Commemorative Projects Research Articles

Investigating the enforced disappearances of Algeria's ‘Dark Decade’: Omar D's and Kamel Khélif's commemorative art projects

ABSTRACTSome estimates indicate that as many as 7000 people have been reported missing in Algeria since 1992. While Islamists are responsible for some of these abductions, the majority can be attributed to the Algerian state. Human rights organisations have since called for the investigation of ‘enforced disappearances’ or the denial of individual freedoms in the form of state-sanctioned abductions, detentions, or executions. To put pressure on a government favourable to national reconciliation and the concealment of collective trauma, women continue to gather in front of the capital's administrative offices with photos of their missing so as to demand the identification of bodies and the restitution of memory. Yet, to state officials, the recurrence of this symbolic, pacifist act constitutes a threat to the Algerian republic, as it attempts to re-emerge unscathed from the ashes of a civil war without confronting its tumultuous past. Aware of the dangers inherent to such policies, Omar D (photographer) and Kamel Khélif (graphic artist) have joined the women's plight deploying similar arms. Their work re-appropriates identity photos of the missing and engages in the struggle against amnesia and the pursuit of justice. This article analyses the significance and impact of commemorative art practices that use identity photographs to liberate the word, to denounce mass disappearances and the effacement of a new democratic Algerian identity. For artists and families, identity photographs surface as a powerful political space where individual memories become collective and where citizens can hold the state accountable for its actions.

Artefacts as Agents for Change: Commemoration and Exchange via Material Culture

As Northern Ireland seeks ways to deal with the memory of the conflict, artefacts associated with the period that can be ascribed with an aura of historical authenticity are placed on public display as yet another means to employ the past. These artefacts become another element of the media machine of commemorative projects, touchstones to the past, and agents in contemporary political activities. This paper considers the methods employed by In Their Footsteps, an artefact-based initiative organised by groups and families seeking justice for conflict related losses. It takes the format of a memorial exhibition with objects, text and imagery intended to garner support for the political ambitions of their justice campaign. By critically investigating the methods employed by this initiative, insights are given to the use, meaning, symbolism and contribution of artefact display to the social processes of commemoration.

<i>Ubuntu</i> and the journey of listening to the Rwandan genocide story

In the face of collective trauma such as genocide, apartheid, mass killings and xenophobia,ubuntu requires of us to show solidarity with our fellow human beings. To my mind, one of the highest forms of doing so is to open up spaces of authentic listening to the stories of those who have experienced these atrocities. In the genocide narratives of the commemorative project Rwanda: �crire par devoir de m�moire (Rwanda: Writing as a duty to memory), travelling and writing become a mode of listening and transformation. However, this theme is articulated very differently in the many texts which form part of the project. This article concentrates on one such representation of the transformative voyage that the writers propose, namely the highly symbolic work of Koulsy Lamko.

THE BATTLEFIELDS OF PERSONAL AND PUBLIC MEMORY: COMMEMORATING THE BATTLE OF SARATOGA (1777) IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

AbstractThe commemoration of the Battle of Saratoga (1777) a century after the pivotal Revolutionary victory illuminates the imbrication of public and personal memory in the politics of late nineteenth-century patriotic commemoration. The fiscal challenges faced by the white elites who stewarded the project and the compromises they were forced to make expose the uncertainties of public commemorative projects, a theme overlooked in foundational scholarship on patriotic public memory. Given the frequent failure of monument projects in an era before governments led heritage planning, the significance of individuals to the fulfillment of ambitions warrants greater consideration. Using a microhistorical approach, this paper analyzes the Saratoga Monument Board members’ ambitions, promotional strategies, and improvisations, prompted in part by an issue unique to this Battle: how to deal with Benedict Arnold's significant role in the Americans’ victory over the English? The Board's sole female trustee, Ellen Hardin Walworth, confronted a similar challenge: how to remake her life after surviving a scandalous domestic tragedy? The interweaving of their stories and strategies highlights the ways in which the cultivation of Revolutionary memory served both political and personal attempts at reconstruction without fully managing to resolve the conflicted past. Thus, scholars must factor individuals’ unique connections to the past into the broader structural characteristics of patriotic commemoration in histories of public memory and its orchestration.

What Does Remembering Racial Violence Do? Greensboro’s Truth Commission, Mnemonic Overlap, and Attitudes toward Racial Redress

In recent decades, African Americans have called for greater reckoning with historic race-related violence. One such violent incident took place in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979, when Klansmen killed five Communist demonstrators. Greensboro’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created in 2004 as an intervention into collective memory of the killings. In this article, I draw on a unique survey of 716 respondents about this case to make three arguments. First, I argue that memory projects can induce mnemonic overlap between creators and audiences, modestly stimulating support for redress of historic injustice. Second, I show that while “preaching to the choir” and to undecided audiences is effective, building project awareness among ideological opponents triggers increased resistance, not persuasion. Third, I show that audiences filtered the project’s story through its key characters’ ingrained reputations, especially that of the Ku Klux Klan, which constrained and enabled the Commission’s effectiveness in surprising ways. I discuss implications for commemorative projects as a part of redress.

Reminiscence of the 100(th) annual general meeting of the Japanese Society of Gastroenterology and its commemorative project

Reminiscence of the 100(th) annual general meeting of the Japanese Society of Gastroenterology and its commemorative project

Die Tätigkeit der Allrussischen Gesellschaft zum Gedenken an die Soldaten der russischen Armee in den Jahren des Großen Krieges: Eine Untersuchung auf der Grundlage von russischer Archivalien

The All-Russian Memorial Society for the Killed Soldiers of the Great War An Archival Study of its Activity. The article is devoted to the history of the foundation and the activities of the All-Russian Memorial Society for the Soldiers of the Russian army, fallen during the war with Germany, Austria and Turkey. This public organization was founded for the implementation of commemorative projects and the improvement of military burials during the First World War. Recent historiography has for the most part neglected the All-Russian Memorial Society. The author uses new archival sources, such as official correspondence (incoming and outgoing letters), protocols and registers of the executive agency of the All-Russian Memorial Society, parish registers, lists of members, as well as published sources such as the organization’s charter, directives of the Holy Synod and articles from the journal Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel’nik. The article concludes that by the beginning of 1917 the All-Russian Memorial Society had received support from the Emperor, had opened local departments all across the Empire and had prepared for the implementation of its projects. Activities of the All-Russian Memorial Society stopped after the Bolshevik’s seizure of power.

Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney W. Fitzhugh Brundage (bio) Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. 464. Cloth, $35.00.) Remembering the Civil War is an important and daring book. It challenges, forthrightly but respectfully, ascendant ideas about Civil War memory during the century after the Civil War. According to Caroline E. Janney, the memory of the Civil War remained a raw scar and an ongoing source of rancor long after a culture of national reconciliation purportedly took hold. The implications of Janney’s argument are important for how we understand not just the postbellum memory of the conflict, but also the regional and national legacy of that memory to the present day. Any reader familiar with David Blight’s acclaimed Race and Reunion (2001) will discern that Remembering the Civil War offers extended dissent from its tale of national declension. Blight’s magisterial book has a juggernaut narrative that stresses the dialectical relationship between white northern and southern memory. According to Blight, national reconciliation necessitated a willful amnesia about the role of race, slavery, and black agency in the Civil War. For white northerners, it cost little, as victors, to ignore the black memory of the war or the central place of emancipation in it. For white southerners, parroting bromides about reconciliation was a fair trade for northern paeans to white southern principles and valor. Blight’s book has had tremendous resonance because of its poignancy; it complements our contemporary recognition of the shallowness of the nation’s commitment to the principles of freedom and liberty during much of its history. [End Page 326] Janney’s most important contribution may be to draw our attention to those postbellum Americans who were earnest, vociferous, and articulate disputants in the lively contest to define the war’s meaning. These white and black, northern and southern men and women were willing to entertain the possibility of reconciliation, but only on their own terms. One after another, they displayed little interest in sectional appeasement or healing. Instead, they were tenacious in their insistence that their wartime enemies were depraved, cruel, and unprincipled. Janney builds on her earlier work and that of other scholars published since the appearance of Race and Reunion that have broadened our understanding of the diverse communities and motivations at work in postbellum commemoration. Whereas Blight’s interest gravitated to the printed word, Janney’s gaze tends as much or more in the direction of public ceremony and organized commemoration. Some of the same prisoners of war, women’s organizations, and veterans take the stage in both Blight’s and Janney’s book. Yet comparatively obscure veterans, women, and African Americans are more visible participants in Janney’s account. These advocates of memory were far less inclined to acclaim sectional détente than were the editors of Century magazine, public intellectuals, or literary lions. And by tracing this mnemonic contest up to World War II, Janney emphasizes the persistence of the disputants. Indeed, the erection of a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery and the building of the Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac River from the cemetery are, for Janney, just another thrust and counterthrust in the decades-long struggle over the war’s meaning. By carrying her story past the oft-discussed fiftieth anniversary of Appomattox, Janney necessarily highlights the crucial role of women in twentieth-century commemoration. Whereas the commemorative activities of veterans have sometimes been privileged in previous histories of postbellum memory, Janney places women, northern and southern, white and black, at the center of the commemorative project. As Janney explains, they raised the money, mobilized their communities, organized the memorial dedications, explained their causes in speeches, and displayed a doggedness that few aging veterans could equal. If some veterans of the war elected to shake hands and reconcile, many more women along the fault lines of the conflict seemingly spurned even token gestures of reconciliation. Other scholars have dwelled on women as guardians of memory, but Janney offers the fullest and most compelling treatment of their essential contribution to...

Degrees of freedom in Canada's culture of redress

This article examines some recent Canadian projects of historical narrative revision in light of Canada's broader redress culture: the recurring norms and assumptions that govern its apportionment of causal and reparative responsibility for historic wrongs. To this end, it studies several grassroots commemorative projects funded under the Community Historical Recognition Program. It asks whether these projects contribute to forging a broader culture of redress capable of contributing to a goal that this article identifies as a central underlying justification for enterprises of historical justice in general: democratizing citizenship. Thus, the article aims to fulfil two main objectives. First, it offers an empirical analysis of some important Canadian historical justice initiatives, thus contributing to our understanding of a case often seen as a leader in redress politics. Second, by developing and then applying its own account of how historical justice projects can contribute to goals of democratic citizenship, the article offers what I hope is a suggestive model for analysing and evaluating particular acts or policies of historical redress more generally. A key conclusion from this analysis is that the Canadian example is much less inspiring than often assumed.

Transforming collective memory: mnemonic opportunity structures and the outcomes of racial violence memory movements

While some research on collective memory has addressed the creation of memory projects such as memorials and historical commissions, less attention has been paid to explaining variation in these projects’ success. America’s troubled history of lynchings and race riots is one topic increasingly addressed by commemorative projects. This article evaluates factors shaping efforts to imprint past racial violence into broader collective memory. Building on research on constraints imposed by actual pasts and environmental conditions, I argue that structural influences on collective memory, or mnemonic opportunity structures, powerfully affect the success of commemorative initiatives. I identify three major dimensions of mnemonic opportunity structures: (1) an environment’s present-day commemorative capacity, a past incident’s (2) ascribed significance, and (3) the moral valence of key characters at the time it occurred. Qualitative data from multiple case studies and 90 interviews, along with supplementary quantitative and qualitative comparative analyses (QCAs) of all recent projects marking segregation-era racial violence, illustrate the utility of the framework.

‘From here Lincoln came’: Anglo-Saxonism, the special relationship, and the anglicisation of Abraham Lincoln, c. 1860–1970

Despite being reviled by much of the British political establishment during his life, a statue of Abraham Lincoln was, nonetheless, erected at Westminster in 1920, whilst a year earlier a Lincoln bust was also established in the parish church of Hingham, Norfolk, the birth-place of his lineal ancestor, Samuel Lincoln. The dedication ceremonies of both were dominated by politically motivated invocations of Lincoln's English ancestry. Similar efforts to anglicise Lincoln recurred in the years immediately after the Second World War, and Lincoln's ‘Englishness’ continues to occupy the attentions of some commentators – especially in East Anglia – even today. This article accounts for twentieth century attempts to anglicise Lincoln by connecting these appropriations to the wider transatlantic political and cultural context, and by paying close attention to the details of place and locale in which so many Lincoln focused commemorative projects unfolded. In doing so, this article contends that the twentieth centu...

Flashes of a Southern Sprit: Meanings of the Sprit in the U.S. South. By Charles Reagan Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011, xviii + 249 pp. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) of a Sprit is a compilation of essays published between 1993 and 2007. In it, Wilson's subject includes a 1993 foray into southern historical memory, which foreshadowed much of the recent scholarship on the topic, an assessment of the sources of southern musical creativity, and insight into the evolution of his scholarly interests over his career. Readers who thread their way through these essays will recognize two consistent themes: the search for a approach to the American one that both anticipates and compliments the so-called new southern studies, and an insistence that any understanding of the South must take into account spirit and spirituality. Because Wilson moves back and forth across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and from literature and the visual arts to music and theology effortlessly and without pause, it is a fool's errand to attempt to neatly summarize the essays. But by focusing on three essays I may be able to give a hint of their richness.Wilson devotes several essays to the role of invented tradition and myth in the South. His interest in the topic has been evident since his highly regarded Baptized in Blood: Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). Almost all subsequent scholars of southern memory have followed in his footsteps by concentrating on the deeply conservative uses of myth and memory in the region. Indeed, in no other region of the United States has the reactionary use of memory been more fully charted. In The Myth of the Biracial South, Wilson complicates this understanding by reminding us that myths need not be exclusively conservative. During the 1970s, Wilson contends, black and white southerners agreed that the region had undergone an abrupt and profound moral transformation that would make possible a biracial future unique in the nation. Wilson acknowledges that the myth was wishful thinking. But he also points out the myriad ways that the myth energized black and white politicians, artists, and activists to undertake initiatives that had previously been unthinkable in the South. myth provided a mythic present for unprecedented experiments in biracialism. In the absence of the myth, Wilson wonders, what sources of optimism would have sustained champions of biracialism. Although more than a decade has passed since its first publication, this essay remains useful for understanding why George Allen's off-the-cuff bigotry on the campaign trail in 2006 was so costly or why, even during a era of heated wars, the most ambitious commemorative project in present-day North Carolina is a memorial to African American freedom.Several of Wilson's essays address the relationship of religion to cultural expression, another one of Wilson's abiding interests. In Flashes of the Spirit, he offers a respectful riposte to H. L. Mencken's 1917 withering attack on southern cultural primitivism. From the vantage of Mencken's desk in Baltimore, most of the South was rife with snake-handling religious zealotry, lynch mob barbarism, and unspeakable cultural ignorance. root cause of the region's cultural depravity, Mencken insisted, was southern religion, which suffocated creativity and curiosity alike. Wilson deftly turns Mencken's critique on its head by pointing out that the same South lampooned by Mencken was at that very moment nurturing the culture that would become synonymous with American culture during the twentieth century. In addition to the canonical Southern Renaissance in literature, Wilson points to a litany of seminal musical genres (jazz, blues, country, gospel) and visual art (especially folk art) as examples of creativity overlooked by Mencken. …

Interrupting commemoration: thinking with art, thinking through the strictures of Argentina's Espacio para la memoria

Recently, a few buildings within the Espacio para la memoria in Buenos Aires have been designated as a UNESCO Centre where, amongst other educational activities, evidentiary materials of the past repression are to be stored and displayed. Another building in the complex houses a Community Centre operated by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, where the mandate is to learn about and continue the revolutionary ideals of those disappeared during the repression. Amid these commemorative projects, designating a space for exhibiting art presents a significant opportunity for posing difficult questions, which go beyond the terms of information and idealization. Through a close reading of Diana Dowek's art exhibit, ‘A Long March’, the paper invites us to consider how art can draw out a particular haunting temporality that holds the present open to provocative questions that are difficult to pose and sustain amid the strictures of this commemorative site.

Rabin’s road: The politics of toponymic commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel

Embedded into the language of the landscape and integrated into the routines of everyday life, toponymic commemorations belong to the political geography of public memory. The impact of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on Israeli society and culture was made apparent in a space-time matrix of public commemorations, which introduced remembrance of the slain Prime Minister into the public sphere. This article focuses on the politics of Rabin’s toponymic commemoration, evinced in decision-making procedures at local and national levels of government in various stages of the commemoration project. It expands on toponymic commemoration as a measure of conciliation for a politically divided nation and as an arena where political struggles between Left and Right were waged. The article further elaborates on public criticism of the commemoration project, which was mainly directed against what seemed excessive commemoration and inappropriate naming practices. Focused on the extraordinary circumstances of the political assassination of a head of government, this paper offers insights into how toponymic commemoration in a politically divided society unfolds between a demonstration of national consensus and expression of political conflict. It also directs attention to the question of appropriateness of commemorative naming practices in a democratic society.

The Football Ground and Visual Culture: Recapturing Place, Memory and Meaning at Ayresome Park

2010 marked the 15th anniversary of Middlesbrough Football Club leaving its historic home at Ayresome Park, and the tenth anniversary of the completion of the housing estate that now occupies the site. It was also the tenth anniversary of the start of Neville Gabie's ‘The Trophy Room’ commemorative art project. This involved the incorporation of artworks in and around the new houses as symbolic allusions to the former ground. This article re-examines the motives, concept, challenges and methodology behind the project; explores the original relationships between the artist, developers, residents, fans and club; investigates current views and attitudes towards the artworks; and opens out debate on visual culture in this context, focusing on such questions as place attachment, public memory, history and heritage, civic pride and identity and nostalgia sport tourism.

Dealing with the Past: shared and contested narratives in ‘post‐conflict’ Northern Ireland

This article explores a West Belfast commemoration project that challenges dominant narratives shielding State‐sponsored violence from interrogation and demands that these acts be recognized and redressed. The remembrance trail offers a counternarrative by presenting memory that contests hegemonic constructs and articulates the need for justice. Both the trail’s temporality and its insistence on making conflict visible rather than homogenizing the past demonstrates its innovation and necessity in a society in transition.

The Number of the South African War (1899-1902) Concentration Camp Dead: Standard Stories, Superior Stories and a Forgotten Proto-Nationalist Research Investigation

Tilly extols the power and compass of ‘superior stories’ compared with ‘standard stories’. However, things are not always so clear cut, as the case study discussed here shows. A 1906 – 1914 research investigation headed by P. L. A. Goldman, which has initially concerned with the enumeration and commemoration of the deaths of Boer combatants during the South African War (1899-1902), and later with the deaths of people in the concentration camps established in the commando phase of this war, is explored in detail using archived documents. Now largely forgotten, the investigation was part of a commemorative project which sought to replace competing stories about wartime events with one superior version, as seen from a proto-nationalist viewpoint. Goldman, the official in charge, responded to a range of methodological and practical difficulties in dealing with a huge amount of data received from a wide variety of sources, and eventually produced ‘the number’ as politically and organisationally required. However, another number of the South African War concentration camp dead - different from Goldman's, and also added up incorrectly - concurrently appeared on a national women's memorial, the Vrouemonument, and it is this which has resounded subsequently. The reasons are traced to the character of stories and their power, and the visibility of stories about the concentration camp deaths on the face of the Vrouemonument, but their anonymity within Goldman's production of ‘the number’. Tilly's idea of an ‘in-between’ approach to analysing stories by historical sociology is drawn on in exploring this.

United, Regardless, and a Bit Regretful: Confederate History Month, the Slavery Apology, and the Failure of Commemoration

Three governors of Virginia issued a succession of proclamations declaring April to be the month in which Virginians should celebrate their Confederate forebears; a few years afterwards Virginia became the first state to “apologize” for slavery. While the messages in these official expressions seem radically different, this article examines the similar messages that appeared in the proclamations and the apology. Addressed to specific audiences, official commemorative proclamations create boundaries and function to include and exclude groups from the larger collectivity. “Whiteness” has long been presented as guiltless in Confederate narrative; thus whites are free to ignore their racial identity and claim ownership of the regional, local or historic identities upon which commemorative projects are based. The introduction of the realities of slavery into such narratives thus disrupts many whites’ sense of history and identity, causing resistance to revision of the historical narrative.

Whose Justice? Rethinking Transitional Justice from the Bottom Up

This paper argues that transitional justice needs to adopt a participatory approach to achieve longer‐term sustainability, shifting away from the top‐down ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ approach to allow ‘voices from below’ to be heard and heeded. It critiques dominant interpretations of key transitional justice concepts, and links them to the difficulties of post‐conflict transitional justice in a range of violently divided societies. Popular participation and local agency, it is argued, is necessary to achieve ends identified in much transitional justice discourse, and to embed mechanisms for the creation of sustainable peace. A Northern Ireland initiative (the Ardoyne Commemoration Project) will be explored in‐depth, illustrating how a bottom‐up ‘truth‐telling’ process can make a significant contribution to transitional justice and casting doubt on the validity of the deference to legal dominance in current policy and practice. The paper recommends that knowledge available in development studies and participatory theory be applied more clearly in debates and approaches in transitional justice.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration

This essay situates the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt within the vigorous culture of national commemorative building in the late twentieth-century United States, a culture that found its first articulation in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We begin with an assessment of ways in which the AIDS Memorial Quilt appropriated and extended the rhetoric of the VVM in terms of the two memorials' modes of democratic representation, their troubling of the boundaries between contexts of invention and reception, and their differential coding of the public and private. We take up later memorial projects, specifically the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the September 11, 2001, commemorative projects, to suggest how the rhetoric of the AIDS Quilt can be marked as a harbinger of practices to come and how its progressive rhetoric has been turned in some later commemorative works to very different ends.