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Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouettes. Scholars such as Salamishah Tillet argue that Walker's art, along with art by some of her post-civil rights contemporaries, offers 'aesthetic interventions' to problematic racial histories as part of a larger project of memory reclamation and justice. Walker's A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant is another such interventionist project. Debuting in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York in May of 2014, A Subtlety explores how a figure like mammy 'survives as a cultural force that influences and reflects a national conscience' (Wallace Sanders [2008]. Mammy: a century of race, gender, and southern memory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 12). And yet, to say that the historical rootedness of the title, sugar sphinx sculpture, and molasses-covered walls and cherub-faced small figures throughout the installation were ambiguous to some spectators, is an understatement. Hundreds of photographs and videos were uploaded to social media sites with people making gestures towards the figure that some critics deemed highly inappropriate. This paper explores how A Subtlety both understands and undermines representations of Black women's bodies and how Black artists in the African diaspora contend with complex cultural signs of the past in the present. Utilizing studies of Black feminist theory and visual culture, I argue that Walker's A Subtlety – and her art more broadly – offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as in the Black nostalgic imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt's distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba can at once be known but not understood by Israeli Jews. Drawing on the tours conducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for 'we remember') to the ruins of Miska, I argue that the embodied and symbolic practices conducted during the tours to Miska can work to challenge the gap between knowing and understanding by creating a different perspective on the Nakba. From this perspective, the Nakba is not only understood as the memory of the 'other'—that is, the Palestinian memory of the place—but is understood as a complex memory that embodies a dialectical relationship between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a potentially common memory of the place and the basis for the imagining of a common future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2002 and the election of Álvaro Uribe as president, national pride and sentiment have grown substantially in Colombia. While it is possible to understand this as a positive phenomenon, given Colombia's historical difficulties in constructing itself as a nation, this paper develops the notion of nationism (distinct from nationalism) and on that basis argues that the figure of the nation is actually central to constructing an enduring right-wing hegemony in Colombia. I focus on the Victims' Law of 2011, an important achievement for the country, crucially understood as part of the process designed to help Colombia move beyond the violence that has dominated its history since the middle of the twentieth century. The Victims' Law prioritizes memory and remembering for overcoming the divisiveness of Colombia's recent past and enabling it to enter a peaceful future. I develop a reading, however, that favours comprehending this project more fruitfully as an attempt to create memories that, in turn, will lead to the recognition of the existence of a reconciled nation, the subject of such memories: for collective memories require collective subjects (nations) to be their bearers. But the nation so-created, I then argue, is not what it purports to be: a collective subject supporting the collective aspirations of all Colombians. Rather, banefully, I contend that the figure of the nation being developed in Colombia is, more pragmatically and indeed more fundamentally, a symbolic means by which dominant social actors repudiate and repress internal dissent and dissenters, induce historical amnesia about the actual causes of Colombia's conflict and its history of violence, and thus, rather than serve as a prerequisite to usher in a future of peaceful and widespread social development, it aids and abets the prorogation of right-wing hegemony: apparently ending it theory while doing nothing to discontinue it, in fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the impact of the trope of theshōjo, or girl trope in post-war Japanese cinema, this paper argues for the repeated motif as a key factor in the creation of a particular affective economy around the memorialization of war in Japan. I trace the development of theshōjomotif from the post-defeat era through the anti-nuclear films and activist movements of the early 1950s to show how the affect generated by the repeated trope drew real-life events into a persuasive cycle of repetition. The tone of this repeated trope thereby came to dominate the practice of public memorialization of war in Japan. Today’s post-pacifist Japan is informed by these past moments in the memorializing process, which impact on contemporary anti-war and anti-nuclear protests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is part oj the recent shijt within the 'New Cinema History' from the attention for the film text to a broader consideration of the social and cultural history of cinema. In the last years, research did not only concentrate on the production and meanings of the pictures, but it also saw an increased interest in the distribution, exploitation and consumption of film. Interest for film as a consumable good has come from various disciples such as Cultural Studies, sociology, anthropology, political economy, geography and oral history. This study is based on oral accounts. Research on memories of going to the movies has contributed significantly to difining the spatial and social conditions of the cinematic experience. Yet this illuminating bottom-up approach of lived cinema cultures is mostly limited to the Anglo-Saxon experience of American Jilms in English spoken film markets. As part of a larger research project on cinema culture in Flanders, 62 inhabitants of Ghent, Belgium, were interviewed concerning their moviegoing habits from the 1930s to the late 1970s. The oral history project aimed to analyze the significance of cinemagoing in a local community d fined by class, language and a 'pillarized' society. The main research question in this paper is how particular was going to the movies in a local film market not overwhelmingly defined by American distributors or Hollywood movies and what were the sociocultural mechanisms behind moviegoing. In doing so we look at the entwinement of the experienced everyday lfe with the memories tf choosing a movie theatre, remembering a movie and recollections if choosing cinema as leisure. Memory reclamation of local moviegoing as non-textual empirical research can define a parallel media history of cinema culture in Ghent and supplement the international research on cinemagoing experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that hegemonic memorial ceremonies are typically based on the practice and discourse of de-politicization of the ‘Israeli condition’. Three mechanisms serve such de-politicization: rendering death meaningful; idealizing the fallen and focusing on their transcendental as opposed to their corporeal side and the sanctification of time. Ceremonies featuring these mechanisms are paradigmatic events that perpetuate the hegemonic model of bereavement in Israel. Ceremonies deviating from these practices function as an opposition to static collective memory by acting as extra-paradigmatic sites of memory (Lieux de mémoire). This paper analyzes the Hallal (Hebrew for both ‘fallen’ and ‘void’) ceremony (Tzavta Theatre, Tel Aviv, 2009), that serves as an ‘alternative’ Remembrance Day ceremony. Drawing on the ethnography of ceremonies, we claim that this ceremony is an extra-paradigmatic event on account of its subversion of the de-politicizing mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I draw on Walter Benjamin's understanding of the flaneur, memory and history to discuss my recent ethnographic fieldwork on the cultural history of abandoned spaces and places in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. By utilizing Benjamin's notion of historical accumulation that is based in individual perception, I ask how abandoned spaces can create reflexive textual meaning through the process of historical accumulation in space. Additionally, I work to develop a conflux of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope and Benjamin's theories of time, history and memory to create an understanding of abandoned space that sees isolation and depopulated locations as fertile grounds for cultural critique. I also invoke Benjamin's writing on the figure of the flaneur in my methodological approach to anthropological fieldwork by transferring the image of the urban wanderer (the flaneur) into the context of an 1000 kilometre driving trip through Saskatchewan, Canada that I undertook in search of abandoned spaces and objects to document in writing, photography and video. Here, I discuss the ways in which Benjamin's notions of the flaneur and history/memory can be effectively integrated into the practice and theory of contemporary ethnographic inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue this paper wishes to address is how history, as encoded in historiography of history-writing, is actually based upon its capacity to conceal, disguise and indeed suppress the everyday. This is especially true when you consider that most history is really driven by the nation state and that far from envisaging a history free or rescued from the nation, most history-writing ends up reinforcing it. In other words, history's primary vocation has been to displace the constant danger posed by the surplus of everyday life, to overcome its apparent 'trivia', 'banalities' and untidiness in order to find an encompassing register that will fix meaning. With Hegel, narrative was given the role of supplying the maximal unity by which to grasp the meaning of history. What immediately got privileged was, of course, the nation state in the making of world historical events or and ultimately class, subjects who can claim world historical agency. By the same measure, the surplus or messy residues of modern life, especially its immensely staggering complexities, its endless incompletions and repetitions - all irreducible - are repressed or in some instances the microcosmic is sometimes mobilized to reinforce macrocosmic meaning. (This has frequently been called history from below and what Germans have called Alltagsgeschichte.) What I would like to do is explore the category of everydayness, ushered in with the masses and the appearance of the subaltern, as a minimal unity that provides its own principle of historical temporality that easily challenges the practice of history-writing as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text takes the form of a dialogue – a series of spoken fragments developed in correspondence by Phelan and Heathfield and written in an interleaved structure. The performance of this dialogue employed slide imagery and a musical score, and the correspondence was pursued through a game of spelling in which the participants gradually chalked out a word on a board. Each letter of the word stands for a thematic concern elaborated in the speaker's writing. Working from various anthropological, psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses on the nature of the gift, the dialogue examines the place of performance within various economies of cultural and personal exchange. Writing letters to one another, the authors move through the intertexts of Beckett, Boltanski, Heidegger, Nabokov and Franko B. The resonance of the act of giving is explored as it is played out in the relations between language and loss, calculation and love, memory and the object, the body and sacrifice, the arts of living and the arts of death. Aside from its conceptual address the presentation explores possibilities within the practice of performative writing and opens the form of the scholarly paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the narrated memory of a Swedish settler colony in northeast Argentina. Recently, scholarly attention has turned to how migrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to colonizing processes in the Americas as they established themselves on lands already inhabited by Indigenous Peoples. The settlement of Swedish migrants in Misiones is here regarded as part of a strategy of settler colonialism advocated by the Argentine state in order to extend the agrarian frontier further and thereby 'civilise' and secure the nation's rural landscape through the presence of white settlers. From this perspective, the aim of the article is to understand how the historical macropolitical framework of settler colonialism in Argentina is interwoven in the collective and individual narratives of Swedish descendants in present-day Misiones. The article draws on ethnographic interviews and observations made in Misiones between 2017 and 2019. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 individuals along with walk-along observations at seven Swedish community sites. The article argues that a central narrative of memory among the descendants of Swedish settlers relies upon certain elements crucial to settler colonial societies. However, while this narrative structure is intrinsic to settler colonialism, it must also be analysed as part of a migration narrative. This article brings forth new empirical material from a site in Latin America where Swedish migration history has not previously been studied ethnographically. Further, it brings the study of migration, colonial settlement, and indigenous dispossession together through its analysis of a settler narrative in the particular context of settler colonial history of Misiones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conversation with Doreen Massey after her passing. A meditation on memory, on how the living can keep in dialogue with the dead and continue to be guided by their thought, and the role of the book as a carrier of ideas. On Massey's exploration of the theoretical frame of 'settlements', it's application to the political turbulence of 2015–2017, and how the nature and character of people are being altered by these times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how individual memory fits, or more accurately, does not fit with history is at the heart of this paper on Marysc Condé's novel Heremukhonon about Veronica Mercier, a character who was horn in Guadeloupe, lived in Paris and travels to West Africa in search of an ancestry that was interrupted by slavery. Suggesting that readings that focus on Mercier as a character arc limited in approach, it reads the novel as a staging of time and is attentive to the gaps between thought and speech, between memory and history, between Guadeloupe and Africa, and between women's personal sexual pleasure and the impersonal reproductire body that interrupt the narrative. The central character's personal quest for her African roots for 'niggers with ancestors', for Africa as a singular lost object, which necessarily involves ignoring the subaltern is nuanced by the novel's deployment of heterogeneous time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2005, a large-scale raid organized by Kanagawa Prefectural Police and the municipal government eradicated sex trade businesses in Koganecho, a marginalized district in the port city of Yokohama. The array of small brothels in the district was completely uprooted, and transnational migrant women who were working there disappeared. Although the migrant sex workers are no longer present in the district and the city landscape is shifting rapidly, their ghostly ‘traces’ persist in the city in the forms of rumors, people's memories and affective experiences, various cultural texts and the architectural remains of former brothels, which continue to constitute the materiality of Koganecho today. While Koganecho has traditionally been regarded simply as a place to engage in illicit and ‘abnormal’ activities – namely, prostitution – the ghostly traces of Koganecho suggest that it was a cultural space where migrant sex workers participated in the production of everyday culture, shared experiences, affects and identities. In this article, I present an alternative way of remembering Koganecho's brothel district by using the notion of ‘scene’. Based on my ethnographic research in Yokohama, I reconstruct a scene of Koganecho brothel district through these ghostly traces, primarily by presenting emotional moments of the scene remembered by local people and photographic images of the district that I produced during my fieldwork. The things people remembered were not the ‘primary’ activities of the scene (i.e. prostitution), but activities that took place outside the regular work hours when sex workers engaged in mundane social activities, including eating, singing karaoke, shopping and hanging out with friends. In these moments, the Koganecho scene transformed into a diasporic space where migrant women remembered and maintained relationships with family back home while building new relationships with the local Japanese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With specific reference to public policy and the housing market in post-Second World War Britain, this article explores the relationship between housing, memory and everyday life. It argues that the house owes its cultural and emotional power to its capacity to separate itself ideologically from what Marc Augé calls the 'non-places' of everyday life. The extent to which houses have come to be seen as refuges from the non-place requires a great deal of symbolic work to conceal their sameness and everydayness. The association of the house with nostalgia, in particular, represents a denial of what Henri Lefebvre sees as the 'residuality' of the everyday, its capacity to lag behind the more dramatic transformations of modernity. In order to explore these questions, the article focuses on different types of housing in contemporary Britain, which are all based on a serial repetition and collectivity that are often denied. It examines: how the demolished terraced house and the surviving slum reveal the broader structures of everyday life in a way that the refurbished middle-class town house, alternating between a commodified past and a self-promoting futurism, specifically conceals; how the high-rise estates represent the most visible manifestation of the residuality of the everyday; and how new suburban houses are built in 'timeless' vernacular styles and sold as well-equipped interiors for exclusively privatized use, in a way that obscures their links to systems of mass production and consumption. The article concludes that the cultural economy of houses denies the reality of uneven development, and the ways in which our carefully refurbished homes are achieved at the expense of other everyday spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the author's fetishization of photographs and old clothes. Reading an old photographic album made by her own grandmother against other maternal collections of plenitude (whether they be old clothes or photographs or domestic bric-a-brac). The author reveals how such accumulated goods are made to fill in for the pangs of loss: lost childhoods, lost family histories, lost memories, lost friends. Mixing corporeality and critical theory, the author engages with photographer Emily Apter's notion of 'maternal collectomania' as a site of provocative meanings worthy of placement alongside more conventional discourses on visual representation and collecting.

This article focuses on the writings of Toni Morrison. Literature as a resource for education research, as a source for examining perspectives of schools and schooling, and for pedagogical use beyond the literature class has become familiar to many in curriculum studies. Memory involves a kind of translation, an ongoing reinterpretation of events, thoughts, feelings, and sensations past. Remembering is translation within a body, though it is mediated by a community of listeners, or imagined listeners, and by time. Its utterance sometimes emerges as testimony, sometimes confession, revelation, complaint, nostalgia, or ordinary conversation.