Abuse Of Memory Research Articles

The Politics of Yehuda Amichai's Aesthetic Camouflage: Jerusalem and the Settler-Colonial Gaze

Drawing on the notion of aesthetic camouflage the uses and abuses of memory and forgetfulness, this article seeks to examine and interrogate the ways in which Israel’s ‘national poet’ Yehuda Amichai (born ‘Ludwig Pfeuffer’, 1924–2000) relies heavily on the imperialist Zionist ideology to justify and legitimise the settler-colonial existence of Israel from a European and Zionist hegemonic perspective. The postcolonial image of Jerusalem, as mystified by Amichai’s poetry, signifies an apolitical and ahistorical Orientalist image of Jerusalem as being ‘a troubled sacred and mythical city’ claimed by clashing monolithic religions including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In other words, the systematic and historical absence of Palestinian people in Amichai’s poetry is ostensibly bound up with what Edward Said calls ‘the functional absence of ‘native people’ in Palestine’.

Images for the Interpretation of the Past: Uses and Abuses of Memory in Documentary Film*

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the number of theoretical studies exploring social, collective, historical, and media memory from a wide range of perspectives, including sociol...

Memory abuse, violence and the dissolution of Yugoslavia: a theoretical framework for understanding memory in conflict

This paper explores the term “memory abuse” as an analytical framework to understanding politically constructed mnemonic tensions in the years preceding Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Here, “memory abuse” represents an intersection between the literatures of memory and conflict studies and refers to the intentional manipulation of memory beyond an intangible threshold, past which violence inevitably results. Drawing on the typologies of collective and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I argue that the political mobilisation of both distant and recent memories in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s to a significant degree contributed to the outbreak of war in the early 1990s, and contemporary political actors have perpetuated an abuse of memory that has limited reconciliatory outcomes in the region since the end of conflict. In reformulating the memories of, inter alia, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the atrocities of the Second World War to fit nationalist narratives, political actors across Yugoslavia's republics sought to profit from forced divisions that ultimately brought about the country's end.

La Memoria como campo disciplinar. Algunos problemas teóricos y políticos

Memory as human need is linked to modernity and to relate with understand the fast pace of life, her transience and fragility. It is therefore no wonder the development of a disciplinary field called composed by many academics, students and resources. In countries emerging from traumatic experiences of state terrorism leads to the analysis of repression and violation of human rights. The study of the past can seem fair and democratic. But the matter is so simple? The purpose of this article is to discuss the approach that has been given to the subject of memory and question the assumption of it as a disciplinary field autonomous, reflect on its meaning and prevented excesses such as those mentioned by Todorov, abuses of memory, preventing abuses what inhibit the reflection and debate on memory and its possible meanings.

The Fragility of Identity in the Age of Manufacture

This essay begins with a discussion of how globalization poses a threat to identity. To support this claim, the second part reflects on the pathologies of the city, as characterized by Paul Ricoeur, with a particular emphasis on memory. Globalization’s effects are clearly manifest in the scale of the city, and as such, Ricoeur considers the pathology of the city an expression of global society’s pathology. Because for Ricoeur, identity is always narrative identity, and narratives are repositories of memories, the question of identity is also a question of the use and abuse of memory. The third part examines the maintenance of identity, particularly collective identity, in the age of manufacture and considers the place of the more vulnerable nations and their cities in the global age.

A memória do imigrante japonês no Brasil e de seus descendentes a partir da literatura: o Nihonjin de Oscar Nakasato

The present article intend to analyze the memories of the Japanese immigrant in Brazil parting from the romance Nihonjin, of Oscar Nakasato. For this, will be used the tools of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of memory, specially the relation between individual and collective memory, and the abuses of memory. Therefore, the literature will serve as object to be studied with the philosophical tools about memory

The Use and abuse of memory: interpreting World War II in contemporary European politics

Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about and allusions to World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction. This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent academic inquiries. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and area study specialists contribute wide-ranging theoretical paradigms, disciplinary frameworks, and methodological approaches. The volume focuses on how, where, and to what effect World War II has been remembered. The editors discuss how World War II in particular continues to be a point of reference across the political spectrum and not only in Europe. It will be of interest for those interested in popular culture, World War II history, and national identity studies.

Anchors in Time: Historic Memory and Representation

Spanish cinema during the transition to democracy developed a series of policies on memory with the aim of proposing a revision of the official history that had been established under Franco. Spain is now at a point in history when many of the policies of the transition are in crisis and when approaches to historical memory have begun to question what the transition concealed as a result of its pact of silence. This article offers an analysis of a series of films produced between 2002 and 2011 that open up a new debate on historical memory. Most of these films return to the Spanish Civil War to tell stories that had been hitherto concealed, such as the brutal repression in Franco’s prisons. Drawing from some of the ideas set forth by Tzevan Todorov regarding the abuses of memory, this article attempts to analyse the new discourses being developed about the past and the way in which they attempt to establish new connections with the political reality of the present.

September 11, 2001: Remember Forgetting

In History, Memory, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur speaks about the paradox of memory that appears as "an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory—and of forgetting." In this essay, I reflect on this paradox and, in particular, on what needs to be forgotten in popular imaginaries as the very condition for commemorating it. My intent is to show how dominant narratives about "9/11" enable abuses of memory and what is lost in the process. Although I don't offer a determinate conclusion, my point is to suggest that what we lose is a fuller awareness of ourselves and others.

The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology

In recent years, studies of memory have blossomed in the humanities. (Klein 2000, Radstone 2000, Zelizer 1995) 2 In anthropology in particular, a vast number of scholars are currently occupied with research about memory. (Candau 1998, Climo and Cattell 2002, Olick and Robbins 1998) The list of contributions in this recent field of research is too voluminous to even begin to report. In every new anthropological publication, there is another article about social, cultural or material memory. Anthropology of Memory has become a respected course of many American and European University programs, something that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Also, conferences and workshops are being organized with a special focus on memory issues, something that would also have been unthinkable 20 years ago.3 However, they are many unsettled areas in the field of memory studies. Historians have indeed begun warning us against the "terminological profusion" and the "semantic overload" of the notion (Kansteiner 2002, Klein 2000). Gillis observes that "memory seems to be losing precise meaning in proportion to its growing rhetorical power" (Gillis 1984: 3). As historian Jay Winter cogently writes, [End Page 197] "The only fixed point is the near ubiquity of the term [memory]. Just as we use words like love and hate without ever knowing their full or shared significance, so are we bound to go on using the term "memory," the historical signature of our generation" . (Winter 2000: 13) From the idea that "a society or a culture can remember and forget" (Are not only individuals capable of remembering?)4 to the widely used notion of "vicarious memory"5 and the questionable validity of the notion of memory in approaching certain trans-culturalcontexts,6 a broad range of fundamental epistemological issues are still to be raised with regard to memory. The point that I would like to emphasize here concerns the "danger of overextension" of the concept. A concept losing precise meaning, memory can also be approached as an expansive notion. For Gedi and Elam, "'collective memory' has become the all-pervading concept which in effect stands for all sorts of human cognitive products generally" (Gedi & Elam 1996: 40). In particular, historians have already underscored the risks of entanglement of memory and identity (Gillis 1994, Megill 1998). Some anthropologists, too, started expressing concerns about the "dangers of overextension that are inherent in the current boom of memory" (Fabian 1999: 51). For Fabian, the "concept of memory may become indistinguishable from either identity or culture" (ibid: 51). Jonathan Boyarin concurs, noting that "identity and memory are virtually the same" (Boyarin 1994: 23). In this essay, I contend that the current usage of the notion by anthropologists can be a source of confusion as it tends to encompass many features of the notion of culture itself. I argue that this process of conceptual extension leading to the entanglement of memory and culture merits careful scrutiny as it tells us a great deal about the anthropological project. Needless to say, I will raise many questions and give very few answers. This piece should be taken as an epistemological challenge rather than a pessimistic reproach. Memory in Anthropology: a Historical Perspective It is unfortunate that there has not been yet a history, a genealogy of the concept of memory in anthropology, whereas the ongoing obsession with memory in the humanities has been abundantly documented. In a powerful article, Klein reminds us that [End Page 198] "Memory grew incredibly marginal, and in 1964 The Dictionary of the Social Sciences claimed that the word verged on extinction [...] The 1968 Edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences declined to define memory at all, despite the luxury of stretching its contents out for 7 volumes. By 1976 [...] Raymond Williams's classic study, Keywords, [...] ignored memory. [...] Little more that two decades separate memory's virtual disappearance and triumphal return" . (Klein 2000: 131) To explain this triumphal return, historian Jay Winter has shown that there...

The Uses and Abuses of Memory

The Uses and Abuses of Memory

On the use and abuse of memory: habermas, "anamnestic solidarity," and the historikerstreit

on the use and abuse of memory: habermas, "anamnestic solidarity," and the historikerstreit

The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and the Discourse of Bitburg

*This paper was delivered as a special presentation at MIT on November 12, 1985. I would like to express my thanks to Inez Hedges of Northeastern University and Michael Geisler of MIT for organizing the lecture and encouraging me to present it in that forum. Also, I would like to acknowledge the productive impetus offered in conversation by Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch. Finally, I want to credit the UCI Committee on Research whose generous Faculty Research Fellowship provided the material support that enabled me to write this essay during the fall months of 1985.