Memory Studies

This paper discusses the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace built in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Installed in 2011 to commemorate so-called “comfort women”—the former sex slaves forced to work in brothels during Korea’s occupation by the Empire of Japan—, several identical-looking copies of the statue have since spread throughout the country and beyond. While many observers have noted the symbolic politics of the sculpture, I argue for taking into account its material dimension too—with the aim of furthering our understanding of how commemorative practices are enabled by mnemonic installations. Building on the scholarship that has addressed the rhetoric of objects and places of remembrance, I ask how the statue acts on and engages with its viewers. Among others, site visits, observations, own experiences, interviews, and visual documentation serve as the basis of the discussion.

In the midst of the activism outburst after the Ayotzinapa crisis, the Mexican collective ‘Rexiste’ wrote the phrase ‘It was the state’ in Mexico City’s main square. I define such action as an embodied practice of memory, which re configurates Mexico’s history of violence. Based on an affective approach, I delve into the kinaesthetic of the performance to show how the action is summoning archived repertoires of Mexican activism post-1968. I first refer to the foundation of human rights committees in the late 70s and their main repertoire of action, hunger strikes, to then consider the funeral re-enactments of the late 1990s after the Aguas Blancas and Acteal massacres. Through this unarchiving I want to analyse how the unresolved past re-emerges in the creation of a non-teleological temporality of state-fostered violence.

Many Lebanese films and documentaries of the last few decades have focused on the hidden legacies of the civil war (1975–1991) that remain unprocessed in public, and often private, life. Unsurprisingly, these works have often been discussed by critics through the lens of traumatic cultural memory. In the first part of this article I argue that this model is productive yet insufficient. I suggest, instead, a methodological approach which acknowledges the intersections between trauma and other processes underpinning everyday life in the city. In the second part of the article I apply this approach to the film A Perfect Day (Hadjithomas and Joreige, 2005). Using the directors’ own concept of latency, I analyse the affective modes of touch, breath and the hidden life of objects to show how the performative existential drama that unfolds in the film opens out onto processes that go beyond the haunting legacies of violence from the civil war and includes a vision of singularity and infinite possibility that relates back to the birth of cinema itself.

The experience of the Partition (1947)—the contexts of migration and the experience of refugeehood—in East-India is assumed to be different from that in the West. But, even after some 70 years after the Partition, there has been no substantial study on the difference in the ontology of refugeehood across the two sites. More to it, narratives from the North-east (Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura), which again differ significantly from their western Indian or West Bengali counterparts, are under-represented in the existing database of oral narratives and ethnographies on the Partition. Departing from here, this paper engages in a critical comparative study—across three spatial axes: western India, West Bengal, and North-east India—of the third generation’s experience of “growing up refugee” in India. It offers a nuanced, but empirically-grounded, insight on how memories and narratives of the Partition are grounded in the linguistic registers of those who “grew up refugee” (not the refugees per se). Based on interviews, this paper analyzes the patterns, circulations, transactions, tropes, and motifs in the linguistic registers using methodologies of Digital Humanities, and how they compare across spatial axes.

Android fiction has connected memory to personhood in a variety of ways. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–2014) and its British remake Humans (2015–2018) argue that lived experience is insufficient for making memories authentic. If experiences are to be more than data, they must be imprinted with affect or another subjectivizing force. For the humanoid robots themselves, such memories do not anchor their identity in the past, but in the evolutionary potential of their future. The present-day narratives of these series thus function as pre-memories both for androids that must unite around a creative imaginary, and for viewers who are encouraged to prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s new master-narrative, something akin to Yuval Harari’s dataism, an intersubjective posthumanist creed. Freed from the tyranny of prosthetic and inauthentic memories, the androids join a super-intelligence that offers dataist universal interconnectivity, which is portrayed as a benevolent break with humanism.

This article analyses the role commemoration of Fascist and anti-fascist martyrs played in the battle for political influence in the Italian diaspora of the United States during Mussolini’s early rule. It is structured around two case studies: the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, killed in Rome in 1924, and Giuseppe Carisi and Michele Ambrosoli, two Blackshirts killed in the Bronx on their way to the Memorial Day parade of 1927 in New York. Through an examination of sites of memory and commemoration ceremonies held in both Italy and the U.S., it adds a transnational element to the study of the role of secular martyrdom in the construction of collective identity, concluding that the transnational exchange evident in commemoration of both case studies added to the propagandistic power of the martyrological narrative by drawing meaning from geographical distance from Italy.

This article considers the history-based research networks funded by the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development (FPs). It sheds light on the interactions between the European Commission and scholars – Commission-appointed experts, funded researchers, but also scholars who disagree with the EU memory policy. Even if the scholars’ influence is significant, the FPs remain an instrument in the hands of the European Commission. The visions of the history of Europe brought forward are in conformance with official narratives highlighted by works on other EU memory policy instruments. This leads to a confrontation between ‘authorised’ and alternative narratives at European level. While the institutionalisation of European research networks as a form of knowledge production which is intended to be specifically European contributes to shaping ‘Europe’, the idea of the emergence of an autonomous ‘European memory space’ nevertheless deserves nuancing because of the FPs’ fragmented nature and of the role that national academic levels continue to play.

Colombia is one of the countries that has opted for a model of restorative justice to repair the victims of the armed conflict. To accomplish this, it has created a series of reparation laws which involve building scenarios to foster a call for remembrance (duty of memory) and in which the truth can be cleared up. The objective of this study is to provide a discourse analysis of how the notion of memory is constructed within the official reparation policies in Colombia. A discourse analysis of Law 975, Law 1408, and Law 1448 was carried out, using the logic of interpretive repertoires. As a result, it was possible to identify four repertoires: Institutional, Archival, Commemorative, and Reparative. The increasing globalization of reparation policies and the use of memory for the purpose of institutionalization that hinders the possibility of interpreting the past in another way, is discussed.

Queer and trauma theory both concern internal experiences that challenge normative social frameworks. Considering the roles of queerness within trauma and memory studies opens interpretive pathways for otherwise discredited or inaccessible meanings. It also relates survivors’ receding knowledge to those currently “queered” or endangered. With a focus on childhood and mother-child relationships, this article maps intersections of memory studies, queer theory, and trauma theory, applying subsequent insights to an “autotheoretical” analysis of the author’s own transnational, post-Holocaust family across four generations. It explores the possibility through queer studies of excavating new post-traumatic meanings and relating those meanings to present contexts.

The essay seeks to explain how and why rightwing populists in Europe, North America, and beyond have developed an “illiberal” politics of memory in opposition to the global liberal memory culture of the past generation. After explaining the rise of “illiberal memory” as a byproduct of the rise of illiberal democracy since 2008, the essay advances a comprehensive typology of the movement’s overall objectives and tactics based on numerous empirical examples from different nations, including Germany, Russia, the United States, Israel, and India. It concludes with some reflections about how illiberal memory is likely to evolve in the future. The essay is the first to advance the concept of “illiberal memory” and present an overall theory of its origins and agenda.

Through a qualitative content analysis of an ideologically representative sample of influential media outlets in Spain, this article identifies three principal discursive frameworks surrounding Franco’s exhumation. These frameworks expressed not only deep disagreements over the direction of Spain’s regime of remembrance, but reflected deeper anxieties over the state of a democracy in crisis. More broadly, this analysis responds to calls to engage with journalistic sources in the memory studies literature, while illustrating the role of collective memory in collapsing past, present, and future in the articulation of political identities.

To date, most research has investigated people’s representations of the national past and future separately and the few that examined the relationships between the two overlooked the role of the group’s present. The present study aimed to replicate previous results showing an implicit trajectory of national decline among Americans within a French sample and additionally examined whether perceived societal anomie— that is, perceiving that present society is disintegrated and disregulated—would accentuate this trajectory of decline. Results first showed a positivity bias for the French past and a negativity bias for the French future; thus, replicating previous results showing an implicit trajectory of national decline in another national context. Moreover, the trajectory of decline was steeper for participants who perceived present French society as highly anomic; but only because they projected more negative national futures. Explanations for the conflicting results in the literature regarding valence biases in collective memory are discussed.

In recent years, political leaders from around the world have been provided with a tour of Argentina’s Parque de la Memoria. What explains their detour from the affairs of state to a park that commemorates the victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship? How do these visits sit alongside other, everyday uses of the space? Borrowing from de Certeau, I interpret these practices as practices of memory. I analyse the ‘pedestrian speech acts’ through which key stakeholders attempt to divert these practices towards a particular construction of the memory space. The invitation to a global political elite can be read as a strategy to protect the symbolic order of the memory of the desaparecidos by performatively enacting a transnational community of memory in mourning. This leaves the park vulnerable to those who would mobilise these mourning rituals as a tactic to dismantle any politics that might take place at the park.

This article explores the use of the UNESCO Memory of the World programme in claims for recognition of atrocities, focusing on two recent nominations: Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’. We argue that amid domestic and international contestation of memories and historical accounts, cultural programmes, such as the Memory of the World, have become increasingly politicised and used to push for international recognition of past atrocities. The article reflects on the character of the Memory of the World programme and the core reasons for nominations to such programmes. It also considers the possible consequences of registration as it transposes the heritage of memory from the local to the global stage (and back) and in the process subjects both memory and heritage to various forms of authorised transformation and reification. We bring attention to how official recognition by the Memory of the World affects ongoing collective memory formation, and express concerns about the appropriation of individual and local memories, as they are granted universal value.

In the current study, we investigated the organization of autobiographical memory in view of the Living-in-History effect, which is visible when personal memory and historical memory become intertwined. We investigated how often participants dated their own personal recollections with reference to important historical events (such as the Fall of Communism). Furthermore, we also examined whether cultural life script events served as a prominent strategy to date personal memories in our sample of 35 participants (M_age = 69.76 years, SD = 8.26). This study failed to document the Living-in-History effect, as participants mentioned only few historical events of interest to this study when dating their personal memories. In addition, supporting the Cultural Life Script theory, participants employed culturally transmitted knowledge to navigate through their autobiographical memories. We conclude that for our sample, historically defined autobiographical memories mainly develop when the specific public events affect in a dramatic manner the individuals’ lives.

This article explores one of the possible approaches to the question of future in memory research. It aims to show that both the currently anticipated future as well as future past and the affective facts construed on its basis (B. Massumi) are a part of collective memory. Polish memory of the Second World War is the main analytical focus in the article and it is considered as a particularly clear example of the influence held by that which did not occur, but merely might have, over contemporary politics of memory. It is argued that the analysis of the visions of the future, which are expressed, for example, in alternative histories, can be beneficial for research on the functioning of at least some European politics of memory, and in particular for those focused on contemporary Polish memory, which is entangled in the need for a constant rewriting and restructuring of the memory of the past.

Issues of time and temporality are highly relevant to the field of transitional justice. The very concept of ‘transition’ and transitional justice processes more broadly reflect a linear and teleological understanding of time that moves in a particular direction. While building on existing temporal critiques of transitional justice, this interdisciplinary article makes two original contributions to this corpus of scholarship – empirical and conceptual. First, emphasizing what it refers to as ‘the living past’, it draws on qualitative interviews with victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda to explore empirically some of the various ways that the past experientially intruded into the interviewees’ present. Second, it utilizes the analogy of the coagulation cascade, a biological blood-clotting process, to reflect on how transitional justice processes might move beyond linear temporal conceptualizations to recognize lived experiences of time and the multiple ways that individuals – as well as communities and societies – continue to coexist and transition with the living past.

For mainstream theories, memory is a skull-bound activity consisting of encoding, storing and retrieving representations. Conversely, unorthodox perspectives proposed that memory is an extended process that includes material resources. This article explains why neither representationalist nor classical extended stances do justice to the active and constitutive role of material culture for cognition. From Material Engagement Theory, we propose an alternative enactive, ecological, extended and semiotic viewpoint for which remembering is a way of materially engaging with and through things. Specifically, we suggest that one remembers when one updates their interactions with the world, a form of engagement previously acquired through sociomaterial practices. Moreover, we argue that things are full-fledged memories, since they accumulate and bring forth how we have materially engaged with them over different timescales. Last, we highlight the need for studies considering the cognitive ecologies where remembering takes place in its full complexity.

This article illustrates the predicaments of self-acclaimed global cities that come under pressure to decolonise heritage practices. Examining the politics of public memory in post-imperial Hamburg through the inner-city redevelopment project Hamburg HafenCity, it shows how commemorative landscapes are co-produced by market rationalities. Through document analysis and interviews with city planners, artists and campaigners, the article explores urban toponymies and heritage sites as relational and contested configurations of post-colonial memory and culture. It finds that the HafenCity’s colonial heritage premediates the area’s contemporary symbolic programme which celebrates European expansion, cosmopolitanism and Hamburg’s maritime tradition. The article engages with the multiple modes of encounter and performative responses that (neo-)colonial memory landscapes elicit. It redraws the affective geographies of (un-)belonging in a post-imperial city and charts decolonial propositions of civil society actors.

This article examines the work of two diasporic memory organizations, Kresy-Siberia and Houshamadyan, which have both developed Internet platforms to collect and share information about lost homelands: in the former case, the pre-Second World War eastern borderlands of Poland; in the latter, the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire that were destroyed by genocide. The article draws on interviews undertaken with participants in order to examine the activism of these two diasporic memory groups and to analyse the relationship between memory practice and the online space. The article asks what difference the creation of an online platform makes to such groups, both for individuals and for the wider diaspora, and seeks to understand how the possibilities offered by these platforms shape diasporic practice. The article shows how, despite the apparent similarities between the online presences of these two organizations, their use of the Internet facilitates diverse forms of memory practice, which are influenced by the historically specific needs of participants in these different diasporic communities.