Dangerous Memories Research Articles

Dangerous memories and entangled temporalities: Irish republicanism and the postcolonial politics of time

ABSTRACT In this article we develop a ‘hauntological’ reading of republicanism in postcolonial Ireland. This reading takes as its object the ways in which the politics of remembering – and remembering republican politics in particular – is equally a politics of time. Exploring the politics of republicanism through the lens of entangled temporalities, we develop an understanding of a particular mode of political desire. This republican political desire holds open the demand for a radical interrogation of the (post)colonial given. As such, it takes the form of a ‘dangerous memory’. Through the concept of a ‘dangerous memory’, we excavate a certain republican politics of refusal, that haunts the legitimacy and automatic reproduction of the postcolonial settlement and the attendant proprietary relations of inequality that it formalizes – culturally, politically, economically and legally. This theoretical interpretation of Irish republican hauntology is empirically explored through three historical layers and entangled temporalities that are organized around the ghosts of Roger Casement, a radical republican figure. The dangerous memories of Casement not only disrupt the canonical or official interpretation of Irish republicanism, but also open up the left-republican possibility to further interrogate the postcolonial present, both in Ireland and beyond.

Difficult Women and Dangerous Memories: Silenced, Suppressed, and Misrepresented Founders in the History of American Religious Life

Abstract: In this essay, I focus on examples of controversial early members of communities of women religious in the United States, particularly their founders, whose significance (and, in some case, even existence) was deliberately obscured or removed from “approved” or “authorized” congregational histories. There are numerous such examples; here, I focus on four (though others figure briefly): Theresa Maxis Duchemin (Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), St. Andrew Feltin (Sisters of Divine Providence), Margaret Anna Cusack (Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace), and Wilhelmina Bleily (Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon). In recounting and analyzing their stories, I hope to explain why so many founders (or, at least, their significance) were silenced or repudiated, even by sisters themselves, and what their “rediscovery” in the past half century or so tells us about religious renewal in the post-Vatican II era. To what extent do their experiences derive from particularized circumstances and contextual factors? To what extent do their stories collectively inform us about important kyriarchal conditions during this formative period in apostolic women’s religious life? Moreover, despite often aggressive efforts to erase their stories or to deny their contributions, why was their influence never completely eradicated? What does this tell us about “official” and “unofficial” history, particularly for what it reveals about women’s responses to patriarchy? These accounts challenge us to see beyond a prescriptive or hagiographic understanding of women’s religious life and to appreciate the complexity of its reality.

Suffering and memory in Asian contexts and beyond: Towards a hermeneutical proposal for remembering comfort women in the future

AbstractHow can we ensure that these important voices testifying to the memory of comfort women do not remain solely figments of local history, fixed within a certain time, to be gradually forgotten with each passing generation? In reflecting on this question, this study ventures the possibility of constructing a hermeneutical model that critically engages the memory of comfort women for the sake of all global citizens committed to resisting any types of violence, regardless of racial/ethnic and gendered boundaries. To do this, it proposes a hermeneutical model based on Kuan‐Hsing Chen's “Asia as method,” which places in conversation the theologies of Johann Baptist Metz and Angela Sims to read the memories of comfort women as dangerous memories that can remember a future of freedom from sexual violence, trauma, and militarism. The final result of the proposed hermeneutical model is to remember the testimonies of comfort women as dangerous memory for the global community, making them part of a global discourse that remembers them into different stories of suffering. Overall, the current project can readily address the implications of the proposed hermeneutical model to make comfort women's stories relevant to the present and future generations locally, nationally, and internationally, not only in terms of resistance to social sins such as sexual violence, but also in terms of fostering a spirit of solidarity with those in need of our support as a form of love.

School Desegregation as Multi-generational Narratives of Afropessimism

The Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) avoided federal oversight to comply with the desegregation ruling for nearly 30 years after Brown v. Board of Education by establishing a neighborhood concept for school attendance boundaries. Jenkins v. Missouri ended in 1995 with a U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools in this district. Our research project used BlackCrit and oral history to examine the experiences of 15 participants, who were educators, students, parents, and community members that formed the legacy of school desegregation. Their counter stories shed critical light on how they continue to grapple with persistent inequalities in today’s schools. Themes from their stories resonated with vivid accounts of the desegregation plan that guided their educational experiences; the community’s reactions to desegregation; views about integration; dangerous memories of institutional racism and antiblackness; and lessons from a contested field. Significantly, our participants’ local stories have the potential to invigorate efforts for Black liberation.

병자호란 직후 속환부녀(贖還婦女)의 이혼 문제

병자호란 직후 속환부녀(贖還婦女)의 이혼 문제

The Accra Confession as Dangerous Memory: Reformed Ecclesiology, the Ecological Crisis, and the Problem of Catholicity

This study presents the Accra Confession as a theological response to the ecological crisis from a Reformed perspective while also addressing its critical weakness, namely the problem of universality in both Reformed ecclesiology and global approaches to ecological destruction. Because of a fragile universality, both Reformed churches and global institutions find it difficult to agree on a concrete plan to address climate change. Theologically, this difficulty arrives not primarily from disagreement with the existence or causes of climate change but how Christian theological values translate concretely to acts of justice. This study proposes a way to ground these discussions on the concept of dangerous memory by resourcing the theology of Johann Baptist Metz. Dangerous memories allow stories of the suffering vanquished to be constitutive to the construction of caritas, which in turn serves as a suitable theological foundation for addressing differing approaches to engaging climate issues. Reading the Accra Confession as dangerous memory, then, provides a valuable resource to the Reformed community by allowing the testimonies of those affected adversely by climate change to substantially inform theological discourses on climate justice.

Can “Dangerous Memories” be Communicated? Extending Insights from the Intercultural Theology of Robert J. Schreiter into Dialogue with Subculture and Racialization

Robert J. Schreiter's groundbreaking work on the connection between theological discourse and intercultural hermeneutics is a sound foundation for a theological project that engages culture and its connection to globalization and racialization within the United States. This essay extends insights from Schreiter's work to bear upon the theological problem within the US context of communicating "dangerous memories" of racialized suffering by bringing Schreiter's insights regarding semiotics and intercultural hermeneutics into engagement with the concepts of subculture and racialization. I conclude that this approach can assist theological communication of "dangerous memories" of racialized suffering through highlighting the aberrant theological anthropology conferred through racialization-and its dehumanizing hierarchy of race that offers and prohibits access to the benefits of globalized society depending upon one's entrance into "whiteness"-and semiotically focusing upon culture and subculture as the locations through which communication is possible. Such an approach may lead to a broader, re-humanizing reinterpretation of the signs, codes, and messages that are intertwined with phenotype.

New Reformed Catholicity

Reformed ecclesiology suffers from a lack of a concrete sense of catholicity, a lack that easily shatters unity in the church. This article broadly sketches a way in which Reformed confessions and the practice of confessing can help fill that lack, drawing from Robert Schreiter's The New Catholicity. By understanding confessing in terms of re-membering dangerous memories, Reformed catholicity has the potential for enabling the church to be a unifying witness in an age where globalizing forces have fragmented societies and inflamed troubling sentiments.

Angel of Oblivion. Literature and memory politics in Austria

Why is memory politics such a contested field? Why is it so hard to change narratives, overcome enemy images, and draw “objective” pictures of the past? In what way can works of art break the ice and promote “dangerous memories” (Bekerman/Zembylas 2012, 22)? How can works of art, and especially literature, use their aesthetic potential to help achieve attitude changes?In this paper, I examine these questions through the lens of literary criticism. I focus on Maja Haderlap’s novel Angel of Oblivion in order to illustrate several typical features of (not just) Austria’s memory politics after World War II: on the one hand, Austria’s claim as Hitler’s first victim; the depreciation of the (Slovenian) anti-fascist partisans; the relativization of Nazi crimes by pointing at the (real or fictional) crimes of Yugoslav communists, and as a consequence the denial of the minority rights of Carinthian (and Styrian) Slovenians. And on the other hand, the struggle for a democratic and honest memory culture – not only within Austria’s borders but beyond, in the entire “Alps-Adriatic” region. Haderlap’s book is itself a wonderful example of the success of this ongoing endeavour.

Not the Israel of My Elementary School: An Exploration of Jewish-Canadian Secondary Students' Attempts to Process Morally Complex Israeli Narratives

ABSTRACTThe following article presents data from a mixed-methods practitioner research study that focuses on understanding how Jewish secondary students learned about controversial topics in Israel's history and how these topics impacted their connection to the country. The responses that were provided by the students showed that the material forced students to conceptualize Israel in new ways and that the material— learning from Palestinian and Israeli texts about events that happened in 1947 and 1948—was disruptive to their preconceived notions of Israel. With the passing of time, the students were able to reflect on the real difficulty they had with learning about the topics but were able to synthesize the disruption into their Israel narrative to arrive at a new understanding. The integration of this new material into existing schema is understood within the context of dangerous memories, and how learning about controversial moments in nationalist narratives can impact the way students learn and relate to a topic. A further finding was that some students expressed resentment at previous educational experiences for not being fully transparent about historical events.

In Search of Peace: Public Humanities and the Face in Creative Arts

Through this paper, I will consider the roles that the humanities can play in interpreting and interacting with the arts. To investigate this topic, I will use several international examples. These are situated in Cannes, Edinburgh, and London, though they directly connect with countries such as South Africa and Mozambique. The world's best known film festival (Cannes), and the world's largest theatre and arts festival (Edinburgh), alongside the world's first national public museum (the British Museum in London), provide the contexts in which my argument develops. In each of these spaces, one can be confronted by a myriad of human faces, presented publically in innumerable ways. Film posters, stand-up comedy adverts, and exhibition fliers commonly employ the human face to attract, to intrigue, and to entice audiences toward their spectacle. The humanities can both interact with and critically analyse these uses of faces. The human faces in these diverse and dynamic settings provoke questions which the public humanities can address, as they interrogate celebrity, analyse portrayals of suffering, and in the shadows of dangerous memories, even help to create materials to inspire peace.

Performing Redemption: Metzian Theology in the Art of Kendrick Lamar

The German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz makes a convincing case that in the face of the catastrophes of the 20th century, Christian theology can no longer isolate itself from its role as a perpetrator of injustice. To that end, he seeks to challenge abstract answers to theological questions with a renewed sensitivity to past transgressions. For Metz, Christian faith cannot simply be a matter of assent to theoretical propositions, but rather a practical engagement with "dangerous memories" of systematic injustice. In this paper, the author takes up Metz's conceptual framework for political theology and uses it to examine Kendrick Lamar's "Sing about Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" as a theological, and specifically soteriological, performance. By re-telling in his own voice the stories of friends who have died, Kendrick both documents the struggle they lived and reveals his own vulnerability to the same conditions (of sin). But in addressing this vulnerability, he transcends it, protecting himself from sin precisely by telling the story. The paper closes with some reflections on how Kendrick's track might gesture towards a mode of doing theology that subverts the abstract tendencies of the hegemonic Western tradition.

Testimonio and secrecy in a traumatic past

This article discusses the fate of dangerous memories of war associated with the “internal armed conflict” in Peru. It focuses on the Andean community of Sarhua in Ayacucho and their experiences with political violence as depicted in a collection of paintings, Piraq Causa (Who Is Still to Blame?). A close examination of this visual testimonio reveals that some dangerous memories have been denied representation. I suggest that these become silences and absences that give expression to a “traumatic gap”, which includes memories of fratricidal violence and the community's initial endorsement of the Maoist Shining Path. I argue that Piraq Causa reflects the magnified secrecy around events that the community agreed to deliberately “remember to forget”. In so doing, I also propose that the perceived gaps in the pictorial narrative provoke the unmasking of what is “secretly familiar” in Sarhua. To that extent, Piraq Causa exposes as much as it affirms the secrecy around traumatic memories of war.

Dangerous Memories: Social Justice and the Politics of the Present in Mahasweta Devi's Statue

Dangerous Memories: Social Justice and the Politics of the Present in Mahasweta Devi's Statue

Re-living Dangerous Memories: Online Journaling to Interrogate Spaces of “Otherness” in an Educational Administration Program at a Midwestern University

This theoretical paper explores the use of online journaling in an educational administration program to interrogate spaces of “otherness”—the geographical spaces of cities where poor children and children of color live—and the dangerous memories prospective administrators may have about diversity. The cultures of most educational administration programs do not help graduate students “dig beneath the surface” of the seemingly benign recipes of current school reform to explore cultural differences. When given the opportunity to use reflective online journaling, candidates talked more freely about race, ethnicity, class, language, ability/disability, gender, sexual orientation, and other facets of diversity. Reculturing educational administration programs will require both students and instructors to have similar opportunities to interrogate spaces of “otherness” and work to transform them.

Education and the Dangerous Memories of Historical Trauma: Narratives of Pain, Narratives of Hope

The purpose of this article is to explore the meanings and implications of dangerous memories in two different sites of past traumatic memories: one in Israel and the other in Cyprus. Dangerous memories are defined as those memories that are disruptive to the status quo, that is, the hegemonic culture of strengthening and perpetuating existing group-based identities. Our effort is to outline some insights from this endeavor—insights that may help educators recognize the potential of dangerous memories to ease pain and offer hope. First, a discussion on memory, history and identity sets the ground for discussing the meaning and significance of dangerous memories in the history curriculum. Next, we narrate two stories from our longitudinal ethnographic studies on trauma and memory in Israel and Cyprus; these stories are interpreted through the lens of dangerous memories and their workings in relation to the hegemonic powers that aim to sustain collective memories. The two different stories suggest that collective memories of historical trauma are not simply “transmitted” in any simple way down the generations—although there are powerful workings that support this transmission. Rather, there seems to be much ambivalence in the workings of memories that under some circumstances may create openings for new identities. The final section discusses the possibilities of developing a pedagogy of dangerous memories by highlighting educational implications that focus on the notion of creating new solidarities without forgetting past traumas. This last section employs dangerous memories as a critical category for pedagogy in the context of our general concern about the implications of memory, history and identity in educational contexts.

The language of patriotism: sacred history and dangerous memories

This paper examines arguments about the teaching of history in Cyprus, especially as they relate to the cultivation of patriotism. I point out how the narratives of ‘sacred history’ and ‘dangerous memories’ are discursive elements of a pedagogy that aims at maintaining patriotism by preventing subjective and divisive personal memories from eroding a cohesive national narrative. Along with other linguistic strategies (‘passions of the past’), these discourses allow an idealization of history and a rejection of subjective, personal memory. I argue that this contributes to viewing history as a distant entity and not as a field of action, something that ultimately works against the purported goal of sustaining patriotism.

Book Review: Dangerous Memories: A Mosaic of Mary in Scripture

Book Review: Dangerous Memories: A Mosaic of Mary in Scripture

The Unfinished Agenda of School Desegregation: Using Storytelling to Deconstruct the Dangerous Memories of the American Mind

This article describes school desegregation as a 3-generational, intricately linked process. The 1st generation included efforts toward physical desegregation for African American students; the 2nd generation emphasized equal access to classrooms, teaching bias, and ability groups; and the challenges of the 3rd generation include barriers to equal education outcomes. Dangerous memories of school desegregation are interwoven with historical and sociocultural precepts that have helped to shape schooling in America, including ideas about individualism, merit, cultural superiority, equality, and abundance of economic opportunity. Thus far, school desegregation has failed because many educators have not examined beliefs and assumptions about cultural differences. The unfinished agenda of the 3rd generation persists amidst the complexities of the first 2 generations. The dangerous memories of school desegregation that permeate our minds may be transformed through storytelling. I demonstrate the strategy using the story of an urban school educator, almost 5 decades after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), and offer suggestions to help educators implement storytelling in their schools.

Dangerous Memories and Reason in History

AbstractA critical examination of "dangerous memories" illuminates the shortcomings of attempts to master the past when history is understood as a neutral medium for revealing the integrative forces of reason; an empty vessel to be filled with the facts of the way things were; or the product of an interpretive fusion of horizons between past and present. The disruptive potential of memory resists narrative control. A new model of historical understanding is needed wherein thinking is not a flight into transcendental categories but a form of critical responding that makes judgment possible.