Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2103620
Zachary Riebeling
ABSTRACT This article argues that historical existence in the Anthropocene is constituted by waste. As both act and product waste increasingly dominate natural, social, and political environments. The Anthropocene as a threshold in natural history then is inseparable from the profusion of waste that has accompanied its rise. Our insatiable wastefulness and our reforming of the planet with trash in turn create distinct consequences for historical consciousness and historical theory. Historical thinking and historical writing must reckon with waste in its physical and metahistorical registers. Key to this challenge is the thought of Georges Bataille, who attempted to reorient political economy by centering waste in place of production. With expenditure at the center of human existence, twenty-first-century historians can undertake an analogous restructuring of historical knowledge. Waste constitutes a central experience of sovereignty. In wasting, the consumer attains momentary sovereignty over self, world, and history. This article also examines Jean Baudrillard’s articulation of the end of history as a moment of refusal in order to sketch how waste has emerged as a historical condition. As a consequence of this connection, it also considers how the historicity of waste might reshape the self-understanding of historians as they take stock of the Anthropocene. (7724 words)
{"title":"Waste and historicity in the Anthropocene","authors":"Zachary Riebeling","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2103620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2103620","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article argues that historical existence in the Anthropocene is constituted by waste. As both act and product waste increasingly dominate natural, social, and political environments. The Anthropocene as a threshold in natural history then is inseparable from the profusion of waste that has accompanied its rise. Our insatiable wastefulness and our reforming of the planet with trash in turn create distinct consequences for historical consciousness and historical theory. Historical thinking and historical writing must reckon with waste in its physical and metahistorical registers. Key to this challenge is the thought of Georges Bataille, who attempted to reorient political economy by centering waste in place of production. With expenditure at the center of human existence, twenty-first-century historians can undertake an analogous restructuring of historical knowledge. Waste constitutes a central experience of sovereignty. In wasting, the consumer attains momentary sovereignty over self, world, and history. This article also examines Jean Baudrillard’s articulation of the end of history as a moment of refusal in order to sketch how waste has emerged as a historical condition. As a consequence of this connection, it also considers how the historicity of waste might reshape the self-understanding of historians as they take stock of the Anthropocene. (7724 words)","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"319 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43999735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2066307
Nagatomi Hirayama
ABSTRACT This article discusses an important political conflict of historical knowledge between Chinese and Anglophone academia. By exploring divergent perspectives either on long-term and coherent narratives of China or short-term and differentiated narratives of China through the founding issues of Historical Review (Lishi pinglun) established by the Chinese Academy of History in 2020, this article illustrates a ‘battle’ of narratives derived from different regimes of historical knowledge, either officially institutionalized in contemporary China or unofficially constituted in Anglophone academia. Specifically, by critically evaluating the discursive constructions of identity-driven historical narratives of both sides, this article gives a serious consideration to the Historical Review’s mission against the deconstructionist historical narratives. In so doing, I argue that even if it is true that the Historical Review contributors are nationalists and thus help radicalize Chinese nationalism, the liberalist deconstructionist historians of China in English academia are not free from the same types of ‘political contaminations’ by lighting the excessive fires of China bashing.
{"title":"History in politics: a “battle” of identity historical narratives between Chinese and Anglophone academia","authors":"Nagatomi Hirayama","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2066307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2066307","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses an important political conflict of historical knowledge between Chinese and Anglophone academia. By exploring divergent perspectives either on long-term and coherent narratives of China or short-term and differentiated narratives of China through the founding issues of Historical Review (Lishi pinglun) established by the Chinese Academy of History in 2020, this article illustrates a ‘battle’ of narratives derived from different regimes of historical knowledge, either officially institutionalized in contemporary China or unofficially constituted in Anglophone academia. Specifically, by critically evaluating the discursive constructions of identity-driven historical narratives of both sides, this article gives a serious consideration to the Historical Review’s mission against the deconstructionist historical narratives. In so doing, I argue that even if it is true that the Historical Review contributors are nationalists and thus help radicalize Chinese nationalism, the liberalist deconstructionist historians of China in English academia are not free from the same types of ‘political contaminations’ by lighting the excessive fires of China bashing.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"179 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44806056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2066286
Yang Zhao
ABSTRACT This article explores filmmaking as a historical research method by drawing on the output and experiences from my fieldwork at the Nanyue Martyr’s Shrine, Hunan province of China, where I produced a forty-five-minute documentary Till the Living Memory Fades (2020). Situated on the frontline of fighting in Hunan during the Resistance War against Japanese invasion (1937–1945), this war memorial, dedicated to fallen Chinese soldiers, has survived Japanese occupation and years of Communist erasure, re-emerging today to be visited by groups of people and thus being reincorporated into contemporary China’s war narrative. By analysing selected scenes from the film, I map out the temporal and spatial presence different from the text and discuss how this practice-based research contributes to the current memory study of war. The film uses observational methods from visual anthropology to visualise a complicated correlation between memorial landscapes, material culture, and individuals’ behaviour. It examines how remembering processes have been encoded in senses, embodied knowledge, and lived experiences, generated through affective communication between filmed subjects and the remembrance work organised in commemorative spaces. The capacity of camera to capture multi-layered acts of remembering points to the possibilities of bringing together historical research with practices of filmmaking.
{"title":"Visualising memory: filmmaking as research method to engage with China’s wartime past","authors":"Yang Zhao","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2066286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2066286","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores filmmaking as a historical research method by drawing on the output and experiences from my fieldwork at the Nanyue Martyr’s Shrine, Hunan province of China, where I produced a forty-five-minute documentary Till the Living Memory Fades (2020). Situated on the frontline of fighting in Hunan during the Resistance War against Japanese invasion (1937–1945), this war memorial, dedicated to fallen Chinese soldiers, has survived Japanese occupation and years of Communist erasure, re-emerging today to be visited by groups of people and thus being reincorporated into contemporary China’s war narrative. By analysing selected scenes from the film, I map out the temporal and spatial presence different from the text and discuss how this practice-based research contributes to the current memory study of war. The film uses observational methods from visual anthropology to visualise a complicated correlation between memorial landscapes, material culture, and individuals’ behaviour. It examines how remembering processes have been encoded in senses, embodied knowledge, and lived experiences, generated through affective communication between filmed subjects and the remembrance work organised in commemorative spaces. The capacity of camera to capture multi-layered acts of remembering points to the possibilities of bringing together historical research with practices of filmmaking.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"148 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41700950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2040130
Melanie A. Kiechle
ABSTRACT As climate change alters our cities, a better knowledge of past environments is necessary to understand current flooding patterns and anticipate future ones. This cumulative tale is a narrative riff on the comparison between history and archaeology, that each dig into layers of time and soil, respectively. By starting at the surface of a present-day flooding issue and digging into both the landscape and historic sources, the cumulative tale relates the burial of Miller’s River, once the boundary between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. This article explains how a repeatedly forgotten river and its altered environs complicate current and future life in the greater Boston metro area and points to many other buried waterways that pose similar problems.
{"title":"A buried river, an emerging crisis, a cumulative tale","authors":"Melanie A. Kiechle","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2040130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2040130","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As climate change alters our cities, a better knowledge of past environments is necessary to understand current flooding patterns and anticipate future ones. This cumulative tale is a narrative riff on the comparison between history and archaeology, that each dig into layers of time and soil, respectively. By starting at the surface of a present-day flooding issue and digging into both the landscape and historic sources, the cumulative tale relates the burial of Miller’s River, once the boundary between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. This article explains how a repeatedly forgotten river and its altered environs complicate current and future life in the greater Boston metro area and points to many other buried waterways that pose similar problems.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"119 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47439584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2087016
C. Steedman
ABSTRACT The focus is the historiography of Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) and her intention to produce a ‘history-novel’ that contained ‘everything’. Modern English-language novelists (popular and literary) also invent characters that embody a preoccupation with the philosophy of history, with the idea of time and duration; sometimes these characters are historians, who are used to inscribe method in social history. The ideas of the marginal note, of marginalia in general, and the footnote provide new ways of understanding history-writing in the modern era.
{"title":"The notes, the markings: along the margins of the years","authors":"C. Steedman","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2087016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2087016","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The focus is the historiography of Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) and her intention to produce a ‘history-novel’ that contained ‘everything’. Modern English-language novelists (popular and literary) also invent characters that embody a preoccupation with the philosophy of history, with the idea of time and duration; sometimes these characters are historians, who are used to inscribe method in social history. The ideas of the marginal note, of marginalia in general, and the footnote provide new ways of understanding history-writing in the modern era.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"267 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47673936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2079892
Sameer Ahmed
ABSTRACT What does morality have to do with history? Should the past be pluralised as a heuristic category? Might we disengage common representational tropes from historical events otherwise remembered in mutually contradictory ways? This study attempts to answer these questions by narrowing in on the contested legacy of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750–1799). Tipu is remembered today both as a proto-anticolonial figure who died fighting the East India Company (EIC), and a Muslim tyrant who colonised a mostly Hindu southern India. This martyr/monster duality finds expression in contending portrayals of his death in combat against the British in 1799. Tipu’s ‘last stand’ becomes the pivot of this discussion where I will demonstrate how the past is used to envision moral victory from conflict by its presenters in comparable events like the Battle of Pollilur (1780) and the Battle of Alamo (1836). This means, I contend, that the past being exploited for various ends is split from itself at the moment of its enunciation; replicated and reproduced in accordance with the ideological exigencies of its presenters. I will argue that this calls for a paradigmatic shift from the Rankean ideal of what really happened to how what supposedly happened is told; who tells it; and for what purpose. Through this proposed model, I will elaborate how the historical ‘fact’ becomes ‘meaningful’, and how morals and history, history and fiction, colonial and anticolonial, are closer to each other than apart.
{"title":"Fall of a tyrant, or heroic last stand? Tipu Sultan and the moral undercurrent in historiography","authors":"Sameer Ahmed","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2079892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2079892","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What does morality have to do with history? Should the past be pluralised as a heuristic category? Might we disengage common representational tropes from historical events otherwise remembered in mutually contradictory ways? This study attempts to answer these questions by narrowing in on the contested legacy of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750–1799). Tipu is remembered today both as a proto-anticolonial figure who died fighting the East India Company (EIC), and a Muslim tyrant who colonised a mostly Hindu southern India. This martyr/monster duality finds expression in contending portrayals of his death in combat against the British in 1799. Tipu’s ‘last stand’ becomes the pivot of this discussion where I will demonstrate how the past is used to envision moral victory from conflict by its presenters in comparable events like the Battle of Pollilur (1780) and the Battle of Alamo (1836). This means, I contend, that the past being exploited for various ends is split from itself at the moment of its enunciation; replicated and reproduced in accordance with the ideological exigencies of its presenters. I will argue that this calls for a paradigmatic shift from the Rankean ideal of what really happened to how what supposedly happened is told; who tells it; and for what purpose. Through this proposed model, I will elaborate how the historical ‘fact’ becomes ‘meaningful’, and how morals and history, history and fiction, colonial and anticolonial, are closer to each other than apart.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"207 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46056795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2085012
P. Caldas
ABSTRACT The Periodic Table (1975), by Primo Levi, is divided into 21 chapters in which the author recounts episodes of his life as a chemist in a linear chronological order. The idea of linearity might suggest a slow pulling away from the past, an issue that can be problematized in at least three chapters (‘Uranium’, ‘Silver’, and ‘Vanadium’), where Levi meets characters that lead him to speak again of the Fascist period and the war. The article’s central question emerges from this perception: what is the meaning of this reencounter with the Fascist past? The elaboration of this question will involve the idea of a double meaning of metamorphosis: that of transformations of the past as well as the way this transformed past itself produces metamorphoses. I will focus on the political implications of this double meaning of metamorphosis, following three stages with distinct goals: (1) to demonstrate metamorphosis as the book’s poetic principle; (2) to show how this principle can be framed in a relative light and tested according to ‘Uranium’ and ‘Silver’; and (3) to propose an idea of recovery of the metamorphosis principle based on a reading of ‘Vanadium’.
Primo Levi的《元素周期表》（1975）共分21章，作者以线性时间顺序讲述了自己作为化学家的生活。线性的想法可能意味着对过去的缓慢抽离，这个问题至少可以在三章（《铀》、《银》和《钒》）中解决，在这三章中，李维遇到了让他再次谈论法西斯时期和战争的人物。这篇文章的核心问题来自于这种看法：这种与法西斯过去的重演意味着什么？这个问题的阐述将涉及变形的双重含义：过去的转变以及这种转变的过去本身产生变形的方式。我将着重探讨变形的双重含义的政治含义，分三个阶段进行，目标明确：（1）将变形作为本书的诗学原则加以论证；（2） 展示如何在相对光线下构建这一原理，并根据“铀”和“银”进行测试；（3）在阅读《钒》的基础上，提出了恢复变态原理的思想。
{"title":"Metamorphoses of the past: a study of Primo Levi´s The Periodic Table","authors":"P. Caldas","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2085012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2085012","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Periodic Table (1975), by Primo Levi, is divided into 21 chapters in which the author recounts episodes of his life as a chemist in a linear chronological order. The idea of linearity might suggest a slow pulling away from the past, an issue that can be problematized in at least three chapters (‘Uranium’, ‘Silver’, and ‘Vanadium’), where Levi meets characters that lead him to speak again of the Fascist period and the war. The article’s central question emerges from this perception: what is the meaning of this reencounter with the Fascist past? The elaboration of this question will involve the idea of a double meaning of metamorphosis: that of transformations of the past as well as the way this transformed past itself produces metamorphoses. I will focus on the political implications of this double meaning of metamorphosis, following three stages with distinct goals: (1) to demonstrate metamorphosis as the book’s poetic principle; (2) to show how this principle can be framed in a relative light and tested according to ‘Uranium’ and ‘Silver’; and (3) to propose an idea of recovery of the metamorphosis principle based on a reading of ‘Vanadium’.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"232 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44407219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2087015
Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum
ABSTRACT How can we compare two historical narratives about the same occurrence when each of the narratives satisfies the criteria of truth but nevertheless, portray incongruent views about the past? To answer such a question, we can identify a conservative view in history that commits to a correspondence theory of the past that argues that the scrutiny of the primary and secondary sources alongside a precise division of what counts as ‘objective facts’ and ‘subjective information’ can discern which narrative is the correct one. In other words, they value ‘truth as correspondence’ as the ultimate way to settle epistemological disagreements. In this paper, I challenge such a view and argue that it does not answer our primary question. I will propose a new standard for historiographic normativity, one that takes Catherine Elgin’s notion of understanding and Alva Noë’s idea of reorganization at its center. I will further argue that Elgin and Noë’s work allows us to bring Arthur Danto’s idea of redescription and Louis Mink’s notion of understanding from the descriptive to the normative realm.
{"title":"Beyond truth: an epistemic normativity for historiography","authors":"Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2087015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2087015","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT How can we compare two historical narratives about the same occurrence when each of the narratives satisfies the criteria of truth but nevertheless, portray incongruent views about the past? To answer such a question, we can identify a conservative view in history that commits to a correspondence theory of the past that argues that the scrutiny of the primary and secondary sources alongside a precise division of what counts as ‘objective facts’ and ‘subjective information’ can discern which narrative is the correct one. In other words, they value ‘truth as correspondence’ as the ultimate way to settle epistemological disagreements. In this paper, I challenge such a view and argue that it does not answer our primary question. I will propose a new standard for historiographic normativity, one that takes Catherine Elgin’s notion of understanding and Alva Noë’s idea of reorganization at its center. I will further argue that Elgin and Noë’s work allows us to bring Arthur Danto’s idea of redescription and Louis Mink’s notion of understanding from the descriptive to the normative realm.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"250 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46035658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2033908
Georgi Asatryan, Jack V. Kalpakian
{"title":"Rethinking medieval margins and marginality","authors":"Georgi Asatryan, Jack V. Kalpakian","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2033908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2033908","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"116 - 118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47902171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2022.2042649
Jukka Kortti
ABSTRACT This article makes use of history documentary films to examine mediated historical culture and memory narrated by media. It particularly focuses on transgenerational dimensions of memory in media representations – the idea of how collective memories are transmitted through media to a second generation of people who did not directly experience the actual events but who nonetheless have often been exposed to the traumatic tensions of the first generation. The article first asks how mediated memory provides different views on war in historical culture. Second, it discusses how the memory of war is negotiated in the contemporary institutional historical culture of a democracy. The article demonstrates that since the role of the state in public remembrance is no longer as clear-cut as before, at least in democratic countries, historical culture is a more appropriate and precise concept than either civil society or even public history for analysing the importance of memory in society. The article also confirms the notion that it is difficult, if not even impossible, to separate media-narrated memory into the collective and private spheres of life. The empirical body of research consists of three Finnish history documentary films on WWII screened or broadcast in 2017, when Finland celebrated its 100-year anniversary.
{"title":"War, transgenerational memory and documentary film: mediated and institutional memory in historical culture","authors":"Jukka Kortti","doi":"10.1080/13642529.2022.2042649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2042649","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article makes use of history documentary films to examine mediated historical culture and memory narrated by media. It particularly focuses on transgenerational dimensions of memory in media representations – the idea of how collective memories are transmitted through media to a second generation of people who did not directly experience the actual events but who nonetheless have often been exposed to the traumatic tensions of the first generation. The article first asks how mediated memory provides different views on war in historical culture. Second, it discusses how the memory of war is negotiated in the contemporary institutional historical culture of a democracy. The article demonstrates that since the role of the state in public remembrance is no longer as clear-cut as before, at least in democratic countries, historical culture is a more appropriate and precise concept than either civil society or even public history for analysing the importance of memory in society. The article also confirms the notion that it is difficult, if not even impossible, to separate media-narrated memory into the collective and private spheres of life. The empirical body of research consists of three Finnish history documentary films on WWII screened or broadcast in 2017, when Finland celebrated its 100-year anniversary.","PeriodicalId":46004,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking History","volume":"26 1","pages":"93 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47385886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：