Collective Memory and Nation-Building in Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Obinna Iroanya
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Causal Factors ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
African Context ◽  
Mixed Approach ◽  
Violent Conflicts

Based on documentary analysis, this article argues that lessons of violent conflicts are rarely appropriated positively for nation-building in the context of post-conflict African societies. The article further stresses that the reasons often projected as causes of ineffective nation-building, such as multiple ethnicity and neo-colonialism, are unjustifiably projected as causal factors. It argues that diverse ethnicity remains a dormant destructive force until operationalised for political gains through misappropriation and deployment of collective memories. In the African context, post-conflict societies adopt the mixed approach of selective amnesia which emphasises amnesty, reconciliation, rehabilitation and reintegration as necessary for nation-building. Experience, however, suggests that the operationalisation of this approach is always marred by inconsistencies and repression. Consequently, repressive mechanisms suppress violence and achieve relative stability. True reconciliation which is critical for nation-building is never achieved. Among loser ethnic groups (hereafter loser groups), resistance to selective amnesia and simultaneous preoccupation with collective memory of victimisation, discrimination and injustice continue to reinforce sentiments of group exceptionality and separatist impulses rather than national consciousness. Therefore, cautious expression of citizenship among segments of the loser groups continues to attract mutual suspicion and distrust from leadership of post-conflict states. It is concluded that the challenge of social contradictions in post-conflict societies is serious because neither the state nor loser groups positively deploy memory of conflict for nation-building. A new reconciliatory approach drawn largely from lessons of history is recommended for post-conflict nation-building efforts in post-conflict African states. Positive appropriation and deployment of memory for nation-building ensures amnesty and restoration without repercussions; and remembrance without resentment.

Collective Memory After Violent Conflict

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Markus Breitweg
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Conflict Studies ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Effective Interventions ◽  
Peace And Conflict Studies ◽  
Peace And Conflict ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
The One ◽  
Violent Conflicts

This chapter develops a framework for the analysis of collective memory in post-conflict settings. It is argued that so far collective memory is not sufficiently theorized within peace and conflict studies, even though in the aftermath of violent conflicts competing memories easily become subject to salient struggles that may even result in yet another outburst of violence. It is these competing representations of the past that researchers should more thoroughly concern themselves with and that they lack an appropriate heuristic device for. Focusing on processual and multidimensional concepts from the fashionable field of memory studies, the author proposes a new framework for analysis that offers categories and ideal-types for practice-oriented research. Based on poststructuralist discourse analysis, the framework allows to link discursive structures and patterns of identity, on the one hand, to actual agency on the other hand, thus facilitating effective interventions.

CONTEXTUALIZING PALIMPSEST OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN AN URBAN HERITAGE SITE: Case Study of Chahar Bagh, Shiraz - Iran

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Mahmoudi Farahani ◽  
Marzieh Setayesh ◽  
Leila Shokrollahi
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Urban Heritage ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
A Site ◽  
Historical Centre

A landscape or site, which has been inhabited for long, consists of layers of history. This history is sometimes reserved in forms of small physical remnants, monuments, memorials, names or collective memories of destruction and reconstruction. In this sense, a site/landscape can be presumed as what Derrida refers to as a “palimpsest”. A palimpsest whose character is identified in a duality between the existing layers of meaning accumulated through time, and the act of erasing them to make room for the new to appear. In this study, the spatial collective memory of the Chahar Bagh site which is located in the historical centre of Shiraz will be investigated as a contextualized palimpsest, with various projects adjacent one another; each conceptualized and constructed within various historical settings; while the site as a heritage is still an active part of the city’s cultural life. Through analysing the different layers of meaning corresponding to these adjacent projects, a number of principals for reading the complexities of similar historical sites can be driven.

Memory Practices in History Education about the 1947 British India Partition

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meenakshi Chhabra
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
British India ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Memory Practices

This article is an epistemological reflection on memory practices in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memories of a historical event involving collective violence and conflict in formal and informal spaces of education. It focuses on the 1947 British India Partition of Punjab. The article engages with multiple memory practices of Partition carried out through personal narrative, interactions between Indian and Pakistani secondary school pupils, history textbook contents, and their enactment in the classroom by teachers. It sheds light on the complex dynamic between collective memory and history education about events of violent conflict, and explores opportunities for and challenges to intercepting hegemonic remembering of a violent past.

scholarly journals Re-living a Common Future in the Face of Ecological Disaster: Exploring (Elements of) Guarani and Kaiowá Collective Memories, Political Imagination, and Critiques

Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Normann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Growth Models ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Green Growth ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Mato Grosso ◽  
Ecological Disaster ◽  
The Face ◽  
Group Interviews

AbstractHow to re-member a fragmented world while climate change escalates, and green growth models reproduce coloniality, particularly in Indigenous territories? What can be the concrete contributions from different scholarly disciplines to a broader decolonial project? These questions are debated by decolonial scholars who call to re-think our practices within academic institutions and in the fields that we study. This article contributes with a decolonial perspective to sociocultural psychology and studies on Indigenous knowledges about climate change. Through ethnographic methods and individual and group interviews, I engage with indigenous Guarani and Kaiowá participants’ knowledges and practices of resilience opposing green growth models in the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul. Their collective memory of a different past, enacted through narratives, rituals, and social practices, was fundamental to imagine different possible futures, which put in motion transformation processes. Their example opens a reflection about the possibilities in connecting sociocultural psychology’s work on collective memory and political imagination to the broader decolonial project, in supporting people’s processes of re-membering in contexts of adverse conditions caused by coloniality and ecological disaster.

KA'KAW POTS AND COMMON CONTAINERS: CREATING HISTORIES AND COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AMONG THE CLASSIC MAYA OF XUNANTUNICH, BELIZE

2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa J. LeCount
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Classic Maya ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Domestic Consumption ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Public Offerings ◽  
Natural Cycles ◽  
Lowland Maya

AbstractReconstruction of foodways at the Lowland Maya center of Xunantunich, Belize, illustrates how commensality is fundamental to the construction of multilayered identities. Collective memory and linear histories form the foundation of identities because they are the mental frameworks people use to construct shared pasts. At Xunantunich, community identity was expressed though pottery and practices associated with the preparation of foods for domestic consumption and public offerings. In a world of natural cycles centered on family reproduction, horticultural activities, and yearly ceremonies, these symbols and rituals structured the lives of all people and embodied within them a collective memory of community. Linear histories were recorded in images and texts on drinking paraphernalia that were likely used for toasting honored individuals, ancestors, or gods during commemorative rites. These inscriptions and bodily practices marked individuals and their houses as people and places of prominence with separate identities.

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 Vilnius memoryscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-280
Author(s):  
Irina Moore
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Memory Formation ◽  
Power Relation ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Baltic

Abstract Through the lens of semiotic landscapes, I analyse here collective memory formation in the Baltic republic of Lithuania. A theoretical focus on power relation in “monumental politics”, the concept of memoryscape (Clack, 2011), Van Gennep’s 2004 sociological application of liminality, and a methodological approach that “treats space as a discursive as well as physical formation” (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010) are combined to examine the process of monument destruction, creation, and alteration in post-Soviet Vilnius. I argue that cultural landscapes represent not only relationships of power within societies but are also used as a tool of nation-building and power legitimation. I highlight a fourfold process: (1) razing – monumental landscape cleansing; (2) raising – the return of memory via the creation of national historical continuity symbols and of new lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1996) and the memorization complex (Train, 2016); (3) polyphonic memorial narratives of empty spaces; and (4) the memory limbo helix or recursive memories.

scholarly journals Limits and Possibilities of the United States Military in Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Stabilization

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alcir Santos Neto
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Humanitarian Assistance ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Military Engagement

This study probes the limits and possibilities of US military efforts to facilitate the transition from warfighting to nation-building. Most comparative studies conceive the complexity of this transition along a spectrum from conflict to humanitarian assistance to post-conflict stabilization. While the last two stages have often been interpreted as a coordinated act of civil-military ‘nation-building’; the spectrum, in fact, represents an ideal type simplification. At one level, outcomes depend on the players involved, including: sovereign nations, national militaries, international and regional institutions, UN peacekeepers, private security contractors, and non-governmental humanitarian providers, among others. On the other hand, because the number, types, and causes of case outcomes are highly diverse and contingent upon many possible factors (among them for example: political, economic, military, organizational, humanitarian, cultural, and religious), institutions like the US military face serious difficulties both planning and coordinating post-conflict scenarios. Assuming this complex backdrop, the present study offers a qualitative analysis of two recent US government reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) on US military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the US government sought to ‘nation-build’ by facilitating post-war stabilization and humanitarian assistance, detailing its genuine efforts to record both processes. While results indicate some limited successes in both cases, they also indicate a familiar pattern of uneven performance failures consistent with other cases internationally. The analysis concludes with recommendations for further research that may better control the contingencies of post-conflict management.

scholarly journals Peace Governance and Multiculturalism: What role for Peace Education in the Balkans

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lidija Georgieva
Keyword(s):  
Peace Education ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Negotiated Settlement ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Negotiated Settlements ◽  
Peace Agreements ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Violent Conflicts

This article will focus on theoretical and practical dilemmas related to the concept of peace governance, and within this context on the possible transformative role of peace education trough facilitation of contact between communities in conflict. The basic assumption is that violent conflicts in the Balkans have been resolved trough negotiated settlements and peace agreements. Yet, education strategy including peace education and its impact on post-conflict peacebuilding and reconciliation are underestimated. Peace governance is recognized as a dynamic but challenging process often based on institutional and policy arrangements aimed to at least settle conflict dynamics or in some cases even to provide more sustainable peace after signing of negotiated settlement in multicultural societies. We will argue that education in general is one of the critical issues of peace governance arrangements that could facilitate peacebuilding and create a contact platform between communities. The first question addressed in this article is to what extend peace agreements refer to education as an issue and the second one relate to the question if education is included in peace agreement to what extent it contributes for contact between different conflicting communities. Although it is widely accepted that contacts between former adversaries contributes for multicultural dialogue it is less known or explained if and in what way peace agreements provisions on education facilitate contact and transformation of conflicting relations.

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