Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241255073
Lucy Britt
The memorials commemorating Rwanda’s 1994 genocide are rare in their use of human remains and depictions of violence. These memorials have been widely criticized by European and North American scholars, who focus on the danger of depicting bodily vulnerability, arguing that it supports the regime’s politics of exclusion. However, by conflating what is exclusionary about the framing of the aesthetic of bodily vulnerability at Rwandan memorials with the aesthetic itself, these critics write off vulnerability altogether, risking a colonialist stance that reduces the Rwandan context to the non-political by fitting its commemorative politics into a false dichotomy of emotion and reason. In conversation with theories of vulnerability and the human by Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, I argue that the aesthetic of vulnerability, when framed in an inclusive and critical way, can provide hope by supplying a way to see others’ bodies as non-disposable and oppose debasing forms of power.
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Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241243039
Sulamith Graefenstein, Rosanne Kennedy
This article introduces the concept of mnemonic reciprocity to examine the dynamics of exchanges between local memory activists and other community members after a Comfort Women statue was installed in 2016 on the grounds of Sydney’s Ashfield Uniting Church. Contributing to the scholarship on grassroots memory activism and on the global travels of the Comfort Women statue, we take a feminist, decolonial approach that identifies points of connectivity between the disparate communities that have come together in the semi-public location of the church for selected commemorative events. Based on an analysis of the ways in which mnemonic reciprocity is fostered through exchanges between Korean-Australians and Indigenous Australians, we suggest that the statue’s commemorative functions, when activated on the level of the local, are doubly decolonial. The Comfort Women statue activates the memory of Japan’s imperialism in South Korea and beyond in the semi-public locality of suburban Sydney. In addition, when articulated critically, the Peace Statue can help to decolonise memory in Australia, contributing to intimate, small-scale acts of a reconciliatory and reparative nature. This case, we argue, demonstrates first that it is crucial to identify the particularities governing the place in which a carrier of memory, such as a statue, is re-territorialised. Second, by showing that localised acts of mnemonic reciprocity can strengthen community relations, it offers an alternative to the nationalist memory wars between South Korea and Japan that have been repeated in many diasporic communities where statues have been erected.
{"title":"Mnemonic reciprocity: Activating Sydney’s Comfort Women statue for decolonial memory","authors":"Sulamith Graefenstein, Rosanne Kennedy","doi":"10.1177/17506980241243039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241243039","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the concept of mnemonic reciprocity to examine the dynamics of exchanges between local memory activists and other community members after a Comfort Women statue was installed in 2016 on the grounds of Sydney’s Ashfield Uniting Church. Contributing to the scholarship on grassroots memory activism and on the global travels of the Comfort Women statue, we take a feminist, decolonial approach that identifies points of connectivity between the disparate communities that have come together in the semi-public location of the church for selected commemorative events. Based on an analysis of the ways in which mnemonic reciprocity is fostered through exchanges between Korean-Australians and Indigenous Australians, we suggest that the statue’s commemorative functions, when activated on the level of the local, are doubly decolonial. The Comfort Women statue activates the memory of Japan’s imperialism in South Korea and beyond in the semi-public locality of suburban Sydney. In addition, when articulated critically, the Peace Statue can help to decolonise memory in Australia, contributing to intimate, small-scale acts of a reconciliatory and reparative nature. This case, we argue, demonstrates first that it is crucial to identify the particularities governing the place in which a carrier of memory, such as a statue, is re-territorialised. Second, by showing that localised acts of mnemonic reciprocity can strengthen community relations, it offers an alternative to the nationalist memory wars between South Korea and Japan that have been repeated in many diasporic communities where statues have been erected.","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141410153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241242388
Katharine McGregor, A. Dragojlovic
The year 2021 marked the 400th anniversary of the Banda massacres, in which the army of the Verenigde Ooostindische Compagnie (The United East India Trading Company) massacred the Bandanese in a brutal campaign designed to secure a monopoly over the global nutmeg trade. While for centuries, the Bandanese remembered the massacre in a range of cultural mediums, the 400th anniversary was marked by a production of a multi-media project entitled The Banda Journal, produced by Muhammad Fadli and Fatris MF and from West Sumatra, Indonesia. The Banda Journal project represents a new form of decolonial memory work that accentuates the connections between place and memory for people from Indonesia’s ‘outer islands’ including people who fled the Banda islands following the massacre. In addition, the project adopts decolonial methods and critically engages with histories of colonialism to move beyond nationalist framings and prompt reflection on the excesses of capitalism and economic exploitation and the resilience of affected communities.
{"title":"Songs from another land: Decolonizing memories of colonialism and the nutmeg trade","authors":"Katharine McGregor, A. Dragojlovic","doi":"10.1177/17506980241242388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241242388","url":null,"abstract":"The year 2021 marked the 400th anniversary of the Banda massacres, in which the army of the Verenigde Ooostindische Compagnie (The United East India Trading Company) massacred the Bandanese in a brutal campaign designed to secure a monopoly over the global nutmeg trade. While for centuries, the Bandanese remembered the massacre in a range of cultural mediums, the 400th anniversary was marked by a production of a multi-media project entitled The Banda Journal, produced by Muhammad Fadli and Fatris MF and from West Sumatra, Indonesia. The Banda Journal project represents a new form of decolonial memory work that accentuates the connections between place and memory for people from Indonesia’s ‘outer islands’ including people who fled the Banda islands following the massacre. In addition, the project adopts decolonial methods and critically engages with histories of colonialism to move beyond nationalist framings and prompt reflection on the excesses of capitalism and economic exploitation and the resilience of affected communities.","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141406005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241240715
Lia Kent
This article examines how Timor-Leste’s dead are memory workers. Drawing on ethnographic research, it probes how the restless spirits of those who died during the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999) are activating practices of searching for and recovering their bodies among their families and communities that allow them to be ‘gathered in’ and cared for in new geographic and socio-political spaces. These practices enable the re-membering of communities of the living and the dead in the aftermath of the profoundly dismembering effects of the occupation while also allowing some of the silences of nation-and-state-building projects to be made partially present and negotiated. I suggest that while the dead are not memory activists in the sense that they push for a specific social or political agenda, they are memory workers in the way they work on the living, opening up reparative and political possibilities. The work of the dead troubles the distinctions between the active and the passive, the subject and object, and the human and the more-than-human that lie at the heart of dominant understandings of memory-work and memory activism, inviting new ways of thinking about agency and the unexpected avenues through which social and political change can sometimes take place.
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Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241241589
Rachel Hughes
This article examines how a recent multi-media requiem sought rest for Khmer Rouge victims and connected audiences in the Cambodian post-conflict diaspora. Composed by Him Sophy, the requiem takes its name from a funeral ritual that assists re-birth: Bangsokol. Performed in various international cities throughout the years 2017–2019, Bangsokol, with a libretto by researcher Trent Walker, combined chanting and singing in Khmer and Pali with the music of a traditional Cambodian orchestra blended with that of a Western chamber orchestra. The performance was backlit by projected film images by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, and accompanied by stage performance elements such as procession, drumming, and dance. I draw on interviews with the key creatives involved in the Bangsokol Requiem, visual documentation of the Requiem in development, and experiences of its premiere performances at the Melbourne Festival in October 2017. I follow Elizabeth Grosz on art to consider the Requiem in terms of its capacity for ‘activation’ and trace three of its micropolitical alter-accomplishments. I argue that the performances deterritorialised existing memorial refrains and reconnected diasporic and wider audiences through an experience of affective intensification.
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Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241255079
Elizabeth Benjamin
We live surrounded by sites of memory, and are broadly aware of their existence, sometimes their significance. But what often goes unremarked in the memoryscape – the spaces and places of memory that make up a geographic or abstract area – are the monuments, memorials and museums that are partial, missing or never existed. This article proposes a new type of monument – the ‘ nonument’ – as a site of both remembering and forgetting that is yet a key contributor to latent narratives of cultural, individual and collective memory. The article proposes five categories of nonument – the Rejected; the Removed; the Ruined; the Rebuilt; the Repurposed – and demonstrates these categories primarily through the development of the urban memoryscape of Paris since the French Revolution (1789), founding event of the French nation, and key contributor to ideas of a French collective and cultural memory.
{"title":"Monuments and ‘nonuments’: A typology of the forgotten memoryscape","authors":"Elizabeth Benjamin","doi":"10.1177/17506980241255079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241255079","url":null,"abstract":"We live surrounded by sites of memory, and are broadly aware of their existence, sometimes their significance. But what often goes unremarked in the memoryscape – the spaces and places of memory that make up a geographic or abstract area – are the monuments, memorials and museums that are partial, missing or never existed. This article proposes a new type of monument – the ‘ nonument’ – as a site of both remembering and forgetting that is yet a key contributor to latent narratives of cultural, individual and collective memory. The article proposes five categories of nonument – the Rejected; the Removed; the Ruined; the Rebuilt; the Repurposed – and demonstrates these categories primarily through the development of the urban memoryscape of Paris since the French Revolution (1789), founding event of the French nation, and key contributor to ideas of a French collective and cultural memory.","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141275298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241255075
Joe Edward Hatfield
Across the globe, visitors tour corporate museums. Corporate museums commemorate the history of a private company, often using standard methods of artifact curation and display. On the surface, these institutions appear like any other place of public memory. However, I argue that corporate museums pose a challenge to scholars who have conceptualized public memory as a domain of activity closely associated with the democratic ideal of the public sphere. Rather than promoting civic engagement or critical dialogue, corporate museums reduce public memory into a set of aesthetic resources that may be commodified, privatized, and thus transformed to benefit a social and economic system suffused by neoliberal capitalist values. To make this case, I perform a close reading of the Walmart Museum, showing how the institution memorializes the company’s founder as a technique for reinforcing established brand messaging and installing emergent modes of consumer citizenship under the guise of heritage tourism.
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Pub Date : 2024-06-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241242381
Nayahamui Rooney, Shameem Black
This conversation explores themes of memory, activism, and the arts through the scholarship, poetry, and practice of Nayahamui Rooney. In a range of interdisciplinary work, Rooney, a Papua New Guinean woman, has analyzed key issues of power, violence, justice, and voice in Papua New Guinea. In this interview, Rooney reflects on how her journey to become a maker of baskets on Manus Island informed her understanding of the political and social dynamics of memory, especially in the context of Australia’s decision to base a regional processing center for asylum seekers on Manus Island in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The interview explores how the relationships among basket-making, collective memory, interdisciplinary scholarship, and political activism can emerge in non-linear and recursive ways in response to changing political discourses. It concludes by reflecting on how the scholarship of today can lay the groundwork for a more inclusive collective memory that will be needed in the future.
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