Memories Of Violence Research Articles

Genres of Witnessing: Narrative, Violence, Generations

ABSTRACT Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory’s insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared with future generations. If much attention has been paid to the narrative forms that traumatic plots take from the perspective of adults, our work is motivated by a fidelity to the voice of the child, and the ways in which they piece a world together from the debris of social life that they find around them. We are interested in exploring what this piecing together of the world might reveal in terms of the embedding of memories of violence in the textures of everyday life.

Living without closure: memories of counter-insurgency and secret killings in Assam

ABSTRACT The experiences of insurgency and counter-insurgency in Northeast region of India have left behind some of the brutal memories of violence. This paper intends to explain how fear and suspicion in societies under counter-insurgency build up the narrative of silence and secrecy when the state and the security forces allegedly commit excesses against civilians. For this, the paper revisits the ‘secret killings’ of the family members, close aides, and sympathizers of the insurgent organization United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) between 1998 and 2001 in Assam. Personal narratives question the official statistics of deaths and explore the conditions under which silence is manufactured in cases of violence which do not qualify for legal evidence. The motivation then is to disrupt the silence in absence of closure to those affected. From interviews conducted with sixty individuals representing multiple backgrounds, violence and power emerge to be integral in understanding secret killings in Assam.

Declining ethnic relations in post-war Liberia: The transmission of violent memories

AbstractMore than ten years after the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its Final Report, there has been no implementation of the recommendations proffered. This article focuses on post-conflict memorialization, the TRC's strategy to engender collective remembering, and a set of State-led actions designed to teach future generations about the past violence with a view to preventing relapse into violent conflict. Both the constructive and destructive patterns of remembering that have evolved in the wake of the government's silence since the release of the recommendations will be analyzed.

Memories of violence in spiritual renewal

ABSTRACTSpectres of the 1984 violence against Sikhs and Ahmadis in the Indian and Pakistan border areas of Punjab are fascinating mediums for Michael Nijhawan’s new book, The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations: Violence, Memory and Agency. Though violence against Sikhs and Ahmadis had taken place before, Nijhawan suggests the scale of violence in 1984 altered social imaginaries and biographies of migration, which youths inherit and de-inherit in today’s precarious diasporas. Beyond ‘postmemory,’ this essay considers memories of violence in mediated messianic spatiotemporalities, ethical forms of agency, and spiritual renewal, which emerge so strongly in Nijhawan's research.

Memories of violence: Of emotional geographies and planning in post-Partition Delhi, 1948–62

ABSTRACTThis article engages with the messy streets of post-Partition Delhi. The author engages with a relatively understudied facet of the Partition: its impact on the everyday life of a city. Through physical sites which carried imprints of former inhabitants, to letters that refugees wrote to express their anxieties, the article constructs identities that were forged in the everyday life of Delhi. Questions of ownership, self-making, and governance help answer how the trauma of riots was negotiated in mundane paper trails. The essay is divided into two parts. The first half describes the emotional topography of the city, with an eye on the aspirations of the refugee. It describes the emotional city the refugee encountered. The second half addresses the way the refugee talks back and creates her own emotional landscape. The first master plan of the city enacted in 1962 provides the context for this conversation.

Wearable cameras, in-visible breasts: intimate spatialities of feminist research with wearable camcorders in Istanbul

Video-based wearable technology such as actioncams and optical head mount devices lead to various kinds of visualities and interrelations between camera vision, bodily visibility, immersive viewing and public visibility of the body-wearing-the-camera. These interrelations are not neutral and in order to claim wearable visual technology's potential for critical, feminist research, it is essential to problematise the contexts and frictions that precede and/or surface during and after the bodily experience of shooting with a wearable device in a research context. In this article, I problematise the common approaches to video-based wearable research technology by engaging participants' particular ethical, emotional, political positions and embodiment of camera's prosthetic vision during mobile visual research in Istanbul. This work was realised as part of the ongoing study on memories of violence and wellbeing in Istanbul and the specific questions that guide my discussion are: what wearable camcorders as mobile research tool do to bodies; how they co-constitute the norms of visibility, movement and gender of particular bodies and what practices and emotional responses emerge from these intersections. A major aim, therefore, is to situate the camera experience as in physical and social relations of moving, seeing and be seen as gendered bodies in specific (research) settings. Drawing on ‘the embodied nature of all vision’, the article provides a close-up, chest-specific analysis of the implications of doing wearable visual research and presents breast-space as an emergent research site in my Istanbul study.

The beach as (hu)man limit in Gold Coast narrative fiction

Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist’s paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker’s Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet and Matthew Condon’s Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one’s own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.

Reawakening in Yoorana: Glitch and the Australian Gothic film

ABSTRACTSeason 1 of ABC Australia television series Glitch applies Gothic themes to a modern, semi-rural Australian context. Borrowing heavily from Australian gothic cinema, the series sees several characters returning from the dead in the fictional town of Yoorana. Each returnee is from a different time period in Australia’s history, returning from the time of colonial settlement through to the more recent past. Each returnee’s revelations play to Glitch’s Gothic narrative of violent memories, personal yet representative of Australia’s history, coming back to haunt the current residents of Yoorana. Much like seminal Australian Gothic films, such as Wake in Fright, the television show inverts clichéd notions of ‘Australian-ness’ and presents them as grotesque. In particular, the show represents a crisis of Australian masculinity.

The Xenophobia, Racial Identity and the Crisis of Federalism in East Pakistan

The racial identity of Bengal played a significant role in shaping and determining the political discourse in South Asia at different periods of history. The most violent expression of this identity occurred during the 1970-71 crisis between East and West wings of Pakistan and culminated in the dismemberment of Pakistan and the emergence of separate independent state of Bangladesh with the support of India. This violent episode of assertion of racial identity was marked with drama, trauma and tragedy. The tragic memories of violence are still alive and affect the attitude of people and state as well. While for Bengalis the war of 1971 was a war of liberation and deliverance from tyrannical and exploitative rule of West Pakistan, for Indians the victory was a great national achievement and a good lesson and settling of score with Pakistan. For Pakistanis it was the act of betrayal from Bengalis and an Indian conspiracy. An attempt will be made in this study to understand the development of racial identity in East Bengal and its culmination in armed conflict of 1971. An effort will be made to understand the xenophobia of Bengali nationalists and the xenophobic response of Pakistani military. The study will trace historical and structural roots of this phenomenon to understand the way this xenophobia was politicized and to understand the dynamics of this crisis through application of xenophobic response of conflicting identities. Xenophobia, in East Pakistan, acquired the general character and was institutionalized and manifested itself in mass scale. This study will be an effort to approach this problem through historical perspective; where the humans’ social behavior determined and guided the political conduct of a certain community.

The Memory of Violence and the Narrative Repersentation in Navels of Kim Yu-jeong

The Memory of Violence and the Narrative Repersentation in Navels of Kim Yu-jeong

The Memory Landscapes of “1965” in Semarang

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the formation of memory in relation to the mass violence of the years 1965/68 in Semarang. This port city offers a unique opportunity for studying both the violence of 1965/68 and its long-term effects from a local to a global level. Once nicknamed the “red city” and famous for its Chinese community, the events of “1965” deeply affected the city. Many (alleged) communists from Semarang were sent to prison camps in other parts of Indonesia, while many members of the Chinese community sought refuge abroad. As a result, the mass violence in Semarang continues to reverberate not only in the city, but also throughout and beyond Indonesia. The article is based on the results of two workshops in Semarang, during which a group of Indonesian students studied the memory landscapes of “1965” by combining oral history with site observations. The central question is how the memory of violence, shaped primarily by everyday interaction and communication, relates on the one hand to the urban space in which the violence largely took place, and on the other hand to the official state narratives that deliberately created memory gaps regarding this violence. We focus on three sites representative of different aspects of the mass violence of the years 1965/68 in Semarang: the Sarekat Islam building, the Mangkang mass grave and the Chinese Karang Turi school. Scrutinizing these three sites has taught us that people in Semarang make sense of “1965” through stories and activities that, while interacting with the official narratives, include the missing and the dead. Communism might have been “crushed” with success, but the Indonesian state clearly failed to eradicate the memory of state-supported anti-communist violence.

Collective Identity, Memories of Violence, and Belief in a Biased International Criminal Court: Evidence from Kenya

International judicial institutions consistently struggle to build diffuse support. This struggle is particularly visible at the International Criminal Court (ICC), which aims to hold high-level perpetrators accountable for grave atrocity crimes. In ICC situation countries, the push for accountability invites an 'us vs. them' narrative, which frames the ICC as an outsider court set on intruding in sovereign affairs. When the ICC charged political operatives with organizing horrendous post-election violence in 2007-8, Kenyan leaders publicly advanced a conspiratorial narrative that the Court is a neo-colonial institution biased against Africa. This article uses unique survey data collected throughout Kenya to seek answers to the following question: which citizens are most likely to believe the story that the ICC is politically biased? The psychological approach we advance predicts that people negotiate between collective identities and personal experience when evaluating narratives about the performance of international institutions in their country. Ruling-party co-ethnics are far more likely to agree that the ICC is biased against Africans, as are members of other groups who think the ICC is a threat to Kenyan sovereignty. However, those with a personal experience of post-election violence are much less likely to agree that the ICC is biased against Africa, even if they are members of or associate with the ethnic groups in power. Among other things, this implies that the ICC is more supported by those who have borne the brunt of political violence.

Dealing with Trauma Experience and Political Violence Memory

Dealing with Trauma Experience and Political Violence Memory

Narrating palimpsestic spaces

The term ‘palimpsest’ refers to medieval manuscripts that have been multiply erased and inscribed with the overlapping texts of successive scribes. More recently and amongst academics, the term has become a metaphor for describing the city, including both the physical urban form as well as memories and experiences of everyday urban life. The palimpsest offers a way of thinking not only about urban transformation, where new and repurposed structures exist alongside the old, but also changes in how the city is experienced, or how life stories are written upon and rewrite existing spaces. This paper focuses on the latter. Though the palimpsest metaphor has been used to describe material transformations of the urban, the question that this paper raises is: how can the notion of the palimpsest inform methodological approaches to researching how the city is lived and seen? Collaborative, digital storytelling that combines images, narration, and sound can provide a method that emphasises the polyvocality and multi-temporality that the term palimpsest implies. A palimpsestic approach to digital storytelling, as a visual and narrative method, gestures at places as open to future readings and inscriptions. This is relevant to all cities, but perhaps most obviously in cities where historical narratives, memories of violence, and questions over the future political direction of the country in which the city is located are all highly contested. To illustrate these points, this paper draws upon research conducted with young people in Beirut, Lebanon as part of a wider study about how youth experience citizenship and belonging in divided societies.

Memórias violentas: a persistência da vivência traumática nos vácuos do esquecimento

This paper aims to reflect on violence related to destructiveness, emphasizing the paradox that the barbaric and the civilized coexist in human nature, and it is also considered one of the social symptoms of current days, which produces repetitive circuits fed by hatred, resentment and segregation. These circuits continue and give the impression of being hardly broken. In order to understand how these circuits are formed, it is carried out an analysis of the traumatic experience that, due to their untimely character, produces violent memories, especially provoked by gaps caused due to forgetfulness or its opposite, and persist in a stream of continuous images over a time shown as an extension of an uninterrupted present. People who have been exposed to violent situations of different forms are marked by a state of impotence which results in monotony. This condition can be a trigger for the practice of violence glimpsed as a possibility of change in subjective position, i.e., it is solving the violence suffered by violent actions, making reverberate the repetitive circuit. a para solucao da violencia sofrida por intermedio de acoes violentas, fazendo reverberar o circuito repetitivo.

Mapping the self: challenges of insider research in a riot-affected city and strategies to improve data quality

Ethnic riots in India rarely lead to convictions of perpetrators and redress for victims. By implication, antagonisms prevail years after violence has ceased and victims often find themselves sharing everyday spaces with their attackers. The task of identifying the risk factors leading to ethnic violence as well as the nuances of coexistence for individuals ridden with memories of violence and prejudice is rife with methodological and ethical challenges. Concerns surrounding data quality are enhanced when the researcher is also an insider. In a study spanning 26 months (undertaken between 2010 and 2015), I examine the challenges of an insider researcher in the context of Hindu–Muslim violence that occurred in Gujarat in 2002, and offer techniques to improve data quality. Strategies include the cross-verification of sources within official data; interviewing respondents in group and individual settings to address the attitudinal fallacy; and employing respondent-empowered cognitive maps. I argue that visual data, such as cognitive maps, enable a better understanding of abstract social concepts and also facilitate a balance between distance and involvement for the insider researcher.

Collective Identity, Memories of Violence, and Belief in a Biased International Criminal Court: Evidence from Kenya

Collective Identity, Memories of Violence, and Belief in a Biased International Criminal Court: Evidence from Kenya

Collective memory of violence of the female brown body: a decolonial feminist public pedagogy engagement with the feminicides

Feminists have consistently engaged with ontological and epistemological issues about what counts as knowledge, based on whose worldview, and what knowledge and worldviews remain unrecognised or ignored. Utilising Mexicana and Chicana fictional and conceptual writings and public art installations on the Juárez feminicides, the article focuses on the ontological, epistemological and pedagogical significance of collective memory. From the mid-twentieth century Mexican feminist playwright Elena Garro and the contemporary work of Chicana feminist Alicia Gaspar de Alba, I examine the legacy of collective memory that underlies Mexicana and Chicana feminist conceptualisation of gender violence. In doing so, the article first draws attention to the ontological significance of collective memory to contemporary understanding of the feminicides; then discusses how knowledge is inscribed on the female brown body; and ends with the notion that decolonial feminist public pedagogies are one way of educating about and disrupting dominant discourses about the feminicides and other issues.

De-silencing the Past: Traumatic War Memories in Zimbabwean Narratives

The contradictions and traumas of the national liberation war in Zimbabwe (1966-1979) as well as the horrors and violence that marked that troubled period are conveyed from different perspectives by the Zimbabwean writer Alexander Kanengoni in Echoing Silences (1997) and by the British writer Alexandra Fuller in Scribbling the Cat. Travels with an African Soldier (2004). In the post-independence period, Zimbabwean narratives disclose the pain and suffering associated with the liberation struggle and the birth of the new nation; the search for identity in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, a country deeply fractured by colonial rule, combines personal experience and historical memory. Although a sense of failure and loss pervades both narratives, the painful process of de-silencing the past generates a cathartic effect, paving the path for healing and reconciliation . DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-31 Bibliography Chan, Stephen. 2005. The Memory of Violence: Trauma in the Writings of Alexander Kanengoni and Yvonne Vera and the Idea of Unreconciled Citizenship in Zimbabwe. Third World Quarterly , 26, 2: 369-382. Chiwome, Emmanuel & Zifikile Mguni. 2000. Individual Identity, Ethnicity and Nation- Building: An Exploration of Historical Characters in two Zimbabwean War and Independence Novels. Journal of Cultural Studies , 2, 1: 160-179. Dodgson-Katiyo, Pauline. 2009. In the Enemy’s Camp. Women Representing Male Violence in Zimbabwe’s Wars. Stella Borg Barthet ed. Shared Waters. Soundings in Postcolonial Literatures . Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 60-74. Emenyonu, Ernest N. ed. 2008. War in African Literature Today 26 . Woodbridge-Ibadan: James Currey-Nebn. Fuller, Alexandra. 2003 [2001]. Don ’ t Let ’ s Go to the Dogs Tonight. An African Childhood . New York-Toronto: Random House. Fuller, Alexandra. 2004. Scribbling the Cat. Travels with an African Soldier . New York: The Penguin Press. Harold-Barry, David ed. 2005. Zimbabwe. The Past is the Future: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis . Harare: Weaver Press. Harris, Ashleigh. 2005. Writing Home: Inscriptions of Whiteness/Descriptions of Belonging in White Zimbabwean Memoir-Autobiography. Robert Muponde & Ranka Primorac eds. Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture . Harare: Weaver Press, 103-118. Kaarsholm, Preben. 2005. Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Developmment of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe. Robert Muponde & Ranka Primorac eds. 2005. Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture . Harare: Weaver Press, 3-24. Kanengoni, Alexander. 1997. Echoing Silences . Harare: Baobab Books. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma . Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Lewis, Simon. 2003. White Women Writers and Their African Invention . Gainesville: University Press of Florida. McDermott Hughes, David. 2009. Whiteness in Zimbabwe. Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Muponde, Robert & Ranka Primorac eds. 2005. Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture . Harare: Weaver Press. Norridge, Zoe. 2008. The Need to Go Further? Dedication & Distance in the War Narratives of Alexandra Fuller & Alexander Kanengoni. Ernest N. Emenyonu ed. War in African Literature Today 26 . Woodbridge-Ibadan: James Currey-Nebn, 103-111. Primorac, Ranka. 2006. The Place of Tears. The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe . London-New York: Tauris. Primorac, Ranka & Stephen Chan eds. 2007. Zimbabwe in Crisis. The International Response and the Space of Silence . London-New York: Routledge. Rauwerda, Antje M. 2009. Exile Encampments: Whiteness in Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier . Journal of Commonwealth Literature , 44, 2: 51-64. Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies. Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma . New York: Columbia University Press. Simoes da Silva, Tony. 2005. Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, Race and History. Third World Quarterly , 26, 2: 471-478. Soyinka, Wole. 1999. The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness . New York: Oxford University Press. Tal, Kali. 1996. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vambe, Maurice T. 2004. African Oral Story-telling and the Zimbabwean Novel in English . Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Whitlock, Gillian. 2000. The Intimate Empire. Reading Women ’ s Autobiography . London-New York: Cassell. Zhuwarara, Rino. 2001. An Introduction to Zimbabwean Literature in English . Harare: College Press.

Feeling the boundaries of normality – ‘tristeza’ and the restitution of community in the aftermath of violence

This article considers the impact of violence on the circulation of affect in a community of relocated internally displaced people in Guatemala shortly after the end of the conflict. It argues that the affective economy of the community of Primavera binds people through feelings of sadness or tristeza that define both the contours of the community and normalised behaviour within. Violence claimed many lives, destroyed communities and challenged deep-rooted cultural assumptions about what it meant to be a decent human being. Through feelings of tristeza people were able to feel their way back to a sense of normality after living 14 years in the jungle. Tristeza stuck to certain actions, actors and social conditions, realigned subject positions and social conduct. This opened up the possibility for the emergence of a new sociality grounded in collective affective memories of violence and loss.