Grassroots Memorials Research Articles

On Victims, Heroes, and Gulag-gupvi Survivors

Abstract Employing a biographical, oral history approach, this article documents the life story of a war veteran and gupvi survivor in Hungary to illustrate the multiple synchronic as well as diachronic cleavages that exist between the official, societal, and collective memory regimes in postcommunist Eastern Europe. István Bicskei’s life story highlights, in a tangible way, the fact that the socially constructed notions of victimhood and heroism vary as a complex outcome of the interaction of multiple forms of human, institutional, and political agencies in an ever-changing historical context and in multi-layered cultural milieux. The article argues that these key cultural notions are closely tied to individual understandings of personhood, to national and collective identities, but also to ruling ideologies and political regimes. The article also highlights the glaring gap between official, scholarly, and local narratives about the past that exists in marginalized rural communities and points to the conspicuous lack of cultural “mediators” or “intermediators” between these distinct political, media, and social spheres, and between official and grassroots memory narratives.

Naming and framing victims: Identity, ‘usable’ victimhood, and the spectral turn in transitional justice

Drawing from the literature on victimology, memory studies, and transitional justice, this article critically examines how representations of victimhood in post-conflict memory activism are rooted in contemporaneous claims-making. Using the collective remembrance of the events of August 1969 in Belfast as an empirical case study, it argues that memory activism centres on ‘usable’ victims whose victimhood can be seamlessly mapped onto preferred interpretations of the past in furtherance of post-conflict claims-making. Acknowledging the recent ‘spectral turn’ in transitional justice, the article explores how selective remembering and forgetting and the instrumentalization of selected identities through memory activism can transform otherwise problematic spectral figures into ‘usable’ victims. Once they have become ‘usable’, these victims become embedded in grassroots memory activism because they speak to claims-making over post-conflict truth and justice, the causes and consequences of past violence, and the post-conflict treatment of certain constituencies.

Memory practices ‘from below’: Mnemonic solidarity, intimacy and counter-monuments in the practices of Zoscua, Colombia

This article analyses the memory practices of Corporación Zoscua, a small, grassroots activist group in Colombia representing victims of the armed conflict within the region of Boyacá. After an initial grounding within the broader context of transitional justice and historical memory debates within Colombia, the article focuses on how Zoscua’s practices constitute a form of tactical, vernacular memory-making from below that involves temporary alliances and negotiations in order to make interventions into the mnemonic spaces of the city. Based on a mixed-methods approach that includes semi-structured interviews with participants, as well as textual and paratextual analysis, the article provides an analysis of the conception and construction of their memory wall in the city of Tunja. It highlights first how the choice of location of the wall constitutes a tactical take-over of public space, with grassroots memory being inserted into a conventionally top-down locale that conveys official, state-sponsored national values. Second, the article considers the practices and negotiations involved in designing and building the wall, and, subsequently, focuses on the content of the wall, with particular attention to the collective and collaborative nature of the artwork that, through its imagery, composition and focus on emotions, and contests the high-art values normally associated with monumental practices. The article concludes by suggesting that the distinction between top-down and bottom-up memory initiatives is complicated when examining the mnemonic practices of grassroots memory actors, who make tactical use of alliances to further their aims. As the analysis in this article reveals, bottom-up strategies undertaken by community groups and top-down initiatives promoted by authorities often become entangled or coalesce, evidenced both in the practices and negotiations involved in creating grassroots memorials, and in the resulting materiality of the memorial wall under discussion.

Polish Refugee Children in India: Personal Memory, Grassroots Activism, and Transnational Commemorative Diplomacy

This article explores the memory of nearly one thousand Polish child refugees who found safe haven in India during the Second World War. It discusses how from the 1970s onward, the former refugees attempted to sustain the memory of their exilic homeland, often with support from other memory actors in both Poland and India. Analyzing both personal testimonies and grassroots memory activism, this article investigates the intertwining of individual memory with wider memorial trends, such as vernacular, national, and transnational memory. By discussing the ways in which personal and familial memory of wartime childhood serve as a springboard for other commemorative initiatives, this article also examines how children and young people feature in public memory, both as memory actors and objects of commemoration. In doing so, not only do I ask broader questions about remembering children that are relevant to this special issue, but also provide a window into the vicissitudes of Polish politics of memory from the late 1940s to the present.

National Socialism, Colonialism and Antifascist Memory Politics in Postwar Dutch–South African Exchanges

ABSTRACT This contribution addresses the dynamics of Dutch memory politics in the Dutch–South African exchanges between 1948 and 1975. The 1948 election victory of the Nationalist Party and their Apartheid policies brought about painful memories of Nazi attrocities, antisemitic persecurtion and anti-fascist struggle in the Netherlands. Soon, however, the Dutch government acquired an interest in highlighting a different history in relation to South Africa when referring to the notion of stamverwantschap. This implied an ethnic–racial identification of the Dutch with White, Nationalist South Africans on the basis of an alleged shared history of Dutchness. These memory politics changed after ‘Sharpeville’ in the 1960s. Once more memories of racist exclusion during National Socialism were revived in relation to the Apartheid regime. These memories facilitated and were strengthened by a growing anti-Apartheid movement. Yet, in their effort to be ‘on the right side of history’, the grassroots memory politics of the anti-Apartheid movement ignored the Dutch colonial implementation of racial inequality and its effects, not only on the Apartheid policies but also in contemporary Dutch society. This article aims to explore spaces for a synergy between narratives of historical catastrophe such as colonialism and Nazism, both with deep historical and intellectual roots in many parts of the world.

Nunca Invisibles: Insurgent Memory and Self-representation by Female Ex-combatants in Colombia

As part of attempts to end more than half a century of armed conflict, transitional justice and memory initiatives have proliferated in Colombia, providing recognition and redress to victims of violence. Yet, alongside the focus on victims, former insurgents in Colombia have also called for the inclusion of their own narratives of the conflict in public memory initiatives. Responding to recent memory studies scholarship, which has begun to reorient the field away from a narrow focus on past trauma, this article analyses the construction of ‘insurgent memory’ in Colombia through the 2018 documentary Nunca Invisibles: Mujeres Farianas, Adiós a la guerra. Emerging from a grassroots memory project led by women from the FARC, I explore how the film challenges the predominant framing of ex-combatant women as victims in transitional justice and DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration) scholarship. Situating this in a longer history of memory projects by female combatants, the article analyses how such projects, whilst articulating a discourse of peace and reconciliation, vindicate a narrative of female revolutionary activism and a political identity that is often erased in post-conflict ‘reintegration’ processes. In doing so, I demonstrate the importance of creative, grassroots processes in enabling ex-combatants to represent themselves and move beyond the limitations of official memory and transitional justice frameworks.

When Ritual Becomes Protest: Crossing the Bridge of Russian Mourning

Grassroots memorials have become well known for scholars since the 1980s. The researchers mostly place these practices in between public grievances and grassroots political protest. I propose a not less productive way to analyse these kinds of memorials, considering them as a channel for self-representation in the public sphere that is used by margin social and political groups. In societies where access to the public sphere is limited, a non-conventional mechanism that lets margin groups represent themselves via non-political practices, such as a funeral rite, may appear. The public nature of the funeral rite allows political groups to use it as an occasion to mobilise supporters. The commemorative background of these gatherings prevents them from being considered as a political manifestation, nor do they have any organiser who could be legally penalised. Thus, death-related rituals, including grassroots memorialisation, appear to be an effective channel for margin political groups to represent themselves and even to state and promote their political ideas. In this paper, I will analyse this phenomenon using current Russian observational data and show how these practices become an important channel for political opposition in Russia to communicate with the electorate, opponents and authority.

Emotions, Neighbors and Nation-State Identifications at the Grassroots Memorials of the Madrid Train Bombings

Après les attentats du 11 mars 2004, les stations du « Corridor de Henares », une ligne de train de banlieue au sud de Madrid, furent utilisées pendant trois mois comme des arènes publiques pour exprimer diverses émotions. Cet article analyse un aspect spécifique de l’univers émotionnel des mémoriaux populaires créés dans ces stations: les références aux États-nations comme marqueurs identitaires et territoriaux. Il se focalise en particulier sur les émotions exprimées par les personnes s’identifiant dans leurs messages à d’autres pays que l’Espagne, de manière à mettre en lumière les interrelations entre émotions et pays d’origine.

Shaping Seoul’s memories: the co-evolution of memorials, national identity, democracy and urban space in South Korea’s capital city

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the evolving subjects, forms, symbolism, and spatial constellation of the diverse memorials erected in Seoul since 1953. It explores how these memorials have expressed shifts in national identity towards democracy since the end of dictatorship in 1987. It illustrates how commemorative intentions in this massive, rapidly-changing metropolis have intersected with other urban design aims and pressures. The analysis reveals an evolutionary progression in memorial themes, from heroic statues that re-establish roots of Korean national identity and independence, to marginal grassroots memorials and wider themed precincts that present more inclusive, democratic, complex narratives of identity and history.

Martin Pogačar. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-Presencing the Past. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

The development of participatory culture on the internet over the last 15 years has challenged conceptualizations of many social phenomena, including society’s work with the past. Acknowledging efforts by José van Dijck, Andrew Hoskins, and others to accommodate the conceptual architecture of shared remembering to the Web 2.0 reality, the field of memory studies still remains undertheorized. Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-Presencing the Past by Martin Pogačar intends to fill the conceptual void by exploring grassroots memory practices on the internet. Along with exploring digital memory, the book focuses on how online remembrance activities redefine or, in Pogačar’s words, represence the Yugoslav past. DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2018-10-1-139-142

Making meaning of violence: Human rights and historical memory of the conflict in El Salvador

ABSTRACTHuman rights narratives about victimization run the risk of depoliticizing the acts of violence that created victims. In many communities in El Salvador, grassroots memory narratives have not suppressed victims' participation in the revolutionary movement before and during the country's civil war. Quite the contrary, one of the key reasons Salvadoran survivors identify for doing memory work is preserving revolutionary ideals — not to preserve the accounting of abuses, as is familiar in international human rights circles, but rather to relate the underlying reasons why so many risked so much. There is reason to believe this is different than other countries in postconflict Latin America. This may be the result of the relative weakness of postconflict accountability efforts and a reality that may give victims less perceived incentive to frame their life histories in ways that intersect with dominant human rights tropes. It may also pose a challenge as legal accountability efforts accelerate in the years ahead.

Between Scholarship and Dissidence: The Dissident Historical CollectionPamiat΄ (1975–1982)

This article examines the history of the Soviet dissident historical collectionPamiat΄through the lens of liminality. It argues that the publication sought to bridge the gap between dissident and professional scholarship, between grassroots memory collection, with its emphasis on the witness's voice, and historical research's reliability and “scientificity.” AlthoughPamiat΄was inspired by earlier dissident historiographical projects and its editorial team was closely linked to the human-rights movement, its ambitions of objectivity and representativeness also connect it to later Perestroika projects based on citizen involvement, such asMemorial.Pamiat΄s ambiguous identity and claim to neutrality may have delayed the Soviet authorities’ response to it, but repression eventually hit the publication. By putting into question the state's monopoly on historical scholarship and connecting readers and contributors across the Iron Curtain,Pamiat΄had clearly overstepped the boundaries of the permissible and acquired a political meaning it disingenuously claimed not to have.

Witnessing in the age of the database: Viral memorials, affective publics, and the assemblage of mourning

Many terms, such as spontaneous shrines, grassroots memorials and performative commemoratives, have been used to describe the collaborative on-site and online memorials created following the deaths of national and global figures, as well as those of unknown victims of mass-mediated disasters. I argue that the adjective “viral” better captures the temporality, spatiality, materiality, and mimeticism of these formations, as well as their frequent pathologization. Contemporary performative public mourning follows from mediated witnessing in the era of networked digital media, forming a witnessing/mourning assemblage. The corporeal testifying of the witness-turned-mourner contributes material derivatives to an affective network. Breaking from constative, narrative testimony and the exclusionary logic of the monument, these memorial aggregations emerge from processes of database (de)composition and network virality. Through the close analysis of a 2008 YouTube memorial video tribute for victims of a Greek bus accident, I consider shifts in public grieving and memorialization of catastrophic media events in relation to developments in web protocols and platforms.

Public commemorations of Danish soldiers: monuments, memorials, and tombstones

ABSTRACTThis article takes a point of departure in Denmark’s decision to use the armed forces as a tool of foreign policy, even when this implies deployment to regions where combat and casualties must be expected. Since war, combat, and violence contradict traditional self-understandings of being Danish, recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have implied renegotiations and reconstructions of the national ‘we’. In this article, I examine how this is reflected in the emergent memorial landscape by focusing on one national monument, two grassroots memorials, and 20 individual tombstones. All memorials, I argue, relate to a recent public discourse about the ‘war-fighting nation’ and the ‘warrior generation’. The national monument eschews references to war and violence to produce a national narrative focusing on ‘effort’ as the core collective value. One grassroots memorial subtly challenges war and insists on possible alternatives. The other silently accepts war, but demonstrates that, apart from the ‘fallen soldiers’ who are commonly memorialized, war produces many other kinds of suffering that remain officially and socially unrecognized. The individual graves and tombstones, which have been designed by the soldiers and their families, memorialize soldiers as professionals with a military belonging as well as persons with numerous social attachments. And they most directly address the war, violence, and suffering that the emergence of a ‘war-fighting nation’ and a ‘warrior generation’ inevitably implies. Assembling different kinds of memorials that represent different positions of authority and power in the same analysis, I argue, provides a unique insight into how Denmark’s recent military adventures are ascribed meaning, contested, and negotiated.

Transitional Justice: Images and Memories. Edited by Chrisje Brants. Antoine Hol and Dina Siegel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 284 pp. £68.00 cloth.

Transitional Justice: Images and Memories. Edited by Chrisje Brants. Antoine Hol and Dina Siegel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 284 pp. £68.00 cloth.Kofi Annan, chair of Elders group of former world leaders and former UN secretary general, was cited recently to effect that climate change would leave living envying dead (Vidal 2015); Annan is echoing a phrase by Nikita Khrushchev talking about nuclear war in 1979. The point he is making is that political and environmental turmoil caused by droughts, floods, and many other effects of rising temperatures will crucially transform our social life and times. Transitional Justice makes a contribution to discussion of this issue, within more general context of considering criminology as social theory tasked with analyzing a contemporary world marked by global political, economic, and environmental turmoil.The book is an edited collection in Ashgate's series Advances in Criminology. It makes a timely, well-organized, and thematically coherent contribution to field in two ways: via its discussion of transitional justice and via its overarching theme of role of criminology. Its particular strength lies in its multidisciplinary and international approach: its 13 chapters provide critiques of various dimensions of transitional justice by criminal lawyers, cultural anthropologists, criminologists, political scientists, and historians. Transitional justice is concerned with judicial, political, and cultural procedures of dealing with mass atrocity, or the reckoning afterwards (p. 2), as editors articulate it. Such procedures range from international trials to grassroots memory initiatives, and this collection offers a detailed map of discursive field of transitional justice. Each chapter is a case study of different procedures and landscapes of transitional justice, such as role of political apology (Chapter Seven) and emotional landscape of India/Pakistan partition (Chapter 13). Although all these case studies differ in their disciplinary approach, rigorous research and clear editing results in valuable contributions to each chapter's topic as well as book's overall theme. The areas of discursive field laid out in book are: historiography and nation-building; state sovereignty and rights of individual; commemoration and ideological control of space and history, through lieux de m^emoire (sites of memory) (Nora 1989) of atrocities; official versus grassroots commemoration or state appropriation and civic activism as political critique; and, finally, binding it all together, transitional justice procedures (political rituals, lynch mobs, trials, and so forth) and moral questions of how to recompense victims and to actually do justice.The book's aim is to provide a perspective on justice that goes beyond issues of legalities, in order to address complexities of different dimensions of transitional justice involved in dealing with past. The wider question that book asks is how to develop forms of empirical enquiry that respond to social world in what Zygmunt Bauman (1990) calls responsible speech (p. …

Pictures That Save, Pictures That Soothe: Photographs at the Grassroots Memorials to the Victims of theMarch 11, 2004MadridBombings

This article examines the various roles played by photographers and photographic images in the grassroots memorials to the victims of the March 11, 2004Madrid bombings, as spontaneously displayed by anonymous citizens in public spaces. For purposes of comparison, parallels are drawn with similar memorials to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks inNewYork. Although photographic depictions of the pain and suffering caused by the massacres seem to predominate in both cases, photographs served another—and at least in local terms—socially significant purpose, as this article will try to show, through its material anchoring in collective remembrance photographs contributed to the public memorialization of the events.

Book review: Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death

Book review: Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death