Cultural Amnesia Research Articles

Editor’s Note

We are excited to announce that ISLE 29.4 is almost a double issue. The volume opens with Rebecca S. Oh’s “Apocalyptic Realism: ‘A New Category of the Event,’” which examines how “apocalyptic realism both traces the ways in which world-ending closures are historically produced and the ways in which worlding goes on from within imposed forms of futurelessness.” Oh’s article “considers Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People as an example of apocalyptic realism.” Then, Swaralipi Nandi, in “Speculating the Carbon Rift: Capitalistic Dystopias and the Ecological-Noir in ‘Carbon,’” “analyze[s] Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan’s short film Carbon (2017) as a fictional resistance to the cultural amnesia of climate change.” Nandi also explores “the unsuitability of literary realism as a mode for the representation of climate change and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a narrative vehicle to convey the vagaries of a future thriving on present fossil capitalism.” Angelo Monaco’s article “Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses and Melancholia” focuses on how Moss’s novel Cold Earth (2009), which is set in the Arctic, is “concerned with the dread of obliteration and the yearning for recovering time” and how “archaeological excavation, environmental apocalypse, temporal disarray, and memory frictions function as archiving vehicles.” Staying in the polar regions, in “The Silent Continent? Textual Responses to the Soundscapes of Antarctica,” Carolyn Philpott and Elizabeth Leane study “the soundscapes of Antarctica—especially its silence—and their role in human experiences of the continent, as captured in written narratives from the ‘Heroic Era’ (1895–1922), when the continent was first explored on foot, to the present day” in order “to draw greater attention to the role of the sonic in human engagements with Antarctica and to the importance of written texts in capturing the essence and meaning of these experiences.”

Against Cultural Amnesia Through Optimizing The Role of The Youth Generation in Paloh Naga Agrotourism

This article aims to describe strengthening character and love of culture as an effort to fight cultural amnesia through various forms of creativity of the younger generation in Paloh Naga Agrotourism. The research method is an ethnographic method with a naturalistic approach. Collecting data through participatory observation, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and archiving folklore. The data analysis technique used Spradley ethnographic analysis with a series of analyzes processed using ATLAS.ti software. The research results are; Optimizing the role of the younger generation in cultivating positive characters around Paloh Naga Agrotourism through participation in art training in music, dance, and traditional theatre. While in the field of education, through participation in the Lingkaran Community Learning Activity Center, the program consists of Character Education, Cashier Education (Coastal Children's Area), Taqsir (Taqlimul Qur'an for Coastal Children), Community Reading Parks, and teaching at the Rehabilitation Workshop of the National Narcotics Agency, Deli Serdang District. Furthermore, efforts to fight cultural amnesia in the aspect of cultural love by participating in various activities related to folklore, namely oral folklore performances in the performance of the Paloh Naga Legend ballet, partially oral folklore performances in traditional dance and game practices, and non-verbal folklore training in the course of product exhibitions and traditional cuisine. Furthermore, the regeneration process of the younger generation in fighting cultural amnesia begins with participating in character and art education after fulfilling the requirements to become a volunteer-based on qualifications. Finally, the forms of creativity displayed by the younger generation, include preparing various folklore performances, creating creative dances, playing traditional music and traditional games to strengthen social interaction and the value of creativity, and creating various traditional cuisines.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman

Reviewed by: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman Robert Benne The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. By Carl Trueman. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2020. 425 pp. Carl Trueman is one of America’s most important rising Christian public intellectuals. Scottish born and educated, Trueman is currently professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. Earlier he taught at the Ministerial Training Institute of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His columns are published regularly in Public Discourse and First Things. Most importantly, he has written several significant books, including The Creedal Imperative (2012) and Luther on the Christian Life (2015). I taught the latter in an adult class at church and found it very well-written and informative. Though an orthodox Presbyterian, he is almost persuaded by Luther on the liturgy and sacraments. Trueman starts with the assessment of the modern self by two major theorists, Philip Rieff and Charles Taylor, both of whom see “expressive individualism” as the essence of the modern self. The modern self is no longer guided by the sacred order of great religions, the obligations to others in the given stations of life, or the virtues that solid traditions have formed in their adherents. Rather, the modern self aims at “authenticity,” the untrammeled expression of whatever inner definition or inclination the self wants to express. Modern societies are not only to tolerate such expressive [End Page 474] individuals; they are to affirm and embrace them. Criticizing them or their actions amounts to “hate speech.” Trueman devotes the main part of his book to tracing the intellectual pedigree behind the phenomenon of the modern self. Ideas have consequences and the author wants to examine the chain of ideas that have brought us to the current state. In “Foundations of the Revolution” he traces the impact of Rousseau, the Romantic poets, and the really big theorists: Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin. He then moves to the “Sexualization of the Revolution,” in which he surveys the thought and impact of Freud. He concludes that section by conjuring up thinkers of the recent past, whom many of us remember from the 1960s—Marcuse and Reich—who “politicized sex.” Throwing off the sexual restraints of the old Christian bourgeois order would be the first step to revolution. The last major section deals with the triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the “T,” which stands for transgenderism. In the latter section he deals with the incongruities and contradictions of the powerful LGBTQ movement. All sorts of “expressive individualism” do not fit together so easily. In a concluding “Unscientific Prologue,” he reflects on the possible futures of a society so destabilized by rampant individualism, and what it means for the church. This book is a bracing survey of intellectual history and makes a compelling case for understanding the current situation in the light of major thinkers of the past. But there are problems. A major one has to do with the role of ideas in historical change. Are they as important as he makes them out to be? He admits that he is not doing a comprehensive account, but it would have been helpful to have touched on the major economic, social, and political changes that are perhaps just as important as ideas in the unfolding of history. Further, he implies that the emerging notion of the human self is drastically different than Christian views of the self but does not explain how it is different. The lay folks I taught kept asking about the Christian anthropology that is being jettisoned by the triumph of the modern self. The teacher had to supply the answers! Another oddity is that he does not mention Robert Bellah, whose Habits of the Heart (1985, re-issued 2007) made “expressive and utilitarian individualism” part of the intellectual landscape. Indeed, more attention [End Page 475] to the utilitarian version of individualism, as well as to the identity politics, to which extreme individualism inadvertently leads, would have been very helpful. Nevertheless, this formidable work lends great understanding to our current chaos...

The Literary Art of Ali Smith: 'All we are is Eyes' ed. by Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sumner

Reviewed by: The Literary Art of Ali Smith: 'All we are is Eyes' ed. by Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sumner Caleb Sivyer The Literary Art of Ali Smith: 'All we are is Eyes'. Ed. by Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sumner. (Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture, 31) Berlin: Peter Lang. 2019. 162 pp. £38. ISBN 978-3-632-82242-2. Despite Ali Smith's growing popularity and critical acclaim, especially with the recent completion of her seasonal quartet of novels, The Literary Art of Ali Smith is only the second book-length collection of essays devoted to her work. The first was Monica Germanà and Emily Horton's excellent Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), featuring essays that explored a wide variety of themes, including Smith's rewriting of classical myths, her employment of the stranger figure to disrupt the status quo, and her repeated use of spectral figures. This new collection, published by Peter Lang, offers a slightly narrower focus as the subtitle suggests: 'All we are is Eyes'. Indeed, several of the essays published here shed light on Smith's persistent fascination with the visual, including the presence of cinema in her work, her explorations of what it means to be a spectator in the [End Page 297] age of ubiquitous social media and surveillance technologies, and her queering of masculine structures of vision or what Laura Mulvey famously termed 'the male gaze' back in the 2970s. Two essays in particular offer comprehensive and novel analyses of Smith's continued interest in visuality: drawing on a broad range of scholarly texts concerned with spectatorship, Jess Orr's chapter on The Accidental (2006) centres on the mysterious figure of Amber, who is not only a kind of human embodiment and symbolization of the cinema, but who also disrupts the viewing practices of the other characters in the text, forcing them to become 'more active and critical agents of their own watching experiences' (p. 54). Similarly, Rochelle Simmons traces the influence of John Berger's work in the first volume of Smith's seasonal quartet, Autumn (2026), arguing that Smith's text 'draws upon Berger's transformative vision, in order to portray a better world' (p. 248). Her chapter gives a detailed account of the influence of Berger's seminal BBC television series Ways of Seeing, as well as several of his writings on painting (in particular cubism), upon Smith's literary fiction. There are a couple of other persistent themes that run throughout this collection. Many of the essays explore Smith's working of recent political events into the narrative of her texts, most notably the UK Brexit referendum of 2026. Rachael Sumner's chapter on memory, for example, observes that Autumn features several 'hints [. . .] that as a nation Britain appears to be suffering from a form of cultural amnesia', while the 'failure of forgetting is charted metaphorically across the British landscape itself' in the text (p. 234). Like many of the critical assessments of Smith's work, Sumner also correctly points out the characteristic sense of hopefulness in Smith's writings: Autumn 'indicates that the deliberate erasure of memory is not inevitable' and offers a positive example of remembrance through the 'intimate bond developed between [Elizabeth and Daniel] [which] results from the memories they share' (p. 235). This quality of hopefulness appears in another theme explored by several writers in this volume, namely Smith's retelling and reinterpreting of classical myths, in particular those that appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Attila Dósa explores Smith's retelling of the tale of Echo and Narcissus, focusing on how Smith weaves the figure of Echo into her narrative concerns with temporality, death, and narration, while Héloïse Lecomte unpicks Smith's use of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in Artful (2022), arguing that Smith takes the 'traditionally [...] passive object of mourning', Eurydice, and gives her 'a consciousness and an agency' of her own (pp. 47–48). More broadly, many of the writers in this volume unpack the rich intertextual vein that runs throughout Smith's œuvre, including the numerous references and allusions to Shakespeare and Dickens in her most...

Stop drinking the waipiro! A critique of the government's ‘why’ behind Te Mana o te Wai

Stop drinking the waipiro! A critique of the government's ‘why’ behind Te Mana o te Wai

Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels by Golnar Nabizadeh

Reviewed by: Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels by Golnar Nabizadeh Yun Lan Golnar Nabizadeh, Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels. London: Routledge, 2019. 208 pp. The past decade has witnessed an explosive interest in graphic narrative, which was once dismissed as frivolous and heterodox but is now praised as innovative and flexible in its ability to accommodate both fiction and nonfiction and to address an array of topics, old or new. Among thought-provoking studies such as Hillary L. Chute's Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), Elisabeth El Refaie's Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012), Karin Kukkonen's Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (2013), Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon's From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (2013), Achim Hescher's Reading Graphic Novels (2016), Kai Mikkonen's The Narratology of Comic Art (2017), and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer's The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), Golnar Nabizadeh's Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels is noteworthy for its original focus. It centers on the issue of how marginalized and minority groups reproduce their memories in comic form. Nabizadeh attempts to do justice to the enormous potential of a word-image alliance to "materialize" the past, contending that the fragmented panels, the gutters, and the drawings in comics document the episodic, imaginative, reconstructive, and visual nature of memory, especially traumatic memory. Comics are valorized as an effective medium for the socially excluded and the neglected to challenge authoritative discourses and to make their suppressed voices heard. The ethics of comics that stand for occluded voices is showcased in Nabizadeh's selection of the works analyzed. The book covers memory of sundry types of human experience and shows how the texts discussed, incorporating both fictional and non-fictional, realistic and non-realistic constituents, represent individual and collective memories through multifarious visual techniques, media, and distribution channels. Chapter 1 examines two graphic narratives that display the experience of immigrant arrival in foreign countries. When analyzing Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama's The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]), Nabizadeh attends to the work's major technical features: humor, cinematic and comic elements, the appropriation of Western art styles, bilingual conversations, and, most importantly, references to influential historical events—for instance, "The Turlock Incident"—which are interconnected with episodes embodying the immigrants' painful memories. When coming to Shaun Tan's The Arrival (2006), which reproduces the experience of an unnamed migrant in an unknown place, Nabizadeh dissects references to historical facts as well as the artistic and conceptual inspirations that the book draws from films, pictures, and literary works. She discusses the material features of the book—the spine, the cover, the page color, the use of a gold ribbon—which contribute to a sense of nostalgia and make the book [End Page 179] resemble a mysterious photographic album. Through an insertion of other migrants' narratives into the main account, this wordless "photo album" serves as a repository for memories, visually representing the traumatic past and vulnerability of immigrants from distinct backgrounds. Nabizadeh also shows how iconic elements such as origami and gestures buttress the representation of the immigration experience. Chapter 2 continues the theme of immigration with Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (2006) and Pat Grant's Blue (2012) but from a different angle, that of cultural identity and exclusion, as well as the ways in which the two authors strive to dismantle the stereotypes that the hegemonic "us" imposed on the "other." In her historical and cultural unpacking of American Born Chinese, Nabizadeh demonstrates how notoriously negative cartoon images of Chinese people give birth to the stereotype Cousin Chin-Kee that the protagonist is desperate to break away from. The deliberate placement of Chin-Kee in sitcom context self-reflexively manifests the flatness of both the medium and the image of the Chinese in the West. The book interweaves three story lines, which "mimics the compartmentalisation that can take place with regards to difficult memories" (66), as in the protagonist's "cultural amnesia" (71). If American Born Chinese reflects on the internal apprehension of "otherness," Blue, dealing with the...

The Fimbulvetr Myth as Medicine against Cultural Amnesia and Hybris

ABSTRACT: An increasing number of scholars has associated the Fimbulvetr myth with the dust veil event of 536 CE, due to several apparent consistencies between its representations in eddic tradition, contemporary historical accounts, and modern scientific evidence. In this article such consistencies are first summarized, with the aim of enhancing the debate and explaining why recording the dust veil event could have been important to its witnesses and to the creation of their cultural memory. Dendrochronological and archaeological evidence suggests that the 536 CE event was probably catastrophic, and this article argues that its memory may have been preserved and recorded in myth. The related myth may have had the purpose of handing down important teachings to future generations: the awareness that life is cyclically threatened by natural disasters, the value of humbleness before nature, and the hope that, no matter what happens, humankind is going to survive.

On Carl R. Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution

On Carl R. Trueman's <i>The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution</i>

Rituals of Restorative Resistance: Healing Cultural Trauma and Cultural Amnesia through Cultural Anamnesis and Collective Memory

Using a womanist auto-ethnographic approach, this essay presents an anamnestic remedy for healing cultural trauma and cultural amnesia within the African American community. The essay narrates the creation then infusion of rituals of restorative resistance into the liturgy of a traditional, urban black Baptist Church as a means of resistance, resilience, and restoration. By commemorating the sacrifices of Jesus and enslaved African ancestors in eucharist rituals that are enhanced with sacred songs, readings, and symbols, the liturgy expands the meaning of “Do This in Remembrance of Me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) to “Re-Member Me.” Drawing especially on work of Engelbert Mveng, Delores S. Williams, Barbara A. Holmes, Linda E. Thomas, and JoAnne Marie Terrell, and combining theology and anthropology, the essay describes a hermeneutic of healing within the community. It argues (1) that participation in enactment of rituals of restorative resistance decolonizes minds and deconstructs negative Western characterizations of black and brown bodies and (2) that ritualistic inversion and transformation of painful histories and traumatic stories into narratives and symbols of endurance and faith can re-invent, re-construct, and re-member individuals and communities into whole and healed entities.

Tales of the Horrors of War: Analysing Select Indian Fictions on World War I

Conscription of Indian men from different states and ethnicities were recruited to fight in the First World War for the British in foreign lands, while Indian resources kept the Allies going. The discursive reduction of it quantified India to merely numbers, of soldiers given, soldiers lost, tons of food sent, and money spent. The Indian Movement for Independence as an act of political negotiation with the British masters had warranted the cultural amnesia of the Indian intellectual class about the War’s impact to focus on the more vital demand, and how easily were all the unwanted marks of the War hidden and left behind. Thus, my paper will examine the representation of War in India and identify the ways in which Indian involvements in the War remain unacknowledged in the contemporary period through select works of fiction and non-fiction by Indian authors. Therefore, it is a pressing concern that much of the information about the World War I from an Indian perspective is lost, or is on the verge of being lost forever, because of the general apathy towards the preservation of such materials. This engagement with the First World War is not acknowledged the way it should be, since most of these works are not even categorized or identified as ‘war literature’ even if their sole concern remained precisely that. It is also important in this regard to understand the inclusion of the World War I in the silences and the omissions. Therefore, I will analyse select literary texts by Indian authors to evaluate the intersections of fiction and history alongside the enunciation of the unknown/forgotten voices of the marginalized people in the World War I.

Chinese Mining &lt;em&gt;Kongsi&lt;/em&gt; in Eastern Oregon: A Case Study of Cultural Amnesia

Chinese Mining &lt;em&gt;Kongsi&lt;/em&gt; in Eastern Oregon: A Case Study of Cultural Amnesia

Chinese Mining Kongsi in Eastern Oregon: A Case Study of Cultural Amnesia

This research article draws on transnational histories of Chinese mining companies to argue that biases of the dominant Euro-American population diminished the contribution of Chinese immigrants to the formation of modern Oregon. Chinese immigrants who were highly skilled at the art and science of gold mining dominated placer gold mining in eastern Oregon during the nineteenth century. For over a century, however, historical narratives have generally portrayed them as unskilled laborers subsisting on scraps of gold recovered by rewashing the waste rocks abandoned by white miners. Chinese miners from Guangdong Province had worked in southeast Asia for a century before the discovery of gold in Oregon. By the time Chinese miners reached eastern Oregon in the 1860s, they were experienced at moving people, supplies, and gold over great distances in foreign lands. Following the established practice, most Chinese miners in eastern Oregon worked in partnerships wherein they earned a share of the profits, instead of wages. Several nineteenth-century documents accurately describe these Chinese mining partnerships in eastern Oregon, and as author Don Hann argues, the disconnect between those earlier depictions of Chinese mining companies and the later portrayal of the Chinese as unskilled laborers is a form of cultural amnesia.

Rethinking food, fortune, and misfortune: Reading Wendell Berry in a time of pandemic

The highly efficient food system produced by industrial agriculture is often thought to be one of the great blessings of modern technology. In a time of pandemic, however, this supposed “good fortune” becomes highly problematic. Using the observation from Boethius that “good fortune corrupts, bad fortune instructs,” I turn to the insights gained from reading Wendell Berry during a time of pandemic. Berry is particularly insightful at helping readers understand how one can overcome the cultural amnesia brought about by our loss of connection with food and farming through the cultivation of a renewed imagination, self-control, and a reinvigorated work ethic.

“He Was Shot because America Will Not Give Up on Racism”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American Civil Rights Movement in British Schools

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.

June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive: A Diasporic Feminist Dwelling Space

What is the role of cultural archives in creating and sustaining connections between diasporic communities? Through an analysis of an audiovisual archive that has sought to bring together representations of and by African, Caribbean and Asian people, this article discusses the relationship between diasporic film, knowledge production and feminist solidarity. Focusing on a self-curated, UK-based archive, the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive, we explore the potentiality of archives for carving out spaces of diasporic connectivity and resistance. This archive assembles the holdings of pan-African films and film-related materials, built over several decades by June Givanni, a Guyanese-born London-based film curator. Givanni’s archive embodies her long relationship with the intersecting worlds of African and Asian diasporic cinema, which hold deep connections to Black British heritage through global networks spanning across empire. In the making of this cultural analysis, we employ a co-produced, decolonial methodological approach by designing and producing the article in collaboration with Givanni over a two-year period. We aim to foreground the role of feminist labour (academic and practitioner) as agents of change who are reclaiming stories, voices and memory-making. The wider backdrop to this co-produced analysis is the ongoing resilience of a cultural amnesia that has pervaded the Black British experience and the current fragility of Black arts and cultural spaces in the UK. Our question is how might archives help us map the connections between racialised ideas of belonging, memory politics and the reconfiguration of colonial power whilst also operating as a site of feminist connectivity?

THE ISSUE OF “CULTURAL AMNESIA” IN THE CONTEXT OF DIGITAL CULTURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT

The issue of the dual impact of innovative technologies on the sphere of spiritual culture has been considered. On the one hand, the digitalization of cultural values gives hope for their longevity, compared with traditional storage methods. On the other hand, the preservation of cultural heritage is facing new, previously unmet difficulties: the life of digital documents is short due to constant technological improvement and the rapid obsolescence of technology; not all artifacts can be digitized; when knowledge is transmitted through the media, its reduction, vulgarization occurs; finally, the person is changing, for whose sake the preservation of the cultural heritage takes place. Generations possessing clip thinking will have to deal with the fragmented, unsystematic cultural heritage, which is fraught with real cultural amnesia. The new approaches to digital information management and, specifically, digital cultural heritage have been proposed in the article.

Cultural Memory and Gādaliyā Luhār Identity in Gujarat

Focused on the cultural memory of the Gādaliya Luhār community in Gujarat, this article discusses ways in which oral traditions and cultural memory among nomadic groups in India shape the identity of a community under the challenge of cultural amnesia. The Gādaliyā Luhārs claim Rājpūt status and close association with the kings of the Mewar region of Rajasthan, but experienced double cultural amnesia, first under the Mughals and later in the British Empire, which affected their identity. The article seeks to assess the authenticity of the community’s assertions of cultural memory in the light of some historical documents and asks to what extent cultural memory through oral narratives can be taken as valid evidence for understanding the cultural identity of a specific community.

Artistic Culture under Hybrid Conditions

The paper is focused on the cultural aspects of the interaction of contemporary art practices with the digital technologies under hybrid conditions of post-culture information spaces. The risks of the commodification processes of visual practices and cultivation of historical and cultural amnesia, which deform the cultural memory of the public consciousness and level the essential identification of art, are clarified. The reasoning of the paper is based on a substantive body of analytical considerations by well-known Western and domestic experts.

Rancangan Bigbook Bilingual dalam Konteks Budaya Jawa Barat

This research is the background of the phenomenon of cultural crisis that should be resolved Cultural Preservation in the form of efforts to protect, develop and utilize a dynamic culture. It is not only the global problem that triggers cultural amnesia but individual self-factors that should be aware of and action among elementary school children that is happy with foreign cultures such as cinema, reading books, food and appearance styles have become the development of the current modern era. This study aims to describe the development, implementation and identify the difficulties faced by students in the development of Big Book as a tool for developing media literacy for elementary school children in the cultural context of West Java. Regional coverage in West Java which is the subject of analysis is Bogor, Sukabumi, Cianjur, Bandung, Karawang, Subang, Sumedang, Garut, Tasikmalaya, Kuningan and Cirebon.

“An Object Lesson in Americanism”: Performing Cultural Amnesia in Mosinee's Communist Invasion

On 1 May 1950, a communist army invaded the small town of Mosinee in central Wisconsin. Occupying communist soldiers dragged Mayor Ralph E. Kronenwetter from his home at six that morning, interrogated and executed Police Chief Carl Gewess, and exiled other religious, civic, and political leaders to the stockade. They ransacked citizens’ homes and raided the public library in search of capitalist propaganda. Cars parked across the local train tracks isolated the town. Roadblocks disrupted travel, and armed soldiers demanded identification cards from anyone hoping to enter or leave Mosinee. Within hours, the paper mill, the newspaper, and other local businesses had fallen to the invading communist army. Food prices tripled and ration cards were required to purchase potato soup, borscht, and black bread. Nearly half the town—more than a thousand of the twenty-two hundred total Mosinee residents—marched in a parade that led to the town square, renamed “Red Square” by the invaders. The townspeople carried red flags and banners espousing famous communist ideology (Fig. 1). The Red Star, a special edition of the Mosinee Times, issued the official “United Soviet States of America” manifesto and abolished the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.