment of the two sets of cinematic representations, in the first two sections of the paper and, in building on the conclusions of this analogy, I will allocate the third section to a more theoretical discussion on the possibilities offered by the study of cultural memory in a transcultural setting. The paper will unfold itself as follows:
The focus of the first part will be a comparative positioning of the two cinemas in their respective social and cultural contexts, the main interrogation evoking the eventual similarity of social and cultural determinants for the two sets of images of the “past”. Subsequently, an unexhaustive range of narratives, metaphors and icons describing the past, will be held under scrutiny for comparative purposes. These images are intended to be representative of the work of both old-generation directors, who continued to make films in the years following the fall of communism (e.g. Muratova, Sokurov, Gherman, in Russia, Abuladze, in Georgia, Bela Tarr, in Hungary, Lucian Pintilie, Romania, Kieslowski, Poland) and, also, of the “new-wave” directorial approaches of the subject (e.g. in films by Cristian Mungiu, Cornel Porumboiu, Romania, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Russia, Gyorgy Palfi, Hungary etc). The representations withdrawn from the East-European cinematic “landscape” will be “tested” against an extremely rich collection of fictional renditions of fascism in German, Italian and Spanish cinema, with a particular emphasis being placed on the influential work of authors such as Fellini, Pasolini, Visconti, Bertolucci, Bob Fosse, Fassbinder, Almodovar et al.
The last section of the paper will rely on the findings of this comparison in order to advance a discussion about the complex interplay between the various influences informing cultural memory and, most specifically, between the local images and interests defining the production of artistic representations belonging to a specific cultural setting and the more general context of transcultural influences.
Yannik Porsché, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
‘Interactive Knowledge and Memory Construction in Transnational Space. Intersections of Institutional, Academic and Public Discourse in a French-German Exhibition on Representation and Identities of Immigrants’
Curators and academics are increasingly discussing how to deal with phenomena of migration and collective memory constructions in museums. Debates on migration and museum show that questions about the constitution of memory and identities in processes of cultural transmissions are of growing importance due to cross-cultural interactions and diversity in times of globalisation. Immigration provides an interesting approach in questioning essentialist concepts of cultural identity and how boundaries are transcended in the construction of multiple and dynamic identities. How are images of the “self” and the “other” produced in times of globalisation? Using an exhibition presented by museums of migration in Paris and in Berlin as an example, this case study examines the various discursive levels which are involved in the construction of intercultural identities. Those being: both museums as institutions, the EU institutional initiative “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008” which constitute the context of the exhibition and academic conferences that influence the choice of objects for the exhibition, which aims to transmit its concepts into wider public debates.
This sociological study investigates how knowledge about the identities of immigrants, and how they are represented today and in the past in France and in Germany, is constructed through identity attributions in the production and reception of an exhibition. This discourse analytical study focuses on the discursive processes, mechanisms and conditions involved in the construction of the debate about identity (re)construction and transformation. By means of discourse and interaction analyses based on ethnographic observation of guided tours of the exhibition and focus group discussions with visitors and the organisers of the exhibition, as well as of interviews carried out by journalists, the analysis focuses on the interaction between the museum as an institution and the general public. How do written texts, films, posters and other objects of the exhibition as well as the surrounding programme receive meaning? Does the reception of the same exhibition vary in different kinds of interaction in one country? Which differences are apparent between interactions in France and in Germany? The key-issues are how scientific knowledge influences the construction of identities and memory and how the (scientific, political, institutional, etc.) context both makes enunciationspossible and simultaneously constrains what can be said. Special attention is also given to analysing whether and how immigrants were involved in preparing the exhibition and how the exhibition is subsequently perceived and used by immigrants in the discussions. The study aims to investigate how cultural knowledge and memory are constructed in intercultural and transnational contexts.
Jessica Rapson, Goldsmiths UL
'Atrocity Displaced: The Babi Yar Ravine'
Broadly speaking, this paper is interested in the issues raised by site-based commemorative projects which operate via a geographical, transnational displacement of a specific original location. In order to discuss some of these issues I am taking the case study of the Babi Yar Ravine in Kiev, site of a large-scale Einsatzgruppen massacre, and the corresponding Babi Yar Memorial Park in Denver, Colorado.
After briefly relating the history of memorial culture at the original site of the massacre, the paper will discuss the inauguration and later redevelopment of the Babi Yar Park memorial in Denver. As will become clear, both the commemorative landscaping and the rhetoric of official narratives surrounding it raise questions about the potential and limitations of geographically displaced commemorative sites. Although strictly this could be called an investigation of transnational memory culture, this analysis will also work towards exposing an attempt to create a transcultural commemorative language. In order to unravel the nature of this language, I will consider the ways in which the story of this event became integrated into the landscape of popular imagination, with reference to a series of relevant literary renditions. In theorising these developments, I finally rely to some extent on a ‘multi-directional memory’ framework as defined by Michael Rothberg’s introduction to his recent book of the same name.
Anna Reading, London South Bank University
‘The Globital Memory Assemblage’
The combined forces of digitisation and globalisation are transforming memory languages, practices and forms, resulting in the traversing of conventional epistemologies and categories within memory studies such as the individual and the collective, the organic and the inorganic, the static and the mobile. This paper builds on the concept of the globital memory field (Reading, 2009) through the idea of assemblage to explore the processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisation of trans-medial memories and the ways in which they are rapidly transformed and reassembled through the combination of wearable and networked media intersecting with conventional media organisations.
The paper takes two contrasting examples of the globalised trans-medial memory processes. The first concerns the rapidly globalised camera phone footage of Neda Agha-Soltan, shot during protests in Iran in June 2009, and the processes through which it was disseminated and taken up by Western mainstream news organisations. The other example focuses on Yad Vashem’s development of part of its website in Arabic and Persian with stories adapted for Muslim audiences outside of Israel posted on YouTube. The paper examines the extent to which Manuel de Landa’s extension of Deleuze’s theory of assemblages is meaningful within the developing field of globital memories. The paper is part of a larger project on globalisation and digitisation, building on recent work on mobile and digital memory (Hoskins, Garde-Hansen, Reading, 2009; Reading, 2007) and earlier work on transcultural memories of the holocaust (Reading 2001, 2002, 2005).
Adeline Remy, Université Libre de Bruxelles and UCL
‘Comet: Memories of a European escape line. An anthropological approach to Resistance Commemorations’
My research looks at the transmission and the construction of memories within a Belgian association composed of Second World War’s resistants, their descendants and friends. It aims at analyzing the association and its trans-generational structure compared to two others historically related European associations: Les Amis de Comète (France) and Escape Lines Memorial Society (England). Concretely, I investigate how these descendants remember the past of their parents through these associations by studying: 1) the mnemonic discourses of several members of these associations; 2) annual commemorations throughout Europe organized by these associations; 3) the various ways of transmission into private life of families-members. My research is an ethnography of memory, an anthropology of commemoration and transmission of an heroic resistance past within a transnational perspective.
At the origin of the Belgian association, there was an escape line named “Comet”. Founded in 1941, this line had for mission the escape of Royal Air Force’s aviators from occupied Belgium to England. Comet was a European project due to its wide geographic area – including Belgium, France and Spain - and its European composition.
The “Amicale Comète” was created in 1950 and intended to preserve Comet’s memory and to organize on a regularly basis meetings of former resistants, until the end of the nineties. In 2005-2006, two descendants from the second generation decided to create a new association: Comete Kinship Belgium Association. The creation of a new association attests the wish of members to assume and to transmit their past linked with the Second World War. Heteroclite, this newly founded association is composed of Belgian resistant’s, their children and grand-children, but also of many Brits and French from all generations.
In this paper, I want to show how representations, practices and emotions related to the Second World War past is transmitted and in which networks of transmission, such an heritage is constituted. And in particular my goal is to analyse: how can descendants remember what they have not experienced? How is structured an association of resistant’s descendants? What kind of memories is transmitted? How do they transmit experiences inherited from the Second World War? Do the three European associations mentioned above remember collectively their common memory? What are the functions of steles or museums in this memory work? And eventually, is there a trans-generational continuity or a rupture from the past?
Edmund Richardson, University of Princeton
‘Spaces of Memory, Sites of Forgetfulness: The eighteenth century drinks from Lethe’
Borges tells the story of Funes el Memorioso, who fell off his donkey one fine day, and from that moment on remembered everything – every vein on every leaf, the shadows cast by every blade of grass at every moment of every day. The weight of those memories, unbearable, quickly sent him mad.
History’s goal cannot be, like Funes, to recall everything; it should let itself, sometimes – echoing John Donne – be ‘re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not’. Forgetfulness and elision are, after all, integral to the transformation of the past into sense and narrative; they demand as careful scrutiny as remembrance. This paper – a fusion of literary criticism, historiography, and cognitive science – will explore the often-paradoxical ‘crossroads’ (Benjamin) between history and oblivion, memory and forgetfulness. It asks how the relationship between later cultures and the ancient world has been shaped by the awareness of loss.
Eighteenth-century Britain, and its rich culture of fascination with the ancient world’s spaces of forgetfulness, will be at the heart of this narrative. ‘How happy,’ wrote Alexander Pope, ‘is the blameless vestal’s lot. / The world forgetting, by the world forgot.’ Here, the River Lethe demands (problematic) remembrance; its banks crowded with eager, jostling ghosts, it has often been depicted as a site of great joy (Virgil, Aeneid VI.705ff.; Seneca, Hercules Furens 762ff.), a symbol of the powerfully ambiguous productivity of forgetting. In David Garrick’s Lethe (1749), this chapter’s central text, a procession of regretful eighteenth-century comic ‘types’ come to beg for a drink from the waters: the poet who longs to forget his critical reviews; the old man who longs to forget that he is to die. Just as in Lucian’s The Tyrant, the inability to let go of the past becomes the greatest punishment imaginable. Yet this eighteenth-century celebration of oblivion – which enthralled London, and played before royalty – can only be given shape, paradoxically, through remembrance of the ancient world.
To examine the lure of forgetfulness, this paper will also engage productively with current debates in cognitive science, particularly on the physical necessity of forgetting; forgetting for sanity’s sake, and simply in terms of brain-storage (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2002; Gazzaniga, 1998). For it is possible that the physiological factors which determine whether something is remembered or forgotten can help to illuminate the processes of making history, processes which are, after all, largely determined by the combined cognitive mechanisms of historians and their receivers. In this study of the paradoxical and the fleeting, unpublished scenes from an eighteenth-century text enrich, and are enriched by, today’s most provocative scientific studies of why forgetfulness can become a mind’s deepest desire.
Absence looms, powerful and pervasive, over almost all narratives of the ancient world – yet as historians, we still have little sense of how to use it productively. This paper, with its intertwining narratives of memory and oblivion, asks how the inheritors of the past – the children of Babel – may tell the paradoxical tale of their ever-present loss.
Aino Rinhaug and Joel Taylor, IGRS and UCL
‘Embodied Performances of Memory’
In the face of what he saw as the chaos of modernity, Samuel Beckett believed that the artist’s task was to find “a form that accommodates the mess” [1]. The “mess” in terms of “lived experience” and further, as memory, can stem from multiple values and interpretations related to their physical manifestations. How we “embody” cultural memory (CM), whether regarded as collective or individual memory, is no clearer than it has ever been, as both the heritage profession as well as narrative studies still search for a definition of ‘authenticity’. The difficulty of defining CM originates (partly) from its tendency to translate an experience of memory across a number of borders simultaneously, which, however, allows for different disciplinary perspectives on memory to emerge and to form new meaningful assemblages (and hence, frontiers). This presentation will examine such a cross-disciplinary view.
On the basis of how “value” influences “representation” at any given time [3], we will look at “life narratives” in a broad sense and at those mechanisms that are operative in the incessant process of conservation and modification of memory. In terms of content, “messy” experiences of the past, or enactments of gathered material (“archives”) emerge in the lieux of memory [2]: They can be seen to surface on the border between (lost) historical and (present) fictional, or feigned, events. This, in turn, causes these enactments (or embodiments) of memory to invite to interpretative strategies based on how and what we perceive (or valuate) as alterity and identity, authenticity and inauthenticity, materiality and immateriality. The claim is, moreover, that the way in which we consider issues of authenticity or reconcile collective and personal memory, and ‘universal’, inherent and personal values of sites of memory partly depends on these enactments and embodiments. The relationship between CM and the sites that embody it relates to narrative as the emergent voice in the “mess”. Various kinds of narrative, including film and literature will be examined. Can narrative as a space of cultural memory be said to negotiate between these poles and thereby construct the (dynamic) frontier(s) of memory? And if so, would it be possible to claim that this form of exchange is decisive of the production of memory as a singular event?
[1] Memory & Narrative, by James Olney
[2] Between Memory and History, by Pierre Nora
[3] Representation and Intervention: The Symbiotic Relationship of Conservation and Value, by Joel Taylor and May Cassar
Daniele Salerno, University of Bologna
‘Museum for the Memory of Ustica: Christian Boltanksi and the Wreckage of Itavia Airlines DC-9’
In the summer 1980 Bologna was struck by two massacres. On the 27th June an Itavia Airlines DC-9 (flight IH 870), departed from Guglielmo Marconi airport in Bologna, crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea near Ustica, probably suffering an in-flight explosion, whose cause is still officially unknown. On the 2nd August the Central Station was destroyed by a bomb attack, which killed 85 people. In 2010 Bologna remembers 30 years from these two massacres, which are still open wounds in Italian history.
This paper is part of an ongoing research project on that summer of massacres. In particular my purpose here is to provide a description of how the Ustica massacre is represented, reconstructed and remembered in the Museo per la memoria di Ustica (Museum for the memory of Ustica). The Museo per la memoria di Ustica was opened on the 27th June 2007 through the dedication of the Associazione dei parenti delle Vittime della Strage di Ustica (Victims’ Relatives of Ustica massacre Association). It was meant to display the wreckage of the aircraft, which was carried back to Bologna in 2006, reconstructed and restored.
The French artist Christian Boltanski was called to build around the wreckage a permanent installation, which is the heart of the museum, in order to help visitors to remember the massacre and the victims: 81 black mirrors – the number of the victims of the strage – reflect the faces of visitors while 81 speakers emit phrases about daily life and 81 bulbs twinkle simulating the respiration rhythm. Nine caskets contain the belongings of victims as they were recovered from the sea and every piece composing these “reliquaries” is photographed and visible in a “Lista degli oggetti personali appartenuti ai passeggeri del volo IH 870” (List of IH 870 passengers’ personal belongings). Boltanski – whose works on Holocaust, loss, death and memory are well-known – asks visitors to look for the sense of this massacre: such a search begins from the materiality of the disaster scene.
Joanne Sayner, University of Birmingham
‘Politics and Pedagogy: Educating the Educators of Memory’
This paper takes as its case study the InSite CPD programme run by the Imperial War Museum under the auspices of the 'Their Past Your Future' project. Designed for school teachers, museum curators and academics, the programme targets those involved in the transmission of memory in pedagogical and museal form. It involves trips to museums, memorials and concentration camps in Germany, The Czech Republic and Hungary as well as workshops within the exhibits of the IWM London. Originally intended as a project to bring veterans and young people together, it has now developed into one which educates the educators through a confrontation with sites of memory of national significance. The paper argues that this shift and resulting emphases within the programme are symptomatic of the inherent difficulties of attempting to make such memories and sites signify on a wider level. Notwithstanding an explicit aim to consider these national and local sites within the context of understandings of European identity and memory the current identificatory emphases within pedagogical approaches to memory necessarily restricts the ability of such memories to become transhistorical in a meaningful way. Drawing from my experience as a participant on the programme, I investigate through texts and interviews the politics of the pedagogies involved.
Aline Sierp, Università degli Studi di Siena
‘The End of the Memory War: From a National to a European memory Framework’
How does memory work when events are remembered across and between cultures? In an age of globalization, is it still possible to speak of local and national memory, or do the local and national always exist in implicit and explicit dialogue with the transnational?
The proposed paper analyses how different public memory cultures that have shaped public commemoration policies in Europe since 1945, have changed over the years. The main research questions to be answered in this context would be:
Has there been a move away from a purely national towards a more European public memory discourse?
Which role does the European Union play in this perspective? Are there signs of the development of European-wide public commemoration practices?
How do the individual countries react to the framing efforts of the EU?
The analysis will be twofold: By tracing back discussions on how the Nazi/Fascist past should be remembered and by investigating disputes centring on the question of what should be evoked by establishing a specific calendar of official remembrance days, I am going to scrutinize the way different European countries have dealt publicly with the memory of WWII. The direct comparison of different European countries then opens up a second level of analysis, allowing the investigation of the question if we can observe some kind of convergence of dealing with the past on the European level. This includes the exploration of the EU’s efforts to frame this development and the following examination of the way individual European countries have reacted to this. Due to the evident link between memory and identity, the analysis might furthermore shed some light on the European identity debate from a new angle and allow for the reflection of the question if the development of a transcultural memory framework is possible within Europe.
Max Silverman, University of Leeds
‘Fearful imagination: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) and concentrationary memory’
In an essay entitled ‘The Concentration camps’ published in 1948 Hannah Arendt asks ‘What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses?’ Arendt suggests that the absolute novelty of ‘totalitarian rule’ (of which ‘the concentration camps are the most consequential institution’) calls for what she terms ‘fearful imagination’. In this paper I will argue that Alain Resnais’s 'Nuit et brouillard' (1955) exemplifies Arendt’s ‘fearful imagination’ through its invention of what Griselda Pollock and I have termed ‘concentrationary memory’, that is, a notion of memory as the haunting (and hence disturbance) of the present, a site of the in-between, of doublings and overlappings, of an uncanny superimposition of the visible and the invisible, the here and the elsewhere, and the living and the dead. I will draw out some of the implications of concentrationary memory to suggest that, for Resnais and his collaborator Jean Cayrol, ‘fearful imagination’ in the wake of the camps is one that must permanently unsettle all normalising assumptions that, in the words of the film, ‘all this happened only once, at a certain time and in a certain place’. In this sense, it provides a model for (trans)cultural memory as both a palimpsest of superimposed traces and as a Benjaminian ‘constellation’ in which the moment is forever in dialectical tension with history.
Tea Sindbaek, University of Aarhus
‘From Class Struggle to National Tragedies: Public Memories of Second World War Massacres in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav historical cultures’
The aim of this paper is to explore how the history of massacres committed by and against Yugoslavs during the Second World War has been included in different official memories; initially in Communist Yugoslavia, and later, as the Yugoslav federation broke down, in the national republics of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia.
At the end of the Second World War, the Yugoslav communists, wanting to recreate a multinational state and drawing heavily on their heroic victories in the war, had to cope also with a recent history of large-scale inter-Yugoslav massacres. They did that by creating a simplistic narrative of the war, with the Partisans and the Yugoslav peoples on the good side, and the occupiers, collaborators and the Partisans’ political opponents on the bad side. War crimes were ascribed exclusively to members of the bad side, national traitors and members of the ‘rotten bourgeoisie’, thus externalising crimes and conflict from what was presented as Yugoslavia’s patriotic peoples. During the next 40 years, this narrative was challenged and the sensitive elements touched upon, but the basic framework remained. With the breakdown of the Yugoslav federation, however, these public memories were shattered and reputed and new and radically differing public memories, focusing on national tragedies and claims of genocide, were promoted in the post-Yugoslav states of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and elsewhere.
In the paper, I investigate how the inter-Yugoslav massacres have been represented in political statements and major historical works from 1945-2002, within what we may understand as Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav historical cultures, mainly in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia. By the term historical culture I wish to emphasise the numerous ways in which history is communicated and drawn upon in society, as well as the different rules and structures that organise society’s relationship to history. The paper aspires to demonstrate how the problematic history of the wartime massacres was transformed both by the changes within historical culture and by crossing between different historical cultures as Yugoslavia broke down. I argue that the public memories of the wartime massacres should be understood as truly trans-cultural, both because they are based on shared and differing experiences of various Yugoslav groups in the Second World War, and because they are shaped by constraints and demands within different political and national historical cultures.
Cecilia Sosa, Queen Mary, UL.
‘Cooking in Hell: A non-normative response to Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983)’
This paper focuses on the emergence of a new public culture of mourning after Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983). While it has been argued that traumatic experiences are inseparable from the subjects who have suffered them (Taylor, 2003), I will show how the experiences of mourning can be expanded beyond the boundaries of the direct victims –the relatives of the disappeared. Working from the premise that the affects associated with trauma can serve as the foundation of affective, vital, non-normative and non-institutionalized public memories (Cvetkovich,2003), this paper addresses a performance that is currently taking place at the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the military school that functioned as the main clandestine detention camp during the dictatorship in Argentina and where more than 5,000 people were arrested and tortured.
The place has become an infamous site of mourning, and has sparked a heated debate about what to do on its premises: the victims and the democratic government cannot agree whether ESMA should be converted into a museum, an open place or be demolished. Right at the centre of this contended place, the most famous and controversial of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini, has set up a strange performance: “Cooking and Politics”, a weekly open venue where she gives lessons in political activism alongside practical recipes of “combative food”. While Bonafini cooks, the public debates local politics and exchange food recipes. At the end they all eat and drink together.
Working on an embodied idea of memory that largely exceeds the margins of the official duty of remembering, this paper explores the new linkages that can be established between the ambivalent temporality of memory and the presentness of grief. What kinds of affects are involved in these venues? Can they be conceived as an uncanny assemblage between the family rituals at the dinner table and the affects involved in the collective process of grief? How do traditional gender roles appear iterated in this performance? Can this disruptive bio-drama be considered as a non-normative response to the collective process of mourning? The consideration of these queries will also draw on a non-conventional interview with Hebe de Bonafini conducted in April 2009. Finally, this paper will consider how this performance set up at ESMA has managed to constitute a new political system of kinship on the basis of mourning.
Nikki Spalding, Newcastle University
‘Learning to Remember ‘Difficult’ Histories: School Field Trips to Museums that Represent Transatlantic Slavery’
The essential ingredients in creating a durable collective memory that can be transmitted from generation to generation include (1) the construction of cultural memory by institutions of learning, (2) the performance of commemorative rites and (3) sites or monuments that create tangible links with the past (Assmann, 2008: 54-6). Taking as its point of departure national education initiatives developed in tandem with the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, this paper discusses how memory works at the interface between two significant institutions of learning: the museum and the school.
If, as Assmann states, “history textbooks are the vehicles of national memory”, then it follows that government sponsored education initiatives delivered by museums should also be considered as “weapons of mass-instruction” (2008: 64). In reconceptualizing history education’s place in memory studies, Seixas claims that those institutions “whose work has an impact on the next generation have particular weight in considering the future of the past”; he cites the current prevalence of research focused on what “takes place in schools” (2004: 103).
This paper illustrates that an understanding of transcultural memory and the (re)negotiation of national memory can be gained from studying history education practice that take place outside the classroom. Focusing on the learning experiences of school pupils (age 11-14) in museums in England that deal with the history of slavery, this paper explores these sessions as ‘sites’ that produce moments where recent shifts in historical consciousness are rearticulated.
What does it mean to present the transatlantic slave trade as ‘unique’? How are transcultural memories interpreted and appropriated by individuals, groups, institutions and government bodies? These interconnected questions are pursued through an investigation of whether, within the context of these sessions, transatlantic slavery is communicated as ‘exceptional’, or whether it is perceived by museum learning facilitators, teachers and pupils in more banal terms. It is suggested that it is regarded as being distinct (due in part to its pervasive legacy), yet is simultaneously treated as a conventional history topic through which the ‘universal’ themes and skills of the citizenship curriculum can be taught in order to develop “active global citizens” (QCA, 2007: 39).
By theorizing these sessions in conjunction with the museum as a ‘staging ground’ (Annis, 1994), the paper discusses the interactions between concepts of remembering and forgetting; inclusion and exclusion; individual and meta-narratives; local and global; diversity and collectivity; evidence and empathy.
Rachel Steward, Goldsmiths College, UL
‘A Future-Memory: The Space Age’
From a Western perspective America has dominated what could be called the first phase of the Space Age. The Space Race was fuelled by cold war politics, and the imaging (and thereby to some extent the imagining) of Outer Space was an important aspect of this deeply competitive era. The League of Nations 1967 Treaty of Outer Space describes the exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies¹ in terms of a utopian vision, that of benefiting all of mankind. It is the most recent legislation though not ratified. It can be read as a legislative-poetic vision of the future.
In recent years both NASA and the European Space Agency have been drawn into educational and cultural projects with new Space oriented funding bodies and cultural organisations coming into existence. Cultural practitioners have both engaged with and critiqued these new initiatives.
This paper will plot a possible future-memory of the Space Age by drawing out the trans-cultural imagings inherent in the history of man¹s relation with Outer Space. Expressions of cultural imagings will be drawn from science, commerce, national and international policy, science fiction, and practices such as those of the Otolith Group, Yinka Shonibare, Werner Herzog, and the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. When brought together these disparate articulations can be read as shaping a future memory,speculative and science fictional in nature.
Dan Stone, RHUL
‘Memory Wars in the 'New Europe'’
Since the end of the Cold War, the memory of World War II has become central to European consciousness. Indeed, the war is being more fiercely fought over now, seventy years later, than at any time previously, precisely because of the opening up of new discursive spaces after the 'Cold War freezer' started to thaw. In both eastern and western Europe, the common theme of this new discourse is the demise of the postwar anti-fascist consensus and the revival of previously marginalized ways of thinking. This in turn means that an unprecedented assault on the values of the postwar period has taken place on the one hand and that an exaggerated version of them has survived on the other. Through an analysis of political discourse, museums and memorials, I offer a reading of the way in which the shape of memory in post-Cold War Europe has been and is being moulded. This reading identifies populism and demagoguery on the one hand, but also chances for toleration, reconciliation and stability on the other.
Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, UCL
‘Digital Memories and Memorial Culture in Second Life’
The increasing presence of electronic media or digitalisation in contemporary culture are often blamed for the alleged disappearance of memory. The more Memory our computers and servers provide the more we fear will be forgotten. Nevertheless, new technologies make it possible for individuals to record and archive all aspects of life (see lifelogging), and national cultural institutions allocate more and more of their meager funds to the transfer and replication of heritage cultures and their artefacts from physical to digital media. While there are certainly arguments to be made for both the strengthening (accessibility) and weakening (information overflow) of the cultural weight of the past in lieu of digital media, it is rarely discussed in which ways and to what extend digital global media challenge and transform traditional ways of remembering and memorialising.
The cultural landscape that provides the nodes around which we form our identities, memories and communities is undergoing a process of re-territorialization within digital media. As we fly over the rezzing pixelated landscape of Second Life, we realize the human capacity for virtual world-making, and how new media are now being “settled” by people who carry their identities, cultures, their pasts and memories into new, transnational, virtual worlds. This paper explores how virtual worlds, new media and technologies, adapt and structure our cultural and personal memories. How do we form and perceive cultural memories in a digital world Where in national and global paradigms conflate? In other words, how do avatars commemorate in the transnational, digital environment of Second Life?
Though memorial culture in digital and globally networked environments is the general subject of this paper, the discussion will focus particularly on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s learning environment: “Witnessing History: Kristallnacht –The November 1938 Pogroms”, and on memorial sites for Virginia Tech and September 11, in Second Life. It will be suggested that social media such as Second Life present timely, though fragmented, developments of new democratised and transnational efforts to establish collective memories that challenge the institutional and national frameworks for collective commemoration.
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University
‘African mediations: Transcultural writing in Achebe, Gourevitch, Eggers, and Okri’
A number of seminal books on traumatic events in Africa have in common that their author is not a first-hand witness to the depicted events, and that the writing is clearly trying to present both African and Western perspectives, also in the style of writing itself. In this paper four works and their ways of being transcultural are considered: Chinua Achebe’s classic and best selling Things Fall Apart, Philip Gourevitch’s report on the genocide in Rwanda We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Dave Eggers’s account of Valentino Achak Deng’s history in What is the What?, and Ben Okri’s allegorical history of the continent in The Star Book.
Drawing on the work of Cathy Caruth and Michael Rothberg, I shall argue that the works utilizes references to bodily and non-semantic experiences of life, death and violence as a way to pre-configure the cultural layers that negotiate the meaning of traumatic events and subsequently provide a background for presenting broader aspects of African cultures.
The strategies for carrying this out are very different though. Achebe works with multiple viewpoints and an almost overstated reference to both African and Western culture. Gourevitch aims to show how the genocide has deeper roots in Western thought and history, whereas Eggers cuts between African and American scenery to build up a contrast between these worlds. Finally, Okri’s writing strives to be almost universal in its lack of references for long stretches that are interrupted with very concrete images from the colonial past.
All in all, these works provide a sample of different kinds of transcultural writing that also displays how the traumatic event with its universal references to death and masses has a function, but also that there is a layer of cultural complexity that they try to capture and make present to the reader.
Terri Tomsky, University of British Columbia
‘Spectral Histories: Commemoration and Cultural Legacies after the Yugoslav Wars’
How can a person grieve her country and culture when they no longer exist? How can she reconstitute an effaced and broken history? This paper focuses on the memorial practices of Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugresic, who grapples with precisely these challenges in her literary writings. After the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, tangible memories of the past had either dissipated or had been reshaped beyond recognition. For people like Ugresic, who saw themselves as Yugoslavs, there exists an ethical imperative for commemorative strategies in response to the emergence of ethno-nationalist states (e.g., Croatia, Serbia, and the partitioned polity of Bosnia). These strategies must not only work through the traumas of the Yugoslav wars of 1991-1995, but also assert the existence of a multiethnic and cosmopolitan Yugoslav culture in the face of its systematic erasure by new and revisionist state histories.
Using Ugresic’s novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998), as a case study, this paper discusses the relationship between trauma, commemoration, and institution-building. Of particular interest to my argument is the way Ugresic explores other traumatic histories in her attempt to build archives and institutions that testify to, and so legitimate, a Yugoslav collective memory. Here, the memory of the Holocaust plays a significant role, articulating the suffering of minority groups as well as the danger of the drive towards an ethnically pure state. In light of the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars–from the persecution of undesired minorities and the setting up of concentration camps, to the genocidal practices carried out in Bosnia and Croatia–Ugresic’s turn to the Holocaust stresses the importance of revisiting other traumatic pasts in order to cultivate new memorial practices.
Conventionally, such traumatic histories are addressed in museums, those guarantors of collective memory and social history, but Ugresic realises that the disavowed nation and culture has no such recourse. Instead she initiates an anti-hegemonic mode of remembrance. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate this mode, partly by comparing Ugresic’s reimagining of 1990s Berlin with Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927-1940) where entire archives of memory are uncovered from the topography of Paris. In Ugresic’s novel, Berlin’s spectral history, that is, the virtual histories of the Second World War, the Cold War, and the Holocaust, are made apparent by the writer’s attention to the presence of former communities hidden over time. In elaborating these spectral histories, Ugresic not only opens up an understanding of the conditions of political violence, but also reanimates past political opportunities and modes of working through trauma.
Dylan Trigg, University of Sussex
‘The Texture of Death: Memory and Monumentality’
How does the materiality of a monument embody a memory that has never been experienced? Phenomenologically, the question raises a doubt as to the validity of lived experience in relationship to the past. Not only does the past come to articulate something detached from experience, but often the articulation signifies an event beyond a lifespan, so marking an event in history rather than memory. How, then, does the language of monuments transcend the heterogeneity of different cultures and experiences? In this paper, I will intersect in this tension between lived experience and an external history in two ways.
First, by turning to a phenomenological study of the materiality of the Chattri, an Indian war memorial in Sussex, I will consider how the motif of silence is an invariant feature in the language of monuments. Doing so, I will phrase the appearance of the Chattri as an embodiment of silence, which offsets the broader environment, conferring an irreducible presence on the monument. The result of this is a moment of discovery, in which the world is broken up, so writes Lefebvre of monumentality, “with the fullness of swelling curves suspended in a dramatic emptiness” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 224).
Second, by building on this phenomenological foundation, I will contrast a Heideggerian reading of monuments against a Levinasian one. By constructing this dialogue, I will argue that uniting the materiality of the monument with the individual experiencing that site is an aesthetic of death. Against Heidegger, however, I will suggest that the monument serves less a reminder of finite mortality and more as a plea to what Levinas terms “the dia-chrony of the past” (Levinas, 2005, p. 112). From a Levinasian perspective, the monument does less to affirm our fortitude in the face of death, and more to shatter our egocentric bond with mortality. I will conclude by suggesting that the result of taking materiality and monumentality in strictly phenomenal terms is a challenge, not only to our attempt to “place” the past, but also to place our own selves within relation to that past.
Maria Tumarkin, Swinbourne University
‘Transcultural memory as ‘more-than-representational’ – silence, encoding, affect’
I am interested in bringing to the discussion of transcultural ‘figurations of memory’ (Olick), the argument for the urgency of examining and rattling the distinctive cognitive bias within the field(s) of memory studies. To date, most of the mnemonic processes andproducts that we have tended to focus on under the rubrics of ‘collective’, ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ memory have been of the declarative and representational variety. To me, the move towards thinking about movements of memory across and between cultures is the perfect moment in which to start theorising social forms of remembering that do not come to us prepackaged as representational practices or declarative technologies.
The proposed paper concerns itself with exploring some of the ways in which we can move beyond the ‘cognitive bias’ within social memory studies without re-igniting and replaying the debate about the absurdity of thinking about memory in collective terms and, at the same time, without going back to trading in metaphors.
A key obstacle to engaging with the kinds of manifestations of remembering that cannot be reduced to intentional and conscious articulations or representations of the mediated past is a deeply entrenched opposition between representational and non-representational (or declarative and non-declarative) mnemonic practices. This opposition dictates that we either assume that in taking on social and cultural memories, we can only speak about conscious and tangible manifestations and practices OR it valorises the non-representational by deeming technologically, institutionally and culturally mediated forms of social remembering as deeply inauthentic. It strikes me that this opposition is, at least partially, a product of early thinking on memory and trauma, in which affect and representation were opposed to each other and the notion of non-representational memory was subsumed in the idea of the traumatic. Inevitably, both of these positions will become dead-ends.
In this paper, I intend to try out the idea of ‘more-than-representational’ coined in the field of human geography (Lorimer, McCormack) to reach out to mnemonic processes and practices that operate on various levels not fully reducible to cognition, with the products of these processes exceed representational form (rather than being completely outside or beyond it). Specifically, I will focus on the ideas of silence, encoding and affect and their relevance to our exploration of transcultural memory.
Sandra Vacca, University of Cologne
‘Remembering and Narrating Immigration: Two European Examples ‘
Immigration is a topic getting increasing interest from the cultural sector. While many European countries, such as France and more recently Italy, elaborate policies and laws to deal with what is often considered as a problem, many projects have been developed to tell the history of immigration and explain its consequences on society. One of the many possible answers to this social curiosity is the creation of museums, a type of institution which will be at the centre of this research.
Museums are relied on as the repository for Truth. Part of the museums' role is to preserve memories for future generations. They are therefore crucial to the building of national memory and, more importantly, citizenship. Their educational role is also increasingly important as school curriculums encourage teachers to use museums as a teaching tool. Consequently, museums are responsible for shaping national memory, and have a duty to inform correctly and objectively people on events they have not necessarily witnessed, in our case, "immigration".
This study will draw on examples from two different immigration museums, the Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration (CNHI) in Paris, France, and 19 Princelet Street in London, to explore how immigration can be remembered and narrated, and how national memory is shaped. These examples are particularly interesting because in both countries, immigration has close links to a colonial past. The CNHI is a state-funded centre and museum which opened in 2007 after seven years of preparation whereas 19 Princelet Street is an independent museum struggling to keep its doors open.
This study will explore how immigration is remembered in both museums and what strategies are used to tell the history of immigration. It will analyse the objects and storylines used by the museums, and question whether it is possible to tell the history of immigration objectively. The study will also examine the difficulty to tell a national history of immigration through a single museum. Finally, this paper will discuss the danger to create a museum of immigration that would act as a memorial relegating immigration to just a national memory when it is, in fact, an ongoing phenomenon.
Patrizia Violi and Cristina Demari, University of Bologna
‘Memory of a Genocide: Spaces, practices and images: a case study from Cambodia’
Cambodia represents a particularly interesting case for the study of the forms in which the collective memory of a traumatic past is represented, elaborated, manipulated for political and other reasons, and transformed over time in relation to different “politics of memory”.
In order to exemplify some main strategies of such transformations, our paper will focus on some elements and “texts” that are representative for what appear to be “schizophrenic” forms of memory. After an initial, extremely long, phase in which Cambodian genocides were partially removed - or at least not collectively elaborated - victims anonymised, and no reconciliation process initiated to heal this traumatic past, we are today, 30 years after these tragic events, facing a new phase. With the beginning of sessions of the Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodian Courts (ECCC), not only are victims being renamed and finally able to give voice to their personal histories, also perpetrators are being obliged to reveal in front of the whole nation the functioning of the Khmer Rouge “death machine”.
In our analysis, we shall consider from two different temporal perspectives what became of one of the most relevant symbols of the Cambodian genocide: the infamous S-21 detention and torture centre at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. Initially transformed into a museum, The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes, S-21 is also represented in the documentary movie The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, made in 2003 by Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. For the first time, in the movie, some perpetrators, together with two survivors, return to the camp area and re-enact some of their everyday torture practices. Here “what happened”, is both revealed and withheld by specific images, in a style often referred to as “traumatic realism”, which seeks to give body to absence and confront disappearance.
The space of the actual Museum itself is worthy of further investigation, especially regarding the way in which visual materials, and in particular, the thousands of ID photographs taken of their prisoners by the Khmer Rouge, are exhibited.
Finally, we shall compare images of the museum space and their ‘rewriting’ through Panh’s documentary with the words of Guek Eav Kaing (the notorious “Duch”), the main coordinating officer responsible for S-21, in the testimony court. The transcript of his deposition in front of the ECCC, now available on line (http://www.eccc.gov.kh/english/), is an impressive documentation of how the reconstruction of memory of a collective trauma can be carried out.
Colette Wilson, IGRS UL
‘Alexandria’
The rise of Egyptian nationalism culminating in the Suez Crisis of 1956 led to the demise of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan golden age. In her paper, Colette Wilson will explore the relationship between private and cultural memory, identity and exile, and text and image in Alexandrie revisitée (1998) a photobook with text by Jacques Hassoun and photographs by Toni Catany, Anne Favret and Patrick Manez, Bernard Guillot, Nabil Boutros, Gilles Perrin, and Reza.
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