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Publications (101)
This article explores the role of archives and archiving in the memory–activism nexus with reference to the various ‘movements of the squares’ that started in 2011. The Egyptian Uprising, 15M, Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Uprising and Nuit Debout each made concerted efforts to ensure their future remembrance by laying down an archive in which their...
This editorial introduces the 12 articles collected in this special issue on Remembering Activism: Explorations in the memory-activism nexus. It frames the articles within current debates in the field of memory studies and social movement studies on the entanglements between memory work, on the one hand, and activism directed towards social transfo...
The archiving of social movements has long contributed to their cultural impact. Given the wide availability of digital tools for the making and storing of records, ‘autonomous’ archiving is today becoming a significant part of the activist toolkit itself. In parallel, professional archiving has undergone significant change, leading to more partici...
Study on controversial commorative monuments in public space
Publieke monumenten kunnen sterke emoties oproepen. De laatste jaren veranderen onze opvattingen erover radicaal, onder invloed van bewegingen als Black Lives Matter, door sociale bewustwording en de groei van historisch besef. Soms worden de helden van vroeger van hun sokkels getrokken maar het verwijderen van beelden wist de geschiedenis niet uit...
Social movements are not only remembered in personal experience, but also through cultural carriers that shape how later movements see themselves and are seen by others. The present collection zooms in on the role of photography in this memory-activism nexus. How do iconographic conventions shape images of protest? Why do some images keep movements...
The chapter exemplifies an approach to memory outside the framework of the nation state, centered on the acts of “articulation” (Hall; De Cesari and Rigney) that create “unscripted linkages” (Rothberg) between disconnected mnemonic groups. The focus on “acts of articulation” reveals the cultural mechanisms whereby individuals and groups come into i...
This article takes as its point of departure the recent wave of contestations relating to colonial-era monuments in Europe. While the toppling of monuments has long been a part of political regime change, recent attacks on monuments need to be understood instead, not as celebrations of a change that has already occurred, but as attempts to affect ‘...
This article examines the role of the creative arts in renegotiating the border between memorable and unmemorable lives. It does so with specific reference to the (un)forgetting of the colonial soldiers in European armies during World War One. Focussing on the role of aesthetic form in generating memorability, it shows how the creative use of a med...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explain...
This article argues for the need for memory studies to go beyond its present focus on traumatic memories and to develop analytical tools for capturing the cultural transmission of positivity and the commitment to particular values. Building on an emerging interest in the relationship between memory and activism, it puts its case for a re-orientatio...
Given its increasingly multiethnic composition Canada does not fit traditional models of collective memory that imply a fixed relationship between what is remembered and the mnemonic community doing the remembering. This essay draws out some of the particularities of Canadian memory culture in order to show how it exemplifies in vitro a general pri...
This article revisits Anthony Smith's landmark collection Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999) from the perspective of recent developments in cultural memory studies. It argues for a more clearly demarcated distinction between myths and memories which acknowledges cultural memory as a site of new experiential perspectives that often work against...
This article explores the contribution that cultural memory studies can make to the debate about the role of ideas and the dynamics of ideational change in policy making. Cultural memory studies engage with the cultural dimensions of remembering, and analyse how shared images of the past are mediated and transferred across distance and time. Such r...
This roundtable brings together a group of academics and artists working throughout Europe to discuss the question of memory in theoretical and artistic contexts at a historical moment highly preoccupied with acts of commemoration and moving memory.
This paper approaches Scott's writings, his antiquarianism, and his husbandry in an integrated way, treating them together from the perspective of his keen awareness of the materialised presence of the past in the physical environment. Scott's ecological approach to cultural memory, as expressed both in his fictions and in his activities, explains...
On 15 June 2010 the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, David Cameron, addressed the Lower House of the British parliament in a speech that lasted some ten minutes and included the following words:
I know that some people wonder whether, nearly 40 years on from an event, a prime minister needs to issue an apo...
These are the opening lines the Chronicle of the Hundredth Birthday of Robert Burns, edited by James Ballantine and published in May 1859.2 Ballantine’s chronicle records a mind-boggling total of 872 celebratory events, which had taken place in city halls, corn exchanges, local meeting halls, hotels, and private houses on 25 January earlier that ye...
There is a paradox at the heart of centenaries. On the one hand, each event positions itself as totally singular and ‘historic’, as a one-off affair devoted to the memory of a unique individual or event that can at best be replicated at intervals of 100 years. On the other hand, as this volume amply shows, the idea of publicly celebrating the memor...
This volume offers detailed accounts of the cults of individual writers and a comparative perspective on the spread of centenary fever across Europe. It offers a fascinating insight into the interaction between literature and cultural memory, and the entanglement between local, national and European identities at the highpoint of nation-building.
Samuel Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare’s works (1765) represented a landmark in the canonization of the bard, presenting him as an original genius on a par with Homer and the benchmark authors of classical antiquity. In the preface, Johnson raised Shakespeare to the dignity of an ‘ancient’ - what nowadays we would call a ‘classic’ - someone whose...
Ideas about the future of Europe have been articulated from the late 1940s in tandem with ideas about the European past and the need to overcome its violence. This has led to the gradual emergence of a master-narrative that found expression in the Nobel Peace Prize of 2012 as well as in the planning of a "European House of History" in Brussels, whi...
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Throughout Europe, narratives about the past circulate at a dizzying speed, and producing and selling these narratives is big business. In museums, in cinema and opera houses, in schools, and even on the Internet, Europeans are using the power of performance to craft stories that ultimately define the ways their audiences understand and remem...
Using street-names referring to Waverley and Abbotsford as a starting point, this book explains how the work of Walter Scott (1771-1832) became an all-pervasive point of reference for cultural memory and collective identity in the nineteenth century, and why he no longer has this role. It breaks new ground in memory studies and the study of literar...
Chapter 5 turns to Scott’s role in creating synthetic ‘memory sites’ in an age of increased mobility. It first describes how his work helped create an imaginary map of Scotland around memory-laden locations that became tourist destinations. Visitors to locations like Lake Katrine, including Queen Victoria, were re-enacting Scott’s stories even as t...
The centenary celebrations of Robert Burns on January 25, 1859, took the form of more than eight hundred meetings across the English-speaking world at which participants celebrated both the memory of the poet and, especially through the use of the telegraph, their own present-day inter-connectedness. This article situates this extraordinary event w...
In the course of the nineteenth century, the Ayrshire cottage in which Robert Burns first saw the light of day on 25 January 1759 became an internationally renowned tourist destination attracting visitors from all over the British Isles, North America, and Europe. Its prominence was enhanced by tie-in publications including the richly illustrated L...
Over the last fifty years there has been much discussion about the value of narrative in the production of historical knowledge whereby it is generally assumed that “narrative” is a given and that the only thing at issue is its epistemological value. This article critically examines this assumption. It shows how conceptions of “narrative” have muta...
Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was a popular and critical success when it first appeared, and has had a notable impact on popular perceptions of “the bombing of Dresden,” although it has been criticized by historians because of its inaccuracy. This article analyzes the novel's quirky, comic style and its generic mixture of science...
This collection links the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus in particular is on mediation and remediation as two fundamental aspects of media use, and on the dynamics between them. Key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How...
The commemoration of the participation of Irishmen in the British army in the first World War has reflected the political divisions on the island. This article focuses on the Irish National War Memorial, which was built in the 1930s in Dublin but only officially opened in the 1990s, and analyses the cultural life of this monument in relation to the...
Over the last decade, ‘cultural memory' has emerged as a useful umbrella term to describe the complex ways in which societies remember their past using a variety of media. Where earlier discussions of collective memory had a thematic focus and were concerned above all with identifying the ‘sites of memory' that act as placeholders for the memories...
This bi-lingual publication analyses the post 1980s heritage boom which according to many critics is held for the outcome of a loss of historical consciousness. History is more and more experienced as heritage, and also for politicians and policy makers cultural heritage is attributed a broader and more topical meaning as "identity factory". In add...
An argument is made for the need to conceptualize cultural memory, not as merely derivative of individual psychology, but in terms of a ‘working memory’ (Assmann) that is constructed and reconstructed in public acts of remembrance and evolves according to distinctly cultural mechanisms. Foucault’s ‘scarcity principle’ is used to show the role of me...
An argument is made for the need to conceptualize cultural memory, not
as merely derivative of individual psychology, but in terms of a ‘working
memory’ (Assmann) that is constructed and reconstructed in public acts
of remembrance and evolves according to distinctly cultural mechanisms.
Foucault’s ‘scarcity principle’ is used to show the role of me...
This article seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions on the workings
of cultural memory and examines in particular the way inwhich literary texts can
function as a social framework for memory.Through a detailed study of the genesis,
composition, and long-term reception of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1982
[1818]), I argue that li...
That we should speak of "histories" in the plural rather than of "History" in the upper-case singular has become something of a commonplace. One of the central themes of postmodernism in historical theory has been the idea that there are so many different points of view possible on any given event or period of time, that the idea of an objectively...
Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice
This article argues that to the extent that a representation is historical it is necessarily selective or incomplete with respect to the real world: not everything is known and not everything known can be included in discourse. (In contrast, fictional representations are by definition complete in themselves.) It follows from the incompleteness of h...
L'A. souligne l'importance de la reputation dans le cadre de la semiotique culturelle, et considere le controle social et legal de la diffamation dans le cadre socio-pragmatique du discours qui, au-dela de la relation duelle entre l'expediteur et le destinataire de la parole, rend compte de la structure sociale du discours constituee par une troisi...
The role which narrative discourse plays in the writing of history is an area of increasing interest to historians and literary theorists, resulting in some of the most stimulating and controversial historiographical work in recent years. The rhetoric of historical representation represents one of the first attempts to carry out a sustained textual...
Thesis (M.A.)--University College Dublin, 1981.
Is historical scholarship compatible with commitment to social values? Do professional historians have particular social responsibilities and if so, how can they best exercise them? These are questions which are chronically open to debate in the light of changing historical circumstances and changing historical practices. In recent years, they have...
