scholarly journals Post-9/11 Melancholic Identities: Memory, Mourning and National Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 2237-2241
Author(s):  
Aroosa Kanwal
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Immigrant Identity ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia

This paper discusses the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s novels – Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil – highlight the need for a re-conceptualisation of immigrant identity, in post-9/11 world, by linking traumatic experiences of an individual to the collective memory of a community or nation. Taking cue from Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, an interface between transnational movement and mourning will be investigated in order to emphasise how private grief becomes a metaphor for public grief. With reference to Aslam’s novels (that are set against the background of post-9/11 rhetoric of war on terrorism), I discuss how an endless process of diasporic nostalgia and mourning interacts with immigrants’ efforts to deal with different ‘others’ in their adopted homelands.

Shakespearean Melancholy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Core ◽  
Robert Burton

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.

Making History to/as the Main Pillar of Identity: The Assyrian Paradigm

Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 631-646
Author(s):  
Bülent Özdemi̇r
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Segment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions

In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Brickell Bellows
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Oil Paintings ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
The Core ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Emancipation Era

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation’s post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

scholarly journals Rola języka w uwalnianiu się z dziedzicznych traum

Politeja ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2(65)) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Marcol
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Village

The Role of Language in Releasing from Inherited Traumas. Negotiations of the Social Position of the Silesian Minority in Serbian Banat The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.

scholarly journals Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 74-93
Author(s):  
Tirna Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia ◽  
Discursive Traditions

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

Mourning and Melancholia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Dalziell
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia

Mourning and melancholia are among the primary concepts that have come to interest and structure late-20th- and early-21st-century literary theory. The terms are not new to this historical moment—Hippocrates (460–379 bce) believed that an excess of black bile caused melancholia and its symptoms of fear and sadness—but they have taken on an urgent charge as theories respond to both the world around them and shifts in theory itself. With the 20th century viewed as a historical period marked by cataclysmic events, and literary theory characterized by the collapse of the transcendental signified, attention has turned to mourning and melancholia, and questions of how to respond to and represent loss. The work of Sigmund Freud has been a touchstone in this regard. Since the publication in 1917 of his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” theorists have been applying and critiquing the ideas Freud formulated, and examining how literature might register them. The elegy has been singled out for particular scrutiny given that this poetic form is conventionally a lament for the dead that offers solace to the survivors. Yet, focus has expanded to include other literary modes and to query both the ethics of coming to terms with loss, which is the ostensible work of mourning, and the affective and political desirability of melancholia.

scholarly journals Desventuras do Pós-independência em Moçambique: nacionalismo, guerra civil e memória coletiva

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Andressa Da Silva Machado
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
War Literature ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Civil War Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Literary Narrative

O presente artigo apresenta as principais contradições do projeto político nacional da Frelimo, em sua tentativa de construção de uma consciência nacional no pós-independência em Moçambique. É possível  identificar alguns aspectos que interagiam e moldaram a memória coletiva do povo moçambicano com relação à guerra civil, como no romance Ventos do Apocalipse de Paulina Chiziane, onde a autora enuncia, de forma crítica ao governo socialista e unipartidarista em Moçambique, uma narrativa literária que pode ser analisada como fonte histórica.Palavras-chaves: Moçambique. Nacionalismo. Guerra civil. Literatura.Abstract This paper presents the main contradictions of Frelimo's national political project, in its attempt to build a national consciousness post-independence in Mozambique. It is possible to identify some aspects that interacted and shaped the collective memory of the Mozambican people in relation to the civil war, as in the novel Ventos do Apocalipse by Paulina Chiziane, where the author critically enunciates the socialist and unipartisan government in Mozambique, a literary narrative that can be analyzed as a historical source. Keywords: Mozambique; Nationalism; Civil war; Literature; History of Africa

scholarly journals Memory, History and a Mother’s Resistant Mourning in Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-149
Author(s):  
Amy Boylan
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Memory Theory ◽  
Individual Memory ◽  
War Memories ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Italian Women ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia ◽  
The Way

This essay proposes a re-reading of Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore (1961) in the context of collective memory theory and postmodern concerns with mourning and melancholia. Through an examination of the way Dessì represents the interaction between individual memories and official memorialization in the post-WWI period, I argue that Dessì anticipates postmodern perspectives on commemoration. In particular, I look at the protagonist, Mariangela, both as a recuperation of the private and public anti-war activities of many Italian women, and as a melancholic mother whose refusal to obey normative modes of mourning results in a form of resistant mourning. Furthermore, it is precisely through Mariangela’s oppositional gaze that Dessì exposes the inadequacies of her town’s official receptacle of war memories, the monumento ai caduti, in order to interrogate the way collective—but also individual—memory is constructed.

scholarly journals The Importance of National Museums in Preserving Collective Memory

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
Mateja Kos
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Original Function ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
National Museums

Research into memory, which has been carried out in recent decades by researchers in the fields of social sciences and humanities, is also important in the field of museology.Museums collect objects that, at the time of transition, lose their original function they have in previous everyday life and acquire a new one. Objects are generators of memory, and memory works through objects. However, the stories of individual objects are necessarily less comprehensive than stories that are made up of broader semantic wholes. At some stage of the narrative a transition from the collection of individual memories or memories of individuals to a wider whole appears – a collective memory. It is not composed of a multitude of individual memories, but is processed and transformed into a whole that corresponds a particular community. Memory is connected with time, and individual memories are fixed at the points of collective time.Museums are creators of collective memory. Collective memory is connected with the concepts of historical memory, (cultural) heritage and witnessing. The collective memory generated by objects creates an identity. This can be created at every level, from personal to local, from regional to national. Structuring a particular past has an extremely important role in structuring identity. The concepts of memory, heritage, witnessing and history in the field of cultural heritage refer to national museums in the purest form. Each national museum is a guardian, researcher and promoter of a professionally and scientifically transformed collective memory, and thus a constitutive element of national consciousness.

scholarly journals ¿Adónde se fueron?: Modernidad e indianismo en "Sab" de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

2011 ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Jorge Camacho
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Ethnic Literature ◽  
Gertrudis Gomez De Avellaneda ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia

Al inicio del siglo XIX, los países hispanoamericanos obtuvieron su independencia de España. Cuba y Puerto Rico, no obstante, se mantuvieron como parte de la “madre patria” hasta finalizado el siglo XIX. Esto no impidió, sin embargo, que la elite intelectual de estos países repensara la historia y las tradiciones que unían a ambos países con la metrópolis. Aspiraban a encontrar algo que pudiera diferenciarlos de los otros. Como resultado, apareció una literatura étnica importante, altamente contextualizada y muchas veces de naturaleza alegórica que reflejaba la vida de los descendientes de los amerindios en Cuba. En este ensayo, me propongo explorar la forma en que comenzó este proceso, primero con José María Heredia y continuó luego con una de sus discípulas, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. En sus poemas, escritos en México, Heredia reflexiona sobre “la raza original” de las Antillas y lo hace de una forma que Sigmund Freud solamente podría caracterizar como “luto”; luto y melancolía por la muerte de una persona querida, que se asocia en sus escritos con Cuba. En los años que siguieron, la Avellaneda haría lo mismo. Pero esta vez, los descendientes de la “raza original” reaparecerían vestidos para la pelea, reclamando venganza y mezclados con los deseos y demandas de los esclavos, negros libres y mulatos que los habían reemplazado en los campos de caña.  Early in the 19th century, Latin America obtained its independence from Spain. Cuba and Puerto Rico, however, remained part of the “mother land” until the end of that century. That did not prevent their intellectual elite, however, from rethinking the traditional ties between their countries and the metropolis. Their hope was to find something that they could use to differentiate themselves from the others. As a result an important body of ethnic literature appeared, highly contextualized and sometimes allegorical in nature that reflected upon the lives of Amerindians in Cuba. In this essay, I would like to explore the way this process started, first with José María Heredia and continued later on, with Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. In his poems, written in Mexico, Heredia start reflecting on the “original races” of the Caribbean and he does it in a way that Sigmund Freud could have only characterized as “mourning”; mourning and melancholia for the death of a dear person, who becomes associated in his writings with Cuba. In the following years, la Avellaneda will do the same. But in her case, the descendants of the “original race” will reappear dressed for war, claiming vengeance, and interwoven with the desires and demands of the slaves, free blacks and mulattos that have replaced them in the fields.

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