Collective Cultural Memory Research Articles

Yugoslav Eulogies: The Footprints of Gavrilo Princip

While scholars have intensively studied Yugoslavia’s weaknesses and dissolution (both in the interwar and post-World War II eras) from political and economic perspectives, there has been less work on the issue of cultural cohesion so crucial to Yugoslavism (the Yugoslav idea) as it was conceived and developed in the nineteenth century and elaborated upon during World War I. In particular, there has been little attempt to interrogate the long-term (1918–today) discursive construction of Yugoslav identity by means of collective memory—that is, the selectively shared stories people tell about themselves in order to give meaning to the ‘nation,’ a sense of belonging to the ‘national culture.’ And yet from the moment Yugoslavia was created, ordinary Yugoslavists began constructing the Sarajevo assassination as a heroic narrative of opposition and liberation that transcended the particularist identities of ethnicity, nation, religion, and history. How did the different Yugoslav regimes and post-Yugoslav political elites respond to these efforts to shape a collective cultural memory around Gavrilo Princip’s political murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? What can the various manifestations of this memory and official attitudes towards it tell us about the Yugoslav national project writ large? These are the main themes addressed in my paper.

Owning memories: a tale of two cities

In 1894 Queen Victoria opened the Salford Docks, now known as Salford Quays, home of MediaCityUK. At the time, Salford Docks were considered a masterpiece of engineering, allowing Manchester to circumvent the route through Liverpool and have access to international trade. The area was an ambitious hub for commerce, industrial activity and job prospects. Although more than 100 years have passed, Salford Quays is again under the spotlight and has the ambition to be a contemporary contender in the cultural industries market – this time focussing, through MediacityUK, on moving the media industry away from London. In order to attract such a prestigious focus, the developers have responded by building waterside apartments, luxury housing and speedy infrastructure and by promoting a successful professional lifestyle, with cultural and cutting-edge designer events. However, the local community seems to be more than ever alienated from this process, the sense of cultural collective memory being diluted. Throughout this paper, we are considering issues relating both to the historical significance of Salford Quays as well as to its cultural legacy within the local community. In order to do so, we are addressing the following research questions: How can the past be brought to into the present to support a sense of identity cohesion? Can Salford shake off the image of a derelict area and become the innovative creative quarter, through the (living) memories of its community? We will argue that the re- invention of Salford Quays as a new cutting-edge creative quarter happens at the expense of the historical memory of the place. In this way, local people and local memories do not become an integral part of the regeneration strategy, but are almost erased from the whole process.

Le Camembert: French Memories, Identities, and Heritage in the First World War

Proust’s text famously connected taste and memory. The French soldiers’ wartime food experience with Camembert cheese would serve to tie taste to memory, in addition to linking a cheese to national identity and heritage. The concept of collective cultural memory is used to discuss how a foodstuff came to represent a nation and its values during la Grande Guerre, a crucial period of political and social change.

INTERPRETATION OF THE IMAGE OF LATGALE IN THE CULTURE DISCOURSE

INTERPRETATION OF THE IMAGE OF LATGALE IN THE CULTURE DISCOURSE

The Emperor Jones

The Emperor Jones

<em>La Restauration Rapide</em>: An Affront to the Collective Cultural Memory of French Cuisine

A collective cultural memory is established through the evolving interactions and interpretations that a group has with socially contextualized knowledge and experiences. Three elements are necessary: shared history, shared values, and shared language. The cultural construct of French cuisine has been central to its national identity since the early nineteenth century. Yet it has experienced an “assault” from a differing model of production and consumption calledla restauration rapide. How has France’s patrimoine culinaire (re-)interpreted this assault in its collective cultural memory? Reactions include a forged culinary (anti-)identity and a (re-)appropriation of the most offending foodstuff – the hamburger.

When the Everyday and the Sacred Collide: Positioning Płaszów in the Kraków Landscape

In Kraków, Poland, the sacredness of the former Płaszów concentration camp is positioned within the everyday and urban landscape. The grievous history of the site contrasts the urbanity of the busy thoroughfare along one of the site's perimeters, where commercial developments are increasing in number and size. The site's open green spaces and the paucity of formal and material monuments place it outside the ambit of more common public portrayals of collective cultural memories. In this short commentary, I unpack the positioning of memory within the everyday landscape by means of landscape reading and visual methodologies. I critically consider the challenges of representing memory in everyday settings by (de)constructing Płaszów's memory layers. Culminating around the question of how to maintain the site's sacristy amid an increasingly distractive urban landscape, these challenges position memories of the past alongside the stronger attachments we may have with places associated with our daily routines.

“Posterity is dispossessed”: Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth Manuscripts in 1958 and 2012

Between December 1955 and July 1958 Laurence Olivier was planning what was to be his fourth and final cinematic Shakespeare adaptation, Macbeth . Despite reaching an advanced stage of production, the project never materialised and Olivier declared posterity to be dispossessed of his Macbeth . Since then a host of cultural commentators, scholars and members of the public have speculated about what exactly Olivier's Macbeth might have looked like. Olivier certainly encouraged such speculation, suggesting that no screenplays relating to the cancelled film project existed. In 2012, however, I discovered thirteen screenplays for Macbeth catalogued in the Laurence Olivier Archive at the British Library. These documents trace Macbeth's development from a first draft through to a final and very detailed shooting script. This essay examines Macbeth both in its own time and today, using the screenplays to detail the specific cultural and industrial reasons as to why Olivier's final cinematic Shakespeare film was never made. I also explore the unmade film in its archival context, asking what Macbeth can tell us about Laurence Olivier's status in our collective cultural memory. Through Macbeth , I argue, Olivier offers us a posthumous performance in the archive.

The international heritage doctrine and the management of heritage in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina: the case of the Commission to Preserve National Monuments

Since the formal end to the conflict of dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1995, cultural heritage has been given a central role in post-war recovery and reconstruction, and in the development of sustainable peace in the region. This role reflects the pivotal function accorded to heritage in post-conflict settings within the international heritage doctrine, while re-assessing the crucial role of culture in ‘building peace in the minds of men and women’ (UNESCO) and in creating ‘greater understanding of one another among the peoples of Europe’. I will present and analyse the current formal/legal system of heritage construction and reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), its relations with the international heritage doctrine and its implications on the local process of memorialisation of armed conflict. As I will argue, one fundamental pitfall of the international heritage doctrine fashioned by UNESCO and the Council of Europe is that it implicitly relies on the nation-state as the carrier and developer of collective cultural memory and identity, overlooking settings where the primary mode of group identification and legitimisation occurs at different (lower) levels, as in BiH.

Names and Collective Identity

The preceding two decades have displayed a remarkable awareness for a connection between the concepts "identity" and "cultural memory". David Lowenthal speaks of a "current craze for heritage"! Cultural heritage has become extremely popular, especially in combination with tourism, and has accordingly been converted into a modern system of meaning a type of "secular religion". With reference to collective identity and cultural memory, it is important to ask the cul- tural analytical questions: "Why identity now? Why heritage now?" My reply is that we experience a critical identity crisis. Three central aspects signify individual and collective identity: Continuity, coherence and individuality. The three aspects, constituting the concept of identity, are exposed to serious threats in the post-modern era: The danger of changeability, fragmentation and standardisation. This ten- dency has, however, met various compensating counter reactions like for instance "re-traditionalisation". In my presentation, I will examine the phenomenon cultural memory through examples from the German tradition -- principally from the works of Aleida and Jan Assmann.

Migration, literature and cultural memory

The current appreciation of migrants’ literary work in the Netherlands shows that this literature is becoming established and is no longer limited to a few isolated successes. Migrant writers belong simultaneously to two cultures, a fact inevitably reflected in their work. The migration of entire communities has caused borders to fade, while cultures cease to be bound to so-called ‘fixed cartographies’. Literature is no longer studied as an autonomous phenomenon, disconnected from its context, and it is now generally accepted that authors write about or allude to real events, mixing fact and fiction and interweaving various discourses. This article asks to what extent Dutch migrant literature reflects the specific history of groups of migrants. To what extent does this literature relate to the cultural collective memory of authors who have links with two cultures? And, more generally, what is the role of literature in historical consciousness?

ქართული სამზარეულო – „გამოგონილი ტრადიცია“

The goal of Esma Kunchulia’s work – “Georgian Cuisine – Invented Tradition” is to understand the essence of national cuisine and discuss it according to cultural studies, memory studies and modernist theories of nationalism. This work is the first attempt to analyze the national cuisine in the framework of different theories. According to the author of the article, national cuisine, as one of the symbols of the nation and a marker of national identity was created in the era of the formation of nations and became a part of the “great narrative” of the nation. The author considers the collection of dishes as an “invented tradition” by the “imagined community” and suggests that the “national cuisine” with the form and emotion it has today did not exist before the “formation” of nations. The research shows that, for a modern person, national cuisine is a constituent part of the nation’s identification system, the symbols and the codes. Being a national symbol, the national cuisine carries an emotional load characteristic of the national culture for a member of the nation and treating it “wrongly” is as “dangerous” as mistreating other symbols. Esma Kunchulia's work will be interesting for researchers of collective identity and cultural memory of the nation.

Fixing the floating gap: The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place

The article proposes to interpret the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place. After presenting the core elements and basic characteristics of wikis and Wikipedia respectively, the article discusses four related issues of social memory studies: collective memory, communicative and cultural memory, `memory places' and the `floating gap'. In a third step, these theoretical premises are connected to the understanding of discourse as social cognition. Fourth, comparison is made between the potential of the World Wide Web as cyberspace for collective remembrance and the obstacles that stand in its way. On this basis, the article argues that Wikipedia presents a global memory place where memorable elements are negotiated. Its complex processes of discussion and article creation are a model of the discursive fabrication of memory. Thus, they can be viewed and analysed as the transition, the `floating gap' between communicative and collective frames of memory.

Sympathizing with the Monster: making Sense of Colonization in Stesichorus´ Geryoneis

Stesichorus' Geryoneis helps make sense out of the violent, disorienting act of col onization and establishes a collective cultural memory that is both distinct from and loyal to Greek convention. The poet creates a civic literature and identity for Himera in song, while using references to Greek literary convention, namely, the Iliad, erotic motifs and violent marriage imagery. 1 Carson, op. cit. 65. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, 18 May 2016 05:28:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

IDENTITY POLITICS RECO(R)DED: VINYL HUNTERS AS EXOTES IN TIME

The article is a study into exotic record collecting as a manifestation of memory- based identity politics - a way of reasserting one's agency in the consumerist society through an expanded consciousness of the complexities of the forgotten cultural past (in the present case, extremely eccentric obscure viny l records). First, exo tic record collecting is linked to the more extensive tradition of utopian exoticism in Western culture - the recycling of cultural memory (thus also an exoticism based on temporal rather than spatial distance) is presented as an extension of the earlier but largely exhausted exoticism which was inspired by alien territories. Next, exotic vinyl hunting is suggested to be the postmodern revival of the cultural project of 'ethnographic surrealism', celebrated by James Clifford as one of the crucial catalysts of modernism. Finally, the connection between exotic record collecting and other reinterpretations of collective cultural memory is indicated, as exemplified by collector Mickey MacGowan's The Unknown Museum, which ventures to expand collective cultural memory of the history of popular culture and thus combat the perennial industrial promotion of the 'new' with more vintage and affective ways of defining oneself through material objects of imagined value.

Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory

Recorded music is vital to the construction of personal and collective cultural memory. My examination of the interrelation between personal and collective memories of popular music assumes both that human memory is simultaneously embodied, enabled, and embedded, and that (re)collective experiences are constructed through narratives. Analysis of an online set of narrative responses to a national radio-event, the Dutch Top 2000, shows that we need public spaces to share narratives and to create a common musical heritage.

“You Can Never Go Home Again”: Cultural Memory and Identity Formation in the Writing of Southeast Asian Chinese

AbstractThe persistence of memory as a trope in works by Chinese writers in Southeast Asia demonstrates that the sense of identity among Chinese in this area is constantly being interrogated and re-negotiated. This article argues that literary texts are one important constituent factor of collective cultural memory, a purposeful activity undertaken to influence social reality. Even as they foreground the issue of an individual's memory of Chinese culture, they are themselves a type of memorializing practice which seeks to preserve certain types of cultural memory and thus shape the individual's identity. In comparing the works of Singaporean and Malaysian writers, I find a rather stark contrast between the figures used to conceptualize China, Chinese culture, and memory. I argue that Singaporean writers use certain figures to reify Chinese culture and determine its unchanging essence, whereas Malaysian Chinese often have a more fluid view of culture. I then consider some of the ramifications for the use of natural metaphors by the Malaysian writers, which I see as participating in a type of wishful colonial mentality, quite distinct from the historical reality of indentured labor and political disempowerment of the ethnic Chinese in the modern nation state of Malaysia. I conclude by proposing the use of “trunk” as a metaphor for cultural memory and identity formation.

You Can Never Go Home Again": Cultural Memory and Identity Formation in the Writing of Southeast Asian Chinese

The persistence of memory as a trope in works by Chinese writers in Southeast Asia demonstrates that the sense of identity among Chinese in this area is constantly being interrogated and re-negotiated. This article argues that literary texts are one important constituent factor of collective cultural memory, a purposeful activity undertaken to influence social reality. Even as they foreground the issue of an individual's memory of Chinese culture, they are themselves a type of memorializing practice which seeks to preserve certain types of cultural memory and thus shape the individual's identity. In comparing the works of Singaporean and Malaysian writers, I find a rather stark contrast between the figures used to conceptualize China, Chinese culture, and memory. I argue that Singaporean writers use certain figures to reify Chinese culture and determine its unchanging essence, whereas Malaysian Chinese often have a more fluid view of culture. I then consider some of the ramifications for the use of natural metaphors by the Malaysian writers, which I see as participating in a type of wishful colonial mentality, quite distinct from the historical reality of indentured labor and political disempowerment of the ethnic Chinese in the modern nation state of Malaysia. I conclude by proposing the use of “trunk” as a metaphor for cultural memory and identity formation.

Conversations with Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, and Cognition by Edna Andrews (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2005 885 yardstick' (p. 1). The issue of gender as cultural signifier is thus one of the foremost concerns in Colvin's evaluation of selected examples of each author's dramatic writ? ings, regardless of whether these were successful, either in terms of publication or of performance. This alone is an excellent aspect of the book, since it draws attention to many worthwhile dramatic works which have failed to receive the critical attention they deserve. In six chapters Colvin brings together plays which share certain gender concerns, albeit more often than not their approach is radically divergent. Under the heading 'Experiments in Dramatic Writing' she offersan interesting evaluation of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's Maria Stuart, Marie Roland, and Das Waldfrdulein, as well as her struggle to have these plays performed at the Viennese Burgtheater. They are set alongside the intriguing, but now virtually forgotten, Helene Druskowitz and her self-abasing play Die Emancipations-Schwdrmerin. In another chapter, entitled 'The Gender of Creativity', a comparison of the Kiinstlerdramen of Julie Kiihn, Elsa Bernstein-Porges, Mathilde Paar, Gertrud Prellwitz, and Anna Croissant-Rust is developed in terms of the authors' acceptance or rejection, as the case may be, of 'male' notions of artistic value. Similarly Colvin initiates her discussion of the political plays of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, Lu Marten, and Berta Lask with the question to what extent 'these three dramatists are prepared to sideline ideas about women's subjectivity and emancipation to portray the emancipation ofthe (primarily male) worker' (p. 103). In these political plays by women Colvin's preoccupation with gender issues seems somewhat misplaced. It is true that Berta Lask, for example, in her drama Leuna 1921, does focus primarily on the male worker's experience, but this was inevitable since the play was an explicit record of the ill-fated revolt of the Leuna workers in 1921. One might remember, in this context, that in her earlier piece Befreiung Lask did place women's experience at the centre of the action. Surely it is not reasonable to expect every play by a woman to focus upon the woman's angle or issues of gender? The last two chapters focus on Else Lasker-Schuler and Marieluise Fleisser. Both discussions are well anchored in the critical debate, past and present, which surrounds their work and Colvin here succeeds in opening up further angles of understanding. Her reading of Lasker-Schuler's Die Wupper and of Arthur Aronymus, in particular, shows a shrewd awareness ofthe 'metalevel of humor' (p. 132) as an all-important subversive dimension in the plays. Where the work of Marieluise Fleisser is con? cerned, Colvin is in agreement with critics such as Elke Briins that these plays are 'peculiarly corporeal' (p. 160), and she suggests, convincingly, that the visceral di? mension of Fleisser's plays reaches beyond the body to become manifest in a language and a discourse which are displayed outside and beyond the patriarchal realm. Ulti? mately, this is the endeavour which operates as the touchstone against which, in the conclusion, the dramatic writings of all the playwrights discussed in earlier chapters are situated. University of Kent Agnes Cardinal Conversations withLotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, and Cognition. By Edna Andrews. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University ofToronto Press. 2003. xvi + 204pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8020-3686-4. Edna Andrews makes it clear from the outset that the aim of this book is not to lionize Iurii Lotman: The reader will not find an attempt to construct a cult of personality around Lotman or to use him to deconstruct other theorists of his day, either in the Soviet Union or 886 Reviews abroad: Lotman and his work constitute but one portion of the larger fabric of our analysis and exploration of complex questions encompassing dynamic modelling of human language, cross-cultural enquiry, and the relationship between cultural systems and other symbolic systems with which they intersect?especially human languages and the construction of individual and collective cultural memory. (p. xv) The three parts into which the book is divided (' Lotman's Cultural Semiotic Theory', 'The Construction of Semiotic Space in Verbal Texts', and 'Semiotic Theory as a Cognitive Science') reflectand confirm...

Articulating Life's Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Articulating Life’s Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century Lynda Koemm and Mary M. Lay Articulating Life’s Memory: U.S. Medical Rhetoric about Abortion in the Nineteenth Century. By Nathan Stormer. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002; pp xi + 233. $70.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. Do women have a cultural duty to propagate? Is the body free from ideology at its time of birth, or are all bodies born into a cultural ideology that preexists the [End Page 250] individual body? According to Nathan Stormer, the seemingly contradictory assumptions that bodies are free of ideology at birth and that women have a reproductive cultural responsibility dominated early antiabortion discourse in the United States. Although individual and spatial rights of mother versus fetus are valid in any discussion of current abortion arguments, when identifying the origins of cultural influences or practices, finding the root is imperative. In Articulating Life's Memories, Stormer identifies the cultural nexus of antiabortion rhetoric in America. The questions that assisted his understanding of this nexus are "how knowledge of abortion was produced, how the space of its debate was formed, and the materiality of the bodies involved" (xii). Stormer's stated goal is "to understand better why we have an impasse" in the current abortion debate by learning the history of the rhetoric surrounding the debate (xi). He offers then a "not-so-humanistic" approach but looks instead at the rhetoric of practices rather than people (xii). After surveying hundreds of medical journals and texts from the nineteenth century, Stormer attempts what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls a "misreading"—a reading against conventions to discover "what other rhetorical work is being done that we are failing to notice" (xv; emphasis in original, xi). Stormer is interested in a rhetorical analysis of the texts and their performative aspects rather than in their persuasive function. He also makes his own political position clear in the beginning of his text: "I think the final outcome of a pregnancy belongs in the hands of potential mothers as embryos go about becoming" (3), a bold but necessary move for such an investigation. Stormer is successful in presenting a fair and thorough account of the early abortion debate, going beyond landmark works on this period by Leslie Reagan and James Mohr. Stormer offers a rhetorical analysis of the political, material, and spatial origins involved in the formation and maintenance of a cultural memory of antiabortion discourse. He identifies the genre in which he writes as a "feminist critical history of medical practice as rhetoric" (xiv). He covers not only the texts that directly inform his argument but also includes, for example, information on the culture of modesty that limited the physical examination of women, the entrance of women into the medical profession, the focus by physicians first on the uterus and then on the ovaries, and the attempt by physicians to curtail midwifery practice. He astutely weaves his many examples from medical professionals, politicians, and citizens so as to illuminate the spectrum of influences from which the current abortion debate has evolved, rather than relying solely on a preliminary literature review. Stormer's argument is sophisticated and ambitious as he eloquently marries medical texts and rhetorical theory to illustrate how medical discourses of the enlightenment, resulting from rituals of exposure, create and perpetuate antiabortion sentiment through the Neoplatonic processes of hypomnesis and anamnesis, resulting in a collective cultural memory. The eloquence of his style is exemplified by such statements as: "The moment the body gains a cultural purpose, it becomes rhetorical. When it gains a [End Page 251] destiny, it becomes a source of memory" (41). Stormer does not over-teach the rhetorical theory that provides a foundation for his analysis. He challenges the reader to learn the necessary rhetorical terms and tools but does so in clearly articulated statements, such as his definition of memory: "Treating truth-seeking as rhetorical, I consider memory as the capacity for a certain kind of epistemological work that etches the present in the likeness of experiences, places, events, things, and people of a refigured knowledge" (42). The reader then traces with Stormer the messages reflected in medical...