Concept Of Cultural Memory Research Articles

Belleville rouge, Belleville noir, Belleville rose: The Complex Identity of a Parisian quartier

The Parisian quartier of Belleville has long been the subject of scholarly literature and popular culture due to its colourful history and diverse population. Its symbolic boundaries extend beyond the geographical limits imposed by its administrative demarcation. Myths abound as to the extent of its rebellious past, its contemporary image as a melting pot and its prevalence as a décor for the noir genre. In this article a three-tiered categorisation of Belleville is adopted which corresponds to various representations of the suburb in literature, popular culture and from the perspective of its inhabitants. Belleville rouge reflects the quartier’s revolutionary past and the late 20th century struggle associated with its physical metamorphosis. Belleville noir focusses on the quartier’s criminal face, as it is depicted in Parisian film and roman noir and as it exists in reality. Belleville rose highlights the pleasures of the quartier: its cosmopolitan character whose representation verges at times on utopian. In his Malaussène series (1985-1995), writer and former resident Daniel Pennac portrays Belleville as a unique blend of rouge, noir and rose. This fusion of fairy tale, detective fiction, myth and reality establishes a complex Bellevillois identity distinct from other contemporary representations. The article concludes that it is impossible to associate a single identity with Belleville. The quartier’s contemporary face is inextricably linked to its past, the memory of which is preserved by its inhabitants and by social and literary commentators such as Pennac. In keeping with historian Pierre Nora’s concept of cultural memory, Pennac thus assumes the role of guardian of Belleville’s cultural memory in the face of the quartier’s perpetual evolution.

Cultural memory between the national and the transnational

This study explores the dynamics of cultural memory against a transnational background. The paper offers a concise discussion of the concept of cultural memory as developed by Jan and Aleida Assmann and as qualified by the most recent scholarship. Focussing on aspects concerning practices of cultural memory, the analysis proceeds to examine a couple of decisive components of Romania's cultural identity. Over time, the arguments attempting to define this identity have drawn on strands of cultural memory that have defied strictly drawn borders: the Latin cultural connotations as embodied by the Romanian language and Eastern Orthodoxy. Mapping the convergence of these two strands within this particular illustration of cultural identity shows one way in which the concepts of cultural memory, of the national, and of the transnational can be applied to a concrete case.

Reading Satan, Remembering the Other1

While the main subject of the present paper is the representation of Satan as the negative Other in the Qur'an, the general objective of the paper is to show the relevance of the concept of cultural memory as a framework for inquiry into the Qur'an and the theologies of othering that it carries. The cultural memory embedded in the Qur'an not only gives us an idea of how an Islamic identity was invented, established, and can be re-invented during centuries of multicultural co-existence and conflict. It also reflects a normative image of religious opponents, minorities, and enemies against which such an Islamic identity is continuously created. The paper forwards a reading of the main variations of sin, notably kufr, shirk and kibr, which the Qur'anic Satan-narrative articulate, indicating how this Qur'anic figure provides a way of coming to terms with evil as a manifestation of otherness.

Cultural memory: resistance, faith & identity

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Concept of Cultural Memory 2. The Power of Image 3. The Power of Secrecy and Ceremony 4. The Power of Narrative 5. The Power of Syncretism/Inculturation 6. Final Thoughts Appendix 1. Summary of Post-independence Political Movements in Mexico Appendix 2. Short Summary of International Events and Their Impact on Indigenous Political Movements Appendix 3. The San Andres Accords, or the Law on Indian Rights and Culture, 1996 Notes Bibliography Autobiographical Statements Index

Re-writing as re-visioning

In the course of a ‘memorial history’ (that is, the history of how events or persons are recalled by social communities) it is to a great degree the mode of remembering which effects changes in the shape and meaning of the past. Modes of remembering are modes of re-presenting the past. The aim of this essay is to explore the way in which literary forms generate specific modes of remembering. I will look at features such as narrative voice, focalisation, metaphors, intertextuality, and plot structures of the literary (re-)writing of the ‘Indian Mutiny’ (1857) which has been taking place over a time span of almost 150 years, in order to provide some insights into one of literature's potential functions, its power to re-vision the past, in imperial and post-colonial cultures of memory. A broader aim of the essay is to show in exemplary fashion how the field of post-colonial studies can usefully apply concepts of cultural memory.

On a Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory

On a Narratology of Cultural and Collective Memory Wolfgang Müller-Funk The past. . . cannot be recalled; but it behoves us to think the future: perhaps you may again see the object you regret. —William Beckford, Vathek This essay connects two discourses that have not always been linked, especially in the German speaking context: narratology and the concept of cultural memory.1 It argues that all forms of memory are explicitly or implicitly based on retrospective narratives that seek to cross the unbridgeable gap between the time of narrating and the time of the events that will be narrated. If memory and reminding are key issues for understanding the concept of the self, every identity produces the impossible: bridging the gap between the act of reminding and the reminded events, feelings and impressions. Thus all traditional concepts of memory and reminding try to forget this principal difference in reminding. In contrast to political questions susceptible to rational decision-making, we have not the choice between reminding and forgetting. Both are parts of one and the same process.2 Traditional cultures prefer the idea of the eternity of symbols and signs whereas intellectual avant-gardes in modem societies (and modem and post-modem subjectivity as a whole) prefer to extinguish signs and symbols and start at a virtual zero-point (Lachmann). The traditional concept of monumentalized memory, however, denies the open and uncertain JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 207-227. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 208 JNT process of reminding/recollecting that no longer includes the permanent storage of fixed items as happens in a library or a mega-computer or God, who never forget. These metaphors can be understood as protection from the uncanny, from Freud's notion of the "Unheimlichen." They suggest a solid and fixed existence for a reminding subject that may feel its identity to be safe and secure across time. The concept of a more or less perfect memory and the idea of a constant, reliable and complete subject, who is his or her own master, presuppose each other. If one gives up the concept of memory as storage, in which nothing gets lost, you also have to relinquish the idea of a strong and stable subject. The uncanny is the clear effect of that process and modem people have tried, at least since the times of Goya and Hoffmann, to confront themselves with their broken identities and the monstrous features which are the companions of modem subjectivity . Thus, the constructive character and the discontinuity that is written into the structure of reminding are the strongest arguments in favor of the idea of a fragmented subject. In her critique of Assmann's concept of cultural memory, Vittoria Borsô (following Derrida's concept of dijférance) has defined the medium of memory as a space of possibility, which is actualized only by some form of reminding (Borsô, Krummeich, Witte 23-53). So, time is always in-written in the medium of cultural memory which can be described as a constant, but non-continual process of actualization . It always starts from the moment of narrating and re-narrating. Narration and reminding are two aspects of one and the same complex: culture. Media can be understood as the variety of forms which do not simply represent the content of the narratives but also serve to construct them in different ways. The difference between Libeskind's museum and Eisenmann's traditional monument creates a different rhetorical structure of reception and a different idea of reminding. Culture, the realm of identity- and difference-making, can be described as a dynamic cluster of more or less hierarchical, manifest or latent narratives , which have not only a retrospective but also a prospective or teleological aspect. Narratives describe the way of building a world of "symbolic forms."3 Giambattista Vico has already described these symbolic forms of culture on two levels, a diachronic and a synchronic one: the former is exemplified by the symbolic ritualization of funerals and the latter by the symbolic reutilization of marriages (Kittler 19-43).4 Every culture can be interpreted as a symbolic and narrative community that includes Om a Narratology of...