Construction Of Collective Memory Research Articles

I ‘nuovi cittadini tedeschi’ e il dibattito sulla singolarità dell’Olocausto. Su «Adas Raum» di Sharon Dodua Otoo

This paper aims to investigate the relevance of Sharon Dodua Otoo’s debut novel Adas Raum in the ongoing Historikerstreit 2.0. Relevant to this new historical dispute is the possible connection between colonialism and the memory of the Holocaust. As I will show, Adas Raum seems to respond artistically to critical suggestions proposed by Michael Rothberg who interprets the link between memory and identity in a complex way, which results in non-competitive participation in collective memory construction in multi-ethnic societies and redefines the relevance of such categories as victims and perpetrators.

Construction of collective memory through official history education in North Cyprus (1971-2003)

Fundamental to recalling memories and remembering is to look at the past and the future concurrently. Remembering is crucial to have a temporal association so that present changes and developments can be elaborated in understanding the construction of memory. Historical trauma is a psychological and emotional collective and subjective injury which are transmitted from adults to children in a cycle process, and it continues over a life span of individuals and across generations. Soft memories are created and shared as a social process. These are narratives, historical texts and similar, less tangible forms of memory. History education has a profound influence on social discourse and the way soft memories are perceived, and since formal schooling is at the centre of shaping a generation and textbooks are the main medium of knowledge transmission, the official narrative shapes it and is often presented selectively. This research explores how the official regulation of history education is used to align official state discourse with social memory. This research employs secondary data and document analysis by examining the compulsory textbook (1979) used since 1971 in history education. It explores history education’s impact on individual narratives of remembrance and collective memory. It examines the long-term effects of what has been taught in secondary school history education on adulthood perceptions of past historical occurrences. Findings confirm that a consistent, official historical discourse supported by exposure to “hard” and “soft” memories enables the maintenance of collective memory as represented in the official discourse among society members. It also concluded that when difficult history is transmitted to the younger generation as part of education, they may experience trauma and similar negative associated feelings; furthermore, they do not necessarily unconditionally embrace the official history but question it in their adulthood.

Nostalgia for Soviet Estonia: Discursive Elements of Shared Memory in the Facebook Group “Sovetskaia Estoniia – Eesti NSV”

This paper explores the role of online platforms in shaping a nostalgic discourse around Estonia’s Soviet past, focusing on the Facebook group “Советская Эстония – Eesti NSV” (Soviet Estonia). Despite official condemnation of the Soviet legacy, this bilingual Russian-Estonian group fosters a positive representation of the era through shared photos and personal memories. Utilizing sociolinguistic methods, the study examines posts and comment threads, unveiling discursive mechanisms employed to reinforce group identity and leverage nostalgia. Members engage in discussions that not only counter the official narrative regarding the past but also extend to contemporary political issues. The research highlights the impact of digital tools and social media in facilitating the construction of collective memory and challenging dominant historical perspectives.

The Collective Memory Construction and Political Function of the Piano Concerto Yellow River

The Collective Memory Construction and Political Function of the Piano Concerto Yellow River

Finding place in Northeast and Southeast Asia: Collective memory construction of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and dislocated

This introductory article presents the frame and impetus for our special issue on collective memory construction of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and dislocated in Northeast and Southeast Asia. The objective of this article is to showcase this collection as in dialogue and to draw out some of the common themes, including speaking from the margins, the gatekeepers of public memory, the geopolitics of commemoration, and the ongoing negotiation in domestic and international spaces for control of the historical narrative.

Miracle or Debacle? Anti-Colonialism, Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism in Reports of the Friendly Football Match between Kenya and Ghana in 1965

This article examines the 1965 friendly football match between Kenya and Ghana within the broader context of Kenya's early post-colonial era. It conducts a textual analysis of pre-match reports to reveal how the Ghanaian national team was portrayed as a symbol of decolonialism. Additionally, the study investigates the role of journalism in transforming public frustration regarding the match's outcome into a critique of the government. Finally, it discusses how various interpretations of this match have contributed to the construction of collective memories, especially in the context of pan-Africanism. This research sheds light on the complex interplay between sports, political sentiments, and social dynamics in a newly independent Kenya.

Representations of the Communist Resistance in Romanian Cinema. The Thawing Period

"This paper intends to illustrate an often neglected, yet relevant aspect of the collective memory construction in communist Romania. In addition to other forms of collective remembrance, cinematic representations of the recent past have played a significant role for both the political regime and the Romanian society by providing political legitimacy as well as entertainment. The communist resistance was one of the most recurrent topos of collective memory, whereas underground party supporters – the so called “illegalists”- often had to be presented as figures of identification. The cinema permitted, however, a negotiation of the recent past on different levels. Starting from these considerations and focusing on the film production „Duminică la ora 6“(Sunday at Six, Lucian Pintilie, 1966), the paper brings into discussion the communist resistance discourse during the liberalization period. Keywords: communist resistance, cinema, collective memory, communist regime, Romania, liberalization period"

How Do Technological Systems Define Who War Victims Are?

AbstractIn a range of peace process scenarios, the expert’s knowledge has become a fundamental tool for generating information systems as a mechanism for the storage and circulation of data. These information artifacts are supposed to faithfully document situations of human rights violations and contribute to the design of public policy and the construction of collective memory. Following Latour’s (1993) original coinage of the term coproduction, this paper analyzes how the Inter-Institutional System of Information for Justice and Peace (SIIJYP)1 was designed to define victims of war and means of reparation from the State in Colombia. From an actor network theory perspective, we explain how victimizers become the main beneficiaries of the application of the SIIJYP. To comprehend this unintended social impact of the technological artifact and how it becomes an artifact that functions as an aseptic mediator of the historical-judicial truth, and the policy of transitional justice, we examine the relations between human and nonhuman actors, how information is collected, organized, hierarchized, and negotiated, as well as the consequences of the technical and legal construction of the notion of victims of war.

Rituals and Collective Memory Construction in the Age of Social Media: A Case Study of Beijing Temple Fairs

Beijing Temple Fair is a long-standing practice in Chinese folk culture. For a very long time, millions of people have enthusiastically participated in the massive and vibrant temple fairs. As media technology develops, temple fairs have developed into an online tradition or phenomena in the social media age. This article aims to explore the media as a communication carrier in the process of technological development by beginning with the theory of ritual in anthropological research, the ritual concept of communication in communication research, and the cultural memory and cultural identity of human beings themselves. This paper uses semi-structured and in-depth interviews as research methods. The study discovered that, as medium ceremony, Beijing temple fairs are well known and adored by the general public. The inclusion of social media platforms has increased the Beijing Temple Fair's depth and breadth and, to some extent, has sparked its thorough distribution and construction process.

Comics and the Colombian Peace Process: Neoliberal Discourse and the Risk of Revictimization of Displaced Peasants

This article explores how two comics published by Colombia’s National Center for Historical Memory engage with the ongoing peace process by promoting a neoliberal discourse. It argues that these comics are examples of narratives that focus on economic productivity to justify the peace process and restitution of lands. First, it shows how comics participate in the construction of collective memories. Second, based on critical discourse studies, it analyses the comics to trace the signs of the greater economic discourse. Finally, it underlies certain dangers of relying on this discourse to legitimize the peace process in Colombia.

Access to Remedy and the Construction of Collective Memory: New Perspectives in the Realm of the Colombian Transitional Justice Project

This article intends to explore how the production of collective memory within transitional justice processes could be considered as a feasible avenue to advance the instrumentalization of the Access to Remedy Pillar of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This account considers that collective memory is a fundamental component of transitional justice as the attainment of both victims reparation and national reconciliation require the emergence of a shared historical narrative that fixes an explanation as to the implications of violence on the trajectory of the affected society. Hence the current Colombian transitional justice project, and particularly certain social dialogue activities conducted by its Truth Commission (hereafter the Commission), are presented as an embryonic and non-exhaustive case study that serves as the starting point of further research on the matter.

Geopolitics in Glass Cases: Nationalist Narratives on Sino–Russian Relations in Chinese Border Museums

History museums, their narratives of a nation’s past and their construction of collective memory are important but oft-neglected dimensions in international relations analyses. This article examines three border history museums on the Chinese side of the formerly contested Sino–Russian frontier. It argues that their nationalist representations of Sino–Russian history challenge assessments of the recent level of rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing on the international stage and the robustness of a possible future alliance or semi-alliance. Hence, this article raises the question of the role of historical memory in the evolution of the Sino–Russian partnership since the fall of the USSR.

Screening Drone Warfare

While war films contribute to the construction of collective memory, few of them address the changes implied by drone warfare. Drone operators work from remote places and share only one space: the screen that conveys drone images. The possibilities for dramatic actions are too few for a spectacular mise-en-scene: Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2016) and The Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014) slow down the pace of the narrative to focus on the drones’ power of surveillance. The duration of observation sequences creates spaces for reflection and ethical debates about the military strategy of drone strikes. Such reflection pervades National Bird (Sonya Kennebeck, 2016) and Drone (Tonje Hessen Schei, 2014), two documentaries built from the testimonies of drone operators. This article explores the questions posed in theses fiction and non-fiction films through referring to growing drone literature developed in response to the political arguments in favor of drone warfare.

Negotiating the Past Online: Holocaust Commemoration between Iran and Israel

This study explores how marginalized groups negotiate the past and partake in building collective memory online. Using examples drawn from a large-scale ethnographic study, I show how members of the Persian community in Israel (Israelis of Iranian origin) reaffirm and oppose excluding dominant Israeli collective memory narratives of the Holocaust through rereading historic Iranian-related stories of Holocaust occurrences. The article thus aims to both discuss the ongoing struggle of Mizrahi communities to criticize exclusionary practices within Israeli sociocultural discourses and reflect on the research opportunities and limitations social media create in studying collective memory construction online as a whole and in the context of minority groups in particular.

The temporal nexus of collective memory mediation: print and digital media in Brazil’s Landless Movement 1984-2019

ABSTRACT Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST’s internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (1984–2014), and its Facebook page (2014–2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil’s landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements.

Nomadic life archiving across platforms: Hyperlinked storage and compartmentalized sharing

People are today located in media ecosystems in which a variety of ICT devices and platforms coexist and complement each other to fulfil users’ heterogeneous requirements. These multi-media affordances promote a highly hyperlinked and nomadic habit of digital data management which blurs the long-standing boundaries between information storage, sharing and exchange. Specifically, during the pervasive sharing and browsing of fragmentary digital information (e.g. photos, videos, online diaries, news articles) across various platforms, life experiences and knowledge involved are meanwhile classified and stored for future retrieval and collective memory construction. For international migrants who straddle different geographical and cultural contexts, management of various digital materials is particularly complicated as they have to be familiar with and appropriately navigate technological infrastructures of both home and host countries. Drawing on ethnographic observations of 40 Chinese migrant mothers in Singapore, this article delves into their quotidian routines of acquiring, storing, sharing and exchanging digital information across a range of ICT devices and platforms, as well as cultural and emotional implications of these mediated behaviours for their everyday life experiences. A multi-layer and multi-sited repertoire of ‘life archiving’ was identified among these migrant mothers in which they leave footprints of everyday life through a tactical combination of interactive sharing, pervasive tagging and backup storage of diverse digital content.

Portraits of the cultural landscape of the pantheons: Construction of identity and collective memory

Globalization seemed to become the enemy to defeat. For decades some authors have observed a phenomenon that devours everything in its path, destroying identity. However, there is a counterpart, one that has caused many communities or researchers decide traditions or document certain elements of their daily lives with the certainty that his eyes back to the local, encourages and protects the collective memory. The following paper discloses how by using photography and direct observation was possible to document the elements of the cultural landscape in two local cemeteries, whose habits, customs and architecture are completely different. The importance of this study is how the apprehension of these elements can recognize the construction of collective memories of the groups of mourners, mourning processes which were impacted by what lies in both scenarios.

The Multifarious Lives of the Sixth ‘Abbasid Caliph Muhammad al-Amin: Collective Memory Construction, Queer Spaces, and Historical Television Drama in Egypt and Syria

AbstractA vast array of narratives found in medieval historical chronicles and literary sources have referenced the particular ways in which the culture associated with the ‘Abbasid caliphate diverged from a binary model of gender. Despite debate about the historical accuracy of these early chronicles, the repeated references to the sixth ‘Abbasid caliph Muhammad al-Amin's non-heteronormativity indicate at least a kernel of truth. This article examines the collective memory construction of al-Amin in the Egyptian series Harun al-Rashid (1997) and two Syrian series, Abna’ al-Rashid: al-Amin wa-l-Ma'mun (The Sons of al-Rashid: al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, 2006) and Harun al-Rashid (2018). These contemporary portrayals of the life of al-Amin simultaneously illustrate the process by which history is altered by authorial perspective and the erasure of nonheteronormative space within the ‘Abbasid caliphate. My own authorial perspective inclines toward an interpretation of al-Amin as queer; through this lens, an inspection of wide-ranging accounts of al-Amin's life reveals the historical biases of his time and our current moment, too, as historians then and now variably recognize al-Amin's queerness in constructing collective memory. Some have argued that anti–al-Amin chroniclers may have engaged in historical revisionism and referred to al-Amin as queer to discredit the caliph, but ultimately, whether or not this is true, the current application of those early references by contemporary screenwriters is the most revealing historiographical decision, as his many representations serve as a mirror for our contemporary subjectivities, interests, and agendas. At a time when queer lives and experiences are notably absent from traditional historical narratives, this article proposes that regardless of the accuracy of the original sources, the absence itself in contemporary portrayals is significant, as patterns of exclusion yield tangible meaning. In this particular case, the ready elimination of queerness from contemporary narratives shows the ways in which queerness is vulnerable to erasure in favor of other, more politically expedient identity characteristics and values.

MEMORY, BIAFRA AND THE QUESTION OF NATIONHOOD IN BIYI BANDELE’S HALF OF A YELLOW SUN

The essential place of film in engaging the idea of memory and collective memory is established by the fact of its historical origins and development over the centuries. This, in every sense is connected to the socio-cultural, political as well as economic and aesthetic evolution, influenced and controlled by the reality of the people’s experience. From classical to the contemporary times, film makers have drawn montage-like pictures of their world, in concrete terms as historical films for the world to see. However, through the approaches of Social Interaction and Trauma Theories, Image Analysis and Historical Contextualization, this paper interrogates Biyi Bandele’s Half of a Yellow Sun, an adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie’s novel of the same title and how it has been deployed as a tool for the construction of collective memory of the Biafra/ Nigerian civil war experience. Data were collated through library research and critical study of related films. The findings therefore, reveal that memory plays cogent roles in the process of reconstruction of history. The film therefore serves as a point of reference for Nigerians to have reminiscence over the negative effects of the war on the people. It is however clear that the agitation by some groups to call for the renegotiation of the country’s unity is meant for the purpose of self- interest rather than collective. The reconstruction of the memory of agony of the war in the film, if not properly managed could be burdensome to the country, and may degenerate into another internal crisis. Hence, there is the need for any aggrieved party to be cautious in their approaches towards the question of National unity and perceived marginalization.

Memoria colectiva, derecho al olvido y comisiones: análisis de experiencias comparadas

En este artículo de reflexión presentamos un debate sobre la memoria colectiva frente al derecho al olvido y un estudio comparado sobre algunas comisiones de la verdad como instrumentos de justicia transicional. Analizamos los fundamentos epistemológicos de varios autores sobre memoria colectiva; confrontamos dos tesis sobre el derecho al olvido; y, finalmente, realizamos una descripción de comisiones de la verdad, creadas luego de firmarse acuerdos de paz. Con esto pretendemos concluir que, a pesar de las dificultades, estas comisiones se constituyen en un instrumento necesario para reparar a las víctimas a través de la construcción de memoria colectiva.