MICHAEL ROTHBERG. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. (Cultural Memory in the Present.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xvii, 379. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95

This article investigates the possibilities for experiential encounters with ruins in Berlin to complicate the dominant articulations of the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War. Building on works that seek to disrupt normative models of cultural memory of the bombings, and entangling them with existing literature that uses new materialism to engage the sensorial nature of memory site-encounters, I examine my own fieldwork visits the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof—a former train station—as an entanglement of both. Specifically, I investigate how encountering Anhalter through this entangled method allows the site to emerge as haunted. Encountering Anhalter as haunted might complicate the linear temporality that underpins enduring the narrative that the Allies’ actions during the war were completely ethical because they are largely framed as a response to— ergo following—the Holocaust.

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Independent Film for Solidarity of Traumas in the Cinema of Turkey

Kwartalnik Filmowy ◽

10.36744/kf.946 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 6-21

Author(s):

Fatma Edemen

Keyword(s):

Independent Film ◽

Film Analysis ◽

Works Of Art ◽

The Holocaust ◽

Multidirectional Memory

Michael Rothberg introduced the concept of multidirectional memory in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). Later, many other scholars used his idea to analyze works of art, including films. Although multidirectional memory generally focuses on the possibility of establishing solidarity between memories/traumas that are geographically or culturally distant from each other, in this article it will be argued that this concept is also crucial within coexisting multicultural and multitraumatic societies. The concept of multidirectional memory, and subsequently concepts such as travelling memory and postmemory, will be examined through the analysis of an independent production from Turkey, Özcan Alper’s film Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, 2011). With the help of critical film analysis, the multidirectional memory of Turkey’s traumatic past will be discussed as an opportunity to practice solidarity.

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Holodomor and the Holocaust in Ukraine as Cultural Memory: Comparison, Competition, Interaction

Journal of Genocide Research ◽

10.1080/14623528.2021.1968146 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-12

Author(s):

Georgiy Kasianov

Keyword(s):

Cultural Memory ◽

The Holocaust

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“Bled in, Letter by Letter”

The Intimacies of Conflict ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479800797.003.0007 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 173-202

Author(s):

Daniel Y. Kim

Keyword(s):

African Americans ◽

Cultural Memory ◽

Foreign Student ◽

Korean American ◽

Japanese Americans ◽

Diasporic Identity ◽

The Relationship ◽

American Authors ◽

Multidirectional Memory ◽

Do So

This chapter examines how Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered negotiate the ethical and political complexities that shape the relationship between Koreans who directly experienced the trauma of war and Korean American authors who have constructed literary memories of that event. These are novels that are engaged in the cultural process that Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” These works constitute exemplary postmemorial texts that refrain from making the trauma of the war into the essentialist foundation of an ethnonationalist conception of Korean or Korean diasporic identity. These novels do so by highlighting the artifice of their constructions of memories that only belong, properly speaking, to those who experienced the war. In so doing they enact a form of postmemory that involves a kind of translation that is structured by approximations, interpolations, and gaps. Choi’s The Foreign Student is particularly noteworthy for gesturing as well toward the Korean War’s significance for Japanese Americans and African Americans without engaging in a problematic politics of racial comparison. This novel theorizes a mode of cultural memory that resonates not only with Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” but also with Alexander Weheliye’s notion of “racializing assemblages.”

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