Sites Of Memory Research Articles

Neither words nor materiality are enough: The role of testimony in the preservation of an Argentine clandestine detention center

The essay analyzes the efforts to preserve Club Atlético, a site that served as a clandestine detention, torture, and killing center under the Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976–1983). Located in the south part of Buenos Aires, Club Atlético is a memory site in ruins: its materiality challenges architectural design conventions. Examining (1) historical artifacts, the (2) archeological excavation, and (3) a virtual reconstruction of Club Atlético, this article reveals the multiple ways in which a site of memory can be represented, beyond the traditional memorial. Focusing on these three scales, it explores the relationship between the many written and oral survivors’ testimonies and the material evidence retrieved from the site, while also recognizing the tensions that emerge from Club Atlético’s dual function as archeological site and space of memory. Ultimately, the article reveals, how testimony is used to draw physical and metaphorical boundaries between the site as a place of memory and the site as heritage.

Producing Truth: Public Memory Projects in Post-Violence Societies

ABSTRACT: How do societies remember historical political violence? We draw on an original dataset of more than 150 memorialization projects proposed by truth commissions in 28 post-violence countries, from 1970 to 2018. These projects include the removal of monuments, installation of museums, inauguration of national days of remembrance, and more. Truth commission recommendations data allows us to not only consider memory sites once established, but also to examine blueprints for the types of memory that could have been made. We develop a typology and inductively generate a theory of the political contests and conflicts that different memory projects are likely to trigger—contests and conflicts that we expect influence the likelihood of project initiation and completion. We conduct an initial probe of the theory using our new data. In so doing, we offer the first systematic, global study of setting and implementing the memorialization agenda in post-violence societies.

Toppling statues and making space: prospects for anti-racist cultural activism

ABSTRACT Statues have long been recognized as impositions of a particular past that legitimize a power-laden present. Consequently, toppling statues, and engaging with the space they once occupied, opens up the possibility of new and multiple narratives. This article takes this moment of possibility as its starting point. Drawing from nine case studies in five countries, and from thirty-one interviews with cultural activists and other stakeholders, we identify three patterns that emerge in the aftermath of removing statues. First, removing a statue changes the hegemonic narrative of the space it once occupied. Second, stakeholders resist the imposition of a singular new narrative on that space. Third, policymakers and institutions attempt to regulate the space and the narratives it carries. We argue, further, that whilst attempts to impose a new, single narrative on the same site are widely met with obstacles, empty plinths become multivocal sites of memory in their own right.

Drone photogrammetry as a tool for modern conflict archaeology: a case study of a Second World War armament bunker in Bavaria

ABSTRACT Within this paper, a case study on the application of drone photogrammetry at the Second World War armament bunker Weingut I is presented. The aim of the project was the mapping of the preserved remains in advance to the installation of a memorial site. In particular, the preserved concrete arch and one of the ventilation shafts were mapped by this method in high quality. Therefore, even small details of the building structure as well as several damage spots needing remediation became visible. One important advantage of drone prospecting is an enhanced occupational safety and a cost and time reduction as no further manual resources are necessary. In areas without finalized clearing for Unexploded Ordnance, other manual survey method would be especially dangerous. By comparing the photogrammetric model of the bunker Weingut I with corresponding ALS Digital Surface Models (DSM) of varying resolution, the increase in information is shown.

More than Censorship: The Harm of Libricide

ABSTRACT Libricide, although often deemed an extreme instance of censorship, is altogether different. Censorship involves the suppression of particular books due to alleged inappropriate content; libricide refers to the intentional destruction of entire libraries. Understanding the differing motives recognizes that the library is more than the books it contains, and is instead an institution rooted in its history of selection and use by the local community. Over time, the library reflects the users’ identity, a reminder that any aggressor would wish to eliminate when the goal is pacification by erasure of a population’s memory and history. Prerequisites for an act of libricide—the spread of the access-for public library, the rise of an international movement for heritage preservation, and belief in the library as a site of collective memory—identify the first true act of libricide, the 1914 destruction of the Louvain Library.

Reframing Difficult Heritage? The Holocaust Monuments in Croatia

ABSTRACT The article focuses on two monuments in Croatia that commemorate the Second World War and the Holocaust. The first is the Stone Flower monument (Kameni cvet/cvijet) located at the Jasenovac Memorial Site, designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and unveiled in 1966. The second is the Tangible Absence monument (Prisutna odsutnost/Memorial to Victims of the Holocaust and the Ustasha Regime), unveiled 77 years after the war’s end. It is located in the centre of Zagreb and was created by sculptor Dalibor Stošić and architect Krešimir Rogina. Both of these monuments are representative of how the official memory regarding the events of the Second World War is changing in Croatia. They reflect the internal social and political changes occurring within the territory of former Yugoslavia (now in this case Croatia). The main objectives of this text are to provide a comprehensive description of the monument creation process, highlight the meanings conveyed by these monuments, and to address the question of how new official forms of commemoration in Croatia respond to the global processes of reimagining Holocaust memory.

Making urban memory visible: the on-screen transformation of Beijing’s hutong districts during modernization (1940s–2010s)

Abstract As a vernacular dwelling form, the historical hutong districts in Beijing have represented local people’s traditional ways of living and thinking. However, in recent decades, such urban memories have dissipated as the old cityscape has gradually been overwritten by modernist, international-style designs. To ensure that locality and identity are not forgotten, this article examines the potential role of fiction films as a form of digital ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory), which not only archives but also evokes nostalgia for memories lost in urban transition. This interdisciplinary study rereads the extensive modernist transformation of Beijing’s historical hutong area through the lens of film (1940s–2010s), and thus brings a humanized, historical insight into this vernacular cityscape by focusing on reviving and strengthening the fading urban qualities.

The Rashid Theater in Baghdad: The Drama of a Nation

This article examines three main acts in the life of the Rashid Theater in Baghdad, one of Iraq's emblematic national institutions since its establishment in 1981. By applying the concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), I argue that this theater has contributed to the articulation of Iraqi national identity and has been a site of Iraqi national memory. I investigate the political and sociocultural impact of Iraqi oil wealth, showing how the Ba'th Party regime employed this resource in strengthening its ideology and propaganda using the theater. The roles that the Rashid Theater played in Iraq's state- and nation-building processes — through the geographical site it occupies, the aesthetic techniques developed there, and the performances staged there — have given it a crucial position in Iraq's cultural memory.

More than Pierogi and Pączki

Abstract In many urban areas in the diaspora, churches, schools, and ethnic businesses are routinely established to feed the needs of the community. One that has more than a century of history in such communities is the deli. It is the place where products, purveyors, and purchasers interact. But the Polish deli has long escaped the lens of scholars. No longer is this the case. While delis provide sustenance and Polish products to customers in the diaspora, they are also gathering places for the broader ethnic community and crucial sites of memory where people experience and exercise symbolic ethnicity. Additionally, in Ottawa and Toronto, Ontario, Canada, contrary to the deli-lost narrative, the deli has adapted and followed the movements of people out of the traditional ethnic neighborhood and into the suburbs in the two metropolitan areas.

Dark tourism goes underground: ghostly materialities of Japanese occupation in Datong, China

In north China, memorial museums are often associated with the suffering of victims of the Japanese occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945). The Datong Coal Mine Massacre Site Memorial Hall affords visitors opportunity to bear witness to atrocities at the hands of the occupiers. At the 10,000 men pit (wanrenkeng), where over 60,000 miners perished, visitors gaze at the corpses of dead miners in two deep pits, at harrowing photographs of excavated remains and at unnamed spirit tablets in the memorial hall and on the hillside above. The research brings together the spectrality of absent presence with the Chinese tradition of hungry ghosts as social actors. Referencing the newly available North China Railway Archive of photographs taken by the Japanese of everyday life on the Datong coalfields, read through a lens inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman, we aim to enrich the state-authorised narrative of victimization and humiliation with narratives of individual people. The photographs summon the survival, or afterlife, of those depicted, sometimes smiling into the camera. We suggest that the photographic archive may afford identification of miners, enabling their lives to be honoured as well as mourned and their ghosts to be appeased. Collaborative development of a traditional Hungry Ghost festival could fold memorial sites together with intangible cultural heritage to offer visitors opportunity to commemorate both death and life through integrating history with culture.

The Vitality of the Korčanica Memorial Landscape

<p class="Abstract" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The Korčanica Memorial Zone is a Yugoslav architectural heritage, one of the many World War II memorials and one of the rare preserved memorial sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Korčanica memorial of the former Partisan hospital is presented as historical landscape research. Through multi-layered, primarily cultural, social and economic aspects of the Bosnian Krajina territory development at a given time, the paper aims to its (re)integration in urban planning and landscape design, with public participation in local and regional development. Korčanica landscape historical contextualization, through available archival materials and periodicals research, information obtained by interviewing the sculptor and on-site analysis, provided a broad insight into heritage as a process within specific discourses, helping in current significance comprehension. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Universal landmark language in the current Korčanica landscape communicates intelligibly by timeless message design quality. The message sent in this place almost half a century ago, although now out of its political and socio-ideological context and currently unprotected, manages to reach the few casual or intentional visitors. Its vitality lies in the uniqueness of the response to, first of all, the historically significant place marking - for the birth of great social strength and unity, to the expected abstraction or symbolism beyond the national, as well as the response to the natural context of this hidden landmark, whereby in formulating such an answer in a sculpture scale, the author himself remains true to his expression. The landscape biography reading discovered many history lessons about the variable territory state, and many traces of social, economic, educational, cultural and technological layers of Grmeč Mountain history are (un)available in the current Korčanica landscape.</span></p>

“Canada Is Where You Belong. Poland Is The Past”: Images of Polish History and Culture in Heather Kirk’s Warsaw Spring

Polish characters appear in both mainstream Canadian books and children’s literature, but they usually function as either side characters or antagonists. The fiction of Heather Kirk is a noteworthy exception. This Canadian writer, who spent two years in Warsaw in the late 1970s working as a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, devoted her first two young adult problem novels, Warsaw Spring (2001) and A Drop of Rain (2004), to Polish Canadians and Polish history and culture. The article argues that in Warsaw Spring Kirk shows that the teenage protagonist has to experience the history and culture of the country of her ancestors before she can incorporate it into her own transcultural repository of memory. The article demonstrates how the experience of traveling to Poland and meeting with the representatives of the older generations, often survivors of the Second World War and communism, influences the formation of the protagonist’s Polish Canadian identity and cultural memory. Finally, the article shows that despite Kirk’s praiseworthy attempts to introduce young readers to Polish history, the way she portrays Poland is problematic because the country emerges as an exotic, post-Second World War heritage site of memory for Eva, a Canadian teenager whom all of the novel’s Poles seem to treat as superior.

Memory Assaults against Oblivion: Contrasting the Memory of Border Shifts in Cieszyn Silesia, Orawa, Spisz

This paper focuses on the memoryscapes of Cieszyn Silesia, Orawa and Spisz in a context of the border conflicts of the twentieth century. The regions located on the current Czech-Polish and Slovak-Polish border have lived through paralleled histories of the border demarcation after WWI, which was unprecedented there. In both cases the national minorities were left behind the border, outside of their home states. Their stories and memories are, however, not being researched together. This paper contrasts the patterns of memory production related to the border shifts in the landscape in both regions. Emphasis is placed on the memory sites, their narratives and memory activism related to the conflicting past. The results show that the main axes of both memory debates are contrasting. While the conflict over Cieszyn Silesia was most shaped by the short war in 1919, the lesser-known dispute over Orawa and Spisz was marked by numerous smaller incidents, assimilation efforts and a layer of post WWII violence. This has important consequences for the memory production. The other important differentiating factor is the scope of memory activism inside of the national minority group.

Correlational patterns of neuronal activation and epigenetic marks in the basolateral amygdala and piriform cortex following olfactory threat conditioning and extinction in rats.

Cumulative evidence suggests that sensory cortices interact with the basolateral amygdala (BLA) defense circuitry to mediate threat conditioning, memory retrieval, and extinction learning. The olfactory piriform cortex (PC) has been posited as a critical site for olfactory associative memory. Recently, we have shown that N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR)-dependent plasticity in the PC critically underpins olfactory threat extinction. Aging-associated impairment of olfactory threat extinction is related to the hypofunction of NMDARs in the PC. In this study, we investigated activation of neuronal cFos and epigenetic marks in the BLA and PC using immunohistochemistry, following olfactory threat conditioning and extinction learning in rats. We found highly correlated cFos activation between the posterior PC (pPC) and BLA. cFos was correlated with the degree of behavioral freezing in the pPC in both adult and aged rats, and in the BLA only in adult rats. Markers of DNA methylation 5 mC and histone acetylation H3K9/K14ac, H3K27ac, and H4ac exhibited distinct training-, region-, and age-dependent patterns of activation. Strong correlations of epigenetic marks between the BLA and pPC in adult rats were found to be a general feature. Conversely, aged rats only exhibited correlations of H3 acetylations between the two structures. Histone acetylation varied as a function of aging, revealed by a reduction of H3K9/K14ac and an increase of H4ac in aged brains at basal condition and following threat conditioning. These findings underscore the coordinated role of PC and BLA in olfactory associative memory storage and extinction, with implications for understanding aging related cognitive decline.

School trips to historical sites: students’ cognitive, affective and physical experiences from visits to Auschwitz

History can be experienced in many ways, including visits to historical sites. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly common for Swedish schools to organise trips for their students to historical sites; in this case, to concentration camps. This article analyses how cognitive, affective and physical experiences frame students’ interpretations of historical sites, and discusses how visits to historical sites might contribute to history education. The research questions we examine are as follows: What forms of experience did the students express, and how did these forms relate to each other? What implications might these expressed experiences pose for how teachers organise their teaching, including trips to Holocaust memorial sites? This article analyses seminars that comprised part of the examinable work in a course that involved a study trip to Auschwitz concentration camp. Empirical data were analysed using a model in which cognitive, affective and physical experiences were identified and described. The results demonstrate how cognitive, affective and physical responses interact with students’ experiences. Students described how the school trip contributed to their understanding of what is and is not possible to know, and to their will to influence society. Thus, the results indicate that physical encounters with historical sites can create new opportunities for students’ learning of history and the meaning making that comes from it.

“An Opportunity to Reclaim a Place”: A Critical Analysis of Media, Memory, and BLM Plaza DC

In June 2020, protestors in Washington, D.C. gathered peacefully outside the White House fences to protest George Floyd’s murder. Instead of acknowledging George Floyd’s murder or the racist policies that too often result in the death of Black men, women and children, former President Donald Trump staged a photo outside of St. John’s Church. Just a couple days later D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned local D.C. artists and D.C. government officials to paint in massive yellow letters on 16th Street just outside the White House, “Black Lives Matter.” Lipsitz (2011) asserted that Black expressive culture, like street murals, can function as “repositories of collective memory,” (pg. 60), and can also transform and activate community. Mass media play a critical role in the construction of sites of memory and repositories of collective memory, like Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. Informed by both Stuart Hall (1997) and Henry Lefebvre’s (1991) concepts of representation, this research will explore the role of newspaper, specifically the Black Press, in the representation of Black Lives Matter Plaza DC (BLM Plaza DC) and its formation of BLM Plaza’s collective memory. My analysis conveyed that the Black Press represented BLM Plaza DC, a site of Black expressive culture, as a Black spatial imaginary. The Black Press’ representation of BLM Plaza DC helped construct BLM Plaza DC as a Black memory-making project that decentered the white gaze and recalled the names of Black people from our past and present that have fought for social and racial justice.

Sites of Memory in Czechoslovak Silesia 1945–1948

Abstract The paper aims to describe and analyze the changes in public sites of memory in the multi-ethnic border region of Czechoslovak Silesia during the period of restoration of Czechoslovak sovereignty, between the fall of Nazism in May 1945 and the communist putsch in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. This research focuses on transformations and (dis)continuity of cults and symbols during that period, and on specifics and differences within the examined region with regard to ethnic and social structure of local population. Research is based primarily on the recorded agendas of state and district administrations, but preserved memorials and photographs or descriptions of vanished sites of memory also serve as important sources. After the expulsion of German population, the western part of the region was repopulated by settlers from various regions of East-Central Europe. Most of local German sites of memory vanished, with the partial exception of religious symbols and a few “apolitical” memorials. New monuments and memorials were dedicated mainly to personalities of Czech history in an effort to inculcate the “official” identity amongst the new-settlers. In the Ostrava coal basin, the new regime invoked the pre-war tradition of working-class identity and showed tolerance towards the sites of memory of the local Polish minority, except memorials related to the former Czech-Polish border conflicts. In the Hlučín region specifically, a strong pro-German narrative survived despite the “Czechization” efforts of state authorities. In general, the state-supported memory policy aimed to create the narrative of a “Slavic” and “socialist” Silesia, suppress the German past of the region, and weaken frictions between Czechs and Poles.

Remediated memory, digital witnessing and engagement: A qualitative analysis of the interactive documentary ‘The Space We Hold’

This paper sets out to study how creative documentary practices deconstruct traumatic memory, and then digitalise witnessing and engagement afforded by digital technology in the award-winning online interactive documentary The Space We Hold. Premised on culture memory studies and documentary studies, the social function of the documentary in reshaping narratives and forging public engagement has been discussed in this research. Interactive documentary becomes the unique visual artistic medium that allows the wider public to bear witness and emotionally experience the meaning of a traumatic past. This interactive project is reviewed as one site of memory to answer the main research question: ‘How does hypermediacy in an interactive documentary enable this non-linear storytelling structure to reframe the narrative and identity of a community that struggles for social justice?’. Along with presenting direct provocation through the innovative hypernarrative, this interactive documentary focuses on victims’ current lives, familial feelings and their contribution in pursuit of justice, showing depth in reflection and density in life. By exploring how The Space We Hold acts as a bear and agent to enhance audience engagement, I contend that the documentary is restyled as a space that allows individual memory to intertwine with collective memory through the combination of authorial expressivity and interactive participatory. In this pragmatic and reflexive approach to bear traumatic witness, we sense the constant battle between stigmatised communities and their reinterpreting narratives.

Theatre as Memory Site: Cultural Activities, Imaginaries, and Theatrical Things of a Regional Xiqu Theatre in Contemporary China

Abstract: This paper explores how the theatre of a Chinese regional opera, as a memory site and an actor, enunciates stories, theatrical experiences, and imaginaries of xiqu (traditional Chinese theatre) communities. The material presences of theatres ensure the continuities of cultural activities of xiqu traditions in Chinese society today. The institutionalized opera activities that emerged in the 1950s national xiqu reform campaign have molded the Chinese xiqu theatres toward an “enduring site” for constantly revamping regional cultures into the rubrics of national culture coherently. However, to the regional xiqu communities, a particular theatrical form, such as lüju (Shandong opera), intertwines with stories and embodied meanings in their quotidian practices. Drawing on the ethnographic observations of the Lüju Baihua Theatre, this article illustrates that Chinese xiqu theatres traffic the shared past, multi-generational memories, and regional stories that are communicable to the community members who resonate with them. It problematizes the perception of Chinese opera theatres as “static or disembodied sites” by unfolding how theatre as cultural activity constantly facilitates embodied knowledge to carve the contours of the group identity and imaginaries of the xiqu communities in contemporary China .

Site(s), Sight(s), and Memory: The Anxiety of Morrison’s Influence on bell hooks

Abstract: This article considers bell hooks’ thought both in terms of sites of memory and sights of memory, respectively interested in the past and the future, or in antecedence and in posterity, and the extent that both impose meaning on and meaningfulness to black womanhood. What influences hooks’ approach to these sites of memory, as well as these sights of memory, is how she conceptualizes black womanhood, which is initiated by and sustained in the anxiety of Toni Morrison’s influences on hooks, through hooks’ earliest childhood encounters with reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula .