scholarly journals Introduction: Cultural Memory, the Past and the Static of the Present

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Jane Marie Law
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
The Many ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
The Relationship

Ithaca, New York, September 2007 “The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.”WILLIAM FAULKNER The burgeoning field of study loosely known as “cultural memory studies” fills a strange gap between more traditional historiography and the anthropology of memory. Historiography in the more traditional sense embraces the stance that the past is knowable, verifiable to the extent that we have reliable evidence, and retrievable to some extent. It concerns itself with what happened in the past (and the many complications of knowing that). Cultural memory studies, on the other hand, address what Paul Ricoeur so aptly labeled “the mnemonic phenomenon,” the dialogical process through which collectivities recall the past in light of present concerns that arein part shaped by this very past that is being recalled and refashioned in the present. For the scholar of cultural memory, the object of study is not the past, but the many projects memory undertakes: healing, denial, revision, invention, recreation and re-creation, forgetting. What is the relationship between history and memory? What should it be? ...

scholarly journals As voces dos recordos: memoria oral, pasado traumático e novela na Galiza actual

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Diego Rivadulla Costa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Formal Point

Voices of memories: Oral memory, traumatic past and the novel in contemporary GaliciaThe fictionalisation of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in the Galician novel has experienced a significant evolution from a thematic and formal point of view. This evolution has been greatly influenced by the memory boom since the beginning of the 21st century, both in Galicia and the rest of Spain. Therefore, exploring the contemporary Galician narrative corpus requires an interdisciplinary approach to address not only the literary representations of history and memory, but also the functions acquired by those narratives in connection with the context as well as the cultural memory of the Galician people. This paper focuses on the relationship between memory and orality in some of these texts in order to analyse how oral memory emerges in the novel as a form of persistence of the past in current times. This oral memory becomes a key element in many of these narratives and faces a deliberate collective amnesia and the reluctance to remember, acting as a space for resistance that connects the past and present in the texts.

scholarly journals Probing the boundaries of Irish memory: from postmemory to prememory and back

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (154) ◽  
pp. 296-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Beiner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Great War

It has long been accepted that memory plays a prominent role in the construction of Irish identities and yet historians of Ireland were relatively late in addressing the vogue for memory studies that emerged in the 1980s. Its arrival as a core theme in Irish historical studies was announced in 2001 with the publication ofHistory and memory in modern Ireland, edited by Ian McBride, whose seminal introduction essay – the essential starting point for all subsequent explorations – issued the promise that ‘a social and cultural history of remembering would unravel the various strands of commemorative tradition which have formed our consciousness of the past’. The volume originated in one of the many academic conferences held in the bicentennial year of the 1798 rebellion, which was part of a decade of commemorations that listed among its highlights the tercentenary of the battle of the Boyne, the sesquicentenary of the Great Famine, and the bicentenaries of the United Irishmen, the Act of Union, and Robert Emmet’s rising. The following years produced a boom of studies on Irish memory, which has anticipated another decade of commemorations. Eyes are now set on the centenaries of the Great War, the Irish Revolution and Partition, all of which will undoubtedly generate further publications on memory. It is therefore timely to take stock of this burgeoning field and consider its future prospects.

The Power of Black Patients’ Testimonies When Teaching Medical Racism

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-141
Author(s):  
Keisha Ray
Keyword(s):  
Medical Education ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Current Medical ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Negro Male ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Patients ◽  
The Many ◽  
Humanities Students ◽  
The Relationship

Finding comprehensive texts that help instructors teach the relationship between race and medicine can be difficult. If medical education texts do include a discussion of race, it typically recounts some historical and famous cases of racially motivated abuse, such as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” but not much else. After years of using medical education textbooks in courses, the author began to reflect on the message that textbooks’ handling of race must send to bioethics and medical humanities students. Given how little attention these textbooks give to race, a student could easily receive the mistaken message that racist treatment of black patients is a thing of the past or that racism in medicine must be insignificant and infrequent. When teaching medical racism, historical cases of unethical treatment of black patients should be supplanted with recent testimonials from black patients, to put a contemporary face on the topic. This is an effective way to teach medical racism either to students who will have interactions with patients or to current medical practitioners. The chapter includes an exercise on the feminist concept of intersectionality to discuss the many social and cultural categories, other than just race, that we all occupy to help students learn to see black patients as more than just a skin color.

scholarly journals Beyond trauma? Memories of Joi/y and memory play in Blade Runner 2049

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silke Arnold-de Simine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

Cultural memory studies finds itself at an impasse: whereas ‘cultural memory’ is conceptualized as mediated, dynamic, imaginative and shaped by the present, the dominant paradigm of ‘trauma’ illuminates the hold the past has on us, casting the shadow of a melancholic subjectivity that threatens to obscure our agency as (political) subjects. This article asks what lies in store for memory studies beyond the focus on (classic) trauma (theory). Using the movie Blade Runner 2049 (US 2017; dir: Denis Villeneuve) as an illustrative example, it explores how creative and joyful forms of meaning-making through play and acts of memory inform each other in what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott described as ‘cultural experience’.

Colonial memories and transnational mobilizations: Asia’s colonial veterans and their struggle for British citizenship, c. 1980–2015

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1129-1143
Author(s):  
Barbara Laubenthal ◽  
Daniel Schumacher
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political System ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Framing

This article focuses on campaigns by former colonial soldiers from Nepal and Hong Kong and their struggles for British citizenship over the last three decades. When analysing these mobilizations, we combine approaches from social movement research with insights from cultural memory studies. We use the concept of ‘relational fields’ to determine how these former colonial soldiers systematically utilized the past as a political framing device and thus revealed themselves to be not outsiders to the political system but equal players therein. We argue that their actions are best understood as a series of connected postcolonial civil rights campaigns that often reinforce rather than reverse romanticized and positivist representations of Britain’s imperial past. While in some instances colonial veterans were able to mount meaningful political interventions, our analysis shows that the veterans’ eventual acceptance into British society could only come at the price of their continued stereotyped depiction as colonial subjects.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

scholarly journals Maya of the Past, Present, and Future: Heritage, Anthropological Archaeology, and the Study of the Caste War of Yucatan

Heritage ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 511-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kasey Diserens Morgan ◽  
Richard M. Leventhal
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Quintana Roo ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collaborative Community ◽  
Heritage Studies ◽  
Community Heritage ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Caste War

This paper examines the relationship between the past, present, and future of Maya heritage and archaeology. We trace some of the background of Maya archaeology and Maya heritage studies in order to understand the state of the field today. We examine and demonstrate how an integrated and collaborative community heritage project, based in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, has developed and changed over time in reaction to perceptions about heritage and identity within the local community. We also describe the many sub-programs of the Tihosuco Heritage and Community Development Project, showcasing our methods and outcomes, with the aim of presenting this as a model to be used by other anthropologists interested in collaborative heritage practice.

The Many Lives of Chief Kisco

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Communal Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Object ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Village

This paper deconstructs the folklore surrounding an early twentieth-century zinc figure of an American Indian that stands in the center of the village of Mount Kisco, New York. The identity that “Chief Kisco” has assumed over the past hundred years elides the nature of the origins of the statue, which was intended not as a statement of communal identity, but rather as the exact opposite. As a ready-made art object, the statue was emblematic of a new network of commodified goods that transformed the cultural geography of the United States; as it was utilized in Mount Kisco, the statue was a piece of temperance propaganda with strong nativist undertones that tapped directly into the class, religious, and ethnic divisions running through the turn-of-the-century village.

Mimetic Dynamics

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-218
Author(s):  
Natasha Barrett ◽  
Oyvind Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Interactive Installation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
The Many ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Current Paradigm

The ‘art’ we produce today attempts to incorporate an increasing level of computer technology. There are many reasons for this trend, the most significant being a thirst for an exploration of the ‘new’, and the desire to parallel the increasing level of technology seeping into everyday life. However, when surveying recent developments we find an array of technology-related arts projects that instead of reaching forward into the previously unknown, often reproduce the past simply in a digital form, designed to appeal to our immediate senses but lacking in depth and substance. Likewise, it can be observed that in many cultures (ancient and modern), mimesis grows out of what seems to be a human reaction to technological change. Qualities familiar from past usage tend to be reproduced in new materials and with new techniques, regardless of appropriateness. This may have religious origins, or simply result from inertia, reworking concepts within the current paradigm. Parallels can be drawn from evolution, which can be observed to progress in a series of large advancements alternating with periods of extremely slow or zero development (Eldredge and Gould 1972), and from the progress of science, which seems to be similarly stepped (Kuhn 1962).This paper describes Mimetric Dynamics – an audiovisual interactive installation exploring one of the many possible relationships between nature and technology. In this work, real and simulated fluid dynamics are presented simultaneously, allowing both artist and viewer to explore the relationship between ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ media in both sound and visual dimensions. It gains insight from physical laws and time flows derived from the natural world, where digital technology is used to produce mathematical models simulating real physical attributes. In doing so we are able to harness qualities of the ‘natural’ and use their characteristics to control aspects of the ‘artificial’ (virtual).

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