Women Mobilizing Memory ed. by Ayse Gul Altinay et al. (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Mobilizing Memory ed. by Ayse Gul Altinay et al. Helen Makhdoumian Ayse Gul Altinay, María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon, editors. Women Mobilizing Memory. Columbia UP, 2019. 544p. Authored by scholars working in different disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as artists, curators, and activists, Women Mobilizing Memory’s twenty-six essays are organized thematically: “Disrupting Sites,” “Performing Protest,” “Interfering Images,” and “Rewriting Lives.” Its transnational approach studies remembrance practices concerning violence and destruction in North and South America, Europe, and Turkey. This global scope allows conversations about the history and lived aftermath of state terror including murder, forced disappearance, and torture in Chile; enslavement, anti-Black racism, and violence towards Black Americans; practices that facilitate the legal, social, and material death of trans women in Turkey; and gender violence and femicide in Argentina. Moreover, the objects of study range from art to photography, literature, performance, museums, monuments, collective activist and protest efforts, return trips to lost homelands, and more. [End Page 97] This breadth in content will appeal to readers well versed in trauma and memory studies and those who are new to methodologies and theories in these fields. Marianne Hirsch, who developed the theoretical framework of “postmemory” to articulate the intergenerational transmission of collective traumatic memory using the case of the Holocaust, penned the introduction. Hirsch recounts the origins of Women Mobilizing Memory, defines the three words that constitute its title, and provides an overview of the authors’ intellectual contributions to the field of contemporary cultural studies. The collection seeks to “help define the parameters of what we might think of as a feminist ‘ethics of transculturality’” (12). Hirsch clarifies that to put into practice a feminist ethics of transculturality, the authors take up “mobilizing” to mean “activating, setting in motion, [or] moving” (2). More specifically, the essays demonstrate the mobilization of memory for justice and futurity, to confront state and political agents’ silencing of dark pasts, and to form communities of solidarity. Women Mobilizing Memory also provides visual supplements. “Treasures” features artwork from Germany-based, Argentinian Armenian multimedia artist Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, showcasing items from Der-Meguerditchian’s project for the prize-winning Armenity pavilion at the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale in 2015. Another essay, “Blank: An Attempt at a Conversation,” features blank pages submitted by five art students from the Fine Arts program at Mardin Artuklu University. Asked to provide a submission regarding violence centered on Kurdish communities, these students responded: “You are in a hurry but we have an emergency. Our testimony is five blank A4 pages” (n.p./324). Additional images of works by other artists are woven throughout: photographs of some of the embodied experiences of memory work detailed in the chapters; memorial projects at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile to commemorate those who were detained, tortured, and killed there from September to November 1973; theatrical performances that shed light on state violence around AIDS; environmental degradation or what Robert Nichols calls “slow violence”; the gendered labor of agricultural field workers; and the weekly vigil of the Saturday Mothers/People at Galatasaray Square in Istanbul, where the act of peacefully sitting and holding photographs [End Page 98] facilitates public awareness of the disappearance of Kurds by the Turkish state. The editors’ attention to building a conversation among senior and emerging scholars and their goal of making meaning by juxtaposing while honoring differences in the selected case studies of subjugation and survival make Women Mobilizing Memory a timely contribution to the fields of trauma, memory, gender, and feminist studies. As with any edited book, especially one that foregrounds a global scope of study, there are bound to be histories that are not taken up. For instance, it does not include an essay devoted to gendered memory concerning the genocide and territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples of North America. At the same time, María Solded Falabella Luco’s “Hilando en la Memoria: Weaving Songs of Resistance in Contemporary Mapuche Political Cultural Activism” illuminates Chilean state violence and resistance to this “many-sided oppression” by focusing on the “ongoing conflict or war with the Mapuche, the country’s most populous first...