Archival Memory Research Articles

Life Writings, Autobiographical Subjects: Exploring Colonial Narratives and Anti-Memory in African Freedom Fighters’ Texts

ABSTRACT This article attempts to give voice to freedom fighters who died during the struggle for independence in Africa. Due to their untimely deaths, they could not self-narrate their encounters with colonial subjectivity. Taking cues from Patrice Lumumba and Steve Biko, it argues that the unlikely documents of these nationalists can be (re)constructed as autobiographies by reawakening their muted self and deploying them as anti-memory to de-centre colonial grand narratives. Through Howarth’s autobiographical elements, Ngugi’s history typologies, and postcolonial autobiography, the article contends that the absence of autobiographies of some African nationalists creates gaps in anti-colonial historical memory and African freedom fighting literature. It affirms the significance of updating the colonial archive, considering the exclusion of overriding historical contingencies from its memory. The article also asserts the importance of constructing self-narratives for African social activists and using the narratives as countervailing texts against dominant univocal narratives in colonial archival memory.

Colonial Trash to Island Treasure: The Chaney of St. Croix

Chaney is the name given to the porcelain shards found in the soil and washed up on the beaches of St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. A hybrid of the words for “china” and “money”, chaney refers to fragments of European ceramics brought to St. Croix by the island’s former colonisers: England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Cast out as plantation garbage and broken in symbolic acts of destruction, chaney is a symbol of colonial entanglement, intercultural exchange, and resistance. Drawing on postcolonial critiques of colonial settlement and slavery, this article considers the distribution, circulation, and archival memory of chaney in the context of Atlantic slavery, especially as it relates to the consumption of European ceramics by enslaved individuals. This article also investigates the afterlife of chaney, which is collected by local artisans who repurpose the shards into jewellery. The recuperation of chaney shows how the remnants of prior contact and exchange with foreigners are being reworked by the people of St. Croix to create their own forms of cultural production that offer a symbolic resistance to the hierarchies of European luxury design. This paper concludes by examining the work of St. Croix-based artist La Vaughn Belle, whose Chaney paintings and porcelain designs for Royal Copenhagen move chaney beyond the limits of its materiality to explore the politics of resistance, identity, and colonial responsibility. To this end, I argue that the transformation of chaney from island debris into artworks and decorative objects can be viewed in the wider context of artists using broken or discarded former items of distinction to address the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

A Multimodal Smart Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization for Electromagnetic Design Optimization Problems

Electromagnetic design problems are generally formulated as nonlinear programming problems with multimodal objective functions and continuous variables. These can be solved by either a deterministic or a stochastic optimization algorithm. Recently, many intelligent optimization algorithms, such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA) and artificial bee colony (ABC), have been proposed and applied to electromagnetic design problems with promising results. However, there is no universal algorithm which can be used to solve engineering design problems. In this paper, a stochastic smart quantum particle swarm optimization (SQPSO) algorithm is introduced. In the proposed SQPSO, to tackle the premature convergence problem in order to improve the global search ability, a smart particle and a memory archive are adopted instead of mutation operations. Moreover, to enhance the exploration searching ability, a new set of random numbers and control parameters are introduced. Experimental results validate that the adopted control policy in this work can achieve a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Finally, the SQPSO has been tested on well-known optimization benchmark functions and implemented on the electromagnetic TEAM workshop problem 22. The simulation result shows an outstanding capability of the proposed algorithm in speeding convergence compared to other algorithms.

On Resistance and Failure in the Archival Art Installation

This article explores the installation Documentation by the artist Parastou Forouhar as an (un)sighted migratory archive of memory and forgetting. Operating in the liminal zone between a personal archive and a resourceful public space of memory and resistance, Documentation records in numerous post-produced letters, documents and reports the assassination of the artist’s parents and her efforts to seek justice. Exploring the archive’s transformation into an installation, the article discusses its operationality as an archive-as-activist art with its fractured and performative nature, and draws critical attention to the question of how its borders are manifested in the form of resistance and failure.

Detection DETEKSI DAN IDENTIFIKASI KAPANG PADA PROSES BIODETERIORASI ARSIP FOTO MEMORY OF THE WORLD (MOW) RESTORASI CANDI BOROBUDUR

ABSTRACT 
 This study aims to identify the genus of mold in the biodeterioration process of the photo archive of Memory of the World (MoW) restoration of Borobudur Temple and the potential for the enzymatic activity of these molds. The type of research method chosen is descriptive qualitative. Starting with survey sampling and sampling. Inoculation of fungi using the streak method on PDA medium. Mold identification based on macroscopic and microscopic observations of fungi. The results of characterization were then identified using the matching profile method using the mold identification reference book. The identification results resulted in six genera of contaminant molds in the biodeterioration of the MoW photo archive of the Borobudur Temple restoration. The genera identified included: Acremonium (69.66 %%), Penicillium (14.59%), Aspergillus (3.36%), Culvularia (2.24%) Fusarium (1.12%), and Pleurostomophora (1.12%) and some sterile mycelia. The types of biodeterioration in the photo collection include mold growth, discolored spots, peeling off layers, and damage to the substrate in the photo. Based on literature search, all mold genera found as the cause of biodeterioration has the potential to have proteinase, gelatinase, and cellulase enzymes.
 Keywords: Biodeterioration; Mold; Photograph; Memory of the World; Borobudur Temple

Ten Years After Fukushima

Author(s): Sun, Elizabeth; Tawada, Yoko | Abstract: This is a translation of Yoko Tawada's Zehn Jahre nach Fukushima, an essay on the archive of memory and nuclear power.

Introduction: COVID-19, the multiplier

ABSTRACT The global COVID-19 pandemic has robbed us of normal life, however ‘normal’ may be defined. Yet it has also (re)activated certain strands of cultural research that attempt to steer a path parallel to that of biomedical research. Why do we need Cultural Studies in the midst of this nightmarish period? Aside from reactivating and thinking with disciplinary specificities, the COVID crisis has fairly quickly prompted a realization from the early days of the pandemic that a situation far exceeding public health has emerged, with frightening epidemiological, social, cultural, and geopolitical implications. We issued a call for critical, short, and punchy thought pieces in May 2020 and received an overwhelming number of responses globally. In this Introduction, we attempt to outline a certain ‘grid of intelligibility’ that can be conferred upon three specific frames unique to the sort of response that Cultural Studies can make to COVID, frames that are shared in different ways among the contributors to this volume. The frames that we focus on include: the articulation of a cultural lifeworld of the pandemic (in a conscious attempt to connect with the lessons about the force of signification and public political deliberation learned from other pandemics, especially global AIDS); the manner in which COVID has been weaponized in government manoeuvres and in virulent forms of racialization; and the affective and bodily registers that mark our collective vulnerability. In this mapping, COVID multiplies semantically, politically, and corporeally. It is hoped that this Special Issue provides not only a sort of memory archive for what the world has gone through in 2020–21, but also hopefully some intellectual guidance for the way forward.

These Are Only Hints and Guesses

Editorial Summary: In »These Are Only Hints and Guesses« Francesca Torzo explores experience, conscience, and culture as territories to reflect on architecture. Tracing back the narratives and stories from the past as a basic foundation of knowledge, she unravels the resonance of history and knowledge within contemporary experience and design in architecture. Based upon what has been, the thinking and making of architecture is always embedded in the stream of memory and tradition, referring to what was there before. Proceeding from this basis, the personal archive of memories fuels the processes of association and imagination. Any idea is integral to a cultural context, while culture is considered to be this stream of consciousness, forming the background to recent lived experience and its projection into future conception and design. [Uta Graff]

‘Daily I sit | with the Language’: Solmaz Sharif’s and Philip Metres’s Documentary Poetics of War

Abstract The Cambridge Quarterly endows a prize for the dissertation gaining the highest mark in the Cambridge University final examination in English. The article printed here is the Prize Essay for 2020 The documentary poem is a genre increasingly associated with providing a ‘second life’ for voices excluded from or misrepresented in official documents. Solmaz Sharif and Philip Metres enact such a poetic extension of archival memory; through scarred and redacted textual bodies, their poetry re-examines documents relating to recent US military operations, reflecting the insidious ways through which ‘truth’ is rendered a casualty in the official discourses of war. In these wounded texts, the reader is subsequently faced with a position of failed witnessing. This dissertation proposes that an affective and self-aware position of ‘with-ness’ must be taken in response, which makes no claim to completeness or authority. By validating personal acts of ‘with-ness’ rather than giving any stamp of authority to an official record, such poetry therefore constitutes an alternative archive. This, however, must be one that mirrors the act of ‘with-nessing’, continuously adopting a self-reflective and interrogative stance.

Los videos en la red y el net-art

The videos shared on the web are a recent stage in the development of our media culture. Although many of the creators and viewers of online videos consider them as objects of a daily personal activity, with the blurry borders between art and the archive of memory, the simple fact of being on the internet places them in the circle of social communication. Watching videos on the Internet involves reading simultaneous content, such as texts and images, for example, when the video is embedded in a newspaper article or in the middle of still images that alternate with moving scenes of commercials. The computer reading experience often mixes this information with simultaneous images displayed in various areas of the screen. For the internet user, observing a complete image of a temporary object or still image is in practice, an exception. In the words of Andreas Treske, the essential characteristic of an online video is that it never exists alone.

The Forgotten Jesuits: The Society of Jesus in the Duchy of Modena; Between Archival Memory and New Research Trends

The Forgotten Jesuits: The Society of Jesus in the Duchy of Modena; Between Archival Memory and New Research Trends

Milady Součkovej prywatne archiwum pamięci (na podstawie opowiadania Rok šestašedesátý ze zbioru Neznámý člověk)

This article presents an analysis of one of the short stories authored by Czech writer – Milada Součková: the short story Rok šestašedesátý included in the collection entitled Neznámý člověk (published in 1962, written in 1943). The introduction addresses the issues related to the clarification of the concept of a memory archive and the concept of the archive itself. Its characteristics, i.e. a certain arrangement of the collection, its permanent structure and three essential aspects of archiving are indicated: searching, saving and storing. These aspects are also typical of the structure of the analysed prose authored by Milada Součková. The next part of the article (Neznámý člověk as a private archive of memory) pertains to the entire above-metioned volume of the stories whose characteristic motif is the motif of memory linked with space, time and history. In the further parts of the article, the author goes on to the structural and interpretative analysis of the story she is interested in. She draws attention to such aspects as memory figures, i.e. time and space, thematic associations, memory carriers and memory traces and places. In conclusion, she draws attention to three components of the Milada Součková’s private memory archive: the memory of the language, the memory of the father and the memory of the historical events taking place in 1866.

Systematic memory B cell archiving and random display shape the human splenic marginal zone throughout life.

Human memory B cells (MBCs) are generated and diversified in secondary lymphoid tissues throughout the organism. A paired immunoglobulin (Ig)-gene repertoire analysis of peripheral blood (PB) and splenic MBCs from infant, adult, and elderly humans revealed that throughout life, circulating MBCs are comprehensively archived in the spleen. Archive MBC clones are systematically preserved and uncoupled from class-switching. Clonality in the spleen increases steadily, but boosts at midlife, thereby outcompeting small clones. The splenic marginal zone (sMZ) represents a primed MBC compartment, generated from a stochastic exchange within the archive memory pool. This is supported by functional assays, showing that PB and splenic CD21+ MBCs acquire transient CD21high expression upon NOTCH2-stimulation. Our study provides insight that the human MBC system in PB and spleen is composed of three interwoven compartments: the dynamic relationship of circulating, archive, and its subset of primed (sMZ) memory changes with age, thereby contributing to immune aging.

Funes the Crate Digger: AI, Perception, and Recall


 
 This essay is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story about Funes, a young man with perfect perception and recall. His stunning archival ability allowed Funes to create a shorthand system for creativity, a “rhapsody of unconnected words” to stand in for his archive of memories: “Anything he thought, even once, remained ineradicably with him.” There is similar malady today, a cultural hyperthymesia, a fetish for the archive. Information is recalcitrant and will not disappear, which cheapens the value of information while amplifying the need for human attention. The art of searching through the information rapids, then, depends upon elimination perhaps more than retrieval. Human curators with inclinations toward perception and recall are needed to filter through this influx of information rather than permitting the reliance upon algorithms by default. This essay theorizes the remix artist as a Borgesian Librarian, a curator of archived information fragments. Through the process of “crate digging,” remixers find long-forgotten samples of music and then exploit their allegorical potential. Like Funes, remix artists have an uncanny ability for perception and recall. Unlike Funes, rather than perceiving their talents as a curse, remix artists are model curators, exemplars of how to filter and make meaning from information overabundance. To illustrate these points, I will address the crate digging on display in two essential remix albums, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… and J Dilla’s Donuts.
 

Improvisation, Design, and Sociality during the Pandemic: A Conversation with Denise Milstein from the New York City COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive

This conversation explores the use of rapid response oral history to collect the lived experiences of New Yorkers during the pandemic. Through audio-visual interviews and written testimonials, this project archives accounts of the general public, including public health officials, frontline workers, policymakers, and essential workers. Documenting the pandemic in real time offers insight into moments that might be lost as the situation transforms. In this conversation, conducted in early June, Denise Milstein, the project’s co-director, speaks with Barbara Adams about the project’s inception and what has been learned in its first three months. A postscript, added in late October, reflects on the initial interview.

A Letter to My Daughter: An Archive of Future Memories

ABSTRACT “A Letter to My Daughter: An Archive of Future Memories” is a multimedia project about a mother-daughter charting the interconnections between a trilogy of familial forced displacements and their relationship to pivotal moments in contemporary Iraqi/diasporic and American histories, the ongoing living effects of U.S. military interventions, and their ever-evolving effect on intergenerational relations. The multimedia project weaves performance, letter writing, video art, and installation toward bearing witness to the textures of war-based displacement and racialized dispossession, especially in the moment of exile; it also identifies the often convoluted, fragmented, and post memories that accompany transnational migration and refugee movement.

The Late Medieval Cistercian Monastery of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire: Monastic Administration, Economy, and Archival Memory by Michael Spence

The Late Medieval Cistercian Monastery of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire: Monastic Administration, Economy, and Archival Memory by Michael Spence

El archivo visual y la memoria literaria de la Transición, dos instantáneas posfotográficas: Javier Cercas y Marta Sanz

Este artículo aborda el auge de la cultura visual en la literatura española y, en particular, el papel que desempeña el archivo visual sobre la Transición en las tramas literarias contemporáneas. En primer lugar, se define el nuevo régimen visual contemporáneo desde los presupuestos de la teoría estética y la crítica de las ideologías para explicar cómo la digitalización ha extendido el valor de lo serial, y no de lo único e irrepetible. En este contexto, llamado posfotográfico, el valor documental de lo fotográfico se ha visto alterado y ya no posee la función verificadora que tuvo cuando se almacenaba física y materialmente en los archivos históricos. Los almacenes de la memoria colectiva se conforman hoy según el paradigma de la inmaterialidad que dictan las nuevas tecnologías para la captación de imágenes. El artículo explica cómo determina el análisis político y cultural de la Transición la manera en que el escritor incluye este archivo visual de la memoria colectiva en su obra. Esta explicación se realiza en particular mediante el comentario crítico de las obras de Javier Cercas y Marta Sanz.

Цифровые архивы частной памяти

Цифровые архивы частной памяти

Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’sThe Best We Could Do

AbstractThe Vietnam War is the topic of books, comics, documentaries, films, and television shows. Contrary to popular filmic and literary representations of the Vietnam War, which feature violence and militant hypermasculinity, Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017) weaves a tapestry of stories about the Vietnam War through memories of her family members. Rather than reiterating a shibboleth of masculine struggle and American exceptionalism during the war, Bui's narrative centers on women, specifically their experiences with birthing and motherhood. Her graphic novel offers us an alternative lens to view the Vietnam War and the experiences of those whose stories were often excluded. The Best We Can Do illustrates memories of women and families commonly disregarded as unimportant and affirms their importance in understanding history and identities shaped by such exclusions. In mapping bodies and their various connections and separations to the nation and to each other, Bui invokes a new archive of memory in which the female body becomes a site for reframing the discourse of the Vietnam War.