Historical Amnesia Research Articles

Clash of temporalities: Ephemerality and embodied time in Welcome to Our Hillbrow

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of “ruination”, this article critically examines the depictions of time and temporalities in Phaswane Mpe’s novella Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) to explore the dynamically persistent imperial formations that are difficult to notice in the text. These temporalities serve as reflections of pre-existing social issues in post-apartheid South Africa such as apathy, historical amnesia, and xenophobia. The sharp fluctuations of the everyday and the looming sense of anxiety disconnect the Hillbrowans’ perception of their present from the longue durée of empire. This disconnection reduces the characters’ judgement of historical and socio-economic problems as affecting failings of individual morality and xenophobia. Furthermore, Mpe reveals the fluidity of time and space in Hillbrow through the recurring motifs of walking and sharing stories. This allows the characters to envision horizons beyond their immediate experiences and rediscover their lost capacity for remembering and self-recognition in the other.

From Erasure to Restoration: Antisemitism and the Visual Reverberations of a Revolutionary Pedagogy

Abstract A set of rediscovered revolutionary posters by the Reprint Collective (which was presented as part of Documenta fifteen) in Brussels provided an incredibly moving window into times past. Notwithstanding how the events addressed by those political artefacts now lie in the historical past, the revolutionary reverberations of the posters remain something to treasure. They bring to life political causes that underline the importance of radical solidarity and activist alliances. To understand why such artefacts were banned, we need to recognise the role of contemporary racism – the projection of the figure of a Palestine-radical left-Muslim subject that encompasses everything the liberal mainstream supposedly is not. This article argues that the New Anti-Semitism is a merely ideological manifestation that has no contribution to make toward the struggle against antisemitism. The posters remind us that 1) the struggle against antisemitism cannot be separated from the struggle against Islamophobia, but also that 2) the erasure of a particular Jewish and Left revolutionary subjectivity is intrinsic to the workings of hegemonic forces that maintain contemporary politics. Going against the account in which antisemitism has conventionally been framed, this article aims to come to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region in the 1970s. Moroccan revolutionary Abraham Serfaty is an example of how the erasure of the radical history of Arab and Jewish progressives was no coincidence. Reversing this erasure not only helps in understanding progressive Jewish interventions in liberation politics but also that the flattening of complex histories and Arab, Left, and Jewish subjectivities is in fact a prerequisite for Zionism. Arab Jews do not fit neatly within a pro-Israel ideological framework that itself systematically feeds off anti-Arab racism. This article furthermore reflects on New Anti-Semitism as a key political instrument and as a powerful moralistic force that muzzles the expression of political context and social ambiguity. The notion ‘Arab Anti-Semitism’ arose against the backdrop of Israeli state terror and regional warfare. This article also provides insights into important intellectual interventions of the left between the 1960s and the 1980s. In combination with the rise of counter-revolutionary forces and major anti-left crackdowns, this emancipatory approach building on a critique of imperialism and capitalism, and solidarity politics based on progressive universal values, was undermined. Finally, coming to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region and recovering this very legacy serve as an antidote against historical amnesia. This spirit of a progressive universalism – as, for instance, illustrated in Mahmoud Darwish’s rejection of the opportunistic dictum ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ on the grounds that one can readily speak of a ‘world’s enemy’ – is born from the belief that our ethical and moral constellations carry universal value.

Shameful Specters: Remembering Spanish Slavery in Àngels Aymar’s La Indiana

Abstract This article reveals a new figure in the contemporary Spanish imaginary, the indiana, and a new literary mode, the indiana melodrama. It argues that the incarnation of the indiana as a virtuous, melodramatic heroine in Àngels Aymar’s 2007 play La indiana rebukes Spanish participation in transatlantic slavery and counters the historical amnesia that Spanish culture frequently displays toward its colonial past. An early forerunner in Spain’s long-delayed path to recognizing its history of slavery, La indiana forms part of activist efforts in Catalonia, the autonomous community in which the play premiered. Applying theories of memory and melodrama, the article explains how many factors in the play—the actors, their voices, the stage space, the soundscape, and the mixing of the Catalan and Spanish languages—transmit memory across racial, temporal, and spatial boundaries. This effect, “theatrical postmemory,” minimizes the distance between past and present, Cuba and Catalonia, memory and history. The article focuses on Aymar’s transformation of two symbols of Spanish (post)imperial nostalgia, the indiano home and the Catalan habanera, a popular musical genre. La indiana deconstructs the melodramatic convention of a happy ending and the concomitant restoration of innocence.

Forgettable Black and Amazigh Bodies

Boujemâa Hebaz (1943–1981), a Black and Amazigh professor at Mohammed V University, was forcibly disappeared in 1981. This article reads the irresolution of his case against the background of exclusion and amnesia that surrounds the fate of Black and Amazigh people in southeast/southwest Morocco. I argue that Hebaz's case reflects a wider history of absence, disappearance, and discrimination that impacts Black Amazigh Moroccans. Hebaz straddled identities that were simply disregarded throughout the Years of Lead (1956–1999). When the Moroccan police kidnapped Hebaz in April 1981, they were aware that he was from the southeast, an area that is not only predominantly Amazigh and Black but a region that had already been turned into a large prison for political detainees. The presence of several notorious secret prisons further exacerbated the region's territorial marginalization and disconnection from the rest of Morocco. This fact would later be officially acknowledged in the final Equity and Reconciliation Commission's (ERC) report and recommendations. Drawing on interviews, authentic materials, ERC reports, and other sources, the article demonstrates how Hebaz's absence is enmeshed in racism, territorial marginalization, and historical amnesia in Morocco.

THE SUBSTITUTION OF REALITY: MADONNA AS A TOOL OF MASS MEDIA

Using qualitative research methods, we will explicate how the internet and other modern technologies directly impact the reality presented. Through specific segments of this study, we will analyze the democratization of art, fashion, and image in contemporary society, focusing primarily on its real, current, and true-media publication through the phenomenon of Madonna. Employing methods of textual analysis and interpretation, we will examine the works of philosophers Jean Baudrillard, cultural theorist Paul Virilio, and Douglas Kellner. In doing so, we will explain the significance of media manipulation. The primary objective of this study is to depict media through postmodern theory, presenting them as leading factors in contemporary social processes. Postmodern theorists emphasize that the media system, which has dominated reality since the early 21st century, is unable to summon the past, causing human existence to fall into a state of perpetual schizophrenic present. This incapacity results in the simulation of past events, which now return as a series of anachronistic media representations, creating the illusion of historical continuity. This leads to a state of historical amnesia, where the sense of connection to the past is lost. In such a context, everyday human experience becomes fragmented and disoriented. Media, as the primary intermediaries between reality and perception, create a new reality detached from historical continuity and deeply rooted in the present moment. This new reality, shaped by media representations, blurs the boundary between the real and the simulated, further amplifying the sense of temporal dislocation.

Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has not abandoned ‘the dream of cosmopolitan peace’ (Alexander 2005). The adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ refers to the political and philosophical concept that all human beings are members of a single community. In the 21st century, however, the world faces a stark reality that is far from this vision, one which is consumed by an epidemic of social inequality and global injustice. The refugee crisis, climate injustice, racism, nationalism, terrorism, and other challenges are rooted in serious, untreated historical traumata which ultimately can lead to a collective form of amnesia related to these respective histories. I argue that to build a resilient, cosmopolitan society requires giving voice and expression to the narratives of victims of perpetration. And, equally important is to disclose the hidden intention in the historical narratives voiced by perpetrators. Through the exploration of these narratives, I argue, citizens will begin to wake up from their historical amnesia.

Curatorial Dissonance and Conflictual Aesthetics: Holocaust Memory and Public Humanities in Greek Historiography

Despite the increasingly diverse societal landscape in Greece for more than three decades within a context of migration, understandings of its fragile histories are still limited in shaping a sense of belonging that is open to ‘otherness’. While Greek communities have utilised history as a pathway to maintain identity, other parallel histories and understandings do not resonate with ‘Greekness’ for most, such as the case of Greek Jewry. Critical historical perspectives can benefit from tracing ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the reassessment of societal values of inclusivity. Histories of violence and injustice can also include elements of ‘difficult histories’ and must be embraced to seek acknowledgement of these in promoting social change and cultural analysis for public humanities informing curation and curricula. Between eduscapes, art heritage spaces, an entry into contested and conflictual histories can expand a sense of belonging and the way we imagine our own connected histories with communities, place and nation. Greek Jews do not constitute a strong part of historical memory for Greeks in their past and present; in contrast to what is perceived as ‘official’ history, theirs is quite marginal. As a result, contemporary Greeks, from everyday life to academia, do not have a holistic understanding in relation to the identities of Jews in Greece, their culture or the Holocaust. Given the emergence of a new wave of artistic activism in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism, along with activist practices in the art field as undercurrents of resistance, in this intervention I bring together bodies of works to create a dialogic reflection with historical, artistic and feminist sources. In turn, the discussion then explores the spatiotemporal contestations of the historical geographies of Holocaust monuments in Greece. While interrogating historical amnesia, I endeavour to provide a space to engage with ‘difficult histories’ in their aesthetic context as a heritage of healing and social justice.

Станция «Дистанция». Диспозитив производства знания в ранних российских художественных исследованиях

The article examines the specifics of Russian artistic research. First, with the help of historical analysis of the phenomenon in the international context, the essential characteristics of artistic research are deduced. They consist in the intertwining of ontology, epistemology and methodology of a work or a process, which is enacted through a problem beyond the issues of art. Art in this situation acts as an “epistemic thing” (Henk Borgdorff), a “theoretical object” (Hubert Damisch), or an enactive environment. This boundary, or the interdependent intertwining of the subject, method, and purpose of the work, manifests itself in different ways in the various apparatuses of knowledge production in art, varying from context to context, despite the globalization of the art scene of the twenty-first century. The Russian art of the late noughties and early tens was just approaching the use of the research paradigm. Its application is conditioned by a range of reasons, including the need to construct a work of art as a complex reflection on a socially acute topic, such as issues of national identity and historical amnesia. The art segment under consideration tried to avoid merging with the common media imagery, moving away from both the dominant rhetoric and its ironic interpretations by artist predecessors and fellow contemporaries, while bypassing straightforward activist strategies. The kind of knowledge such art dealt with was often non-knowledge, the ungraspable, the erased, and the camouflaged. This knowledge found its elusive manifestation in traces of absence, scattered authorship, failures, and other forms of distancing, yet sometimes revealing through such embodiments its own communicative limitations.

Кордон як фактор мексикано-американської ідентичності

The article explores the dynamics of the formation of Mexican-American identity since the end of the war between Mexico and the United States in 1848. The establishment of a new border between the two countries resulted in the leveling of the culture and traditions of those Mexicans who remained in the territories under the control of the new government. Gradual and coercive state policies against locals who tried to preserve not only their ranches and material possessions but also their spiritual practices, caused a situation of forced historical amnesia. New waves of migration, caused by complex political and economic conditions in Mexico, had a significant impact on both those Mexicans who had long lived on ethnic lands and the migrants themselves, who were forced to assimilate and live according to the laws of the “white world”. It was only in the mid-20th century that the radicalization of the Chicano political movement sparked the beginning of a reconsideration of the identity of Americans of Mexican origin. The border, as a dividing line, not only separates two countries but also splits the inner world of the Mexicans who live in the United States, signifying their border state, belonging to two worlds, two cultures, and two ways of being.

Science Fiction Series <i>Orville</i> as Space for the Memorial Cultures and Memory Wars

The relevance of collective memory analysis comes from the increasing role of memorization in social processes, which are currently acquiring increasingly significant conflict potential. The author analyses visual material of the popular science fiction series The Orville, which represents a segment of American political culture, as one of the cultural mechanisms for the assimilation of ideology and politics in mass cultural discourse. It is presumed that The Orville parodies the classic epics Star Trek and Babylon 5 and thus is part of the processes of deconstructing the historical collective memory of modern American society. This study intends to establish how a formally parody series not only mocks and imitates, but also constructs its own versions of memorial culture. The article aims: 1) to describe the universal tactics of deconstruction as a form of revision of existing memorial cultures; 2) to clarify the possibilities and boundaries of describing memorial culture through the prism of visual mass culture, using the example of a science fiction series; 3) to analyze the modes of updating political and social contradictions in American society on the example of the TV series The Orville; 4) to consider the specificity of the transformation of mass consciousness by constructing a new version of identity in the light of a radical revision of the narratives of classic science fiction series; 5) to analyze the political and ideological dimensions of the memory wars presented in the clash of traditional and liberal values of the characters in the series. Methodology of the article bases on the principles of the memorial turn and the analysis of the politics of memory within the paradigm of cultural and intellectual history and includes the methods of discourse analysis and intent analysis. The novelty of the study lies in determining the directions and specificities of the assimilation of the political, limited by the problems of collective memory, cultural, religious and gender identity along with military and ideological confrontation in modern mass culture of historical memory within the visual space of the science fiction series The Orville. The series is analyzed as an attempt to deconstruct the cultural experience and legacy of Star Trek, which actualized science fiction series as one of the sources of cultural and social meanings for modern consumer society. The author also analyzes the contribution of the series to the development of the collective memory of US society; the transformation of the concepts of Self and Otherness through the prism of specifying cultural, religious and gender roles. Revision of the past in popular culture as an alternative space for the functioning of collective historical memory is investigated. As a result of the study, it is presumed that The Orville actualizes modern American laughter culture and inspires attempts to rethink collective memory, the collective historical experience of trauma and represents an attempt to abandon the strategies of historical amnesia and ignoring politically inconvenient experiences.

Magic of feminist bridging

Are feminist coalitions magical enough to survive and endure while questioning and shaking the colonial/racist foundations of Swedish academic knowledge production and the overall Swedish society? Can feminist bridging and collective writing remain a magical process even when grappling with difficult experiences and memories of othering and racialisation? This is a creatively and collectively written article on feminist coalition building, and its importance in thinking, articulating and deconstructing race, racialization and racist structures. More than two years ago, seven interdisciplinary gender studies scholars of mixed ethnic and racial origins, came together to explore our differently situated experiences of disidentifying with Swedish academia and society in a collective we call Loving Coalitions. Against the background of Swedish exceptionalism, historical amnesia of Sweden’s colonial past and present, and the deafening silence on Swedish whiteness and racism, we are sharing our poems, letters, texts and testimonies of racist interactions in Swedish academia and society. While doing so, we discuss how moving away from conventional ways of doing research and experimenting with creative methodological alternatives, such as automatic writing, epistolary formats, poems, fiction, collective memory-work, allow us to acknowledge and embrace our different life backgrounds and academic trajectories as a mode of knowledge production. We hope and believe that our experiences, refl ections and ways to resist racism and Othering in Sweden and Swedish academia through alternative coalition building, based on mutual care and love, can be relevant in a Danish context as well.

50 years of the Nobel Prize to Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch: integrating behavioral function into an ethology for the 21st century

The 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch, arguably one of the most significant events in the history of ethology, has gone virtually unnoticed. Students and newcomers to the field may be wrongly led to believe that ethology has lost its prominent role as the leading discipline at the forefront of studies of animal behavior with a biological foundation. However, the decline of ethology is more apparent than real, in part a consequence of tying the discipline to a particular theoretical approach (i.e., that of classical ethology), but also due to the historical amnesia affecting many areas of science and the uneasy relationship of ethology with some of its own subdisciplines. Behavioral ecology emerged in the 1970s as an ethological subdiscipline devoted to the study of behavioral function, one of the four aims of ethology famously identified by Tinbergen. Behavioral ecology became extremely popular, but was criticized due to its narrow focus on behavioral function. With the new millennium came a return to a more balanced approach to the study of animal behavior, with frequent calls to recover the balance between the different areas of study and the integrative spirit that many consider one of the most distinctive features of ethology. Still, some behavioral ecologists contend that ethology disappeared shortly after Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch’s Nobel Prize award and has been replaced by behavioral ecology, and offer revisionist narratives of the aims and scope of both disciplines in support of this contention. Contrary to this view, modern ethology remains a necessary and coherent endeavor that encompasses and subsumes all four of Tinbergen’s aims, including those considered to be part of the agenda of behavioral ecology. The challenge for the next 50 years will be to preserve the ethological legacy of pursuing the four aims and their integration across levels of biological organization, taxa, methodologies, and interdisciplinary boundaries for a complete understanding of animal behavior.

A Prosthetic Popular Feminism in Postfeminist Times: Mrs. America’s Cool Feminism and Antifeminist Celebrity

In the conclusion to her study of feminist history in popular culture, Dana Heller calls for feminists “to seize aggressively onto and restock the cultural memory banks” to counter a historical amnesia and a retrograde historical revisionism bedeviling feminism in popular memory. The recent Emmy-nominated television drama Mrs. America is an attempt to do this restocking in culturally hospitable, but politically difficult, times. Mrs. America offers a new televisual rendering of American second-wave feminist history, refracted through the women who mobilized for and against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and one woman in particular: Phyllis Schlafly. This article argues that Mrs. America mobilizes two key and entwined idioms of postfeminist culture, cool and celebrity, to construct a language of second-wave feminist remembrance attractive to, and legible for, a postfeminist audience. This produces a prosthetic memory, enabling a feminist remembrance and therefore a critical historical consciousness for contemporary neoconservative times. Mrs. America dramatizes what happens when antifeminist forces are ignored and/or underestimated—too uncool to be a threat—and younger women viewers are urged to take this history into account, thereby associating the then of the ERA with the now of a United States shaped by Donald Trump. This occurs through the series’s organizing principle of parallelisms—whether in editing techniques, narratives, or imagery—that bring together and into relief the uncanny similarities as well as the differences between feminist and antifeminist forces, then and now.

Forgotten Clones: The Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution. By NathanCrowe. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2021. pp. 336. $60 (Hardcover).

Forgotten Clones: The Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution. By NathanCrowe. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2021. pp. 336. $60 (Hardcover).

The Pasha’s Mansion Refuses to Become a Theater

In this essay, originally written in Arabic, historian Johnny Mansour revisits the dilapidated remains of one of Haifa’s once preeminent buildings, located in what used to be the historical old city inside the Ottoman walls. After its original occupants were forced out and had their property confiscated during the Nakba, the mansion, built by Mustafa Pasha al-Khalil, was first occupied by new Jewish immigrants to the state of Israel. But the new occupants were driven out by the Israeli authorities’ deliberate neglect of their living conditions in a crumbling old structure. The Pasha’s mansion was then appropriated as a liberal Zionist artistic project that turned part of the building into a theater venue, which is now defunct. Through the prism of a flânerie in the city’s old Arab quarter, Mansour retraces the richness of old Palestinian Haifa. He surmises that nothing will be left of it in ten years if it is not salvaged from the historical amnesia induced by Zionist occupation.

The Portrayal of Palestinian and Israeli Suffering and Violent Incidents in Selected US Daily Newspapers

This paper argues that editors of newspapers in the US, in their capacity to select and arrange news related to tragic events in Palestine/Israel, tend to follow an underlying political agenda largely conforming with US foreign policy towards Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab or Moslem world more generally. This is part of a popular American geopolitical imaginary, now being reconfigured through the primacy of ‘terror’ as the enemy number one of the American way of life, and most certainly, by proxy, of the Israeli way of life or the life of any Washington-oriented democracy. Reportage on cases of Palestinian tragedy and agony were represented as part of or the byproduct of protracted conflict within a kind of historical amnesia or bracketing out: Israeli state policy which victimises the Palestinians tends to be rendered invisible in such manipulation of reported reality. In other words, a deft editorial arrangement deflects possible blame on Israel by removing the events from their broader context and time frame. The reports centre on symptoms of the pathology rather than its underlying causes.

THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR AND METAMODERN STRUCTURE OF FEELING

The study takes into the consideration the existing dynamic relationship between metamodernism and the Russia-Ukraine war. The article aims to draw the parallels between metamodern structure of feeling and the harsh reality of war in Ukraine. The author has summarized the conceptual foundations of metamodernism and its paradigmatic benchmarks such as historicity, affect, and depth. It has been argued that these markers of metamodernism, conceptualized by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, have intensified in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. In particular, the past and the narrative of a nation problematized by the postmodern thinkers are re-activated within the Russia-Ukraine war. They are necessary to tie the past with our present and our future as well as to join disconnected presents. Metamodern historicity compensates historical amnesia of postmodernism and gives grounds to imagine a historical moment. Affect as a metamodern intensity through which we articulate the emotional reactions and responses has gained new currency during the Russia-Ukrainian war. Thousands of Ukrainian refugees are receiving help and support from the governments of different countries and people across the world. This situation exemplifies a desire of metamodern subjectivity for a meaningful personal emotional experience and interconnectedness. It has been concluded that metamodern logic has been forged during the Russia-Ukraine war and metamodern touchstones (historicity, affect, and depth) are contextualized in the reality of the 21st-century barbaric bloodshed. Moreover, the Russia-Ukraine war has disclosed that the intellectual life under the postmodern negation of grand narratives, truth, tradition, center, and other categories led us to intellectual and practical dead ends. The clash of civilizations that we experience today confirms the end of postmodern skepticism and irony, fragmentation, and playfulness. The postmodern logic blocked out our ability to respond to the tragedies and deaths brought by the war. We need a metamodern return to emotionality and sincerity to heal the traumas of war.

Exterminate All the Brutes directed by Raoul Peck

Exterminate All the Brutes directed by Raoul Peck

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

Reverberations of Boarding School Trauma in Upstate New York

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices is glimpsed in Upstate NY’s Native populations. One such way of historical preservation is within the literature of the Native descendants of these schools, for example, within the poetic works of Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Gansworth brilliantly crafts poems regarding his youth on reservations and within this youth demonstrates the last intergenerational impacts of the US boarding schools.