Mapuche mnemonics: Beyond modernity’s violence

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Macarena Gómez-Barris

The recent, spectacularly massive student marches in Chile have in some ways occluded Andean regional responses to extractive neoliberalism over the last 40 years. If we consider native subjectivity and the longer periodization of colonialism, then a different conceptualization and analysis of memory and subjugation emerge to complicate the field of memory and cultural studies. In this article, I analyze modern state violence through the “reducciones” period and post-1990 movement of “democratic transition” as two instances of acute racial capitalism and formulations of resistance by Mapuche peoples. Here, I wish to address what genealogy of cultural studies makes sense for understanding the long arc of colonial memory and paradigms of indigenous resistance. As such, my article tries to theoretically address possible future directions of memory studies in the Americas.

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. F. Bertens

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.


Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo

This book, demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. The book argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. The author's research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth-century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, this work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis LF Lee ◽  
Joseph Man Chan ◽  
Dennis KK Leung

Collective memory studies have emphasized how people can utilize important historical events as analogies to make sense of current happenings. This article argues that the invocation of historical analogies may, under certain circumstances, become an occasion for people to negotiate and contest the significance of the historical events. Focusing on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014, this article analyzes how references to the 1989 Tiananmen Incident emerged in the news as a dominant historical analogy when the movement began, foregrounding the possibility of state violence. But when state violence did not materialize, the authorities, young protesters, and radical activists started to contest the relevance of Tiananmen. The analogy was largely abandoned by the movement’s end. The analysis illustrates the recursive character of the relationship between past and present events: after the past is invoked to aid interpretations of the present, present developments may urge people to reevaluate the past.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Rashmi Sawhney

Written as a reflective account emerging from the process of reviewing and revamping an MA in English and Cultural Studies at Christ (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, in the year 2018-19, this essay takes the form of a tapestry woven out of four separate but related inquiries. Section I reflects upon the experience of having taught introductory courses in Cultural Studies (henceforth CS) in India and Ireland separated by a gap of 15 years, and germane questions of cultural specificity and curricula. Section II provides an overview of the available narratives of CS within India, focusing on the distinctive approach taken in each account. Section III looks at the relationship between CS, Postcolonial Studies (henceforth PS) and Subaltern Studies (henceforth SS), as they developed in play with one another in 1980s England and America. And Section IV comments on some wider institutional and creative practices of relevance, and the implications these hold for possible future directions of CS. In totality, the article attempts to assess what transformative wor


Lateral ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi Melamed

A response to the forum, “Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities,” edited by Chris A. Eng and Amy K. King. Jodi Melamed reassesses the analytic of institutionality, which has largely been theorized as a dominant tool of the university in incorporating the emergent and muting the oppositional. In particular, scholars in American and cultural studies have noted how universities responded to the revolutionary calls of radical social movements by institutionalizing ethnic and gender studies into compartmentalized sets of knowledge production. In so doing, the university worked to manage minority difference through flat notions of representation rather than redistribution. The interdisciplines of ethnic and gender studies then became additives to the humanities, upholding the status quo rather than compelling a radical re-envisioning of these academic structures altogether. On an even more macro level, Melamed identifies dominant discussions of institutionality that see global neoliberalism as a new, all-totalizing force. In problematizing how these theorizations elide considerations of the historical conditions of racial capitalism that make possible the ‘global,’ Melamed also excavates a genealogy of radical resistance that might allow us to rethink institutionality toward collective solidarity.


Author(s):  
Thomas Barker

The remarkable return of local filmmaking and the growth of its audience has been one of the success stories of reformasi, which marked Indonesia’s democratic transition after 1998. To account for these changes, this chapter argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture responsive to the market. It considers the emergence of the youth market throughout the New Order and its maturation in the years after reformasi. By conceptualising the process of market engagement and commercialisation as going mainstream, this chapter argues for a new approach to the study of cinema by bridging film studies with cultural studies.


Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar

How is it that nation-states running on democratic procedures like elections engage simultaneously in extreme forms of violence towards its own citizens? While introducing this question in this chapter, I discuss the institutional, conceptual, and temporal-spatial aspects of the modern state and how it can be studied ethnographically. As a study of the violent dimension of the state, questions of legality, routinesness and the targets of violence are also addressed. The chapter also outlines how the notion of legitimacy is conceived in the work, by examining various competing theorizations, and also by showing how a distinction between the terms hegemony and legitimacy are sustained in the work. At the end, the chapter gives an outline of the rest of the book and how various chapters engage with the issue of state violence in two field-contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 81-105
Author(s):  
Hrvoje Cvijanović

This paper examines the ways in which modern philosophical and literary accounts have shaped and produced European modernity. The author looks at the myth as such, but especially in the quest, justifications, and narratives provided by Rousseau, Locke, and Daniel Defoe, among all. They are seen as grounding examples of modern mythmaking in which the concept of savagery has been uplifted and opposed to cultivating and civilizational practices, and used as a conceptual axis for articulating ideas of progress, self-preservation, and the state of nature. It is shown that modern bourgeois power of mythmaking through writing cannot be detached from racial bourgeois-capitalist worldmaking, or from the production and reproduction of racial capitalism – a structural and historical nexus of capitalism and racial oppression. The article concludes that by perpetuating myths of rational individuals rationally organizing the world, cultivating the wilderness, and enjoying freedom of production and consumption, European bourgeoisie conceptualized and constructed a fictional framework of modern man set within the mechanism of the modern state and capitalist production, that legitimized the predatory socio-economic practices based on harvesting social and natural resources, the same practices held by global capitalism as well.


2016 ◽  
Vol a4 (3) ◽  
pp. 218-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Bomyea ◽  
Alyson Johnson ◽  
Ariel J. Lang

This comprehensive review surveys current literature on information processing biases in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The review is organized by information processing systems including attention, judgment and interpretation, and memory. Studies outlined suggest that information processing biases may be key factors involved in the development and maintenance of PTSD. However, inconsistencies exist in the literature within each domain, often depending on assessment paradigm employed or other methodological features. Studies on attention bias demonstrate both facilitated engagement toward and difficulty disengaging from threatening stimuli. Literature on judgment and interpretation biases indicates that those with PTSD are more likely to interpret ambiguous situations as threatening, in addition to over-estimating subjective risk. Memory studies reveal mixed findings; a number of studies found that those with PTSD exhibit a bias toward remembering trauma-relevant or negative stimuli compared to those without PTSD, while others do not replicate this effect. Existing evidence for information processing biases in each of these domains are integrated and future directions for empirical study outlined.


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