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Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory
Abstract
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 do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered? This book first appeared as a hardback volume in the De Gruyter series Media and Cultural Memory Studies. With the present book the original articles are reissued in an affordable paperback edition for graduate students and scholars in the field of Media and Memory Studies.
... The communal praying of this Order, recalling Erll and Rigney (2009) Jewish struggles. This prayer illustrates the memory that the community has constructed for itself, and how it is transmitted in the place-specific medium of prayer. ...
... Thereby, it asserts the significance of the Esnoga for this community as a world-famous synagogue and as a source of divine inspiration and strength, which illustrates both the material and spiritual power of this place for the community as a site where, in Winter's understanding, memories are transmitted and imbued with new meanings through the public activity of communal praying. This performative engagement with memory through the remediation of external symbols, according to Erll and Rigney (2009), ensures the continued relevance of this site of memory. As this prayer makes evident, the Portuguese Synagogue has "by dint of human will" and "the work of time" become "a symbolic element of the memorial heritage" (Nora 1996, xvii) for Amsterdam's Sephardic community. ...
... Moreover, the psalms refer to the Holocaust without mentioning this tragedy by name, nor employing the temporal register to allude to the past. In doing so, the psalms display their function, as described by Erll and Rigney (2009), as external symbols of memory which pass on the past meanings attached to the text, but also generate new meanings due to their usage in specific contexts, such as this service dedicated to the commemoration of WWII. Following Aleida Assmann (2006), the psalms of this Order thus illustrate the function of these reusable symbols in the continuous dynamic process of remembering and forgetting. ...
This article discusses the function of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue (Esnoga) as a site of memory for the Sephardic community. Besides providing a historiography of this community in Amsterdam and discussing the postwar development of the memory of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, concepts from memory studies and a framework for psalm analysis are employed to analyze the communal praying in three of the Esnoga’s Orders of Service of special occasions from the period 1961 (the Eichmann trial) until 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall). This analysis illustrates how the Esnoga is a space in which the Sephardic community can performatively engage with their collective shared knowledge of the past: the mythic past as well as the recent past of the Holocaust. In this way, memories are constructed and expressed which constitute the group’s sense of unity and identity. The memorialization of the past and visions for the future are reconstructed in the Orders of Service in four ways: the psalms and prayers transmit memories over generations; the act of communal praying continually invests the psalms and prayers with new meanings; they provide a distinct, Godly view of reality; and they structure a feeling of communality across time and space. The communal praying in the Orders thus illustrates how the Esnoga allows for the transmission of memories through external symbols by acting as a site of memory in which the identity of the Sephardic community is expressed, transmitted, and affirmed.
... demonstrates how re-enactment practices refashion existent medial constructions in memory culture (Bolter & Grusin, 1999;Erll & Rigney, 2009). Through the process of 'remediation', representations are made meaningful in new cultural contexts, hereby transforming an originally American icon and its subsequent emancipatory connotations into a German setting. ...
... In their aims to 're-engender' the cultural memory of the German Wehrmacht, the reenactors of Die Flakhelferinnen draw upon the male-centric 'models' or 'schemata' that circulate within memory culture (Erll & Rigney, 2009). In Nazi ideology, 'soldierly masculinity' reigned at the top of society (Kühne, 2018: 396). ...
... In Nazi ideology, 'soldierly masculinity' reigned at the top of society (Kühne, 2018: 396). The 'auxiliaries' performances thus appropriate the normative and premediated imagery of the masculine 'warrior' that shaped their own conceptualization of heroism (Hartsock, 1984;Erll & Rigney, 2009). By reproducing the aesthetic characteristics of such earlier representations and instead 'inserting' different protagonists, they aim to show that war heroism can be similarly produced by female bodies. ...
... Historical portrayals in television programs such as Vikings (Hardwick & Lister, 2019) and The Crown (Pearson, 2020) have been found to develop stronger connections to historical events among viewers. Memories attain social significance when disseminated through media channels, framing media as a conduit linking personal and collective remembrance (Erll, 2011;Erll & Rigney, 2009). ...
Media coverage is known to have a significant impact on how important issues are perceived by the general public. There is a scarcity of understanding regarding the specific role of media institutions in creating mnemonic narratives that permeate state rhetoric and contribute to the formulation of collective memory within post-Soviet Georgian society. This is the first attempt to analyze the salience of past events in Georgian television coverage compared with the events deemed significant by the public. Using the framework of agenda-setting theory, a “memory- setting” research design is employed to examine the relationship between the “media memory agenda” and the “public memory agenda.” The findings reveal a statistically significant relationship between the two agendas during the week of Georgia’s Independence Day, a period of increased television coverage surrounding historical and cultural events. The resilience of the public memory agenda becomes apparent whereby additional insights into individual perspectives within the broader collective memory are deemed necessary. Participants’ comments highlight the diverse ways in which the public engages with and interprets media representations of the past. The study provides a fresh perspective on the role of mass media in the formation of collective memory while recognizing the boundaries of its influence. Keywords: media agenda, collective memory, memory-setting
... Los monumentos sirven como una de las muchas formas a través de las cuales la memoria colectiva se materializa y es mediada (Erll, 2011;Erll & Rigney, 2009). Son elementos centrales de la memoria cultural (J. ...
El 18 de octubre de 2019 se inició una de las movilizaciones sociales más masivas en la historia de Chile, transformando el escenario político del país y desencadenando un fenómeno menos esperado, una oleada de alteraciones monumentales caracterizada por el cuestionamiento, intervención, creación y en algunos casos destrucción de los monumentos públicos de Chile. Si bien este fenómeno no es nuevo en el mundo, en Chile se expresó en una magnitud nunca vista, con más del 64% de todos los monumentos del país intervenidos. A partir de un proyecto de investigación que incluye 45 entrevistas con personas que participaron en las protestas y un trabajo de archivo que considera documentos históricos, de prensa y de redes sociales sobre los monumentos intervenidos, este trabajo sostiene que las intervenciones de monumentos conformaron verdaderos museos vivos. Se analizan tres características de las intervenciones a monumentos consideradas claves para producir una experiencia museográfica diferente a la tradicional: la movilización de memorias nacionales y locales, el tono afectivo intenso producido con las intervenciones y la apropiación del espacio urbano. El artículo finaliza con una reflexión sobre el potencial de la intervención monumental y sus huellas una vez que los periodos de convulsión social concluyen.
... Besides expressing their disagreement with the oversimplifying and exclusory victim narrative propagated by the government, the Living Memorial's event enabled the articulation of silenced memories of 1956 and 1989 by making the memorial's embeddedness in the country's revolutionary heritage visible. While memorials are evident and efficient media to visually represent and "remediate" (Erll and Rigney 2009) complex histories, such potential of demonstrations is often overlooked. Ann Rigney underlines the power of protests as a form of cultural remediation that make the past re-imaginable, observing that protests are remembered largely due to their potential to generate a simplistic narrative about the "good struggle" versus suffering or the perpetration of violence by the police, like in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement (Rigney 2020). ...
... While any form of memory politics can be important in promoting such critical engagement with the past, this volume aims to show that cultural products are key to this process. Besides the fundamental role that literature, cinema, visual arts, and other forms of cultural expression play in the production, negotiation, and circulation of memories across society through the processes of mediation, remediation, and premeditation (Rigney 2008;Erll and Rigney 2009;Erll 2011a), cultural products are also one of the main loci in which the past can be experienced and thought throughin the form of narrative and through the filter of cultural memory. Erll has encapsulated such dynamics arguing that the consumption of artworks about the past does not produce so much an idea of what the past was like but generates above all "horizons of meaning" through which human beings can think about the past in the present (2011,165). ...
... The defining premise of memory studies is that individual remembering occurs in 'social frameworks of memory' of what has come to be called social, cultural or collective memory (Laanes and Meretoja 2021). 1 Memory becomes collective through artefacts with symbolic value that mediate between individuals. In doing so, it creates a sense of communality among these individuals, functioning as a networking agent between them and a collective (Erll and Rigney 2009). ...
Authors adopting socio-technical frameworks to study energy transitions argue that individual behavioural change and the uptake of social and technological innovations on higher-level scales are both imperative for sustainability transitions to come about. However, the way individuals are embedded in the larger system has remained largely unclear. To better understand individual embedment in energy transitions, this paper enriches sustainability transition research with the insights of memory studies. During energy transitions, social actors that enact these transitions change their identity. A core premise of memory studies is that individual and collective remembering cannot do without each other in the constitution of identity. To illustrate the role of memory in energy transitions, this paper conducts a historical case study of the role of housewives in the energy transition to gas and electricity in the Dutch household. By adopting a narrative approach, the historical narratives across the Monthly Magazine of the Dutch Association for Housewives (NVvH), published between 1913 and 1942, are explored. The results show how the master narrative prescribed the guiding principles of the historical narratives that emerged in the energy discourse. However, as part of the flexible nature of memory, a varied ‘menu of stories’ came forward that enabled individuals to identify with different historical narratives, incorporating differing energy sources and drawing on the transformative nature of memory by imagining different energy futures. It is concluded that individual agency in energy transitions moves beyond choices of use and consumption. It rests in the individuals’ ability to identify with a historical narrative that adheres to the way the individual makes sense of the world.
This article explores memory activists’ uses of past forms of artistic expression in relation to the opportunities and constraints of the present. In the wider context of Brazil’s ‘turn to memory’ (2007–2012), the article examines contemporary activist art collectives’ appropriations of 1970s avant-garde aesthetics, particularly the works defined by art critic Frederico Morais (1970) as arte guerrilha , to address the country’s dictatorial legacies. I argue that the creative decisions made by activists in adapting historical art practices – which were originally created in direct reaction to State censorship and violence during the dictatorship – reflect the contradictions inherent in the postdictatorial governments’ reconciliation efforts. Finally, the article calls attention to the limitations of such creative forms of memory activism in effecting systemic change in Brazil, while emphasising their important role in fostering participatory forms of, and affective engagement with, transitional justice in postdictatorial(ising) contexts.
The hydrocarbon-rich Gulf states are well-known for their pursuit of modernization following the discovery of oil reserves in the twentieth century, often at the expense of cultural heritage sites. However, over the past two decades, the Gulf states have become more interested in developing cultural legacies pertaining to their heritage, which is a process necessitating the activation of local people’s cultural memory. While restoration and conservation of cultural heritage sites is important for their protection, the performance of heritage is equally significant for the construction and maintenance of cultural memory, especially for abandoned heritage sites. The performance of heritage means a heritage site has a current real use that is sensitively introduced, carefully managed, and pays homage to the heritage rather than a tokenistic resemblance. This chapter uses the case study of the abandoned historical pearling town Al Jazeera Al Hamra Heritage Village in Ras Al Khaimah, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to investigate the influence of the revitalization of the Village on the construction and maintenance of cultural memory in Ras Al Khaimah and the wider UAE. Using interviews, document analysis, and observation, we argue that governmental action, in the form of allowing greater accessibility to the Village, coupled with citizens’ engagement with their heritage, has enabled Al Jazeera Al Hamra to feature more prominently in Emirati cultural memory. Accordingly, the case study is presented as an example of how citizen–government collaboration in the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage can increase local buy-in into national, cultural identity narratives. This chapter seeks to contribute to the academic literature on cultural heritage protection in the Gulf region and wider Middle East and North Africa, including the adaptive reuse of historical sites.
This Element has three objectives. First, it highlights the diversity of the nature of Jacobitism in the long eighteenth century by drawing attention to multi-media representations of Jacobitism and also to multi-lingual productions of the Jacobites themselves, including works in Irish Gaelic, Latin, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh. Second, it puts the theoretical perspectives of cultural memory studies and book history in dialogue with each other to examine the process through which specific representations of the Jacobites came to dominate both academic and popular discourse. Finally, it contributes to literary studies by bringing the literature of the Jacobites and Jacobite Studies into the purview of more mainstream scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures, providing a fuller perspective on the cultural landscape of that period and correcting a tendency to ignore or downplay the presence of Jacobitism. This title is also available as Gold Open Access on Cambridge Core.
There is a conceptual discrepancy between the expression “space of memory” and “place of memory.” In a different realm, the same seems to happen with the terms “safe space” and “safe place.” Coexisting but distinct worlds are explored in this article through the lens of the safe mnemotope: a place where memories have a fertile ground to settle and condense, where people find a safe dimension to externalize their inner emotions connected to the past. Based on a personal encounter with the Wind Phone in Japan, the article identifies some of the attributes that can make a place of memory a safe place, proposing them as initial guidelines to inspire the recognition and enhancement of realities that support the expression of complex feelings, providing a refuge where individuals can confront with their grief.
This article explores memorial distances — i.e., forms of distances that are both personal, temporal, medial, cultural, linguistic, and hermeneutic — in Pas pleurer by Lydie Salvayre (2014) and L’Art de perdre by Alice Zeniter (2017) . The two novels are retellings of violent and traumatic historical events — the Spanish war and the Algerian war respectively — by persons who did not themselves witness these events. As such, they are emblematic examples of indirect mediation of conflict memory. The article emphasizes the importance of studying the complexity and the multiplicity of memorial distances in such narratives and argues that such an approach allows a broader and deeper understanding of the multi-layered memory work that takes place in Pas pleurer and L’Art de perdre.
While often under-researched, mis-catalogued, and obscured from public display, conflict-related sexual violence is acutely entangled in the story of conflict that the Imperial War Museum tells its visitors, beyond the dichotomous characterisation of present/absent, hidden/revealed or remembered/forgotten. This article outlines and characterises ways in which the Imperial War Museum curates conflict-related sexual violence, illustrating how this equates to gendered and gendering arbitrations on what is appropriate, representative, and moreover what counts as conflict-related sexual violence and as the material and visual culture of war. Curatorial practices are found to both reflect and actively (re)produce patterns of representation in sexual violence discourse, through a prism of visual hierarchies inherent to modern museumification and the Museum’s titular imperial legacy. Insights from this case can help guide ambitions of a more activist, feminist curatorial practice, one invested in disrupting harmful patterns and centring what is marginal.
This article discusses how the reproductive rights slogan ‘my body my choice’ – which functions as a carrier of feminist cultural memory – was weaponised when it gained traction in anti-vaccine movements that appropriated it. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, transnationally coordinated groups associated with the far right and characterised by nationalist and pro-life values started using the protest slogan to politicise their resistance to local lockdown restrictions and vaccine and mask mandates. The article shows that their use of the slogan was a hostile form of mnemonic appropriation and analyses the discursive mechanisms used to discredit the reproductive rights movement. It demonstrates that when slogans become carriers of cultural memory, they can be used in claim-making by movements on opposing sides of the political spectrum. It concludes that protest memories can be used politically both in the advancement of social movement causes as well as in the backlash against those causes.
Taking Bosnia-Herzegovina as a case study, this article examines how memory activists, acting at the meso-level, use digital media to implement various counter-memory strategies in relation to the war of 1992–1995. A variety of practices at the margins of official historical discourses, which are still dominated by victimization and hatred, are examined and examples from both the literature and original empirical data are used to show how, in an extremely tense political climate, memory activists can use diverse strategies and tools to allow new representations of the past to circulate, bringing about mnemonic change. I suggest that memory activists in BiH, although operating in a public sphere governed by ethnonationalist divisions and political parallelism, use digital media as an arena, space, or repository for counter-memory narratives. Supported by thematic analysis, this interdisciplinary research paper responds to a need for contemporary empirical research on media memory activism and opens new perspectives for future interdisciplinary studies of these issues in other divided societies.
Tracing out how space can host and feed memory narratives, this chapter presents the book’s core concept: the “space for nostalgia”. In these pages, I define how space can provide consolation for nostalgic yearning through constructed discourses that forge continuity between the present and the past. Here I describe the specific characteristics of the space for nostalgia, highlighting the differences from its counterpart with a fundamental (and prepositional) distinction—the space of nostalgia—which implies a dissimilar model of return. Moreover, this chapter untangles the close relationship between the “irreversibility of time” and “spatial consolation” in the space for nostalgia. I stress here an important clarification: this category does not imply the need for a spatial return, that is, the nostalgic subject does not desire the absent space but rather the absent time. Space serves as a connecting structure, indulging romanticized memories with indexical connections. In this way, this chapter points out my idea of “spatial consolation”, understood simultaneously as (i) the comfort and illusion used to satisfy desires for an impossible return, and (ii) as a strategy to work through the ontological finitude of lost temporality.
Television series enhance the social visibility of their content, as is the case with Queen Elizabeth II and The Crown. Netflix is the streaming television platform that has turned Peter Morgan’s successful series (2016) into a television icon where the monarch is the main protagonist, taking us on a biographical journey that mixes the historical and the political with fiction. The main character is made to seem more humane and is brought closer to the general public, all of which leads to a transmedia narrative. This research aims to analyze the content of the messages published on Twitter during the days surrounding the Queen’s State funeral in September 2022 and their connection with the series through the hashtag #TheCrown. The topics that have become trends worldwide are quantitatively analyzed, using different digital tools. The sample collected 1,489,279 tweets published during the days from the announcement of the death of Elizabeth II to the day of her funeral (from 8 to 19 September 2022). The results show nodes of connection between different players and linked communities to #TheCrown while offering the traffic generated by the hashtag with different nodes and edges.
The article engages with institutionalized German anti-anti-Semitism in recent debates about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To elucidate Germany's raison d’état, current silencing of political dissent and drawing on Stuart Hall's notion of “conjuncture,” the first step is to sketch the dynamics of memory politics after the Holocaust: the silence of the postwar period, the student movement's struggle against bystanders and perpetrators, subsequent debates of representation, memorialization, trauma and finally the provincialization and nascent globalized memory ( Conjunctures and the Politics of Memory). Articulating the aporias of current German (memory) politics between history and event, historical antecedents and singularity, particularity and universalism, in a second step the tensions between German raison d'état, anti-anti-Semitism and postcolonial perspectives are addressed that delimit the frameworks of negotiating anti-Semitism in the public sphere ( Conjunctures and Aporias). In this sense, the remarks contribute to the critical debate on anti-anti-Semitism.
The article poses the problem of the need to study the influence of digitalization on the formation of the historical memory of young people. Based on data from an online questionnaire (multi-stage combined sample, n = 700), the main vectors of constructing digital historical memory and its influence on the formation of civic identity of college and university students are presented using the example of the Republic of Mordovia. The calculation of the “digital historical memory” index made it possible to determine the directions of digital memory influence on the young people self-identity and on the assessment of the main factors of civic identity. A statistically significant relationship was revealed between the choice of “new media” as a source of historical memory formation and such indicators as age, level of education received. The objectives of the study also included the study of memory nodes (selection of the most significant events from the history of the country), digital practices (activities related to historical Internet resources and portals). The article makes an attempt to sociologically comprehend the production of digital historical memory in modern conditions, which, on the one hand, is hyperconnective, i.e. accessible to a large number of users and hyper-meditated - formed on the basis of various and many sources, and on the other hand, there is a great risk of producing a fake story and its different versions, far from scientific character and objectivity, The authors make the assumption, based on the data obtained, that in the new geopolitical conditions the influence of the “digital memory” index on the formation of Russian identity among young people can be described as positive, although this issue requires further research.
The article explores the conditions necessary for a narrative recounting of past events to become memorable and incorporated into collective memory. The analysis is focused on the role played by artistic remediations in creating such memorability. In Romania, as well as in other East Central European countries, the production of memorability and the management of the resulting collective memories are interlinked with the narratives of communism that dominate the memorialisation of the recent past. The article reviews several examples of acts of dissent, based on their representativeness and the existing literature, and question the memorability of dissident acts by considering the memory discourse on communism and the involvement of different agents of memory. It also interrogates the use of the Romanian secret police (Securitate) files in artistic productions, examining this acknowledgement of the role played by the Securitate in creating the narratives of the communist past. Two artistic productions based on reworkings of the Securitate files are analysed: a documentary theatre play staged by Gianina Cărbunariu, Uppercase Print (2013), and Radu Jude’s 2020 film of the same title, both presenting the story of Mugur Călinescu. The article argues that these productions question mainstream frames of memory by revisiting the narratives and biographies created by the Securitate files and give new, artistically mediated voices to victims, perpetrators and collaborators.
In April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped almost three hundred girls attending school in Chibok, Nigeria. The #BringBackOurGirls campaign emerged as a global activist movement in the aftermath of that kidnapping. Onah’s article analyzes the global mediascapes of the campaign to show the mnemonic affordances of the Chibok girls’ kidnapping and the intermedial dynamics that coalesced to make it a global memory phenomenon. By foregrounding the transhistorical and intermedial connections at the core of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, it consolidates the understanding of remediation in memory studies. Consequently, Onah proposes new ways to understand African memorial traditions and testimonial practices in an increasingly hyperconnected world.
El Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT) es un proyecto que nace desde la organización colectiva en Argentina. A partir de la transversalización de perspectivas transgénero, despliega memorias en perpetua interpelación y relectura de los procesos de justicia transicional. Comprendido por un acervo principalmente fotográfico, el trabajo de esta iniciativa privilegia la visualidad. Sin embargo, propone también una respuesta sonora ante los silencios del sub-registro y las limitaciones de la imagen para lidiar con un trauma histórico pluridimensional. En este sentido, el Podcast del AMT emerge ante el deseo de expresar la densidad de lo vivido más allá del encuadre fotográfico. Trascendiendo visualidades, se desencadenan relatos que enriquecen el ecosistema mediático del AMT.
Climate Chronograph is a memorial project designed by architect Erik Jensen and landscape designer Rebecca Sunter, of former Oakland-based architectural firm Azimuth Land Craft. It won the ‘Memorial for the Future’ competition in 2016, a competition organised by the United States National Park Service and the National Capital Planning Commission in collaboration with the Van Alen Institute. Climate Chronograph proposed to record rising seas on the land, marking in space the past, present and anticipated catastrophe of global warming and the subsequent losses it involves. I aim in this chapter to make evident that Anthropocenic memorials are not necessarily located in a failed future, but more significantly, are already present in the past: in lost lands and polluted ecosystems. With this initial case study, I want to suggest directions for examining memorial forms and practices, breaking away from Western-centric and universalist narratives and towards potential countermemorial paradigms.
This chapter describes the aims, theoretical framework and structure of the book. As explained here, one of the goals of this study is to move beyond a national framework for remembering and to adopt, instead, a transnational approach that sheds new light on ways in which mnemonic discourses about South American dictatorships move across and beyond borders, whether these are national, cultural or linguistic. Moreover, by taking an interdisciplinary and comparative approach I seek to illuminate thematic concerns in post-dictatorship cinema that have hitherto remained underexplored, for example, the rise of cross-cultural forms of solidarity, the emergence of new, hybrid identities associated with migration, exile and post-war experiences, and the enduring consequences of forced exile and transnational campaigns of state terror. Above all, such an approach allows me to identify similar patterns of strategies, practices and styles utilized by directors in South America and beyond. Finally, a transnational approach to memory also serves to draw attention to what the term appears to negate: the persistence of national forms of collective remembrance and their coexistence with transnational and transcultural tendencies. After a brief overview of the meanings of memory and the narrative approach to memory, I examine some of the main concepts that inform this study and their relevance for post-dictatorship cinema.
This chapter explains the rise of new modes of cinematic remembering from the early 2000s, in a context of greater public receptiveness to debates about the dictatorial past. As awareness about the dictatorial period increased and a certain consensus about past atrocities was established, filmmakers’ previous concern in documenting information was increasingly replaced by a desire to explore the ways in which we remember the dictatorial past. Hence there was a shift of attention from memory as content to memory as process. As part of this shift, documentarians engaged in a critical reassessment of testimony and broadened their perspectives to include questions such as what constitutes memory, how we remember, who is entitled to remember and what compels us to forget. Such inquiries have encouraged filmmakers to develop new strategies that include (and often combine) aspects of the ‘essay film’, autobiography, autofiction, theatrical performance, video art and photography. The variety of films that resulted from these combinations cannot be overstated, but for heuristic purposes, they can be grouped into three further modes of cinematic remembering. The reflective mode is the focus of this chapter. I explain its emergence as the result of a cross-generational dialogue between veteran directors and newcomers, particularly younger filmmakers associated with the so-called ‘post-dictatorship generation’. After a discussion of Patricio Guzmán’s sustained contribution to memories of the Chilean dictatorship, I focus more closely on two examples of reflective documentaries: La ciudad de los fotógrafos/The City of Photographers (Sebastián Moreno, 2005) and Retratos de identificação/Identification Portraits (Anita Leandro, 2014).
Artikkelsamandrag (Norsk) Denne artikkelen undersøkjer fire norske kulturelle uttrykk, retta mot barn og unge, som kom ut i tidsrommet 2016 og 2017, og som fortel om spesifikke hendingar og narrativ frå det som vart kalla for den europeiske flyktningkrisa i 2015. Dei fire verka består av popsongen «Gutten på stranda» av Rasmus og Verdens Beste Band, teaterstykket «Myke øyne», med manus av Kate Pendry og framført av Artilleriet Produksjoner, romanen Hver morgen dyppet min søster brystene i isvann for å bli pen av Bjørn Sortland og teaterførestillinga «MariAmira» av Siri Broch Johansen. Artikkelen har ei transmedial tilnærming ved at eg undersøkjer korleis flyktningkrisa er mediert på tvers av ulike kulturelle uttrykk. Det teoretiske grunnlaget for artikkelen er minneteoretisk, og i artikkelen argumenterer eg for at vi kan forstå medieringa av element frå flyktningkrisa som del av ei minneskaping («memory-making») (Erll & Rigney, 2009). Eg argumenterer for at gjennom deira mediering tek dei kulturelle verka del i å velje ut kva som blir hugsa frå flyktningkrisa, men også i korleis desse hendingane og narrativa blir hugsa. Det gjer at artikkelen sitt fokus ligg på å undersøkje korleis medieringa etablerer og former kollektive og kulturelle minne frå den europeiske flyktningkrisa frå 2015.
This article explores how the concept of remediation is part of digital memory work performed by young women on Instagram. While remediation has been used to make sense of the ways sites of memory are represented across time and through different media, mnemonic media practices and forms are remediated in digital memory work. This article draws on interviews, observations of Instagram activities, and focus group data to analyse how other media practices and forms are integrated into digital memory work on Instagram and mobilised by young women to make sense of their mnemonic use of the platform. The analysis focuses on how practices of digital memory work use direct remediation of material objects and remediation of the functionality of mnemonic media practices. It addresses how the comparisons participants make to other mnemonic media practices reveal how digital memory work involves negotiation of personal and public, private and professional, and the authentic and staged. In addition, it grapples with the way that sharing happy experiences and moments to produce a ‘highlight reel’ or ‘hall of fame’ in postfeminist digital culture has valuable and potentially harmful implications.
The article attempts to clarify what today constitutes communicative remembering. To revisit this basic mnemonic concept, our theoretical contribution starts from available approaches in social memory studies that assume a binary distinction between cultural and communicative modes of memory making. In contrast, we use concepts that treat them not as structural, historically and culturally distinct registers but as a repertoire of retrospection that hinges on the evoked temporal horizon and media usage. To further interrogate this practical articulation of memories, we direct our attention to the habitual, communicatively realised engagement with the past. We finally turn to the ways communicative remembering is done in digitally networked environments, which provide us with a pertinent mnemonic arena where rigid dichotomies of communicative memory versus cultural memory are eroded.
The representation of the Gukurahundi genocide in the official or state archives focuses on narratives propagated mainly by state-run newspapers. These narratives focus mainly on how the genocide was a government intervention in weeding out dissidents. The official archives do little in capturing the lives and deaths of the victims and survivors. Given such a situation, fictional literary texts have been important in offering sites of imagining alternative visions of Gukurahundi, especially the experiences of victims. A burgeoning body of literary texts such as Yvonne Vera’s Stone Virgins, Christopher Mlalazi’s Running with Mother and Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone has fictionalised Gukurahundi and offered depictions which at times have revealed the graphic violence of this genocide. Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s theorisation of the “archivable” and “unarchivable”, we argue that fictional literary narratives make it possible to archive narratives which have been denied a place in official state archives and deemed unarchivable. Fictional literary narratives create alternative archives of Gukurahundi and engender alternative ways of remembering the genocide and creating memories of it.
This chapter explores the use of heritage and history in the popular romance series The Legend of the Ice People (1982–1989) by Norwegian-Swedish author Margit Sandemo. The epos is the 47-volume multigenerational saga of a family. The series is here defined as a story world in which Sandemo is the creator, but fans are actively involved in collective negotiations. The use of the past within the series offers interpretations to readers, who are putting the old-fashion modes into up-to-date, concurrent, and contemporary understandings of morality by emerging from the historical past within the series.
The following proposes a reframing of approaches to Memory Studies from a materialist perspective. Memory Studies emerged simultaneously with the decline of materialist theories and political economy in historical and cultural studies. Despite attempts to generate alternative genealogies and methodological updates, materialism and political economy have been omitted from the study of memory. Several possibilities to define frameworks for future work on memory will be explored here. First, working on memory as part of a mode of production; second, understanding memory as a field that organises internal hierarchies; and third, defining memory as an ideology that ensures the reproduction of the mode of production. This theoretical proposal is supported by fieldwork and experience in the study of memory practices and policies related to the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco’s Dictatorship.
The purpose of this article is to explore potential avenues for the forthcoming “fourth wave” of memory studies, building upon existing theories of temporality in the field. By focusing on relative duration, particularly short-term versus long-term perspectives, it argues for the differentiation between objects of remembering, such as events and conditions, and modes of remembering, such as commemoration, legacy, and heritage. The article argues that our present moment is characterized by the proliferation of temporalities of various scales and the complex interplay between forms of memory and the scales against which it is constructed. This argument is illustrated by the different forms of the Chernobyl disaster remembering in Russia as well as Putin’s strategic use of historical analogies from the distant past. Finally, the article proposes an agenda for the politics of time, expanding the scope of the “politics of memory” to encompass the social construction of past, present, and future on different scales and their use by existing systems of power.
This article examines the changes experienced by collective memory in the digital era. Contrary to the thesis that digital memory entails a new type of memory, which is radically different from the traditional conceptualization, I argue that the practice of digital memory materializes and implements the theoretical claims made by Memory Studies since the field’s inception – collective memory conceived as a process, mediated and remediated by multiple media, with the participation of dynamic communities that perform rather than represent the past. In the article, I address what I propose are the following four major transformations that collective memory has undergone in the digital era: (1) the new ontology of the digital archive; (2) the shift from narrative as a privileged form of collective memory to the cultural form of the database; (3) the reconfiguration of agency, in which a distributed memory is performed by human and non-human agents in a dynamic entanglement; and (4) the shift from mnemonic objects to mnemonic assemblages, comprising persons, things, artefacts, spaces, discourses, behaviours and expressions in dynamic relatedness.
This paper examines how the production, content and reception of the film Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1924) influenced the historical framing of science. The film features microcinematography by the pioneering Dutch filmmaker Jan Cornelis Mol (1891-1954), and was part of a dynamic process of commemorating seventeenth-century microscopy and bacteriology through an early instance of visual re-creation - a new way of using scientific material heritage, and of enabling audiences to supposedly observe the world of microscopic organisms in just the same way as the Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) had observed them for himself. Knowledge transfer concerning material culture, around both historical and contemporary instruments, was the determining factor in the microcinematography practices applied in this film. The production and experience of the film also mirrored the seventeenth-century process of experimentation, playing with optics, and visualizing an entirely new and unknown world. Unlike other biographical science films of the 1920s, Antony van Leeuwenhoek featured abstract depictions of time and movement that allowed the audience to connect the history of science with microcinematography, contributing to the memory of Van Leeuwenhoek's work as the origins of bacteriology in the process.
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