scholarly journals Landscape after genocide

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
James Riding
Keyword(s):  
Political Geography ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Genocide Studies ◽  
Embodied Memory

The March of Peace (Marš mira) is a 63-mile, 3-day walk through eastern Bosnia organised in memory of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and traces in reverse a death march. Marchers take a trail from Nezuk, stopping at mass graves found along the way, arriving at the memorial cemetery in Potočari a day prior to the annual mass funeral for victims who have been recently exhumed. This article charts the journey from the death march to the peace march and asks the reader to assess the efficacy of embodied memory-work and the ethical responsibility to undertake – and responsibilities when undertaking – alternative memory-work in post-genocide landscapes and sites of mass murder, through a series of rhetorical shifts. A number of frames are enacted to challenge other more linear and conventional approaches, allowing the sociological and political productivity of engaging with post-genocide landscapes in a post-conflict state to emerge, referencing dissident forms of remembrance through the method of walking-with others while traversing this post-genocide landscape on foot. Travelling-with around 8,000 mourners, some of whom were survivors of the death march, the aim here is not to simply describe what is taking place; rather, the journey is undertaken in order to activate a space – a space within which I might engage with issues of landscape, conflict and memory in the context of their current discussion within cultural and political geography, genocide studies and memory studies, and more importantly to speak of genocide and a post-genocide landscape.

scholarly journals Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Roma Sendyka
Keyword(s):  
Human Remains ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Institutional Processes ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Rigorous Research ◽  
The Status ◽  
Memory Practices

“Sites of Violence and their Communities” presents the results of a research project that brought together scholars and practitioners of memory work in an attempt to critically reinterpret the links between sites, their (human, and non-human) users, and memory. These interdisciplinary discussions focused on overlooked, repressed or ignored sites of violence that may benefit from new approaches to memory studies, approaches that go beyond the traditional focus on communication, symbolism, representation and communality. Clandestine or contested sites, in particular, pose challenging questions about memory practices and policies: about the status of unacknowledged victims and those who witnessed their deaths; about those who have inherited the position of “bystander”; about the ontology of human remains; and about the ontologies of the sites themselves, with the natural and communal environments implicated in their perdurance. Claude Lanzmann – one of the first to undertake rigorous research on abandoned, uncommemorated or clandestine sites of violence – responded to Pierre Nora’s seminal conception with his work and with the critical notion of “non-lieux de mémoire.” Methodologies emerging from more traditional as well as recently introduced perspectives (like forensic, ecological, and material ones) allowed team members to engage with such “non-sites of memory” from new angles. The goal was to consider the needs and interests of post-conflict societies; to identify and critically read unofficial transmissions of memory; and to re-locate memory in new contexts – in the grassroots of social, political and institutional processes where the human, post-human and natural merge with unanticipated mnemonic dynamics.

Vergessene Opfer von Mord und Missbrauch: Behindertenmorde unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft in der Ukraine (1941-1943) und ihre juristische Aufarbeitung in der Sowjetunion

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-376
Author(s):  
Tanja Penter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Occupied Territories

In November 1943, shortly after the liberation of the occupied territories by the Red Army, three mass graves with 144 corpses were discovered in a former colony for disabled children in the Zaporizhia region. The disabled inmates had been shot in two mass murder actions by German SS and Wehrmacht units in October 1941 and in March 1943. During the course of the investigations into the case in 1944 by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), seven former Soviet employees of the colony, among them four women, were put on trial and convicted for complicity with the Germans in the crime. The trial not only condemned the murder of the disabled, but also revealed their sexual abuse under the German occupation and in Soviet pre-war times. This article combines three different research perspectives. First, the previously unknown context of the crime is described for the first time on the basis of newly accessible Soviet file material from the Ukrainian secret service archives. In the process, the differing logics behind both the locals and Germans’ roles in the events surrounding the murder are brought to light and examined in the broader context of the German occupation of the Ukraine. Second, the legal treatment of the crime by a Soviet military tribunal is viewed against the background of the general prosecution of Nazi criminals and Soviet collaborators in the Soviet Union. Third, the current handling of the crime in the local Ukrainian culture of remembrance is surveyed. This reveals in particular the consequences of the Soviet memory policies that continue to this day.

Collective Memory and Journalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Bosch
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Journalistic Practice

The relationship between the practice and field of journalism and the interdisciplinary field of memory studies is complex and multifaceted. There is a strong link between collective memory production and journalistic practice, based on the proposition that journalists produce first drafts of history by using the past in their reportage. Moreover, the practice of journalism is a key agent of memory work because it serves as one of society’s main mechanisms for recording and remembering, and in doing so helps shape collective memory. Journalism can be seen as a memory text, with journalists constructing news within cultural-interpretive frames according to the cultural environment. Journalism also plays a key role in the production of visual memory and new media, including social media. Journalism is thus a key agent of memory work, providing a space for commentary on institutional and cultural sites of memory construction.

Writing/performing myself on-screen: Daniel Monks’ memory work on film

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerreen Ely-Harper
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Primary Site ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Development Processes

Performing memories is a way of working through and reconstructing the self. Films that draw on autobiographical experiences are a way of working through and constructing narratives of the self. How can memory work be applied to the writing and filmmaking process? Can memory work, with its focus on personal and embodied experience, lead us to a more truthful account of our individual histories and ourselves? In addressing these questions, I draw on sociological and memory studies into autobiographical memory in my examination of the screenwriting work of Australian actor/writer Daniel Monks. Monks’ films Marrow (2015) and Pulse (2017) are adapted and developed from the author’s personal memories and experiences. Identifying as disabled and queer, Monks’ work straddles the fact-fiction divide, enabling the social and personal to dynamically interact, producing drama narratives where the body is the primary site for retelling and sharing with an audience his need to be seen. My study includes original drafts of screenplays, produced films and interviews with Monks on his writing and development processes. Demonstrating how Monks uses and refigures his body within a cinematic landscape, I aim to promote discussion on how individual memories function as dynamic and interconnected sources for the screenwriter/filmmaker.

On Memory Work in Post-communist Europe

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Anton
Keyword(s):  
Memory Studies ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Anthropological Perspective ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
Communist Past

Taking the memory of pronatalism in contemporary Romania as a case study, this article is an attempt to view the national politics of memory of contemporary Europe with regard to its communist past from an anthropological perspective. From 1966 to 1989, the communist regime imposed extreme policies of controlled demography in Romania, as it was imputed, for 'the good of the socialist nation'. Profamily measures were developed in parallel to the banning of abortion on request and the making of contraception almost inaccessible. The social remembering of such a difficult past is still a taboo in contemporary Romanian society. This general lack of public remembering, which is still playing a role in the current situation of Romania's reproductive health, is influenced by the interrelations between the different forms of pronatalist memory. The analysis is based on oral history fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2008, and is theoretically informed by the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies.

scholarly journals Excavating Occluded Histories at Destrehan Plantation: Afro-Creole Resistance from “Marguerite” to Beyoncé

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-808
Author(s):  
NICOLE WILLSON
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Unique Case ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
German Coast ◽  
A Site

This article interrogates the Creole plantation as a site and sight of memory. It presents a unique case study of Destrehan Plantation, a Creole plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, which, it argues, represents a crypt replete with occluded Afro-Creole histories. These histories speak not only to experiences of subjection and depredation, however, but to rebellious countercultures (represented by syncretic cultural practices), and to acts of collective insurgency (borne out, most potently, in the 1811 German Coast slave uprising). In its analytic enquiry, it engages in a process of what Derek Alderman and Rachel Campbell call “symbolic excavation” in order to penetrate the silences of the Creole plantation, and rehabilitate occluded unruly Afro-Creole voices. It nevertheless strives to go further by promoting interdisciplinary solutions for what it calls “affective memorialization” through what memory studies scholar Karen Till calls “artistic and activist memory-work.” It looks to the work of Hahnsville folk artist Lorraine Gendron and to Beyoncé Knowles Carter's 2016 visual album Lemonade as exemplars of such praxis. In so doing, it invites conversations about how slaveholding histories might be affectively reimagined, and how Afro-Creole histories can be made to service the needs of their descendants.

Of Justice and the Grave: The Role of the Dead in Post-conflict Uganda

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 819-843 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaymelee Kim ◽  
Tricia Redeker Hepner
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
War Survivors ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Post War

In the aftermath of war, survivors’ definitions of justice are often in tension with those of governments and international actors. While post-war northern Uganda has been the site of high-profile prosecutions of Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, our research in rural Acholiland highlights how survivors define justice largely in terms of material compensation for both the living and the dead. These priorities are linked to the omnipresence of improperly buried human remains as evidence of physical and structural violence. Mass graves, burials in former displacement camps, and unidentified remains become focal points around which survivors articulate ongoing socioeconomic suffering and demands for redress. A ‘thanatological approach’ that centres the role of the dead and critically explores the possibilities presented by forensic science in a transitional justice context reveals survivors’ prioritisation of reparative and restorative justice despite the international and national focus on retributive justice through institutions like the icc.

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