Beyond presentism: Memory studies, deep history and the challenges of transmission

Abstract

We take up the challenge to extend the ‘archive of mnemonic practices’ beyond recent histories of violence by facilitating a dialogue between scholarship on deep history and the fourth wave of memory studies, both emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene. In so doing, we engage with the problem of transmission as it has emerged in both fields. Works in cultural memory studies provide us with compelling ways of thinking through mediated practices of transmission, but they are limited by their focus on the recent past and on encultured technologies of memory that primarily reflect the European origins of the field. Studies of deep history, which engage transmission among Indigenous communities, by contrast, tend to rely on an account of transmission as precise replication, oftentimes over hundreds of generations. To reconsider and theorize mediated practices of transmission, we draw on the concept of the deep present as formulated within ethnomusicology. This term describes a present in which Aboriginal culture-work and performance both transmits memory of the deep past and evokes that deep past itself, activating it today. We consider two public installations as examples of remembrance of the deep past in urban Warrane/Sydney – bara by Judy Watson and Virtual Warrane by Brett Leavy – each of which is of Country in a way that connects memory over time and activates a deep present. We argue that these instances of memory in the deep present might offer ways of reconsidering the possibilities of a decolonizing future.