Search

This article examines the ways in which British Second World War conscientious objectors (COs) have been commemorated, memorialized, and represented since 1945. Despite comprising nearly 60 000 men, the CO is strikingly absent in both the popular narrative of the Second World War and official, institutional commemorations of the conflict. This is not true of their First World War counterpart. This is unsurprising: the Second World War CO is largely at odds with popular British conceptions of the war as a ‘just’ conflict. Nevertheless, a broad and diverse set of initiatives have been established to commemorate the CO. The CO also features in numerous forms of post-war popular culture, including fiction, films, television programmes, and plays. It is these disparate remembrance practices and representations that this article brings together to help us explore both the memory of wartime conscientious objection and the broader cultural legacies of the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, national historic sites have played a major role in helping shape the historical narrative in western Canada and throughout the country. In this Forum article I examine how heritage is defined and assess the way the early commemoration of historic sites in the west, including fur trade posts and battle sites associated with the North-West Resistance of 1885, set a conventional direction for what was important in western Canadian history and, just as significantly, what was not. I investigate the changing and at one time progressive role of historical research in Parks Canada, the agency responsible for managing these sites. I consider the later attempts by the agency to refute this innovative research in favour of a return to original, authorized, and archetypal colonialist messages, at the same time narrowing the scope of historical interpretation. Although very recent initiatives have attempted to broaden historic site interpretation in the West, Parks Canada is still faced with attempting to use commemorated and celebrated colonial spaces to communicate post-colonial messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reveals how the official patterns of commemorating the Soviet historical past in Russia match its local projections. Based on interviews with experts from 27 regions and some other field materials, the article maps the diversity of commemorative agendas across Russia. Focusing on the violent aspects of Soviet history, it outlines current configurations of the usable past important for local identity and notably used by regional authorities and other mnemonic actors over time. These repertoires of the usable past depend on the cultural infrastructure that was formed over time, but also on the efforts of mnemonic actors, who promote specific memories. This article argues that although regional approaches to commemorating the historical past are evidently dominated by the official federal narrative, local visions of common history are far from being uniform. The aspects that are downplayed or silenced at the federal level might be indispensable to regional and local identities. Expert interviews suggest that collisions between the narratives circulating at different levels typically do not escalate to open conflicts. The commemorative projects supported by regional authorities tend to conform to the federal-level framing, which is flexible enough to tolerate some local peculiarities. However, in many regions there are also non-state mnemonic actors who promote a commemorative agenda that deviates from the official state discourse. While being short of resources for developing memory hardware, they affect public discussions raising awareness about the downplayed aspects of the local past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is cross-cultural communication around music in the British Asian diaspora shaped by the Partition of 1947? This article will discuss this question through a case study of the writings and relationships of four key South Asian music enthusiasts: one female patron of music, and three male scholar-researchers of music who befriended each other, and in the process redefined rāgadārī (classical) music publics in Britain, beginning in the 1970s and 80s. Through a discussion of their life-stories and narratives I reveal the importance of (i) storytelling and memory in the creation of diasporic homemaking, (ii) a gendered politics of musical commemoration, (iii) the anecdote as 'musical gift' (qua Sykes), and (iv) postcolonial cultural custodianship, in producing a unique rāgadārī musical public in London, across the Indo-Pak national border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen various forms of honorific public art – statues, monuments, and the like – brought under renewed moral scrutiny. This scrutiny has resulted in some high-profile removals, some defacement and additional contextualization to augment existing objects, and some cases of the status quo prevailing. Scholarly treatment of the issues has similarly resulted in arguments that articulate competing values that support removal, modification or preservation. I bring the insights of these arguments to bear on specifically military commemorations, where I argue that they have ample application, but where they do not exhaust the moral complexity to be confronted. This is true first because military commemoration introduces a novel moral concern of militarism, and second because military commemoration frequently has a distinctively normative function of expressing gratitude. Both these points are most powerfully observed in collections of commemorations, rather than individual monuments, a distinction that deepens ongoing discussions about problematic commemorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star ; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia 'archive', with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, focusing on embodied material simulation. I argue that the museum constructs an idealized Oklahoman citizen who works to curb anxieties surrounding domestic threats. The museum mobilizes ideal citizenship through its affective storytelling that functions to traumatize visitors to establish catharsis, which in turn invites visitors to place the blame of domestic terrorism solely on Timothy McVeigh. The rhetorical act of catharsis stunts the community's ability to challenge the rise of domestic terrorism that has been plaguing the United States long after the Oklahoma City bombing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the way a family fashioned a memorial to a son 'taken by the war'. It focuses on the Robert's collection in Melbourne, Australia's largest bound collection of war time ephemera, and the making of what was called 'Frank's Memory Book'. It argues that families asserted ownership over their dead, crafting different modes of memorialization to authorized modes of remembrance, considers the way communities of mourners were brought together and highlights tensions between private loss and public memory. The making of ephemera is examined at length as is the part material culture plays in libraries and archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: On each anniversary of the Montréal Massacre, activist Farrah Khan shares information about the current year's femicide victims on Twitter (now X), raising questions about how victims of gender-based violence (GBV) are represented and memorialized. Analysis: This research comprises an analysis of Khan's December 6 tweets and users' replies from 2017 to 2020, as well as semi-structured interviews with activists and collaborators, to determine what social media strategies activists use to draw attention to and shape public discourse on violence against women. Conclusions and implications: By memorializing victims of GBV on Twitter, Khan and her collaborators rework a traditional genre—the obituary—to serve feminist ends, challenging misconceptions about who experiences GBV and who perpetrates it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings are often portrayed as a wave of failed revolutions that devolved rapidly into anarchic violence. Yemen and Libya appear to illustrate this dynamic par excellence, as interim governments collapsed in the face of violence, war, and humanitarian disasters by 2014. Although studies of these revolutions have proliferated in recent years, the fuller range of outcomes emerging from the Arab Spring at the local level and in everyday life have comprised a theoretical and empirical black box. Based on the grounded analysis of ethnographic data from Yemen and Libya during the post-Arab Spring interim periods (2012–2013), this study argues that although the 2011 revolutions failed to achieve their major goals, they succeeded in breaking down normative forms of incumbent authoritarian power across major urban centers. As a result, activists and ordinary citizens gained what we call newfound "civic opportunities" to make political claims in Yemen and Libya's emergent civic spheres. Participants did so by repurposing their built environment for artistic expression, engaging in peaceful collective action, and publicly commemorating the victims and heroes of anti-regime resistance. While civic opportunities were later eclipsed by violence, we argue that revolutions failing to instigate democratic change from "above" can nevertheless create meaningful civic opportunities for democratic practices from "below." The study concludes by suggesting how this mobilization matters for future waves of protest and democratization, and for the scholarly investigation of revolution outcomes more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Africa presents striking examples of the different ways in which states may seek to promote forgetting through control or suppression of memories of mass violence. In Rwanda, the 1994 genocide is intensively memorialized, yet violence committed by the ruling party is not part of the official history. In Burundi, a power-sharing deal to end a civil war led to the erasure of memory through deliberate neglect. In Kenya, sites of terrorist violence have been fortified and reopened in the name of resilience—a form of triumphalist amnesia. Yet in each country, citizens practice informal varieties of commemoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the relationship between religion and football has gained considerable interest during the last twenty years, scant attention has been paid to the relationship between pilgrimage and football. This paper seeks to advance the study of this relationship through an exploration of collective memory about football disasters that throws fresh light on central themes within pilgrimage studies—pilgrimage as both a journey to a sacred place and the performance of diverse rituals at such places. The paper explores, in particular, the ways in which three different tragedies involving English football clubs have been commemorated through journeys to and ritual performance at places seen as sacred to those involved in commemoration—football stadiums and urban spaces, and cathedrals and pilgrimage shrines in England, Germany and Italy. Through this analysis, we seek to show how the commemoration of football disaster is linked to pilgrimage as a process where people seek healing and reconciliation through the public performance of rituals that link the local to the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing narratives of memory has long been acknowledged as a major component of nationalism and nation building. In Israel the memory of the Holocaust is widely seen as constituting one of these major components and is at the core of Israeli national identity. Since the early 2000s, the imminent passing of Holocaust survivors has resulted in an intense preoccupation with the question of the future of this memory. This preoccupation has produced new commemorative initiatives engaging with interactive digital platforms. In our article we explore the role of human agency in successfully conjuring up alternative or forgotten memories that dramatically transform contemporary remembrance landscapes by analyzing two recent commemorative projects in Israel, Zikaron Besalon and Eva's story. Informed by the understanding of the centrality of temporal orientations to the dynamics of social interaction in our analysis we adopt a temporal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the purpose of an exhibit on Atlantic slavery? Does it seek to raise awareness of the trade in enslaved people, with a view to highlighting and overcoming its racist legacy, or to situate the Atlantic trade within the historical – and ongoing – continuum of slavery, or to draw attention to the role of slavery in constituting colonial modernity? Does giving this history its rightful place within the national story of France, Britain or elsewhere ultimately serve to embed racial divisions in contemporary society, or to expunge them? In other words, does a reckoning with Atlantic slavery open a path to tackling racism today? This article addresses these questions in turn. Its principal referent is the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux, set in the wider context of the city's self-image and French debates around commemorating the Atlantic slave trade. The article concludes that even though Bordeaux's slaving past is integrated into the Musée d'Aquitaine's guiding chronology, the full ramifications of slavery for colonial modernity have not been understood or represented. Beyond simplistic dichotomies of guilt and innocence, accusation and repentance, the enormous significance of coloniality and slavery in constituting European modernity, not least the Enlightenment, have yet to be grasped and assimilated in Bordeaux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the politics of the commemoration of the Kazakh famine of the 1930s by analyzing the commemoration strategies employed by visual artists in the period from 2012 until 2019. It identifies two types of art production on the topic—governmental public art, which avoids politicizing the famine and reads it as the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of the Soviet period, and art projects by independent artists who call the Kazakh famine a genocide. Although these two positions seem to be ideologically opposed on a rhetorical level, the article shows that the difference in the visual language used to express these opposite political positions is not always as pronounced as one would expect, and proposes several explanations for this incoherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre has been enshrined in the collective memory of different social groups globally in various ways, while the Chinese government enforces its own memory of Tiananmen through censorship and revisionism. These result in numerous memories of Tiananmen. Through a qualitative analysis of 27 TikToks posted on 3–5 June 2022, this study examines how Tiananmen is commemorated on TikTok on Tiananmen's anniversary and what is remembered about Tiananmen. This study found that commemoration posts on TikTok remember the protests, casualties, the Chinese Communist Party leaders' role, and the historical contexts, oft using the Tank Man image. The posts also remember the remembrance and memory formation of Tiananmen. Through commemorations, memes, and humor, some posts remember the Chinese government's attempts to recreate the collective memory and other commemoration events. This is best described as meta-memories, where people remember the remembering and possess memory of the memory of events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the photographic representation of former Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, with the aim of understanding memories that were produced following his death in September 2019. Mugabe was in power for 37 years before being dethroned through a military coup in November 2017. His rule divided opinion with some viewing him as a liberator and African icon, while some view him a dictator and tyrant for his role in disregarding human rights. This paper seeks to explore the role of photography in memory with particular interest being on commemorating contesting figure like Mugabe. We analysed photographs used by The Herald and NewsDay to commemorate Mugabe's death. Photographs remain one of the under researched genres in communication, especially in the Global South, yet scholars have argued that contemporary societies have, through the use of photographs, turned their citizens into 'image junkies' and created 'the most irresistible form of mental pollution'. The findings demonstrate that photographs are being used to give a 'testimony' about the contested legacy of Mugabe. Mugabe is framed as a liberator, Pan-African. On the contrary, he is seen as a tyrant and ruled by an iron fist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes historical tourism so compelling? The author reflects upon her personal experience of Holocaust tourism to tease out its meaning and appeal. The paper considers the making of meaning through the in-situ experience, including through association, sensory perception, and imagination. The paradigm of dark tourism, traditionally associated with superficial consumption, is dismissed as being too naive a rendering of the visitor experience. Instead, the author commends the tourist's inherent capacity to make connections between the past and the present, and thereby generate meaning. Ultimately, however, the author finds her most authentic response to "being there" is one of commemoration, since she knows that what she is visiting in the present is not history itself, but merely a memory of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction sets the critical parameters for this special issue on the topic of modernist memories. It describes how the 1922 modernist centenary, and a general turn to critical commemoration across the humanities, has opened avenues for further questions on the interrelation between modernism and memory, questions that this introduction frames and the articles gathered in this issue explore: what is a modernist memory? How have modernist forms and styles been received over the last century? And how does modernism remain to be recollected anew after its historicisation and production as a cultural memory? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese empire's occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and 'bottom-up' wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as 'bogus students' who supposedly received Japanese 'enslavement education' from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People's Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived to Jamestown, United States in 1619, the Ghana government through the Ghana Tourism Authority initiated the Year of Return 2019 (#YOR2019). The goal was to unite Africans in the diaspora with those on the continent, especially in Ghana, through a year-long calendar of commercial and commemorative slavery heritage tourism activities ranging from visits to slavery sites, healing ceremonies, theatre and musical performances, festivals, investment forums and relocation conferences. When a destination tourism product is rooted in a less-than-desirable past, how is 'balance' achieved between commercialization and commemoration? In exploring this conceptual question, we developed a methodological innovation utilizing the social media platform Twitter for data collection. Using a social media crawler coded in Python programming language, we scrapped tweets from the accounts of the Ghana Tourism Authority prior, during, and after the YOR2019 based on hashtag searches. After data cleaning, 1010 tweets were inductively analysed using NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. The findings revealed three emergent themes along a commodification-commemoration continuum: (1) the eventification and festivalisation of slavery heritage tourism, (2) celebrity co-production of YOR2019 experiences through social media and (3) pivoting from a predominantly slavery heritage destination to a destination that focuses on other touristic and business travel. Ultimately, YOR2019 marked a significant push by Ghana to move into a 'Beyond the Return' phase that pivots away from slavery heritage towards a more well-rounded tourism product for roots, leisure, and business travellers. The research established that commodification in slavery heritage tourism does not inherently destroy cultural meanings but provide new commemorative meanings for a new generation of Black travellers searching for more than just their roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1995, thousands of people in Taiwan have pledged each year to donate their cadavers to the medical college run by the Buddhist Tzu Chi (Ciji) Foundation. The "surge of cadavers" seems intriguing in a society where ancestor worship continues to be salient. Drawing on my fieldwork in 2012–2013 and 2015, the purpose of this paper is to describe a series of practices involving the transformation of a cadaver into a Buddhist moral subject: the donor, the family, and the medical school engage in various endeavors and rituals involving "emotional practices" to honor the deceased; situate the donation as a "good death"; and fulfill the family's obligations to ancestor worship. I argue what makes the ritual transformation efficacious is the dominant currency of emotional practices. Emotional practices "authenticate" the ritual transformation. The main ethic for commemorating the cadaver donation is not generosity or dāna but equanimity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although he would come to be seen as the "father of American music," Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864) was mostly unknown until 1900, when a statue by Giuseppe Moretti was erected in Pittsburgh depicting the composer seated above an enslaved man and transcribing the music he performs. This essay explores the historical meanings of the monument by analyzing private and public writings from its genesis, fundraising campaign, and unveiling, situating the statue within the songwriter's family's efforts to shape public memory and the larger political context of reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how ordinary people in the Poltava oblast (Central Ukraine) commemorated the Russia-Ukraine war during the 2014–2021 period (prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022). Focusing on physical commemorative objects constructed by ordinary people, this article investigates the commemorative activity of ordinary people in Central Ukraine who are 'activated' to carry out commemorative work by this turbulent and emotionally charged event in Ukraine's recent history and seek to project their individual, private memories into the public arena. This article's central argument is that ordinary people in Central Ukraine actively exercise their agency in the area of commemoration, to ensure the memory of the Russia-Ukraine war is present in the commemorative landscape, playing an important role in public meaning-making. Thus, by utilising different types of visual language, ordinary people narrate soldiers' sacrifice in the name of the nation, presenting Ukraine's response to Russia's aggression as a righteous and noble struggle. Through linking this event to other periods of Ukraine's history, they create plotlines of Ukraine's centuries-long struggle for sovereignty and self-determination. Therefore, ordinary people contribute to the construction of narratives about history and the identity of the Ukrainian nation. This article is an empirical contribution to the body of knowledge on the commemorative activity of ordinary people as social memory actors, and it also contributes to the knowledge of how ongoing violent conflicts are commemorated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following commemorative article, the author examines intersections between his education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Teachers College Record. He explores how the impact of specific professors—who at different times also served as editors of the TCR—mentored him into the world of scholarship. He emphasizes how the critical education at Teachers College offered a valuable frame for him to work in critical ways as a scholar and to bring this lens to his editorial work at the TC Record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we explore the text of the over 16,000 historical markers erected in the state since 1936, using GIS and corpus linguistics to determine the where, how, what, and when of how Texas memorializes its racial and ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, our results indicate that the story of Texas is implicitly a narrative of white people. More interestingly, the term "African (Americans)" begins to be commemorated especially after the 1990s, but only in stories of community, religion, school, and children, as Texas historical markers do not to dwell on narratives of slavery, the civil rights movement, and lynchings. "Indians" and "Mexicans" in the 1930s and 1960s exemplify the most egregious case of derogatory semantics we found in the markers. As concerns racial and ethnic groups, in general they tend to be memorialized where they were historically present, whether or not such groups are still there. The analysis also reveals the increasing concentration of the markers in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of monuments tends to focus on human agency, in the form of political history, war history, antagonism, trauma and so on. Aesthetic qualities are often seen as superficial and fetishized qualities that belie the impact of the monument in a regional context. The rurally situated monuments of former Yugoslavia, however, must be seen through their extraordinary qualities as works of art, carrying an agency of their own. Rather than restricting the meaning of their impact, their aesthetic qualities and impact in the environment allow them to speak to us today from a new horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to recent debates about memorials and the persistence of outmoded forms that commemorate figures associated with slavery and colonial depredations. The focus is on John Batman, often considered to be the founder of Melbourne, and a subject that has been commemorated in numerous forms. We explore the ways in which reified understandings of Batman were consolidated by these memorials. We argue that they provided a basis for the rampant settler colonialism that was initiated by his arrival in what became Melbourne. While the power of the Batman myth has endured for many years, we show how more recently it has been challenged by a range of art-inspired memorials that provide oppositional and alternative meanings and forms. We especially focus on the potency of counter-memorials, forms that directly address these older modes of commemoration, and anti-memorials, inventive installations that seek to dissolve singular meanings and continue the work of decentring outmoded commemorative forms and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This examination of the politics of historical commemorations uses the case study of a private family chapel in Devon, United Kingdom, that belonged to John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1796. Beginning in 1926, attempts were mounted repeatedly to have it recognized as a historic site as ideas evolved about what the site represented. Some two generations after the campaign began, the chapel and its grounds were donated to the province of Ontario and formally recognized as a historic site. The place of the chapel in changing interpretations of Canadian history remains simultaneously contested and ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital afterlife is becoming increasingly possible due to advancements in VR, deepfake, and AI technologies. The use of computational photography for mourning and commemoration has been re-integrated into practices of remembrance, farewell, continuity, and disengagement. Two case studies, the Shoah Foundation's Dimensions in Testimony and the TV production Meeting You, are analyzed to explore these new possibilities. We show how photography's new affordances enable interaction while maintaining its essence as a representation of reality and argue that this socio-technological transformation habituates contemporary practices of mourning and commemoration, adjusting images to serve the individual needs and interests of the bereaved and the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, a grassroots movement emerged in San Angelo, Texas, with the goal of changing the name of Robert E. Lee Middle School. This movement reflected larger national trends in removing Confederate statues and wrestling with the legacy of the Confederacy. Two professors of history at a regional university decided to participate in the renaming effort. This experience taught them the important role historians can and should play in debates over historical memory and commemoration, especially as allies to movements led by nonacademic community members. Moreover, it offers insights on a significant set of questions for US public historians: What is the role of the professional historian in local debates--contentious school board meetings in particular--that hinge on misconceptions of the American past? In particularly, how can academics use their expertise to combat the supremacy of Lost Cause narratives in the American South? Access to information, often locked behind paywalls, and professional credibility proved to be areas where historians can be of most use. In addition, the authors' experience demonstrates the vital role local institutions play in the lives of their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the so-called refugee crisis, the central Mediterranean Sea has been identified as the deadliest border in the world. As the border studies debate has shown, these deaths reflect the structural violence of border regimes and demand due forms of political accountability and responsibility. However, dominant power structures differentially shape the visibility and grievability of those who are missing and dead at the border. Keeping this complexity as a background, and drawing on examples from Lampedusa and Tunisia, we investigate the politics of challenging Butler’s “ungrievability” – the lack of access to preconditions, spaces and times of private and public mourning and commemoration. We critically discuss the interplay between three components of this political arena: the search infrastructures of the missing and dead at sea; the creation of “spaces of commemoration” through place-making, time-marking and collective actions; the claims for justice and political accountability for those deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bonnet Carré Spillway, a mile-long concrete and wood weir in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, is embedded in a landscape of flood control infrastructure and an institutionally repressed history of the Black communities displaced for its construction from 1929 to 1931. Two cemeteries of enslaved and formerly enslaved people were plowed under and then resurfaced decades later, prompting a movement for commemoration led by descendants. Through histories of both the spillway structure and that of enslaved and formerly enslaved communities, this article examines a growing movement for commemoration that challenges and dismantles the political infrastructure generated by and for the preservation of physical infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexican American educational history has become a vibrant field of study since the late 1980s. In the last seven years, however, it is notable that this research has inspired community-based efforts to preserve and publicly commemorate challenges to unequal education. In this commentary, we discuss the archival recovery of the Francisco Maestas et al. v. George Shone et al. case in Alamosa, Colorado; the excavation of El Colegio Altamirano in Hebbronville, Texas; the complexity of memorializing the Mendez v. Westminster case in Orange County, California; and the implications of archival and oral history research connected to the Soria v. Oxnard School Board of Trustees case in Oxnard, California. These examples illuminate the highly contested spaces that public schools held for Mexican Americans and the role scholars and communities can play in acknowledging those moments. We see public schooling as a place where liberation and hope can occur and where scholars and communities can engage together. This is a call to continue to create relationships that lead to the recognition of past struggles and acknowledge the enduring quest for educational equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public commemoration and performance are closely bound up with time, place and social arenas, the memorialization of the past serving a variety of goals. This article considers the memorialization of the experience of the famine that blighted Ireland and northern Scotland during the Victorian period, and focuses on Glasgow, one of Scotland's major cities and the destination of many famine migrants. It explores the instrumental use of the famine past in the public sphere in a city long haunted by the specter of sectarianism and considers the impact of the choices made by different collectives in the process of heritage making and remembrance of uncomfortable/difficult aspects of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, paying tribute is analyzed as an emergent ritual for national commemoration at British Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs). This study draws on data taken from some of the earliest audio recordings available (1978–1988) to more recent video footage (2003–2013), and Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings. The diachronic interactional sociolinguistic study suggests that paying tribute constitutes a rather unusual practice in which parliamentary speakers tend to display unity across party ranks. In the older dataset, the prime minister's paying tribute is prompted by a substantial parliamentary question. By contrast, in the more recent dataset, the initial ritual answer turn slot has emerged as a locus for ritualized commemoration. The observed process of ritualization, which is accompanied by an individualization and distinction of the troops killed in action, is discussed against the backdrop of political events and as well as changes in the institutionalized procedure in parliament. • British Prime Minister's Questions is a rapidly changing community of practices. • Commemorative practices of paying tribute undergo ritualization. • References to killed troops show individualization and personalization. • Diachronic interactional sociolinguistics illustrates "bottom-up" pragmatic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1944 seventy-six Allied prisoners of war escaped from Stalag Luft III. Nearly all were recaptured; fifty were later shot. This article examines what happened in the period between recapture and the interment of the dead prisoners' cremated remains at Stalag Luft III. It positions what came to be known as 'the Great Escape' as an event of deep emotional resonance for those who grieved and reveals the dual narrative they constructed to make sense of their comrades' deaths. In discussing the iconography of the vault constructed by the camp community to house the dead POWs' ashes, this article also suggests a dissonance in meaning between that arising from personal, familial grief and the Imperial War Graves Commission's standardised memorial practice. Focusing on the Great Escape's immediate aftermath from the perspective of the POWs themselves provides a more nuanced understanding of the emotional impact of this infamous event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its emergence in early Christianity to its invocation in twenty-first century debates, martyrdom has always highlighted the complex relationship between politics, religion, death, and memory. A specifically political notion of martyrdom beyond the world's faith traditions would facilitate the concept's more capacious application and analysis. Political martyrdom, I argue, consists of several components: (1) a death, occurring in what we might call "unnatural" circumstances, connected in some way to an individual's identity(ies) or political commitments; (2) consecration of that death by a community or sub-community; and (3) transmission of accounts of that death across time, through processes of commemoration. This essay illuminates the ways by which political communities enshrine certain deaths in their collective memory, where they subsequently contribute to communal solidarity, identity formation, and political mobilization. I conclude by reflecting on how political martyrdom offers new insights into the intersection of politics, religion, death, and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When India gained independence in 1947, its Independence Day ceremonies became a prototype setting the standard for marking and ritualising imperial withdrawal and achievement of sovereignty in former colonies across the world. Since then, much has been written on the cultural, social and political significances of the annually recurrent celebration of the postcolonial world's many Independence Days. If India has featured prominently in theorising the significance of the ritualised celebration of Independence Day and related national holidays, then this has been from a particular vantage point: That of independence from British rule. Yet this historical perspective far from exhausts the relevant field of post/colonial relations and imaginaries on India and its independence. Through an ethnographic analysis of public holidays commemorating independence, this article argues that investigating the celebration of independence in the former French India, the Union Territory of Puducherry, provides a contrapuntal perspective which can serve to decentre and reframe perspectives on Indian postcolonial imaginaries and understandings of independence. While refracted through the lens of the powerful narratives and ritual practice which surround decolonisation from the British empire, such holidays also constitute symbolic sites where minor histories remain in dialogue and tension with the major narrative on Indian national history and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the collective work of constructing memory during the annual reunions of veterans from a Portuguese artillery division that fought at the Colonial/Angolan Liberation War (1971-73). Based on ethnographic observation of these meetings and on in-depth interviews with ex-combatants, this article puts forward an ethnographic approach to the contemporary revisitation of a past still under scrutiny. These annual meetings offer privileged spaces for the production and negotiation of the past, including intermediation with the literary work of António Lobo Antunes, one of the unit's conscripts. We argue that veterans' reunions are intimate acts of commemoration that build an invisible line between the past and the present based on the imaginary and the dynamics of family ties, on the depoliticization of the conflict as a historical event, and on privileging central aspects and experiential narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1973, Michigan Chemical Company accidentally shipped a fire retardant (polybrominated biphenyl or PBB) in place of a nutritional supplement to a livestock feed mill, which resulted in one of the largest episodes of contamination in US history. Researchers estimate that eight million people were exposed to PBB. This report from the field explores the ways in which community members with public and academic partners documented and shared this history, finding new ways to commemorate environmental disasters. The evolving and collaborative nature of this work highlights the multiple and fluid forms commemoration can take, providing an example and rationale for how the PBB disaster and other large-scale contaminations might be commemorated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay critically reexamines the career of Bernardetto Buonromei (d. c. 1616), a physician who is celebrated today as one of Livorno's founding fathers. It argues that Buonromei's expertise as a medical practitioner was instrumental for turning the Tuscan port city of Livorno into a major stronghold of the early modern Mediterranean slave trade. Buonromei's fame in the early seventeenth century, it proposes, reflected the high esteem with which the Medici Grand Dukes held his contribution to the Tuscan state's involvement in religiously justified slaving. The essay analyzes documentary evidence regarding Buonromei's exceptionally cruel treatment of enslaved Jews and Muslims who were placed under his care while he was serving as the physician in charge of Livorno's slave prison. It demonstrates that Cosimo II continued to back Buonromei despite repeated complaints about the physician's excessively ruthless conduct. The final part of the essay delineates the varied manifestations of Buonromei's cultural commemoration from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The continuous textual, artistic, and performative celebrations of Buonromei's accomplishments, it concludes, complements the erasure of the suffering he had inflicted on enslaved non-Catholics in Livorno. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Northern Ireland poses two particular challenges for the political historian. First, histories of the region are inextricably bound up with contemporary political positions: historical time becomes distorted as histories are refracted through the lens of modern political controversies. Second, the importance of historical 'memory' to contemporary politics leaves little room for doubt, uncertainty or academic expertise. The past is assumed to be known; what place is there for academic historians when politicians and many members of the public are so invested in their own readings of the past? This article explores these challenges through two case studies in which the author was involved: the Historical Advisory Panel established by the UK government for the centenary of Northern Ireland; and subsequent debates around the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland. It illustrates the difficult relationship between academic, public and politicised histories, and considers the lessons for historians whose expertise places them at the interface of those different 'pasts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article undertakes a critical exploration of the Indian poetic responses to World War I. The most striking feature of this poetry was its uniquely diverse nature, which reflected in full the multicultural character of the Indian army at the Western Front and elsewhere in the world. The immense diversity of Indian soldiers triggered a wide range of emotions and ideas from combatants and civilians alike. While we have established writers like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu on the one hand, we have a poetic miscellany of lesser known creative voices on the other, some even documenting their first-hand experiences of the War. Poems, lyrical propaganda, folk-songs, epistolary verse, elegies and even verses accompanying posters make up the various modes of literary circulation during this time of unprecedented global turmoil. Making use of both original compositions and various other works in translation, this article argues that most of this poetic evidence often serves as crucial testimonies, chronicling not only the major historical events of the War years, but also assiduously recording the wide gamut of feelings and emotions associated with the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japanese submarine I-124 was sunk in a military engagement with Allied forces outside Darwin Harbor, Australia, with 80 submariners aboard on 20 January 1942. To mark the 80th anniversary of this historic event and complement more traditional commemorative activities, a virtual-reality experience was created for general public engagement. The experience was based on a high-resolution multi-beam sonar survey completed in October 2021 by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and used an animation-based workflow to illustrate the survey of the submarine, the events of its sinking and the historical data used to digitally reconstruct it. The animation culminates in a virtual dive across its decks as they may have appeared in the years after the sinking. Future plans for the site include diver-based surveys for photogrammetric survey and management-based monitoring. The creation of the experience required an in-depth consideration of a wide range of stakeholder needs and Australian and Japanese cultural attitudes to commemoration of World War II casualties. We describe the technical and cultural challenges encountered throughout the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Red Zinger Bicycle Classic, later renamed the Coors International Bicycle Classic, is renowned for its influence on the development of men's and women's cycle racing in the United States. Recent efforts to create a United States Cycling Monument in Boulder, Colorado, centered on commemorating what is commonly referred to as the Coors Classic. I use the proposed monument as a starting point for exploring how the Coors Classic is being remembered, particularly with respect to the women's competition. Where do women cyclists and their contests fit into the commemoration of this race? My analysis illuminates gendered aspects of this race and what I refer to as re-cycled narratives. I conclude with a concern about the impact of re-cycled narratives on present-day women's cycling and consider historian Beverly Southgate's call for thinking about histories for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez, who created the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, an ongoing project begun in 2017 that consists of botanical illustrations and large-scale maps of California and northern Mexico. Rodriguez’s Codex draws on pre-Hispanic, colonial, and Chicana/o/x antecedents, most notably the Florentine Codex (sixteenth century) and the Chicana/o/x codices of the early 1990s, produced in the context of the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage. This article posits Rodriguez’s Codex as a polyphonic text that exceeds both the linguistic of the literary and the visual of the artistic, drawing on a multiplicity of sources, both historical and contemporary, visual and textual, oral and aural, in her mapping of California’s land and history. The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón collapses precolonial, colonial, and contemporary histories to underscore continuities between the ruptures of conquest and our dangerous geopolitical moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the Northeast, Indigenous people and colonial New Englanders have fashioned myriad expressions of memory that attest to certain versions of conflicted pasts. On one hand, colonial remembrances of violence and upheaval are abundant and amply legible in local historical societies, historical markers, family heirlooms, and many other forms of memorialization. Yet this seeming abundance of memory arises from equally powerful kinds of forgetting: collective colonial amnesias that endeavor to erase, sideline, overwrite, or delegitimize other dimensions of exceedingly complex histories and conceptions of homelands. This essay adopts a fresh focus on Indigenous/colonial remembrances through the lens of materiality, considering the wider historiographical and theoretical implications of recentering tangible objects and landscapes as conduits connecting past, present, and future. Physical objects interact with both mainstream and marginalized narratives in vital ways, opening pathways for profoundly interdisciplinary, multimedia accountings of the nature and changing forms of “memory” in early America. The essay reassesses a wooden pegboard from an Anglo-American dwelling said to have survived an Indigenous attack during King Philip’s War (1675–78). Using decolonizing methodologies, it conveys dramatically more complex conceptions of the past—and of ongoing Indigenous presence and resilience—than stories devised and maintained by Euro-American antiquarians have typically relayed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study highlights the significance of literature to Expo 67 and the tradition of world exhibitions. Like the world's fairs before it, the Montreal exhibition promoted literature as a technology of national progress. Yet Expo 67 reflected simultaneously the contemporary anxieties about technology and nationhood expounded by George Grant in the 1960s in contrast with the celebration of nationalism and technological progress bound together in the tradition of world's fairs. Though world's fairs had depicted the educational utility of literature throughout their tradition, Expo 67 emphasized literature more than any world exhibition had to that point. Its theme, Terre des hommes, drawn from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's autobiographical narrative, its literature conferences and poetry performances, and the broader textuality of Expo 67 as a "total environment" were intended to deploy texts in promotion of the ideals of universal humanism. However, I find that poetry performances by Michèle Lalonde, George Clutesi, and Duke Redbird contradicted the event's stated ideals by spotlighting the negative effects of technology and ongoing colonial violence. I argue further that large-scale literature exhibits at Expo 67 resisted the humanist ideals of the event by continuing the world exhibition convention of treating literary works as an educative technology of national progress. As a result, I find that Canadian literature at Expo 67 complicates the Canadian collective memory of the event and the 1967 Centennial Year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two major rituals of contemporary national life in the UK: association football and military commemoration. It explores the ways in which remembering is enacted and performed within UK football and how these processes are related to issues of power, agency and identity in Britain today. Employing the concepts of collective memory and spectacle, this article argues that 'memory entrepreneurs' have sought to embed football as 'site of memory' in the performance of military commemoration. It concludes that this has contributed to the transformation of military commemoration, from a ritual that is observed to a spectacle that is consumed. This paper thus contributes to emergent debates on the militarization of civilian space, the shifting nature of civil–military relations in the twenty-first century, and the role of military remembrance in the reproduction of Britishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]