Colonial Memory Research Articles

The Leopard, the Lion and the Cock: Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium. By Matthew G. Stanard

The Leopard, the Lion and the Cock: Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium. By Matthew G. Stanard

Paradoxes of curating colonial memory

In the last decade, many initiatives were taken to digitize colonial archival legacies. In this article, we analyse Dutch policy and a number of Dutch initiatives in this field with the aim to find answers to our central question whether digitization of colonial archival legacies offers possibilities to decolonize these archives. The aspiration to decolonize colonial legacies seems to be a paradoxical statement since there is something innately colonial in the recordkeeping systems that cannot, and should not, be removed. But digitization of archives means creating new recordkeeping infrastructures, and these new infrastructures shape new interfaces between the documents which were created in the past and the users of today. We argue that decolonizing these archives can be based on a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the variables which shape the new digital archival infrastructure. Inspired by the third-space perspective and the concept of (de)coloniality, we explore the possibilities to develop archival infrastructures that contribute to decolonizing colonial archival legacies in the sense of offering multivocality, multiple agency and multiple provenance. We conclude that what we call third-space infrastructural frameworks create promising opportunities to contribute to the decolonization of colonial archival legacies.

The Life of an Itinerant through a Pinhole

Between 1956 and 1968, the photographer Gholamreza Amirbegi captured a wealth of images from around his neighborhood in southwestern Tehran. At the time the city had just seen a major influx of working-class immigrants from the country’s smaller municipalities. By re-narrating these materials, which evoke not only particular, local memories, but also distinct subaltern histories, this overlooked archive tells stories of social change from below in Iran, as seen in Gholamreza’s subjects: global cinematic images, and unconscious colonial memory. By applying a comparative historical-material analysis, Khosravi Noori’s aim here is to develop a practice based, multi-sited archaeology of contemporary history. This approach begins with an excavation of the historical materials themselves, in order to both discover lost identities in these images, and to displace them from sedimented historical positions. In doing this, he asks the question: What happens to the past from the vantage point of the future?

Decolonizing International Relations: A Re-Memory of Indentured Servitude in Fiji and How it Impacts Our Present and Future

In response to the fourth coup in the Fiji Islands in as many as seventeen years, the international community demanded the restoration of democracy and order in the country. Historical memories of a British colonialism that brought Indians to Fiji as indentured laborers and proceeded to construct a ‘museum’ for the Euro-American imagination that resulted in such tumultuous conditions in Fiji are conveniently cast aside in a colonial globality masquerading as “liberal international order.” These memories, histories beyond the Western construct of the nation-state, histories of colonialism, are also missing from dominant discourses of realism, liberalism, constructivism and historical materialism. The case of Fiji serves as an example of a ‘postcolonial’ nation-state that current academic IR theory cannot offer much support to since it has a colonial epistemology, shackled and bounded within the confines of the Western-constructed nation-state system. Hence, this paper will shed the secure and comfortable land of the Euro-American, travel down the kala pani (Pacific) waters, and shipwreck on Vanua Levu, one of the many islands in the archipelago of Fiji, as the first Indian indentured laborers did when they were taken from one part of the British empire to another. In a place that is romanticized as paradise in the Euro-American imagination, we will pull back the curtains of the imagined museum and reveal a ‘post-colonial’ nation struggling with export-oriented dependent development while burning in the flames of ethnic-tensions created by the then British Empire and sustained today by a colonial globality. This colonial globality is emulated by the modern nation-state, in which differences are created and otherized, sustained within national spaces and across the inter-national. It is the crucial intervention of historical memory pertaining to the construction of the nation-state and the inter-national that makes possible this Discovery. We propose decolonizing IR through critique where the voices and histories subaltern to IR, but so crucial to the production of the local, the national and therefore, global, are put back on the agenda, which should ultimately provide for more honest and responsible scholarship.

Het gruwelijke gezicht van de geschiedenis

Abstract The memory of colonialism and slavery is finally becoming more widespread in the Netherlands. However, the field of literary studies still falls behind compared to the central place of the Dutch-Caribbean slavery past in recent societal debates. One of the reasons could be that the representation of trans-Atlantic slavery in literature is often oblique and allegorical. This article proposes a reading of such allegories in The Sign of Jonah (Van Leeuwen 1995) by the Dutch-Antillean writer Boeli van Leeuwen. The novel’s intertextual references to both the Biblical story of Jonah and numerous other intertextual references, connect European, South-American and religious texts with the violent colonial history of the Caribbean. Using European (Walter Benjamin) and Caribbean (Eduard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo) theory, we argue that it is precisely this hybrid and postmodern practice of meaning-making that shapes the depiction of slavery and colonial memory in Van Leeuwen’s novels. Binary oppositions between Europe and South-America, masters and slaves, humans and nature, are deconstructed and readers are encouraged to understand man as fundamentally entangled with his other, be it animal, botanical and mineral. The postmodern use of the allegory turns out to produce cultural memory, and also to announce a future of ‘ecobe-comings’.

Guerre d'Algérie: l'impossible commémoration by Rémi Dalisson

Reviewed by: Guerre d'Algérie: l'impossible commémoration by Rémi Dalisson Erika Hess and Benjamin Sparks Dalisson, Rémi. Guerre d'Algérie: l'impossible commémoration. Armand Colin, 2018. ISBN 978-2-200-61713-4. Pp. 318. Dalisson's work problematizes the commemoration of colonial memory and the Algerian War in metropolitan France. This complex, multifaceted issue, existing since the Évian Accords in 1962, resurfaced due to François Hollande's 2012 remarks recognizing the Algerian victims of the 1961 massacre. Also, the law of 6 Dec. 2012 established a national day of memory for the civil and military victims of the Algerian war, to be celebrated every year on 19 March. In the wake of this law, several parliamentary members argued that instead of being proud of its achievements and history, France had become an apologetic country. Dallison demonstrates that the acceptance of 19 March as a national day of commemoration, celebrating the ceasefire between France and Algeria in 1962, is complex as it disrespects those French who lost their lives in this conflict and at the same time celebrates a military defeat. Cities such as Béziers, rather than accepting the traditional commemorative street name as a political symbol, rejected the production of an official shared past by changing the name of the rue du 19 mars 1962 to the rue Hélie-de-Saint-Marc, celebrating a general condemned for the putsch of 1961, while other cities refused outright to commemorate this day. Dalisson argues that these quarrels, among others surrounding the commemoration, revealed fractures in the political landscape and highlighted the confusion between history and memory. To address this, Dalisson analyzes history and its implications on the French national and official memory, focusing solely on the French perspective from 1945 to today. This work is divided into two parts, the first of which looks at the roots of the problem with the commemoration by analyzing the differing perceptions of the conflict, resulting in a variety of memories based on individual and collective experiences. Dalisson examines the French military and their memory of defeat in Indochina, then moves to the harkis, viewed as traitors to Algeria while still not having a place in metropolitan France, and finally focuses on the pieds-noirs who were born and raised in Algeria and whose experience was one of exile. These different experiences create complications for the commemoration process. The second part looks at what is at stake after the official recognition of the conflict as a war at the end of the twentieth century. Dalisson highlights France's long commemorative tradition dating back to the French Revolution as a means of transmitting and creating collective memory. He then brings into question the heritage and function of military celebrations on this memory and the implications of dates and places of commemorative [End Page 217] events. This book delves deep into the intricacies of commemorating a controversial event for a country that prides itself on its history. Benjamin Sparks University of Memphis (TN) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Colonial Pasts in Germany's Present

This article examines how colonial reckoning is belatedly becoming part of the German memory landscape thirty years after reunification. It argues that colonial-era questions are acquiring the status of a new phase of coming-to-terms with the past in Germany alongside—and sometimes in tension with—the memory of the National Socialist and East German pasts. This raises new and difficult questions about what it means for the state and citizens to act responsibly in the face of historical wrongs and their lasting consequences. Given deep disagreements over what responsibility for the past means in practice, these questions also raise the stakes for the future of Germany’s global reputation as a normative model for democratic confrontations with difficult pasts. It provides an overview of the circumstances after reunification in which colonial memory issues came to the fore, and analyzes a 2019 Bundestag debate on colonial heritage as an example of how the main contours of colonial memory are being configured within the context of contemporary politics.

Jasminne Méndez, Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry (2018)

Reviewed by: Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry by Jasminne Méndez Molly Dooley Appel (bio) Jasminne Méndez, Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry. Arte Público Press, 2018. Pp. 227. Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e, the second book of award-winning author and educator Jasminne Méndez, is an exemplary work of creative nonfiction. The volume is a seamless bilingual compilation of personal essays and poetry in four parts. The book weaves together a tapestry of Latina experiences: navigating her status as a Black, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx woman within and outside of her communities; the grief that comes with managing chronic illness and infertility; the micro- (and macro-) aggressions of a racist and misogynist medical system; the work of negotiating cultural norms as the child of immigrants; and the colonial traumas underlying the intersections of these experiences. Méndez's evocative writing foregrounds the embodied nature of these experiences both syntactically and formally. For example, she subversively employs the cold, "objective" rhetoric of diagnosis in order to make it blossom, as when she defines the chronic autoimmune disease scleroderma as "thick skin stretched so taut you become a wax museum replica of who you used to be" (14). She crafts a parodic "how-to" guide for being infertile and a dictionary of missing words for the missing: "___________: There is no word in English or Spanish for a parent who has lost a child. There is no word in English or Spanish for a woman who once was pregnant and suddenly is not. One in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. We named our child Baby M so we had a name for our grief, a word for our loss" (82). These poetic strategies both reveal and undermine the dehumanization enacted by the US/Western medical system on women and people of color. The pieces relay how (particularly male) medical practitioners assume she has minimal knowledge of her own body and its needs, even while they view her body as an object to be fixed: "I was no longer a human being with a soul. I was a human body with a problem, a cracked shell that needed mending, a scientific experiment" (113). Méndez tells of the assumptions she encounters among her family and well-meaning but "healthy" friends around what illness and health supposedly look like. Her writing deftly illustrates the complexity, fear, and fatigue involved in communicating her experiences to those she loves. Above all, Méndez masterfully connects her living experience with scleroderma and lupus to her embodied, cultural memories of racism and colonialism. In the stunning chapter "Hands: El Corte," she places the genocide enacted upon Haitians by the dictator Rafael Trujillo in conversation with the amputation of her fingers, bridging the machetes that "culled" the Haitian population with the red knife that disappeared part of her hands. Méndez [End Page 218] both loses and finds herself in the languages of her body—English, Spanish, music, medicine—and in the process, she maps a new territory of how her body speaks itself into being. The beauty of Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e is in the way it stages a specifically Afro-Latinx feminist resistance to the erasures of Western knowledge, misogyny, and colonialism. I am reminded of the work of Gloria Anzaldúa in the way Méndez uses writing as a praxis of making the wholeness of herself present—in sickness, in healing, in pain, in motherhood and infertility, in loss, in love, and everything in between. Some may find her book to be overtly didactic (as she herself notes; she is a teacher). Yet the work is poetic pedagogy at its best: it makes space for unseen processes of self and communal realization and enriches the lives of those who encounter its praxis. The book is wonderfully multidimensional and accessible: it could find a comfortable place in a high school classroom, a graduate seminar, or a medical school reading group. Those interested in Afro-Latinx feminisms and the medical humanities in particular will find a rich work of art to add to their canons. Molly Dooley Appel Nevada State College Molly Dooley Appel...

From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory

What happens when different histories of extreme violence confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one event erase others from view? When memories of colonialism, occupation, slavery, and the Holocaust bump up against one another in contemporary multi cultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue? Such questions of remembrance, justice, and comparison lie at the heart of any attempt to think through the topic of this special issue: transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory. These questions have also oriented my attempt to construct a theory of multidirectional that focuses on exemplary sites of tension involving remembrance of the Nazi genocide of European Jews in order to offer an alternative framework for thinking about and confronting the recent and ongoing memory wars.1 In Multidirectional Memory (2009), I make three moves toward a new account of transcultural remembrance. First, I argue against a logic of competitive based on the zero-sum game, which has dominated many popular and scholarly approaches to public remembrance. Accord ing to this understanding, memories crowd each other out of the pub lic sphere—for example, too much emphasis on the Holocaust is said to marginalize other traumas, or, inversely, adoption of Holocaust rhetoric to speak of those other traumas is said to relativize or even deny the Holo caust's uniqueness. To be sure, political, economic, and cultural forms of power contour the circulation of memories in the public sphere, but a pre Foucauldian understanding of power as repressive cannot capture mem ory's relative autonomy from such forces. In contrast, I suggest, works productively: the result of conflict is not less memory, but more—even of subordinated traditions. For instance, I would argue that the result of the rise to prominence of Holocaust is not

From the Transnational to the Intimate: Multidirectional Memory, the Holocaust and Colonial Violence in Australia and Beyond

In Australia, public remembrance, particularly relating to national identity and colonial violence, has been contentious. In this article, we take Australia’s recent bid to join the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) as an opportunity to identify national, local and multidirectional dynamics shaping public remembrance of the Holocaust and colonial violence in Australia. Joining IHRA signifies a belated national commitment to Holocaust remembrance, which has traditionally been fostered in Australia by survivor communities. Significantly, the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM) has recently ventured beyond survivor memory, positioning Holocaust remembrance as a platform to identify ongoing human rights violations against Indigenous Australians and other marginalized groups. While this multidirectional framework promotes an inclusive practice of remembrance, we argue that it may inadvertently flatten complex histories into instances of “human rights violations” and decentre the foundational issue of settler colonial violence in Australia. To explore the personal and affective work of remembering settler violence from an Indigenous perspective, we turn to two multiscalar artworks by Judy Watson that exemplify a mnemonic politics of location. the names of places contributes to a local and national public remembrance of settler violence by identifying and mapping colonial massacre sites. In experimental beds, Watson links her matrilineal family history of racial exclusion with that of Thomas Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings. This transnational decolonial feminist work takes the gendered and racialized body and intimate sexual appropriation as a ground for a multidirectional colonial memory, thereby providing an alternative to the dominant Holocaust paradigm and its idiom of human rights.

Museums, Decolonization and Indigenous Artists as First Cultural Responders at the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is part of a global movement of human-rights–driven museums that commemorate atrocity-related events through exhibitions aimed to communicate a national social consciousness. However, museums in Canada are increasingly understood to contribute to the perpetuation of settler colonial memory regimes as dominant narratives of national identity. Through the analysis of theexhibit ‘Aborigina lWomen and the Right to Safety and Justice’, this article explores how museums in represent difficult knowledge and act as sites of decolonization, while suggesting how shared authority and nuanced Indigenous art forms might play a role in both. It posits that if museums in settler colonial societies are to evolve beyond the pretext of detached host, they must not only acknowledge past atrocities and injustices against Indigenous peoples, but also consistently examine the colonial logics and inventions that permeate colonizing and decolonizing exhibitions.

Criticism of Colonialism and the Colonial Memory Work in Germany

Criticism of Colonialism and the Colonial Memory Work in Germany

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Disrupting the Nation-ness in Postcolonial East Asia: Discourses of Jong Tae-Se as a Zainichi Korean Sport Celebrity

This study explores how a zainichi (residing in Japan) Korean athlete reveals often-concealed postcolonial and post-Cold War tensions revolving around ethnic essentialism and nationalism in East Asia. The focus of the study is Jong Tae-se, a third generation zainichi Korean football player who has become a star in Japan, North Korea and South Korea. By examining media representations and online responses to Jong in South Korea as well as his autobiographies written in both Korean and Japanese, it is explained how Jong, as a zainichi Korean sport celebrity, both represents the arbitrariness of nation-ness and reproduces unresolved geopolitical and historical issues of postcolonial East Asia. Whereas his mobility, multilingual capability and fluid belongingness may signal changing dynamics of national-ness in East Asia, this analysis also reveals that his media discourses keep him tethered to anti-Japan and anti-communist sentiments. Such vicissitudes of the discourses around him attest that colonial and Cold War memories and historical wounds continue to be conjured in contemporary East Asia. Ultimately, this study discusses both the possibilities and the limits of a zainichi Korean subjectivity as a de-colonial tool for destabilizing national, colonial, and Cold War ideologies.

Anxieties of mixed-raceness in Kenya: perspectives from music, media, and novelistic representations

This article argues that historical issues that shaped racial relations in Kenya continue to undermine mixed-raceness in social imaginaries. It links the Kenyan public’s stigmatisation of mixed-race couples and mixed-race individuals to colonial histories of oppression and dispossession of subordinated races. The subconscious colonial memories ventilate through anxieties against mixed raceness in the media, music, and novelistic representations. In the representations, one notices mixed persons’ struggles to belong in a society that links them to oppressors. The article further nuances representations that exhibit delusions of racial purity of communities traceable to ‘distant’ mixed raceness and their ironical contempt of those whose mixed raceness is traceable to a recent past. Thus, memories of racial injustices and imbalances can have lasting effects on mixed raceness whereby anxieties against the category may suggest resistance against racial inequalities.

Postproduction, Archive, and Memory in the Work of César Schofield Cardoso

The author proposes an analysis of the ways in which the memory and heritage of colonialism are broken down and critically appraised through artistic speech and the device of a poetic journey in the audiovisual installations of the Cape Verdean artist César Schofield Cardoso. Her starting points are two of Cardoso’s key works: Repúblika (2014), created for the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the death of Amílcar Cabral, and Ferrugem (Rust), exhibited at the Tarrafal labor camp in 2017. She explores how these pieces act as political gestures of decolonization through art and reviews their relevance within the artistic landscape of Cape Verde.

Colonial Incarceration and Selective Memories: What Is Remembered? Who Is Forgotten? The Case of Peasant Women Deported to São Nicolau (Angola, 1969)

ABSTRACTThe colonial judicial system was quite different from ‘the rule of law’ as applied in the European countries. In the history of colonial rule in Africa, collective punishment was among the more brutal and widespread forms of repression, but it has got little historical attention. This is probably due to the banality of those practices but also to the fact that their victims were not distinguished intellectuals, church or union leaders, workers on strike or radical students. They were, most of the time, peasants from places distant from political capitals, rarely mentioned in newspapers, unknown to those committed to defending more ‘important’ political prisoners. And after the independence of their countries those victims of collective punishment and imprisonment have rarely received much attention as part of the anticolonial resistance usually praised in commemorative ceremonies and patriotic discourses. This paper uses an (almost) forgotten episode of Portuguese colonial violence in Angola, involving hundreds of peasant women and their children, to question the way societies selectively remember victims of repression.

The Influence of Anxiety: A Study of the Postcolonial Memory and its Influence on the Indian Postcolonial Research

My paper, is the compilation of the research findings obtained from interviews taken of various Postcolonial scholars. It spans the three generations of Postcolonial scholars including myself. It involves the study of two kinds of memory: firstly, the acquired memory or the memories that these scholars have, either from their own first hand experiences or from the information they had received from their forefathers who had the direct experience of this colonial past; secondly the collective formative memory or the memories they formed as a postcolonial nation from their school books, popular culture, film, theatre and literature. My paper aims to trace as to what extent, if at all, the effect of such colonial hangover has an impact on their research works. My paper would primarily be addressing the issue of the influence of colonial memory from three perspectives: the impact and result on the first generation Postcolonial scholars who grew up just at the brink of Indian independence; the impact and result on the second generation Postcolonial scholars who grew up during 1980’s and 90’s and who had access to the colonial memories from the oral narratives of their forefathers; the impact and result on today’s Postcolonial scholars who hardly have any colonial memories except what they had obtained from the text books and popular media. The result has some autobiographical elements as being a Postcolonial scholar myself, I have not been beyond the studies.

EVERY RUSTY NAIL IS SACRED, EVERY RUSTY NAIL IS GOOD: CONFLICT ARCHAEOLOGY, REMOTE SENSING, AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AT A NORTHWEST COAST SETTLER FORT

Archaeological investigations at Miners’ Fort, a mid-nineteenth-century settler fort located in the US Northwest, is part of a larger inquiry into conflict archaeology and historical memory of settler colonialism and warfare in the region. Built by gold miners, Miners’ Fort overlooked the Pacific Ocean and was used significantly when the Tututni, Joshua, and Mikonotunne besieged it for a month during the Rogue River War of 1855–1856. Archaeological excavation targeting anomalies discovered through remote sensing revealed several features in context, including an indigenously designed hearth built by one or more Native American women who were wives of some settlers. Public archaeology created an opportunity for community building that included descendants of both settlers and indigenous people of the area. Although excavation is destructive to archaeological deposits, by implementing remote sensing and involving the public in the excavation process, a more accurate historical narrative can emerge, as well as a sense of ownership and inclusion among diverse stakeholders.

Dos Museus dos Descobrimentos às Exposições do Império: o Corpo Colonial em Portugal

Resumo: O artigo se insere nos debates sobre a memória do colonialismo português, analisando-a a partir da Interseccionalidade entre Gênero, Raça e Sexualidade. São investigadas as narrativas em torno do Corpo Colonial dos Museus dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, a fim de perceber em que (des)(re)constroem discursos das Exposições do Império Português. A metodologia segue uma inspiração na analítica foucaultiana dos discursos: a arque-genealogia. Como técnicas de pesquisa, são utilizadas: observação direta e entrevistas, no caso dos Museus; e a análise documental histórica em fontes secundárias, no caso das Exposições. As conclusões apontam que há uma tentativa de deslocamento discursivo por parte dos Museus, os quais buscam dissociar Descobrimentos e Colonização. No entanto, há elementos discursivos que se repetem, como a nudez e o exotismo, reconstruindo a Colonialidade dos Corpos de origem não europeia.