Memory Studies

The article examines the question of whether memory of the distant past can matter today by drawing on a case study of contemporary British memory and myths of the Norman Conquest. The two main sources of data are a corpus of newspaper articles in which the Conquest is referred to, and a quantitative survey of the population of the United Kingdom. In a preliminary discussion myths of the Norman Conquest are described, and differences between recent and distant memory of a significant event are considered. Then the question of intercultural relations and distant memory is examined, in particular whether British memory of the Norman Conquest has an impact on international and intra-national relations today as expressed in attitudes towards the French, and towards foreigners in Britain. It is concluded that memory of past iconic events does have an impact, and that characteristics of distant memory such as multiple remediation, multi-directionality and affective mobility are important in explaining the role and influence of memory of the distant past regarding intercultural relations today.

The study uses qualitative research methods to investigate how Canadian youth construct collective memory in relation to the War on Terror, and deals with the memories and understandings of 99 university students. I find that the landscape of collective memory is both material and social in its composition because it involves not only a human agent who remembers but also a collectivity of significant ‘others’ and material technologies of memory. The study concludes that significant, complex, uneven and mutually constitutive relationships between these features result in the construction of multiple and contested collective memories within a single compass.

Trauma has entered the virtual domain of Second Life. Unsanctioned memorials to 9/11 and re-imaginings of a digitized Guantanamo Bay are but some of the more recent installations of traumatic memory to be found in this relatively new online territory. This article seeks to understand how Second Life participates in an affective economy of performative empathy through remediating the traumas of ‘those’ who have suffered ‘elsewhere’. In contemplating one particular online Holocaust museum – the US Holocaust Museum’s Kristallnacht in Second Life, it examines how Second Life participates in the circulation of a range of ‘wound culture’ affects in problematic ways.

The death of legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite in 2009 impelled former and present television journalists to revisit both Cronkite as an individual and the journalistic era of the 1960s and 1970s in which he worked. Through a qualitative analysis of television and National Public Radio (NPR) discourse in the four days following Cronkite’s death, this study examines emergent interpretive patterns in the memorializing of the anchor. Beyond a nostalgic return to the past, the death of Walter Cronkite provided the journalistic community with an occasion to discuss the state of television news. By comparing Cronkite and his era with the present, television journalists were able to contrast an era when television news was dominated by only a handful of powerful networks with the fragmented, heterogeneous news environment of the present. As this study demonstrates, collective memory reveals the conflicted state of television journalism through twin narratives of continuity linking a shared past to the present as well as a narrative of decline from an era of mass audiences and cultural power never to be repeated.

Greenham and Crookham Commons in West Berkshire, UK, are geographic places identifiable on satellite images and survey maps. This article complicates simple physical mappings of the Commons by analysing the mental maps that emerge from the recorded memories of 12 elderly participants engaged in a ‘reminiscence project’. Originally part of a community sound installation, the recordings provide insights into lives lived in and around the Commons from the early 20th century to the present day. Following a chronological structure linked to the geographical features of the Commons, the article examines myths and stories associated with these shared spaces as they were transformed by time, history and ageing. Early childhood memories of the landscape of the Commons create a virtual cartography that brings to the fore experiences of daily life and practices of space belonging to earlier generations. These memories are set in stark contrast to the memories of the US army occupation of the Commons, and of the anti-nuclear protests that made them famous. Considering these virtual cartographies enables reflections on the relationship between memory, space and landscape over time as well as on the unique ways in which old age may alter conceptions of space in shared reminiscences.

The traditional approach towards the research on remembering at a later age has therapeutic connotations. It is usually associated with treatment techniques against depression or dementia. Within the context of social remembering studies, the role of eyewitnesses of the past is routinely assigned to the older generation. Within those research frameworks recollections are often treated as a ready-made means that can help older people to address their current problems. We shall argue that the essential value of remembering at a later age overrides such clinical applications and consists not in reviving the past as it ‘really happened’, but in re-evaluating it. In order to demonstrate this we shall draw on everyday remembering, purposely setting aside any structured form of reminiscing. The analysis will elucidate ethical shifts in attitudes towards the past and contribute to the discussion about the authenticity of memories.

Using a case study of official representation of communism in Romania, this article addresses the rhetoric of historical representation and some of the ways in which the collective memory of communism is managed in the context of how post-communist democracies reckon with former regimes. It specifically centres on the public accomplishment of coming to terms with the past in the ‘Tismăneanu Report’ condemning communism in Romania. Using an ethnomethodologically inspired critical analysis, the article examines how the report and texts supporting it address the issue of how to take the communist era into public consciousness. The shaping of a specific representation of communism and the making of political-moral judgments in the report is legitimated by (1) treating communism as a category of the macro-social and textually mediated reality, (2) constructing the need for a scientific approach, and (3) conceiving communism as Other, alien to national identity and national interest. General implications for the substance and meaningfulness of coming to terms with recent history are discussed.

There are important reciprocities between conflict and memory, which often become embedded in disputed places or territories central to ethnonational conflicts. In Cyprus, the conflict and the subsequent division of the capital city of Nicosia, has disrupted the relationship between place and memory, as populations faced upheaval and displacement. The inability to cross the border running through the city center, from 1974 until checkpoints opened in 2003, resulted in the intensification of many aspects of memory, including forgetting, nostalgia and screen memory as related to the city. This article will describe Nicosia’s historic walled city center as a shell of memory by examining the material reality of the city today and investigating subjective constructions whereby the graphic image of the walled city is used as a symbol. The contested walled city is a site that negotiates between remembering and forgetting, between past and present, and between inside and outside.