Mnemonics 2023: The Industry of Memory
Participant Abstracts and Doctoral Projects
Yair Agmon, University of California Los Angeles
It’s Only Real Estate: The Market Logic of Heritage and Dispossession in East Jerusalem
Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how re-structuring the political economy at the City of David National Park along racial lines, drives dispossession of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Over the last twenty-five years the private settler organization Elad has operated and managed the City of David National Park located in the Palestinian village of Silwan. The National Park, centered around the ancient ruins of Jerusalem, narrates the origins of a Jewish nation, emphasizing continuity with the past, property claims to God-given land, and the endurance of Jewish sovereignty. In addition to Elad’s project to re-imagine the past, the organization has been rapidly colonizing Silwan by expanding the park’s territory and settling Jewish families in the neighborhood. While not originally an economic project, the promise of scientific proof to Jewish land claims has produced a veritable boom for settlers by collecting governmental grants, donor contributions, and fees from visitors. These funds, meant to bolster Jewish heritage, have been subsequently used to purchasing real-estate, subsidizing settler everyday life, and investing in surveillance and security—displacing of Palestinians from their homes and homeland. Moreover, this racialized economy has also diverted investment and revenue away from a previously thriving Palestinian tourist economy, further excluding residents from an economy based in their neighborhood.
This paper argues that the economic dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of Elad, hinges on cultural memory in three distinct ways. First, following political theorist Robert Nichols, I demonstrate that colonial dispossession—the transformation of native lands into private settler property (Nichols 2019)—relies on a cultural re-imagination of a propertied and racialized relationship between a Jewish nation and the land. Second, I argue that the heritage industry obfuscates memory’s colonial dimensions under market logics— “it’s just real-estate” as I often heard from interlocutors—rendering its violence morally acceptable. Lastly, building on Native American Studies and Settler Colonial Studies scholars who have described heritage and memory as colonial violence (Simpson 2007; O’Brien 2010; Wolfe 2016; Rifkin 2017; Azoulay 2019; Bruyneel 2021) I seek to challenge the assumption that heritage tourism is a “prosthetic” experience removed from the past or limited to affective and imagined dimensions. Instead, I demonstrate that heritage in East Jerusalem—with its archeologists, tour guides, shopkeepers, and tourists— is a structure of dispossession that is part and parcel of settler-colonial violence and the “logic of elimination” (Wolfe 2006).
Doctoral research project description:
How do Israeli Jewish settlers come to live comfortably with the ongoing violence of Palestinian dispossession, and how does such violence is normalized amongst the Israeli public? I look at The City of David National Park, a popular archaeological tourist attraction and a growing illegal Jewish settlement located in the heart of the Palestinian village of Silwan. In 1998 the National Parks and Nature authority handed control of both the Park and archaeological excavation over to the private settler organization Elad. In the past twenty-five years Elad has radically transformed Silwan by expanding the scope and locations of archaeological excavations and purchasing properties to house Jewish families in adjacent lots. Elad has effectively mobilized archaeology to re-imagine the Jewish collective relationship to the past as one of continuity and indigeneity and has used the notion of heritage to transform the material and visual composition of the neighborhood. Drawing on information studies, visual anthropology, and geography, my dissertation provisionally argues that cultural memory is used by settlers to render dispossession invisible and disavow the colonial nature of its violence. In this process, settlers’ cultural claim over biblical origins, couched in a scientifically disputed understanding of archaeological findings, are nevertheless pursued as moral and material claims for property, and ultimately materialized through the transformation of the landscape and the affective registers of the everyday. This dissertation, while focused on Israel and Palestine, makes the following contributions to understanding memory dynamics in the settler-colonial context: a) demonstrating how re-shaping the memory of the past is used to imagine an historical and propertied relationships between land and people; b) detailing how settlers use memory to shift territorial borders by shaping the visual and spatial experience of space; and c) expands understanding of what settlers do by attending to how memory shades participation in colonial dispossession on a spectrum within settler-societies, ranging from perpetrators (squatter settlers), complicit actors (archaeologists), unwitting implicated subjects (tourists), and dissenters (human rights activists).
Christian Alexius, Philipps-Universität Marburg/Goethe University Frankfurt
Loving Cinema to Death: Deconstructions of the Memory Industry and Movie Nostalgia in Cinema Purgatorio
In Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s comic book series Cinema Purgatorio (2016-2019) Western film history of the 20th century is used as raw material for fictitious movie productions about the dark side of Hollywood in particular that are shown in the rundown eponymous cinema hall. In doing so, Cinema Purgatorio is not only part of the “memory boom” described by Andreas Huyssen (1995) but critically engages with the memory or “nostalgia industry” (Boym 2001) that commodifies the ways in which cultural history is being remembered. The use of the Italian term ‘purgatorio’ in its title already establishes a connection to the cinephile classic Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988) that tells the story of a young cinema-loving boy in a rural Italian town after World War II and the power of cinema altogether. ‘Cinephilgood Dramas’ as such are getting equally subverted as movie productions like Hail, Caesar! (2016) or Babylon (2022) that glamourize what appear to be the ‘good old times’ of filmmaking in Hollywood. The films shown in ‘Cinema Purgatorio’ focus on the hidden underbelly behind popular phenomena such as King Kong and bring the film industry’s abusive nature towards its employees to the fore. Using the comics form and its potential to not only redraw and reuse images from movies but also to store them within the confines of their panels, Moore and O’Neill rewrite film histories in a graphic way to alter their readers’ perceptions and memories of the world of filmmaking. At the same time, the story of an old cinema hall in decay where people seem to be rotting away in their seats exemplifies how cultural nostalgia and an obsession with the past can not only neglect the future but also turn the present into a living nightmare.
Doctoral research project description:
Cinephilic Fan Comics as Spaces of Remembrance: Memory, Imagination, and the Archive
My dissertation deals with comics that combine a cinephile interest in film with methods typically associated with fan culture. These draw on film history in different ways, tracing, reusing and recombining cinematic images. Professional comic authors such as SeSar, Blutch or Charles Berberian, deal for example with their own cinematic memories or those of their protagonists, and combine seemingly disparate elements from different films in a form reminiscent of fanfictions. The project is located at the intersection of film studies, comics studies, fan studies and cultural memory studies. The aim behind this is to question the differences between cinephiles and fans that have dominated scholarly perceptions so far and to understand these cinephilic fan comics as an archive of (re)drawn cinematic images resulting from the close interplay between memory and imagination of their comic creators. Located at the centre of this ‘fan cinephilia’ is, thus, a transformative memory work that in addition to more traditional concerns for the ephemeral nature of film images focuses on their personal processing and creative appropriation.
Alice Carlill, Goldsmiths College, University of London
The False Memory of Petro-Industries: Petromelancholia, Nostalgia, and the Psychological Cost of Misremembrance
Stephanie LeMenager’s concept of ‘petromelancholia’ captures and conveys the melancholic nostalgia and amnesiac remembrance that pervades a (particularly American) recommitment to an increasingly obsolete, petroleum-fuelled form of life (2014). Fossil fuel (petro)-industries are refusing to confront the loss and losses of petromodernity, instead pursuing evermore invasive methods of extractivism and (re)commitment to what LeMenager calls ‘tough oil’, thereby activating a politicised nostalgia that conceives and conjures the past as a bygone golden age (2014, p.102). The industries of petromodernity thus create and circulate a false memory that is made the more dangerous for its contribution to a wider cultural narrative that insists on the preservation and restoration of an ecocidal, socially inequitable past so as to guard against the perceived risks of the unruly, unmanageable future symptomised and materialised by climate change. Recommitting to petromodernity against indisputable evidence cataloguing the extensive ecological damage wrought by fossil fuels has significant psychological toll: institutions including the IPCC have acknowledged the (unevenly) growing impact that climate change has on global mental health (2022), with phenomena like ‘climate depression’ and ‘eco-anxiety’ increasingly recognised by psychological institutions (APA 2019). Heeding the psychological damage wrought by petromelancholia – here understood as the affective collateral of the false memory of petro-industries – thus challenges the belief that ‘dwelling with’ the melancholy of ecological grief might lead to pro-environmental ethical and political action (van Dooren & Bird Rose 2013; Cunsolo & Landman 2017). By illuminating the burgeoning psychological cost of petromelancholia, this paper therefore troubles a fundamental tenet that informs much existing ecological grief research, demonstrating, rather, that an unresolved melancholia may reinforce the violent recommitment to ecocidal petromodernity and produce (unevenly distributed) psychological distress in the populations of nations that embrace the false memory circulated by petro-industries.
Doctoral research project description:
My PhD research investigates literature’s staging of the coalescence and conveyance of ecological mourning and melancholia in climate fiction through the affect of ecological grief. Broadly definable as the emotional and psychological distress and despair felt as a result of remembering, witnessing, and anticipating lost and to-be-lost human and nonhuman lifeforms and forms of life, ecological grief is increasingly recognised as an emergent and urgent area of enquiry by international psychological institutions, journalistic media, and academic disciplines including climate psychology, anthropology, human geography, and literary studies. My enquiry is the first to conceptualise a literary ecological grief through positioning a corpus of contemporary Anglophone literature – novels by authors including Jessie Greengrass, Jenny Offill, Alexandra Kleeman and Sequoia Nagamatsu – as a hitherto underused archive of ecologically grief-stricken narrative. I use this literature to develop Ashlee Cunsolo’s framework of ecological grief, which critiques the anthropocentrism of Freudian theories of mourning and melancholia by integrating and expanding upon the scholarship of Derrida and Butler, thereby exploring ecological grief’s capacity to realise the entanglements of the human and nonhuman and highlight the limitations of conventional (humanist) psychoanalytic frameworks. Yet, whilst Cunsolo and others including Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose assert that ‘dwelling’ or ‘staying’ with ecological grief necessarily enacts and incites ethical change and consequent political environmental action, I use my corpus to indicate that a felt sense of implication in environmental crisis might, in fact, produce overwhelming, paralysing, or disavowed grief and despair. In other words, I illustrate the incongruence between theories of ecological grief and its literary representation, significantly departing from predominant ecological grief research. Analysis of these novels is further framed within a wider discussion regarding the role that genre might play in reflecting and conveying ecological grief. As such, my research advances original work into an area of scholarly enquiry that is only just developing: although climate fiction is acknowledged as a flourishing creative area ripe for critical enquiry, analyses of that fiction tend towards confusion and contradiction. I argue that the inherent generic instability of climate fiction productively (though uncomfortably) conveys the affective experience of living through environmental crisis.
Yanning Chen, Loughborough University
Mnemonic Labour and the Transformation of Second-Hand Mobile Phones into Nostalgic Objects
This research looks at the circulation of second-hand mobile phones, or ‘old mobile phones’, as nostalgic objects among Chinese enthusiasts. ‘Old mobile phones’ refer to feature phones launched and sold from 1980s to 2000s and smartphones of an early stage in 2010s. Being transformed to nostalgic objects across different ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai, 1986; Reno, 2015; Valk, 2020), their memorial, aesthetic, and affective values are re-discovered and expressed in a monetary way. This transformation is engaged by a group of Chinese enthusiasts, most of which are men and were born in 1970s and 1980s. Based on interviews with 12 sellers and 19 consumers and virtual ethnographies of 4 live commerce channels, this study examines what economic and cultural practices in phases of sourcing and selling cause value transformation of objects. Sourcing means the process of bringing second-hand mobile phones from other regimes of value into that of nostalgia objects. Selling refers to circulations of second-hand mobile phones within the regimes of value of nostalgia objects based on a shared recognition of object values. It firstly examines four material determinants in the shaping of the regime of value of nostalgic objects, including material originality, industrial design, previous popularity, and scarcity and uniqueness. For sourcing, this study draws on an approach of ‘following the things’ (Appadurai, 1986) and ‘cultural biographies of objects’ (Kopytoff, 1986) to examine two types of material movements and value transformation. For selling, this study focuses on the virtual ethnography of live commerce and uses the concept of ‘mnemonic labour’, which is defined as material and immaterial forms of work and effort to navigate memory production and circulation between cultural and economy, to explore three forms of practices, including ‘transactional labour’, ‘relational labour’, and ‘informational labour’. Overall, the study responds to the lack of concern about economic activities in memory studies (Allen, 2014; Pfoser & Keightley, 2021; Reading & Notley, 2017).
Doctoral research project description:
My doctoral research project studies Chinese enthusiasts’ memories of old mobile phones and tech-nostalgia-motivated circulations and consumptions of second-hand phones. I used ethnographical methods, including qualitative interviews and virtual ethnographies to investigate the circulation of second-hand mobile phones as classics and vintages and the role of cultural consumptions in producing and situating memory of technology in everyday lives. Theoretically, it aims to respond to the lack of concern of economic activities in current memory studies. The study particularly uses and develops the concept of ‘mnemonic labour’ as a lens to explore memory practices in a commercial context. It will also cover transcultural and generational aspects of memory of technology when examining cultural consumption of old mobile phones. This project is now at the stage of writing up under the supervision of Prof. Emily Keightley and Dr. Alena Pfoser. It is jointly funded by Loughborough University and the China Scholarship Council.
Duygu Erbil, Utrecht University
Culture Industry vs. Cultural Circuit: Two Frameworks for Cultural Memory
Recently, the quantitative expansion of the commodification of social life has undoubtedly become more visible, calling for an assessment of the relationship between cultural memory and economy. If cultural remembrance is the constitution of a social relation to the past through widely circulated cultural products, then the study of the production and circulation of commodities in the cultural marketplace can help us understand how the “culture industry” shapes memory. However, this paper questions the limits of using this Adornian term, by looking at the case study of the Turkish revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş. Known as “Turkey’s Ché Guevara”, Gezmiş became a political icon following his execution by hanging in 1972, and some suggested that the commodification of his image meant that his afterlife was no longer available to radical political actors. This paper questions whether the cultural remembrance of the Marxist revolutionary has indeed become depoliticized given that it is largely produced by the capitalist culture industry.
I argue that despite the capitalist production of cultural representations of the past, we can move beyond an Adornian framework that identifies the addressee of a mass cultural product as a passive consumer. Instead of focusing solely on the role of production in the designation of meaning, we can take a cue from later cultural materialists in tackling the problem of narrative agency. I suggest that we need to understand cultural memory to be generated by the entire “cultural circuit” of representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation (Hall, 1997; Du Gay, 1997) to avoid the trap of economic determinism inherent in the term “culture industry”. Furthermore, in trying to avoid falling into mere economism, I ask whether we can establish cultural memory as an integral aspect of “social reproduction”.
Doctoral research project description:
Remembering Deniz Gezmiş 1972-
My research analyses the cultural afterlife Deniz Gezmiş, a Turkish student leader and Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla, who was executed by the military junta in 1972 alongside two comrades. I examine the reasons for his extreme memorability as compared to other “martyrs’ from his generation, and the two other comrades executed alongside him. As part of the ERC project “Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe” (ReAct), my project aims to further our understanding of how contentious political actors are remembered through cultural products and practices, and how this cultural remembrance plays into later activism. I ask how and why Deniz Gezmiş came to be so culturally memorable, and how his prolific afterlife feed into contentious politics today. In asking how and why this historical figure is remembered, I focus on the changing historical circumstances that shape cultural production and consumption, especially in print and television industries. With a cultural materialist approach to memory, I incorporate insights from political economy to understand how production and circulation of the dominant cultural representations of this Marxist revolutionary have changed over time. I pay specific attention to the historical conjuncture in which the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey shifted the media industry’s relationship to Gezmiş and the revolutionary past.
Olya Feldberg, University of Virginia
Memories of Industry vs. Industries of Memory: Soviet Atomic Heritage in Modern Russia
Previous studies have shown that the nuclear industry employs a range of metaphors, analogies, and other cultural means to communicate its goals to the general public (Schmid 2006; Josephson 1996; Brown 2013). In Russia, such cultural production has been headed by Rosatom, a state-owned corporation that oversees the entire process of nuclear development, from uranium mining to the decommissioning of facilities. In the last 15 years, the company started an expansive “atomic legacy/heritage” program. On the one hand, this program deals with the physical legacies of the Soviet nuclear project: decommissioning outdated power plants and managing nuclear repositories. On the other hand, it incorporates collecting and curating objects and spaces to culturally represent and shape what nuclear energy means in modern Russia.
The paper calls for the theoretical clarification of the term “nuclear heritage.” The very understanding of what it is to “be nuclear,” as Gabrielle Hecht (2012) argued, is not simply a technical matter. Rather, it is a concept grounded in power relations among governments, corporations, and local communities in pursuit of nuclear power. Radioactive objects can lose and gain back their “nuclear” status as they move through the global supply chain. Similarly, the creation of “nuclear heritage” presupposes that certain objects and narratives are selected through the practices of commemoration and preservation from the available “usable pasts” (Van Wyck Brooks 1918) of Soviet nuclear history, whereas others are left behind. For example, the violent history of early Soviet uranium mining is rarely included in “nuclear heritage” (Rindzeviciute 2021), and uranium-producing GULAG labor camps in the Russian Far East are not turned into memorial spaces. This paper demonstrates another case of nuclear heritage contestation: Rosatom’s decision to install two figures of the NKVD former leader Lavrentiy Beria in the new museum complex “Atom Pavillion” in Moscow. While some public protested, seeing the museum as public space and equating the figure with a statue or a monument, Rosatom argued that its purpose is educational: thanks to Beria’s effective management of the nuclear project, Soviet Union “succeeded in the shortest possible time to destroy the US monopoly on nuclear weapons.”The paper argues that nuclear heritage is a result of a double selection process: it emerges at the intersection of what is politically constituted as nuclear and what is deemed worthy of representation, both for Russia as a nuclear superpower and for Rosatom as a successful corporation.
Doctoral research project description:
My dissertation examines different ways of approaching nuclear collective memory and heritage in post-Soviet space. It looks at popular representations of nuclear power in the Soviet Union and traces the space of variation of those representations over time, from the 1950s to the modern day. It also compares modern Russian approaches to nuclear heritage (including the initiatives developed since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine) to approaches developed in Semey, Kazakhstan (the place of Soviet nuclear testing) and Cienfugos, Cuba (the place of unfinished Soviet-built Juragua Nuclear Power Plant).These three countries differ in their nuclear capacities: Russia possesses both nuclear weapons and energy infrastructure; Kazakhstan does not have weapons but is currently building energy infrastructure; and Cuba has neither.
At these three locations, I plan to conduct participant observations at nuclear heritage sites, including museums, local memorials, exhibitions, research institutes, and laboratories. I also aim to conduct ethnography at Russian sites that were historically important for the development of the nuclear program – uranium mines, testing sites, sites of accidents–but for some reason are not included in the institutional commemoration, are not considered “nuclear,” or worthy of preservation. Conceptually, this dissertation project develops the theoretical differences between the concepts of “historical event,” “legacy,” and “heritage,”; as well as explores the role of nuclear representations in modern Russian political culture.
Sofía Forchieri, Radboud University Nijmegen
“Impure Resistances?” Reckonings with the Violence of Feminicide Remembrance in Contemporary Latin American Short Fiction
In the past three decades, Latin America has witnessed a proliferation of artistic works and practices that bear witness to different forms of gender violence: from rape, to physical and emotional abuse, to feminicide, the killing of women because of their gender. These cultural manifestations draw strength from ongoing processes of feminist political mobilization in the continent and actively participate in them by materializing and disseminating a transnational cultural memory of gender violence. Latin American feminist theorists, however, have increasingly begun to raise voices of concern as to the status and effects of these cultural mediations of violence against women. Is this cultural production, they ask, not in fact imbricated in a “gore market” (Valencia) that offers up violence as a commodity to be consumed by audiences? And, by mimetically replicating scenes of gender abuse, are not writers and artists contributing to its normalization (Segato, Berlanga)? This paper examines two recent literary engagements with feminicide that intervene in this debate by staging and analyzing literature’s implication in a broader cultural industry that often trades on violence for profit: Samantha Schweblin’s “La pesada valija de Benavides” (featured in Pájaros en la boca y otros cuentos (2010)) and Mónica Ojeda’s “Cabeza voladora” (featured in Las voladoras (2020)). I start by identifying the paradox at the heart of these two texts: namely, that their reflections on the ambiguous status of feminicide cultural representation and commemoration are articulated through the very mechanisms of fascination and violence aestheticization they critique. Bringing together the aforementioned feminist theoretical approaches with scholarship in memory studies about complicity and implication (Rothberg, Prade-Weiss, Mihai), I then propose to take this paradox as a point of departure to critically reassess the conditions under which we write about, remember, and study feminicide.
Doctoral research project description:
Towards an Aesthetics of Discomfort: Feminicide in Contemporary Latin American Literature
In the course of the past three decades, feminist activists, artists, and intellectuals throughout Latin America have struggled to establish and disseminate a cultural memory of feminicide: the killing of women structured by a patriarchal-colonial-racist-capitalist system. As this initially counter-hegemonic memory becomes more and more consolidated, new counter-hegemonic reframings of past and present gender violence are surfacing that challenge and supplement existing structures of feminicide commemoration in original ways. My PhD project sets out to demonstrate that recent Latin American fictional writing by women is increasingly becoming an exceptionally fertile space for this process of mnemonic contestation. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory, memory studies, affect theory, and new formalism, I examine a transnational corpus – including literary works from Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador – drawn from the year 2015 to the present. Tis is the time frame in which feminist struggles expanded across Latin America, placing gender violence at the center of the public debate and contributing to an unheard-of proliferation of cultural production on the subject of femicide. Through the notion of an “aesthetics of discomfort,” I aim to explore how the narrative frameworks, affective registers, and formal strategies mobilized by the literary works in my corpus unsettle and push at the edges of Latin American feminicide memory culture to open up new ways of remembering and understanding gender violence.
Stuart Freedman, University of Westminster
The cockney polyphon: the London pie and mash shop as a site of mnemonic industry
London’s fading pie and mash shops and their contemporary memorialisations, within a recent sub-industry of sentimental, nostalgic memoirs are a unique and timely prism through which to examine the historical changes affecting the identity and ‘authenticity’ of London’s cockney working-class against a backdrop of right-wing populism.
My paper explores the crucial work of memory-making in these largely forgotten sites to suggest the competing, tangled, often contradictory nostalgic remembrances within them are best referred to as ‘polyphonic’.
I argue that the present reimagining of cockney and the recent revalorisation of its associated pie shop culture is part of a larger populist regression, initially provoked by the cultural ruthlessness of New Labour’s embrace of globalisation and the acceleration of neoliberal reforms.
The contemporary memory scripts performed and reinscribed (Connerton, 1989) within the shops lever a romantic nationalism and are those of an ageing, post-war generation self-defined as heirs of past class solidarities linked to historical hyper-localities. These contain both the partial reminiscences of a marooned precariat within the dwindling stock of social housing in the fading penumbras of ‘traditional’ cockney zones and also the transmitted memories of their contemporaries and scions in the pioneering townscapes of Essex and beyond.
These groups confused and bitter at the ending of post-war gains and melancholic for a post-colonial yesterday (Gilroy, 2005) have captured the ‘floating gap’ (Vansina in Erll, 2011: 28) that moves with the passage of time and between generations to dominate the memory landscape by selectively narrativizing and reconstructing the past (Bell, 2003 in Bond, Craps and Vermeulen, 2016: 3). They remain “haunted by a sense of their social dislocation” (Cohen, 2017)
I suggest that the pie shops in both locations hold simultaneous memories that are distinct but synchronous: all playing – like the cockney barrel organ – at the same time.
Doctoral research project description:
The Palaces of Comfort and Consolation – The Pie and Mash shop as a performative space of a contested London working class memory
The thesis examines and attempts to clarify the largely unwritten history of these, London’s first working class restaurants. My work excavates a tracing around absences in historical literature, synthesising existing scholarship and applying new research to extend their relevancy. I utilise memory theory, sensory ethnography and semi-structured interviews to explore the shops and those who use them as temporal anchorages within the neoliberal city and the Essex hinterlands. The thesis contextualises the shops’ development, not within any contemporary family dynasty as is commonly held, but as part of a much earlier historical process centred around the greater mobility of labour during early modernity, concurrent with the ideological and cultural accession of a bourgeoisie whose rise was a synchronous dance with an emergent London proletariat.
These spaces I argue, remain an unmitigated, unpretentious, authentic loci of a culture born of the need for sustenance and conviviality; the food served within, a code for a complex but contested ordinariness. The thesis examines the communities that use the shops (and eel eating) as theatres, temporal anchorages and totems of authenticity in a constructed, performative ritual culture largely closed to outsiders but whose contested memories and identities I argue have great contemporary political and cultural resonance in an age of populism and Brexit.
Central to these spaces is the allied but equally contested identity of the cockney recollected through what I have referred to as polyphonic memorialisations. These I suggest are not merely palimpsestic in a linear sense but rather the result of multiple junctures of memory and identity traces.
Andong Li, King’s College London
Remembering strange encounters: The defamiliarisation of ‘Taiwanese compatriots’ through tourism
This paper sets out to address two understudied directions in studies of memory and tourism. First, the existing literature mainly focuses on memory-related forms of tourism or representations of the past in tourism, while how tourists remember their trips in sociocultural contexts has gained less attention. Second, tourism is mostly regarded as a commercial practice that tends to avoid confronting the ‘uncomfortable’ past and thus barely brings essential change, while its potential to resist or transcend the habitual has yet to be adequately explored. In response to these limitations as well as the theme of Mnemonics this year, the paper looks at the role of tourism between contested societies in potentially disrupting hegemonic histories and promoting mutual understanding. Specifically, the paper draws on the concepts of ‘articulation’ and ‘defamiliarisation’ to investigate how mainland Chinese tourists articulate their embodied memories of travelling to Taiwan with their mediated memories of ‘Taiwanese compatriots’ learnt primarily from institutional channels in everyday life.
The paper particularly focuses on the cases in which — and the mechanism through which — this official narrative of shared Chinese national identity is challenged. Tourism from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, which was first permitted in 2008, provides mainland Chinese tourists with embodied experience to complicate the official narrative of ‘Taiwanese compatriots’ that frames Taiwan as part of China and Taiwanese people as ‘compatriots’. This idea has been hitherto contested but only in mediated ways, and tourism offers a chance to analyse the articulation of mediated and embodied memories, through which ‘Taiwanese compatriots’ are re-membered and de-membered.
Based on interviews and focus groups with 29 mainland Chinese tourists, the paper identifies two modes of defamiliarising ‘Taiwanese compatriots’ through tourism, which either resist or reconfirm the embedded feeling of intimacy. These two modes challenge existing habitus by articulating different tourist memories. On the one hand, resistance to intimacy revives the moments of antagonistic encounters with Taiwanese locals, which created ‘mnemonic hesitation’ throwing into question the habitual intimacy of ‘Taiwanese compatriots’. On the other hand, reconfirmation of intimacy revives the moments of encountering Taiwan’s social progress other than economic development, while maintaining the intimacy of ‘Taiwanese compatriots’ but through an alternative way of interpretation. That is, to see Taiwan as a ‘better Chinese society’, a living proof of how China could have become. Both modes of defamiliarisation point to the strangeness of Taiwan, either by feeling it in the first mode or by knowing it in the second. Theoretically, these findings suggest that embodied memories of tourism, along with tourism’s potential to challenge the status quo, should be understood by their articulation with mediated memories in everyday life.
Doctoral research project description:
Andong’s PhD project entitled ‘The Articulation of Memories: Remembering and Imagining Taiwan in Global China’ looks at how mainland Chinese university students (de)nationalise themselves by remembering and imagining Taiwan through Taiwanese idol dramas (as mediated memory) and tourism (as embodied memory). Based on interviews and focus groups with mainland Chinese university students, the study investigates how they interpret their memories and imaginations of Taiwan from childhood to adulthood, how they remember and imagine according to the present contexts their childhood experiences of consuming Taiwanese popular cultural products, and how their mediated and embodied memories of Taiwan are layered together to construct their understanding of Taiwan in relation to the Chinese nation. The study is located at the intersections of memory studies, media studies and nationalism studies. Theoretically, the study intends to contribute to the scholarship of memory studies in two aspects. First, it sets out to propose a past reception model to conceptualise different forms of interpreting the past. Second, it examines the mechanism of memory on the individual level by particularly looking at how mediated and embodied memories are imbricated in the meaning-making process. Practically, the study intends to deepen our understanding of the rising nationalism in contemporary China through the lens of Taiwan. By directly interviewing university students who are purportedly well informed, well-educated and ICT-savvy, the study explores how globalisation and digitisation may cultivate a new form of ‘empathetic nationalism’ that entails the potential to both strengthen and resist nationalist antagonism. Ultimately, the study aspires to find ways to transcend the national frame and promote mutual understanding between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan from the bottom-up, pedagogically through an investigation into the roles of memory and imagination in meaning-making and social harmony.
Mingkun Li, King’s Collage London
The industrialisation and nationalisation of local memory in China – a case study of Panzhihua Third Front Museum
This paper examines the industrialisation and nationalisation of local memory and related memory discourse in China using the Panzhihua Third Front Museum as a case study. The Third Front Campaign refers to the Chinese government’s 1964 campaign to build large-scale military and industrial facilities in the hinterland for a potential World War III. This campaign ceased after Mao Zedong’s death. It involved sensitive issues such as forced migration and was not publicised by the party-state and was forgotten by the public. Panzhihua was one of the cities built due to the Third Front campaign. Since 2010, it has developed its tourism and cultural industry around the Third Front memories, of which the Third Front Museum is the centrepiece, and which was finally recognised by the State Council in 2016 as being emblematic of the Third Front campaign.
This paper argues against the view that the Chinese memory industry is built from the top down and provides an insightful discussion of the complex mnemonics capital involved in the industrialisation and nationalisation of local memory and the close connection between the two. Through fieldwork and archival research, this paper contends that the industrialisation of local memory not only gives it a material entity, but also links the various sponsoring bodies and integrates their mnemonics capital, helping it gain national recognition. The nationalisation of local memory discursively purifies the dark side of local memory, embedding it in a unified national history that collectively shapes the glorious image of the third front enterprises, the city and the party state, ultimately helping the museum to gain institutional, symbolic and economic capital, which in turn contributes to the further industrialisation of local memory.
Doctoral research project description:
Remembering the Third Front through Chinese screen media
My doctoral research project analyses the relatively neglected topic of how the Third Front appears in Chinese screen-based media including films, documentaries, TV series, online videos, home videos and video archives. The Third Front Campaign refers to the massive military, industrial and transport infrastructure project undertaken by the People’s Republic of China government in the Chinese hinterland from 1964 onwards in preparation for a potential World War III. From 1964 to 1980, the project cost 205.2 billion RMB (renminbi) and mobilised 15 million workers and one million family members to move from China’s more economically developed cities to the backward interior. From the Mao era to today, the Third Front has transformed from a once cold war secret into a multi-layered and rich memory phenomenon. Using a theoretical framework of mediated memory, this project examines how Third Front memories have been continuously mediated and remediated by different institutions, groups and individuals over the last forty years. This project selects six key cases to retrace and analyse the dynamic process of Third Front memories as it is mediated by screen media from 1980 to 2022. Employing a variety of methodological approaches including textual analysis, exhibition analysis, archival research, contextual analysis and content analysis, it examines not only cinematic texts and the interactions between the intermedia texts, but also the memory ecology in which they are embedded and, in some chapters, the audience’s response to them. This project refutes static and simplistic understandings of official history and the dichotomy between dominant official histories versus resistant texts of popular memory. It argues that Third Front memory is a mediated process in which diverse mediated memories contest, coexist or transform each other, and that the relationships between them are complex and dynamic.
Michał Gliński, Jagiellonian University
Forgotten industries, or an industry of forgetting. Memory studies on societal change in 19th century Poland
In this paper I aim to recall an actual industrialization process which has been omitted by the processes of memory industrialization in Poland. Even though Romanticism and what is commonly called the ‘Romantic paradigm’ have an enormous presence in Polish culture, the actual reality of life in the era is barely present in the cultural memory of Poles. The absence of state and the resulting subordination of all spheres of life to the idea of independence has left a significant blank space in what is (allowed to be) remembered of those times. The narrative of a great national struggle for sovereignty pushes aside actual experiences of people living on Polish land, especially since the figures which dominate the discourse surrounding the era – namely the ‘Three Bards’ – all have written almost exclusively abroad. Therefore, the literature of those living in occupied Poland, is also being forgotten. As a result, the Romantic way of thinking – which has monopolized historical discourse and the associated ‘industry’ in Poland – can be described as something of a spectral, disembodied product, shaped by voices coming from a void within the collective memory of the nation.
What is disappearing (in a continuous process) from memory is a time of societal and technological progress, with the industrialization making the old ways of life obsolete. At the dawn of the 18th century Poland was very much an agrarian country and strong feudal prejudices were still present; with the identity of the nation (as projected by its elites) tied closely to the gentry and its rural traditions. The emancipation of peasantry, industrialization etc. were often perceived as additional threats to the already endangered Polish identity. This anti-modern and anticapitalistic attitudes were nevertheless incorporated into, for example, the worker movements of the 80’s which opposed the communist rule precisely in the name of modern values and market economy. Close examination of such gaps in the hegemonic history of Poland is a vital step towards understanding its contemporary issues.
Doctoral research project description:
Hauntology of Polish Romanticism. Interpretation and reception
A broad aim of my project is to establish a hauntological perspective in studying the works of Romantic literature. Hauntology, as proposed by Jacques, is a theory that only recently has been brought into attention in Polish academic circles and has been applied almost exclusively in relation to modern literature and art. However, a fundamental thesis that informs my project is that the Romantic era was a starting point for the development of modern subjectivity and of ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’ as such. My interpretative practices focus on figures of specters and ghosts as a self-identification of the Romantic subject which finds itself endlessly torn between the Ideal and the Real, endangered by its great predecessors and self-inflicted mission (similarly to how Derrida re-reads the figure of Hamlet) and, in turn, conceptualizes itself as living dead, producing a unique form of gothic – which lends itself to a ‘criptomimetic’ reading similar to what has been proposed by Jodey Castricano in her work on horror and Gothicism.
Julia Golachowska, Jagiellonian University
Is difficult heritage difficult to sell? The analysis of museums’s gift shops
In my paper I would like to investigate the issue of souvenirs that are being offered in Polish museums’ dealing with difficult heritage (Sharon Macdonald 2016). I plan to analyze museums’ gift shops’ offers and the way it is being displayed. In order to do so, I will combine discourse and visual analysis (semiological analysis). I will also conduct interviews with the designers of the souvenirs – asking about their motivations, strategies and practices.
I want to compare museums commemorating different events of WWII – Holocaust, the military struggle, deportations to the USSR and the Warsaw Uprising. I aim include the analysis of the following institutions: the Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory Museum in Krakow [Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera], the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk [Muzeum II Wojny Światowej], the Sybir Memorial Museum in Białystok [Muzeum Pamięci Sybiru] and the Warsaw Rising Museum in Warsaw [Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego].
I hope to distinguish specific strategies within the variety of museums’ souvenirs and approach them critically. I will be especially interested in the souvenirs that are designed specifically for children and teenagers, namely coloring or comic books, toys, T-shirts and others. Can those souvenirs be considered having educational potential? Are they gamifying the history (Dichev & Dicheva 2017)? Which historical figures are they portraying as heroes? How are atrocities of war portrayed there? I will also verify whether the mnemonic populism (Kończal 2020) or other expressions of the illiberal, revisionist turn in history writing in CEE can be spotted when analyzing the souvenirs (Chiantera-Stutte and Pető 2003; Trencsenyi et al. 2018).
Doctoral research project description:
Museum of nostalgia. The role of Jewish heritage in Polish memory politics PhD project description
In my PhD project, my aim is to investigate the place and role of Jewish heritage in Polish museums. Focusing on local museums (city or ethnographic museums – so institutions originally meant to present history of the majority rather than history of the diasporas) I plan to utilize the concepts of Jewish revival, new philosemitism, heritage tourism and philosemitic violence (Gruber 2002, Zubrzycki 2016, Janicka and Żukowski 2016). How to work with a difficult past when we want to preserve the heritage of a minority?
Maria Jukna, Jagiellonian University
The difficult memory under the Authorized Heritage Discourse. The comfort women story in the official narrative of South Korea
The history of comfort women, sexual slaves to the Japanese army during Asia-Pacific war remains open and subjected to the constant revision and discussion in the contemporary public discourse in South Korea. The memory of them, as well as their own memories, fluctuates between various powers, serving internal and foreign affairs. Starting from bilateral relations with Japan, through the education system and construction of national identity, to the symbol of Korean feminism movement. The Authorized Heritage Discourse that considers the comfort women story, manifests itself in cultural institutions, public narrative, education as well as pop-culture, reaching broader audience. The heritage industry in charge of preserving and presenting the memory of comfort women is widely subjected to the AHD and creating mostly a top-down, one-dimensional interpretation that shapes the cultural memory of the Korean society. Furthermore, it must constantly clash with the contrasting version of that difficult heritage – the Japanese one, affecting not only diplomatic relation between the two neighboring countries but also determining everyday human relations. The proposed presentation will try to examine how the political agenda affects the critical engagement with the past, re-producing the memory of it, to serve as a bargaining chip and a control system over the society, depriving, at the same time, the victims of their individualism and personal recognition.
Doctoral research project description:
The project offers the interdisciplinary approach bridging heritage and memory studies with migration and mobility studies. By adopting multi-sited ethnography, the case study will focus on strategies of remembering the difficult heritage of comfort women within Korean diaspora. The aim of the project is to shed light on how Korean emigrants cultivate and revise the heritage of comfort women to constitute themselves in unsettling cultural landscapes. It critically challenges the ‘static’ paradigm of heritage as locally assigned and formed by authorities. The project seeks for determining how difficult heritage of comfort women is inherited and revised within the environment of migrant families.
Marianne Kirk, University of Copenhagen
Holocaust education between classroom and the industries of memories
The paper presents my recently commenced PhD project on Holocaust education in Danish secondary schools. In the paper, I will explore the political intentions and the conditions for teaching the Holocaust in Denmark. Responding to recent acts of antisemitism and surveys revealing a rise in hate crimes and antisemitic sentiments, the Danish government in 2022 announced a resolution to prevent and reduce these. Among other means, new mandatory Holocaust teaching in secondary schools is intended to play a key role, in educating the youth in recognizing and suppressing antisemitism and hate crimes in society. My paper will explore this resolution and its congruence with guidelines from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), starting with an account of the political institutionalization of the Holocaust as a joint European memory, aiming for developing a shared relation to the past as building block for a common democratic future (Rigney 2014).
Apart from the rescue of the Danish Jews in 1943, where the population helped bringing 98 per cent of Danish Jews to safety in Sweden, the murdering of the European Jews does not play any important role in Danish national memory. Located in the periphery outside the major killing grounds, Denmark has neither an officially declared regret policy nor a noticeably narrative of victimhood. Although unfolding in a far less straightforward way, the Holocaust did happen in Denmark, for example in the Danish State denying asylum to German Jews escaping the National-socialist regime before the Second World War – an event that is still not part of a national awareness (Banke 2020). For the youngest generations of Danes, generally at a distance to the trauma, this lack of widespread, shared knowledge about the Holocaust opens a gap to be filled in by a large range of memory industries, depending upon different cultural sectors, creating “plurimedial networks” (Erll 2014) of memory production for young adults to stage fantasies and develop “prosthetic” memory practices (Landsberg 2004). Along these lines, it could be argued that the state administrative resolution itself, making Holocaust teaching mandatory in Danish schools, takes part in the industries of memory. While institutionalizing a specific cultural memory of the Holocaust, the explicit intention is to promote particular values in Danish society.
References:
Banke, Cecilie Felicia Stokholm. 2020. “Holocaust in the Periphery. Memory Politics in the Nordic Countries.” In Holocaust Remembrance and Representation: Documentation from a Research Conference. Stockholm: Government of Sweden.
Erll, Astrid. 2014. “‘District Six’ to District 9 and Back: The Plurimedial Production of Travelling Schemata.” In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited by Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney. DE GRUYTER.
Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rigney, Ann. 2014. “Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European Project.” In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited by Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney. DE GRUYTER.
Doctoral research project description:
My PhD project explores Holocaust teaching in Danish education system. The project relies on qualitative research in Danish schools, exploring how young adults aged 13 to 16 with different national, cultural and religious backgrounds make sense of memory accounts about the Holocaust presented in school textbooks and other teaching materials. The project will investigate how students interact with, contest or contradict established memory discourses on the Holocaust and how they relate these to their own social frameworks as well as to alternative memory narratives they might know from media productions and memory industries.
Jo Kreft, University of Birmingham
The challenges of unpaid memory activism
In 2022 I conducted a series of eighteen qualitative interviews with memory activists in Germany, who work on shaping Germany’s engagement with its colonial past and postcolonial legacies in the present. These interviews were part of my research on current postcolonial memory activism in Germany. The research aims to highlight the ways in which these activists have been instrumental in shaping Germany’s reckoning with its colonial past and its legacies for the last four decades.
When I asked my interview partners about key hurdles and barriers to this activism, several pointed out that many memory activist practices, such as gathering, researching, preserving, sharing, publishing and exhibiting memory and counternarratives are often done unpaid. At the same time, memory work does not take place outside of the capitalist structures of the society it operates within. It demands material and financial resources, and memory activists themselves need a financial income to live. This poses unpaid memory activist labour as a significant challenge. In the words of my interviewees: who can afford to engage in memory activism?
Building on research on memory activism (e.g., Gutman & Wüstenberg, 2022; Wüstenberg, 2017) as well as research on the relationship between memory work and labour (e.g., Allen, 2014; Reading, 2020), amongst others, I hope to be able to engage with other researchers during the summer school on these questions raised by my interview partners in order to attempt to make sense of these circumstances and to understand their implications for the kinds of countermemories this activism produces. If there are limitations around the accessibility of memory activism, does this mean that certain narratives are being included, whilst others are being left out?
References
Allen, M., 2014. The Labour of Memory: memorial culture and 7/7. Springer.
Gutman, Y. and Wüstenberg, J., 2022. Challenging the meaning of the past from below: A typology for comparative research on memory activists. Memory Studies, 15(5), pp.1070-1086.
Reading, A 2020, A Manifesto for Activist Memory Studies. In: Handbook of Memory and Activism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Wüstenberg, J., 2017. Civil society and Memory in Postwar Germany. Cambridge University Press.
Doctoral research project description:
Beyond “colonial amnesia” – Transformative civil society activism in German postcolonial memory cultures
My PhD research investigates the current development of a postcolonial memory culture in Germany with a specific focus on the role played by the broad network of memory activist initiatives and civil society organisations in this field. Through the use of qualitative interviews conducted with current memory activists in the movement, my project aims to highlight the variety of memory work done by these activists, key campaign issues, motivations, successes and challenges, and to demonstrate the centrality of these actors for knowledge production and dissemination on postcolonial remembering in Germany. In doing so, the work also attempts to problematise the still widespread narrative of “(post)colonial amnesia” in Germany as insufficient, as it undermines and hides the transformative work done by civil society, postcolonial, and Afro-diasporic initiatives in recent decades. This research builds on memory studies and postcolonial theory, as well as perspectives from decolonial and feminist methodologies.
Linda Mannheim, University of Westminster
“Ask a Survivor” — Representations of Holocaust Survivors in Museum Programmes
“Speak with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides through their interactive biographies,” reads the tagline for USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony. The project provides holograms of Holocaust survivors to museums around the world; visitors to the museums “interact” with digital representations of the survivors. “Imagine sitting in a theater listening to Auschwitz survivor Fritzie Fritzshall as she recounts her harrowing story of the Holocaust,” the project’s website suggests. Other museums, like the Museum of Tolerance, present living Holocaust survivors as fonts of wisdom through Q & As posted online. A recent question survivors were asked was, “Considering your Holocaust experiences, what can you teach us to help us get through this COVID crisis?” The USHMM offers guidelines to schools and organisations “arranging a Holocaust survivor speaker,” asking them to: “Please remember that the guest speaker may not have English as their primary language and sharing private and often traumatic memories in a public setting may be difficult.” Are Holocaust survivors in the 21st Century viewed primarily as an educational resource for non-survivors? Do non-survivors believe survivors possess widespread insight and knowledge that others need access to? And do interactive hologram exhibits of survivors, rather than providing a meaningful educational experience, instead represent the objectification of survivors? Does using a technology mainly associated with games and play (as Corey Kai Nelson Schultz has pointed out) mean that non-survivors also experience the survivors depicted in holograms as unreal? And do the holograms capture only the identity of survivors as victims of and witnesses to brutality – an image of them that will persist after they’re dead? By exploring the ways museums presents survivors’ experiences and testimonies, I will look at how the memory industry helps set non-survivors’ expectations of survivors, and survivors’ expectations of how they must respond.
Doctoral research project description:
Barbed Wire Fever – Holocaust Narratives and the Demands of Audiences
How do we tell the stories of Holocaust victims, both those who survived and those who did not? My project explores this question through a creative non-fiction account of my father’s life as a Holocaust survivor and a critical investigation of Holocaust narratives. This practice-led, interdisciplinary, creative writing project will rely on research in my father’s home country (Germany) as well as in England (one of the places my father lived as a refugee, and where I live now) and Australia (where my father was sent to an internment camp in the outback). It juxtaposes stories that my father told about his life with historic documents, interviews, and visits to sites that were significant in his narrative. Within the work of creative non-fiction, I am planning to explore the ways that Holocaust survivors are depicted in literature and film. Do we expect survivors to have an extraordinary understanding of human nature because of their experiences? Do we feel that we have to learn something from Holocaust survivors? Do we limit what we see of them? Can they be fallible, flawed, complex? I want to explore the environment in which my father told his story. I want to consider the possibility that my father might have changed, adapted, and revised his story to match the expectations of his audience. I want to identify and challenge the limitations that we place on Holocaust narratives.
Kelsey Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara
Virtualizing ‘Internment’ Memory: Mediated Experientiality in the Japanese American Incarceration Visitor Center
Following the end of the Second World War, the American federal government swiftly deconstructed the ten Japanese American Incarceration camps remotely placed throughout six states across the country. Though very little architectural evidence contemporarily remains, many of these sites have since been preserved by the National Park Service (NPS), and now host respective visitor centers open to the public. For instance, Heart Mountain, Wyoming’s center invites visitors to “experience life at Heart Mountain through the eyes of those Japanese and Japanese Americans confined here” vis-à-vis “photographs, artifacts, oral histories, and interactive exhibits.”
The multi-modal exhibitions at these sites are a fairly novel phenomenon, one that parallels the development of what Patrizia Violi describes as the experientialist visitor, who privileges (multi) mediated encounters with – and affective reactions to – moving images, interactive replicas, and ‘things one can touch.’ As NPS visitors centers gradually adapt to this sociocultural model, their programming increasingly encourages viewers to “wonder what it would have been like to live” at each respective camp. Consequently, participatory immersion favors the individualized ‘incarceree experience’ over historicizing the incarceration’s place within U.S. sociopolitical memory, its legacy of intergenerational trauma, and the very implications of governmental detainment and institutional memorialization.
In this paper, I examine the Japanese American Incarceration interpretive center as an exploratory nexus between experientialist virtualization, spaces of trauma, and memorialization. Drawing from Japanese American Incarceration scholars such as Emily Roxworthy and Ingrid Gessner, I first briefly historicize the trajectory of ‘internment’ exhibition and public memorialization, particularly highlighting its evolution from (archival) collection to (inter)action. I then turn to the differing experientialist media – including audio-visual displays,touchscreens, and, finally, the all-virtual exhibit and augmented reality – to consider the implications of mediated ‘embodiment’ and role-playing with(in) (what is left of) the campsthemselves. Ultimately, through close analysis of multi-modal immersion, subject positionality, and the experientialist visitor, I examine the extent to which experientiality enables ‘futuristic’ ties to tenets of both memory and history, and the transformative potential thereof.
Doctoral research project description:
Retracing Internment: Archival Dispositions of the Japanese American Incarceration
My dissertation project seeks to consider how differing archival spaces influence both (inter)national and communal memory of the Japanese American Incarceration. Specifically, I look at WRA- and incarceree-produced photographs, newsreel and home movie footage, and born-digital oral history repositories in relation to their federal and communal circulation and preservation, and the ways practices of appraisal and preservation shift alongside evolvinginterpretations of the archival and visual record. My primary research sites include the digital counterpart(s) to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Library of Congress (LOC); Densho and other small-scale media archives; and the multimodal projects and VR apps now found at the incarceration site itself. By tracing the varying digital entanglements between history, memory, and image, my prospective dissertation ultimately considers how an interdisciplinary theorization of archival dispositions may lend itself to similar events and histories haunted by their own archival traces and silences.
Miya Moriwaki, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Unearthing Narrative Intersections: Grounds for Decolonial Solidarities and a Place-Based Study of History
In her 2019 text Unsettled Solidarities, Quynh Nhu Le explores the potential for emergent “ruptures”––“nascent structures of feeling that […] gesture to the always incomplete project of settler empire building and to the percolating, not-yet-manifest, feelings of an ‘otherwise’ that […] provide a groundwork for solidarities.” While Le traces these ruptures within Asian and Indigenous narrative encounters through a genealogy of fictional works, filmmaker Ann Kaneko offers a material example of such an intersection in her 2021 documentary on the Manzanar internment camp located near the Paiute-Shoshone reservation in California’s Owens Valley. As the project unfolded, Kaneko realized she could not tell the story of Manzanar without also recounting the Paiute-Shoshone’s forced removal, and the forced removal of valley water, from the same tract of land.
Manzanar, Diverted emerges as a “material realization” of Le’s imaginative “crossings” as Kaneko exposes the Owens Valley as an economic and geographic colony holding interconnecting histories of imperial violence. Kaneko illuminates efforts to decolonize the valley through the power of memory and story work––efforts that culminate in the convergence of Manzanar Committee and Indigenous community members to combat recent attempts by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to further industrialize the valley.
Doctoral research project description:
My dissertation project engages a place-based approach that considers the stories, histories, and memories of land, water, and environmental networks, and looks to the possibility of solidarities and decolonial resistance that can emerge out of such intersecting narratives and voices. I am particularly interested in exploring the politics and received historical narratives of bodies of water and sites of land, with tangible, material examples of cross-community solidarities working within a decolonial activism. I plan to use a case study approach by focusing on California’s remote Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra because of its intersection of indigenous history and water appropriation by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (a story best known in its fictional framing in the move Chinatown). My project will draw upon the work of scholars and artists such as Quynh Nhu Le, Ann Kaneko, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Francisco Cantú to open up and amplify a place-based practice rooted in these tangible interstices of history––physical sites of entangled community narratives, inclusive of the environmental bodies, as well––for the layers of history buried underneath but still very much alive and at work in the present day. My project asks: what other sites of converging narratives are unearthed using this place-based approach to history? I came to this place, the Owens Valley for several reasons––one is a particular connection with the Owens Valley and the personal relationships I have with the people of the Tribal Nations who dwell there. I also have a close connection to the Owens Valley because of the Manzanar interment site located there, one of ten prison camps built by the American government for the unconstitutional imprisonment of the Japanese American community during WWII––an event that affected my family, as my own grandparents were forcibly detained in the Japanese American Internment camps. In my research I plan to incorporate historical and present-day community narratives that exceed the environmental and Indigenous community relationship. I will explore cross-community solidarities rooted in these shared material spaces that revealed similar narratives of extractive colonial violence. I see generative potential in this broadening of both spatial and community narratives as avenues for this project and for my future work.
Jennifer Noji, University of California, Los Angeles
The Human Rights Regime and Publishing Industry: Pre-Packaging Memories of Violence for Western Readers
This paper explores how the human rights regime intersects with the publishing industry to create and disseminate particular memories and narratives of political violence. In particular, the paper examines how human rights literature, especially autobiographical texts, often include extensive front and back matter written by editors—for example, prefaces, introductions, and afterwards—in order to frame the book’s content and instruct readers how to consume the text.
In our age of international human rights, many of these editors employ the language and discourse of universal and natural human rights to promote their books as urgent and relevant to Western publics. This phenomenon is demonstrated by Marc Falkoff’s edited volume Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (2007) and James Byrne’s edited collection I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond (2019). By analyzing these volumes, particularly their front and back matter, this paper demonstrates how the texts’ editors package the poems written by Guantánamo Bay detainees and Rohingya refugees, respectively, within a human rights framework in order to appeal to Western readers. Consequently, these poetry volumes reflect what John Sekora (1987) has famously described as “Black message/white envelope,” referring to a common practice in the publishing industry in which privileged (White) editors must vouch for the value of reading the works of marginalized (Black) writers. Ultimately, this paper illuminates how the human rights regime and publishing industry work in tandem to influence the construction and circulation of public and collective memory. The paper thus not only contributes to scholarship on memory and human rights (Huyssen, Levy and Sznaider) as well as literature and memory (Erll, Rigney), but it also calls further attention to the role of the publishing industry in memorial culture.
Doctoral research project description:
My dissertation project, titled The Implicated Reader: Politics of Address in Literatures of Human Rights, explores how literature can implicate readers in past and present human rights violations. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s notion of “the implicated subject”—a figure who is neither a victim nor perpetrator but rather enables or benefits from regimes of violence (2019)—this project examines how particular literary forms can facilitate readers’ recognition of their own position as an implicated subject. The project conceptualizes what I call an “implicated reader,” a term that designates an implied reader who is implicated in the violent events represented in a given text. By examining a large corpus of literary texts across a wide range of genres, including novels, poetry, memoirs, and creative nonfiction, this project identifies various literary forms of reader implication, including second-person address, apostrophe, rhetorical questions, and collective “we” statements. This project thus presents a new theoretical approach for understanding how texts anticipate and affect readers, thereby contributing to scholarship in reader-response theory. Moreover, by examining how particular literary forms and narrative techniques can influence our memory and understanding of past and present human rights abuses, this project also contributes to work in the fields of memory studies, human rights, and narrative ethics. Ultimately, by analyzing different methods for facilitating reader implication, this project demonstrates how literature can contribute to collective reckonings with historical and contemporary political violence. It therefore addresses the central question: How can literature transform the way we understand events and structures of violence as well as our implication in them?
Pratiti Roy, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal
The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in Contemporary Media – Analyzing the Social Amnesia and Memory Politics Surrounding the Marichjhapi Massacre
In the remembrance and forgetting of traumatic events, the media acts as an agency that helps a community or an individual decide on what to memorialise and forget. Locating the research on Marichjhapi Massacre (1979) within the rubric of Memory Studies, this presentation invokes the notion of the Memory Industry to analyse the turn of events from forced amnesia to the contemporary surge of memory narratives in popular media about the massacre and its aftermath. This paper will also foreground the current boom in the Indian memory industry and political propaganda as causes behind the sudden traction gained by the massacre, which until recently was deliberately obliviated by the incumbent governments. This article will draw from the different facets of remembering and forgetting while concentrating on the relationship between media and memory.
The coerced displacement of East Bengali refugees after the Bangladesh War of Independence of 1971 continued in India. The hostile situations of the rehabilitation camps compelled one such refugee group to relocate to an isolated island called Marichjhapi in the Sundarbans, only to be violently ousted by the then government in West Bengal in 1979. There was an overall silence in society surrounding the state-sponsored violence, referred to as the Marichjhapi Massacre, which therefore enabled the State to establish a political monopoly over the details of the pogrom. This article proposes to look at the event as a forgotten mass massacre by evoking relevant memory debates while simultaneously gauging the counteractive effect of willful amnesia. Finally, this paper will aim to locate the varied representations of the Marichjhapi Massacre in contemporary media to determine how media and propaganda influences remembering and forgetting.
Doctoral research project description:
I am a Senior Research Fellow in the third year (6th Semester) of my doctoral journey in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal (IISER Bhopal), Madhya Pradesh, India. The East Bengali refugees occupied the Marichjhapi island in the Sundarbans to set up their homes on land resembling their motherland and regain their lost identity. However, the state soon became wary of their independent presence and created a hostile economic blockade that soon turned into a violent evacuation drive for the refugee settlers. The event marks a horrific example of state-sponsored mass violence unleashed on refugees to drive them out of the island by citing environmental implications in the protected biodiversity of Sundarbans. While the official records say that only 10 people died in the massacre, the oral testimonies have suggested that more than two thousand people lost their lives in the massacre. Until recently, the event had been shrouded in social amnesia and had been willfully forgotten by the elite intelligentsia. My research analyzes the causes and effects ofthe massacre, and the silence surrounding it, by amalgamating interdisciplinary approaches such as ethnography,archival research, Cultural Studies, and Literary Studies. My research also traces transgenerational trauma and postmemory in the next generation of survivors. I have thus far interviewed witnesses of the massacre and authors who have written about it. I have worked extensively in the National Archives of India, New Delhi and the State Archives of West Bengal, Kolkata, since last year, gathering data and documentation to substantiate my research. I visited the neighbouring island of Marichjhapi and interviewed people who witnessed the massacre. Currently, my research has advanced to study the policy implications of academic research on the global refugee crisis, coerced migration, and deracination. I have recently worked as an intern with the Migration and Asylum Project (MAP), New Delhi, which is India’s first dedicated law centre on forced migration and displacement, to attain a holistic idea of the present state of affairs in refugee policy. I am thus attempting to create a holistic study of the refugee crisis and its imminent impact on refugees as well as the society.
Kari Thomas, Carnegie Mellon University
The Dangers of Forgetting in the Coal Fields
Corporations can distort collective memories of industry by funding, and thus controlling, sites of memory, but sometimes they simply destroy the site or suppress public memory of the event all together. In West Virginia, the coal industry has long wielded strong influence over state and local governments, including over school boards. For decades, West Virginia’s history curriculum in public schools valorized coal at the expense of the labor and union movements. And this has consequences for the U.S. labor movement today. In my presentation, I will give a brief overview of the West Virginia Mine Wars and the Battle of Blair Mountain, the coal industry’s efforts to suppress a collective memory of the wars (including trying to strip-mine Blair Mountain), and how these efforts have distorted the discourse surrounding the American labor movement, especially on social media sites such as Twitter.
The West Virginia Mine Wars were a series of violent strikes in the early twentieth century (1912-1921) that culminated in August 1921 with Battle of Blair Mountain. Approximately ten thousand miners battled Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin’s army of deputies and Baldwin-Felts detectives for four days before the U.S. Army intervened. It was the largest labor uprising in American history, yet Blair Mountain has only recently resurfaced in American public consciousness because the 100-year anniversary just passed. Stranger yet, the Battle of Blair Mountain is often remembered as the first time the U.S. Army bombed U.S. citizens on American soil. It was not. The planes that dropped gas and munitions on the marching miners were privately owned planes hired by Chafin, not Army planes. In fact, modern-day discourse about Blair Mountain tends to de-center corporations in favor of positioning the federal government as the true antagonist of labor history. The bulk of my presentation will focus on this phenomenon. How did the coal industry manage to obfuscate its own role in the West Virginia Mine Wars so thoroughly that today the Battle of Blair Mountain is remembered as violence perpetrated by the federal government?
Doctoral research project description:
My dissertation, which is still in the very early stages, charts the trajectory of the public memory of the Battle Blair Mountain. In 1921, as the battle was happening, newspapers across the country drew connections between West Virginia and WWI Belgium, between striking miners and African American slaves, and between union organizers and John Brown. After 1925, the battle was largely forgotten until historians in the 1970s and 1980s began to recover the story from the archives. Since then, public memory of the Battle has transformed and shifted from an environmentalist rallying cry to a point of pride for West Virginians back to a labor movement symbol, all without ever settling into a true collective memory. The larger question I want to ask by using Blair Mountain as a case study is what role, in the age of social media, do historians play in the formation of public collective memory? And what can we do when public memory gets off track?
Clara Vlessing, Utrecht University
Memory Work and Memory Workers in the Cultural Afterlives of Sylvia Pankhurst
In her 2020 biography of Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960), Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, Rachel Holmes defines her subject as “one of the greatest unsung political figures of the twentieth century”, positioning her as a “teen radical” like “Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai” (xii). Natural Born Rebel contributes to a recent surge of public interest in the British socialist, anti-imperialist and suffrage campaigner, whose remembrance had long been the preserve of small numbers of socialist feminist activists and historians. With a musical based on her life currently on in London’s Old Vic theatre, her paintings acquired by the Tate gallery in 2018 and a longstanding campaign for a statue of her that might finally come to fruition, Pankhurst has been heralded as a feminist ‘for our times’. But what are the conditions from which Pankhurst’s cultural memory has grown?
Through an overview of popular mediations of her life and using interviews I undertook with those working to ensure she is remembered today, this paper looks at the multi-agential “memory work” (Kuhn 2002, Jelin et al. 2003) that makes up Pankhurst’s cultural “afterlives” (Rigney 2012). It argues that Pankhurst’s remembrance is based off an interaction between the long-term work of dedicated memory workers – who claim a close attachment to her on grounds of political relatability – and, more recently developments in contemporary politics that have made her an appealing figure to powerful cultural establishments. Contributing to discussions on the relationship between gender, memory and activism (Reading 2016, Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie 2018, Chidgey 2018; Altınay et al. 2019), Pankhurst’s case demonstrates the labour that takes place behind the institutionalisation of historical individuals by contemporary feminism.
Doctoral research project description:
My PhD project, “Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst” looks at the cultural remembrance of women revolutionaries from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, focusing on those involved in social movements from roughly 1871 to 1945. It serves as a case study within the wider project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest (2019-2024), which analyses the relationship between civil resistance and cultural memory in Europe since 1871.
Bhagyashri C. Vyasaramacharya, Goethe University Frankfurt
Situating Wartime-Industries as implicated subjects in the case of Bengal Famine (1943)
This presentation examines the industries’ inclination toward profiteering, effectuating them as an implicated subject (Rothberg, 2019) in ‘industry-related mass death’. It does so with specific reference to the memories of the Bengal famine (1943) that occurred amidst World War Two. The memory of the famine popularized as “man-made” had remained as arising out of wartime inflation, disputed stock, and restricted movement of goods. This paper focuses on the wartime industries and their avarice at profiteering as implications to the famine. Apart from colonial policies, misgovernance, and curtailing shipment, the implication of industries and profiteering remains circumvented. The goal of this paper is to pursue how do these industrial implications of mass death shape memory in rising memory industry.
The famine, examined at length, was early on referred to as “price famine” by Paul Greenough and approached by Amartya Sen within an economic context. Deemed essential, the wartime industry backed by the government caused or at the least worsened the famine by acquiring commodities from rural areas and destabilizing the markets. Concurrently, the government acquisitions drove commodities into stockpiles, also engendering large-scale black market. Though the economic destabilization has been addressed in the famine scholarship, the focus on business interests and profiteering by Indian and Europeans alike has remained rather meagre. This paper concludes that wartime industries and their rapacity at profiteering, effacing commodities and obliterating trade were as much implicated subjects in the mass death of three million.
Doctoral research project description:
Brenda Wang, University of California, Los Angeles
A memory of shadow and concrete: Trauma studies and the screening of Asiatic racialization post-Hiroshima
Scholars such as Lisa Yoneyama and Ran Zwigenberg have maintained the centrality of Hiroshima to the development of memory studies and its related field of trauma studies.[1] Zwigenberg in particular has pointed out how American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton’s encounter with Hiroshima survivors shaped modern constructions of trauma and the category of the “survivor” itself.[2]But the racial dynamics which helped produce trauma studies have yet to be considered, which is striking considering the long history of Oriental inscrutability that characterized (white) Western – Asiatic encounters, particularly acute amongst the Allied powers during World War II.[3]
This paper asks how post-Hiroshima Oriental inscrutability transformed, and was transformed by, the emergence of trauma studies as a discipline and a memory industry. To do this, I examine two key sites of Hiroshima memory: the construction of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which was completed in 1955, and Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). These two objects conventionally occupy different territories of inquiry — architecture and film studies. In reading them not only in conjunction but as belonging to the same field, I take up visual studies scholar Giuliana Bruno’s provocation to expand our definition of “the screen” so that surfaces are taken up as a kind of “architexture.”[4] As “architexture,” we see how Hiroshima mon amour screened a certain kind of traumatized Hiroshima survivor which was then taken up by academic discourse.[5] Inseparable from Hiroshima mon amour are the raw concrete surfaces of the brutalist Memorial Museum, which feature prominently in the famous opening sequence of the film and whose indestructibility and impermeability to radiation I read in relation to what Asian American studies scholar Xine Yao has termed “Asiatic racialized insensibility.”[6] Ultimately, I call for renewed attention to how materiality, real or imagined, conditions the packaging of institutional memory.
Doctoral research project description:
My dissertation investigates representations of Asian inscrutability within Anglo American and Pacific Rim entanglements in the early-to-mid twentieth century in order to stake a claim for the continued political salience of the visibility of the body in our understanding of Asian racialization. By bringing the methodologies of Black feminist and critical race theorists to bear upon an archive of visual mediations, including x-rays of bound feet, colonial landscape photography, and the Hollywood films of Anna May Wong, I explore the possibilities, and limitations, of mediated intimacy in racial contexts.
[1] See Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory, 1999 and Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[2] This in addition to his study of Holocaust survivors.
[3] Writing on the long history of Oriental inscrutability, Eric Hayot has argued that “the Asian body…has always been (seen as), in some sense, a doubled or doubly mediated figure, forced to bear on its surface the mutually intermediating concepts of racial otherness and industrial modernization. In the American context, that body’s figural duplicity has most often been marked by the convention of calling it ‘inscrutable,’ suggesting that its exterior surface conceals an unavailable internal meaning.” See Eric Hayot, “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures: Nationalism and Its DIscontents,” Representations 99, no. 1 (2007): 53.
[4] Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
[5] For example, I am thinking of Hiroshima mon amour’s importance to the argument in trauma theorist Cathy Caruth’s field-defining book Unclaimed Experience. See Cathy Caruth, “Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour),” from Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
[6] Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
