Memory, Re-memory and Post-memory

Matatu ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Nilufer E. Bharucha

Abstract For the Indian diaspora their new lives in the Imperial colonies became the present and the country left behind became memory. As the diasporics tried to recall the past, they dealt in what Toni Morrison has called the act of re-memory. Pheroze Nowrojee’s re-telling of the tale of his grandfather, who went from India to Kenya to run the trains on what was then called the Uganda Railways, is a case of re-memory, as the private memories of an earlier generation are etched into public and even national spaces of independent Kenya. There is also what Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory which can also be considered in the case of diasporic writing. While A Kenyan Journey (2014) tells the story of the author’s grandfather, it is much more than just a Parsi Zoroastrian family’s memoir. Intertwined in the grandfather’s story are the wider narratives of colonialism and old and new homelands.

Significance At least in the EU’s eleven eastern member states (EU-11), there has been significant if slow progress in lifting standards of living across the board in the past decade. However, progress is uneven and the impact of the economic slowdown due to lockdowns in the past year may well have affected disproportionately already poorer regions. Impacts Some governments, notably Hungary’s, will put political loyalty above need in directing recovery funds to the localities. People in ‘left-behind’ regions may seek a better life in relatively prosperous capital cities or abroad. There is scope for countries and regions to learn from each other given clear cases of significant development in the past decade.


Itinerario ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
D.H.A. Kolff
Keyword(s):  

The motto I wrote at the top of this address and that I quoted just now is quite ordinary. But what else would a British civil servant, unmarried, note in his diary at a quiet post at the foot of the Himalayas? What fascinating details for that matter does one expect to find in the papers left behind about British Indian colonial relations in this century and the last? What indeed should a newly appointed professor tell you about them which is more than just curious or half exotic, and which, buried in the past as they have been for decades, would moreover only be appropriate at a Dutch university that refuses to withdraw into a hedgehog position called ‘Europe’?


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-127
Author(s):  
Tiffany Rhoades Isselhardt

Where are the girls who made history? What evidence have they left behind? Are there places and spaces that bear witness to their memory? Girl Museum was founded in 2009 to address these questions, among many others. Established by art historian Ashley E. Remer, whose work revealed that most, if not all, museums never explicitly discuss or center girls and girlhood, Girl Museum was envisioned as a virtual space dedicated to researching, analyzing, and interpreting girl culture across time and space. Over its first ten years, we produced a wide range of art in historical and cultural exhibitions that explored conceptions of girlhood and the direct experiences of girls in the past and present. Led by an Advisory Board of scholars and entirely reliant on volunteers and donations, we grew from a small website into a complex virtual museum of exhibitions, projects, and programs that welcomes an average 50,000 visitors per year from around the world.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco

What this book has attempted to do is to look at the Jewish heritage of Polish Galicia from a contemporary perspective, focusing on what can be understood of the past and the outstanding Jewish civilization that flourished there by looking at the present-day realities of what has been left behind....


2021 ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Nora Parr

While imagery and ideas from the past remain significant across much of Palestinian cultural production, there is an increasing push against a quagmire of language, where meaning is stuck in a past paradigm. Focusing on the work of Adania Shibli, Maya Abu al-Hayyat, and Mahmoud Amer, this chapter looks at contemporary writers who use their art to forge new words—a new language, a new framework for language—that better responds to life as they live it. In the process, existing structures of representation are forcefully discarded, though not entirely left behind. The chapter contends that the stories demand repudiation; a reckoning with the fact that somewhere between the Oslo Accords and the new millennium Palestine’s symbolic order and its lived world ceased to cohere.


Author(s):  
Kitty Hauser

Photography, as is well known, is the image-making technology which specializes in the freezing of time.1 What kind of historiography, then, might photography be said to embody? How can photography, with its ineluctable connection to the present moment, hope to say anything at all about the past—about either the broad processes of history or even the events of the hours and minutes immediately preceding the second in which the photograph is taken? What kinds of knowledge of the past does photography allow, and what does it disallow? How can photography, that most superficial of media, hope to become a vehicle for the archaeological imagination, with its love of immanent depths? If photographic technology is uniquely equipped to record (visually) the present moment, it is also characterized—famously—by its thorough and indiscriminate recording of surface detail. What it lacks in temporal depth it makes up for in this meticulous rendering of appearances; any surface marked by the effects of action or time can be faithfully recorded by this technology which itself produces the marked surfaces of photographic plate, film, or print. History and the passing of time is available to photography only in the form of its traces, the more-or-less legible marks and remnants it has left behind at any one moment in the world. And it is precisely photography’s own nature as a chemical trace (until digitization, at least) that enables it accurately to reproduce these marks and signs of history. As discussed in Chapter 1, since the nineteenth century (at least) historical sciences such as palaeontology, geology, and archaeology have based themselves upon the reading of such signs of the past in the present, and this broad epistemological model could be extended to include military reconnaissance, forensic science, and art connoisseurship. Photography, fixing these signs in an image, has had—unsurprisingly, perhaps—an important part to play in the historical development of these disciplines. Photography meets the archaeological imagination as soon as photographic images are scanned for historical information in these disciplines and practices. In a sense, however, photography cannot help but represent the world archaeologically, since it cannot help but record its objects and landscapes in a temporal context, the traces of the past scattered across their surfaces. Ruskin enthused over this quality of the new medium.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Yael Munk

This article relates to the complex approach of Dina Zvi-Riklis’ film Three Mothers (2006) to immigration, an issue that is central to both the Jewish religion and Israeli identity. While for both, reaching the land of Israel means arriving in the promised land, they are quite dissimilar, in that one is a religious command, while the other is an ideological imperative. Both instruct the individual to opt for the obliteration of his past. However, this system does not apply to the protagonists of Three Mothers, a film which follows the extraordinary trajectory of triplet sisters, born to a rich Jewish family in Alexandria, who are forced to leave Egypt after King Farouk’s abdication and immigrate to Israel. This article will demonstrate that Three Mothers represents an outstanding achievement, because it dares to deal with its protagonists’ longing for the world left behind and the complexity of integrating the past into the present. Following Nicholas Bourriaud’s radicant theory, designating an organism that grows roots and adds new ones as it advances, this article will argue that, although the protagonists of Three Mothers never avow their longing for Egypt, the film’s narrative succeeds in revealing a subversive démarche, through which the sisters succeed in integrating Egypt into their present.


Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Talbot Rice

The peninsula of Athos, home of monks, resort of pilgrims and the sole surviving example of the life of the Middle Ages which exists in Europe, is the only spot in these days of hooting motor cars, roaring machinery and rushing, busy people, in which it is possible to lead a completely altered life. There only in Europe can one meet an entirely original mental outlook. Even in the remotest European village everyday life is of this age and it is only by exercising the imagination that one can transfer oneself to the past. But on arrival on Athos this earth is left behind and one begins to experience the life of a pilgrim of the Middle Ages. One sees from actual experience what that life really was, and one continues to live it until the discomforts of the thirteenth century finally persuade one that the evils of this age are amply repaid by its merits and that the romance of the Middle Ages is even excelled by the adventurous spirit of today. The medieval life is something that one likes to remember as a curiosity, something to be experienced occasionally only. But the claims of its art are more lasting and in these days of ease and luxury we can appreciate them the more fully.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Grace McGowan

Abstract “A central figure in transnational intellectual history” (Roynon, 2013), Toni Morrison’s oeuvre has helped deconstruct the triangulated relationship between a European Graeco-Roman classical tradition, Africa, and America. Morrison’s deconstruction of the classical past and its aesthetics have laid the foundation for the reconstructive work of a new generation of writers, including Robin Coste Lewis. Both writers renegotiate and reclaim a classical aesthetic by recovering its African roots and situating it in an African American context. In addition, the article (1) examines the role of a classical aesthetic in beauty discourse and Robin Coste Lewis’s re-vision of the black female body and (2) addresses what this means for canonicity, linking Lewis’s ambivalence about reclaiming a classical aesthetic to Morrison’s ambivalence in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1987).


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