Independent Film for Solidarity of Traumas in the Cinema of Turkey

Michael Rothberg introduced the concept of multidirectional memory in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). Later, many other scholars used his idea to analyze works of art, including films. Although multidirectional memory generally focuses on the possibility of establishing solidarity between memories/traumas that are geographically or culturally distant from each other, in this article it will be argued that this concept is also crucial within coexisting multicultural and multitraumatic societies. The concept of multidirectional memory, and subsequently concepts such as travelling memory and postmemory, will be examined through the analysis of an independent production from Turkey, Özcan Alper’s film Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, 2011). With the help of critical film analysis, the multidirectional memory of Turkey’s traumatic past will be discussed as an opportunity to practice solidarity.

Whose Museum Is It? Jewish Museums and Indigenous Theory

Are museums places about a community or for the community? This article addresses this question by bringing into conversation Jewish museums and Indigenous museum theory, with special attention paid to two major institutions: the Jewish Museum Berlin and the National Museum of the American Indian. The JMB’s exhibitions and the controversies surrounding them, I contend, allow us to see the limits of rhetorical sovereignty, namely the ability and right of a community to determine the narrative. The comparison between Indigenous and Jewish museal practices is grounded in the idea of multidirectional memory. Stories of origins in museums, foundational to a community’s self-understanding, are analyzed as expressions of rhetorical sovereignty. The last section expands the discussion to the public sphere by looking at the debates that led to the resignation of Peter Schäfer, the JMB’s former director, following a series of events that were construed as anti-Israeli and hence, so was the argument, anti-Jewish. These claims are based on two narrow conceptions: First, that of the source community that makes a claim for the museum. Second, on the equation of Jewishness with a pro-Israeli stance. Taken together, the presentation of origins and the public debate show the limits of rhetorical sovereignty by exposing the contested dynamics of community claims. Ultimately, I suggest, museums should be seen not only as a site for contestation about communal voice, but as a space for constituting the community.

In search of a lost cinema

This article shows how creative approaches can contribute to a productive engagement with losses in film heritage. By (re)producing and (re)circulating images, sounds and narratives, documentaries on film heritage in particular relate to larger contexts of cultural and moving image memory. On the one hand, they are premediated by older productions, including feature films. On the other hand, they bring in new artistic, political and/or social perspectives. Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou, 2012), a documentary about Cambodia's lost film heritage before the Khmer Rouge period, serves as an example to illustrate these ideas. It carries a dual perspective that is simultaneously post-migratory and marked by (French) cinephilia as a cinematographic memory culture. In order to do justice to this complexity, dynamic concepts from the field of memory studies such as Svetlana Boym’s notion of nostalgia (Boym 2001) and Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) are drawn on alongside literature on the history and theory of (French) cinephilia. In this way, cinephilia is reimagined as a multidirectional moving image memory culture that plays a particularly important but also complex role with regard to film heritage. In conclusion, several questions are outlined that need to be explored in further research.

Multidirectional Memory, Polyacroasis and (Un)translatability in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad

The primary aim of this chapter is to analyse the alignment between multidirectional memory and literature. Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory model is scrutinized so as to elucidate how this approach works in fiction. The chapter further analyses the rhetorical concept of polyacroasis, proposed by Tomás Albaladejo in 1998 in order to analyse its interlacing with multidirectional memory as well as to demonstrate the manner in which polyacroasis may function as a vehicle of multidirectional memory in literature. On the other hand, the notion of translator as secondary witness (Deane-Cox, 2013; 2017) will be employed so as to examine the role of the author as translator. By means of a case study, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sefarad. Una novela de novelas, I will attempt to analyse how the frameworks provided by multidirectional memory and polyacroasis along with the workings of empathy encourage and pave the way to translatability. Similarly, I will examine how the notion of translator as secondary witness functions in a novel like Sefarad taking into account that the author of that novel inscribed his translation into Spanish of passages coming from Holocaust testimonies which were not published in Spain by the time the novel was being written.

Ambivalent Déjà-vu: World War II in the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles

This article addresses how the poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles enters into a dialogue with the memory of World War II. Poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Sinéad Morrissey are analysed, showing how World War II is a controversial source of comparison for these poets. While World War II provides important ways of framing the suffering and claustrophobia of the Northern Irish conflict, evident differences also mean that such comparisons are handled warily and with some irony. The poems are highly self-conscious utterances that seek to unsettle and develop generic strategies in the light of traumatic suffering. This essay draws on Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, and it also makes use of Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory in order to highlight how Seamus Heaney in particular makes use of the World War II memories mediated by popular culture to respond to the Troubles.

On the Specificity of the Formation, Distribution and Translation of Memory in the Network Space

The article analyzes the main approaches in Russian and foreign literature in the study of the formation and functioning of memory in networks. The duality of interest in the topic of memory is noted. It is shown that, on the one hand, the network space opens up new perspectives for creating and distributing memory. Thus, digital technologies allow the creation, processing, storage and dissemination of information on a historically unprecedented scale, and many people with a wide variety of values, interests and expectations gain access to this information. Consumers may have alternative sources of information and need not use official archives. They can reproduce their personal historical experience by publishing family archives, articulating their own impressions of the past. Consumers get the opportunity for an individualized interpretation of the material. No wonder, many researchers mark the concept “prosumer” as blurring the lines between the consumer and the content producer. As a result, the formation of multidirectional memory and its decentralization are noted. Researchers highlight the abundance, ubiquity and responsiveness of digital media. At the same time, their institutionalized forms are supplemented, shifted and often forced to compete with information produced and disseminated by individual users. Moreover, contacts in and through digital media are not complementary to the usual forms of social interaction, but intertwined with them. On the other hand, the negative sides of the “boom” of memory, which researchers associate with the growth of amnesia intensified by this “boom”, and the deforming of commercialized memory are emphasized. First of all, it should be noted that openness also provided an opportunity to sound to the voices that can hardly be associated with democratic tendencies. This approach will enhance the nostalgic and thus mythologized memory. The role of the consumer context in which the interest in memory is realized is noted. This turns memory into just a type of product that is worth consuming simply to be modern. Also, the specificity of the functioning of communication provided by Internet platforms turns the past into one of the types of broadcast content and one of the tools for increasing the status of the user. It is not without reason that a number of authors believe that it is more reasonable to speak not about the “boom” of memory, but about the growing pace of oblivion, where the dominance of the above-described forms of memory only enhances it. I believe that attention to such forms of memory is necessary to increase reflexivity when discussing the issue of working out those productive goals and tasks that are assigned to the memory of the past.

Cross-communal acts of commemoration designed to promote peace at a local level in Bosnia-Herzegovina

This essay describes two distinct senses in which local remembrance activities are used to build peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina: to counter nationalist conflict narratives and to demonstrate cross-communal recognition on the local level. The existing literature on such activism in Bosnia-Herzegovina foregrounds the objective conditions in which the combination of memory activism and peacebuilding is necessary as a counter to the uses made of remembrance by the main ethnonationalist parties to justify their divisive rule. The article draws on the concepts of Michael Rothberg�multidirectional memory and implicated subjectivity�to show how the divergent forms of local peacebuilding and memory activities imply choices which also have a subjective, relational element. To enable the reader to understand these choices, the article first reviews the historical, political, and social conditions faced by activists. Secondly, it explores ways in which the subjective, relational dimensions of these choices are also keys to understanding ways in which their variety and their engagement with local realities are not captured in objectivising literature on peacebuilding and memory work.