National Amnesia Research Articles

Colonialismo italiano e questione meridionale: amnesie, memorie competitive e alleanze intersezionali ai margini di una comunità immaginata bianca1

This article examines the intertwined histories of “internal colonialism” in Southern Italy and Italian colonialism in Africa, addressing the question of Italy’s national amnesia in relation to these topics. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” framework, the essay explores how the two historical issues mentioned above risk becoming competitive memories in contemporary public history debates. To develop this argument, the essay presents two case studies. The first is Pino Aprile’s Contro l’oblio. Giorno della Memoria per le vittime meridionali dell’Unità d’Italia. The book exemplifies competitive memory in the broader context of the neo-Bourbon approach to the Southern Question. The literal use of concepts such as colonialism and racism as metaphors for the Southern Italian condition risks creating self-apologetic narratives driven by “white anxiety,” absolving Southern Italians from their historical involvement in colonialism and contemporary racial privileges. The second case study examines the Museo Cesare Lombroso in Turin as an archive of Italian antiblackness. This section proposes the museum as a potential site for multidirectional memories, focusing on the interplay between the racialized representation of Southern Italians and Italian colonial racism. The goal is to articulate these two memories without overlapping them, emphasizing different historical responsibilities and contemporary privileges. The article underscores why intersectionality and positionality are critical to analyze the complexities of racial and colonial histories and their relevance to contemporary social justice struggles.

Epidemia niepamięci. „Pomór” Wałerija Szewczuka

The article concerns the novel The Plague (1989) by Valeriy Shevchuk, in which the author explores the motif of epidemic. In the novel, the epidemic is a metaphor for the lack of historical and cultural memory caused by an oppressive political system. Presented as a form of cultural and national amnesia, it serves as background for reflection on the post-totalitarian heritage of contemporary Ukrainian society. Valeriy Shevchuk’s novel is based on historical documents, but it is not a work of literary realism, but rather a kind of morality play that deals with universal issues.

“Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?

ABSTRACT The Buried Giant is now established as an uncanny precursor of an emerging “Brexlit” canon. However, Ishiguro’s long-held interest in how nations other than Britain forget, remember and memorialise their pasts, together with his response to civil conflict and resolution in the 1990s, should modify overly “presentist” Brexit interpretations. Integrating Giorgio Agamben’s work on the Greek idea of stasis as civil war, I argue that The Buried Giant tests the ethical limits of amnesty, revealing both the culpability of national amnesia and injurious wielding of reawakened collective memory. The essay then turns to allegory and allegoresis, considering the novel’s refusal of the dystopian mode, despite that genre’s concern with the state’s nullification of memory. In the end, The Buried Giant frustrates a point-by-point allegorical decoding of its ancient Britons and Saxons. Acknowledging the historical continuity between the 1990s and the post-Brexit present, I argue for a political unconscious in the text which, in taking us to a “pre-posterous” place before England was, is timely in its untimeliness. If the novel is to be read as Brexit allegory, this must be to understand Brexit less as a singular, aberrant crisis and more as a contraction within the longue durée.

The “National Amnesia” in the Traditional History of Iran

Abstract It is well known that the pre-Islamic “national history” of Iran (i. e., the indigenous secular historical tradition, transmitted orally over many centuries) knows nothing at all, or as good as nothing, about the dynasties and empires of the Medes, Achaemenids, Seleucids, and Parthians (ca. 700 BCE–226 CE). It is first with the Sasanians (226‒651 CE) that Iran’s “national history” evinces more detailed knowledge. Instead of reports on the historical Medes and Achaemenid dynasties, accounts of mythical and legendary dynasties, the Pīšdādians and Kayānians, are found. In this essay, an attempt will be made to explain this “gap” in the pre-Islamic historical tradition, this “strange historical (or national) amnesiaˮ (Ehsan Yarshater) in the cultural memory of the Iranians, with the help of a theory on the structure and modality of oral tradition, based on field research, by the Belgian historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina. The structure in question concerns a tripartite perception of the past: a wealth of information about antiquity (traditions of origin or creation and reports on culture heroes) – plenty of information, too, on the recent and most recent times – and lying between them, a “gap” in the accounts. Vansina described this phenomenon as the “hourglass effect.” This is exactly the narrative structure of Iranian national history; it is evident that the Achaemenids and the other pre-Christian dynasties fall into the “gap” described by Vansina. The same phenomenon can also be detected on the level of Sasanian history. We find there a plethora of information on the founder of the dynasty, Ardašīr (reigned 226‒241 CE); meanwhile, very few details are known of the kings following Ardašīr, and it is only as of Kavād I (reigned 488‒496 and 499‒531 CE) that we have outstanding historical information.

Hibernating in Havana: Paradoxical Memory in Todos se van and Nunca fui primera dama by Wendy Guerra

Hibernating in Havana: Paradoxical Memory in Todos se van and Nunca fui primera dama by Wendy Guerra Juli A. Kroll Far from being traditional Bildungsromane, the novels Todos se van (2006) and Nunca fui primera dama (2008) by Cuban author Wendy Guerra contribute to the late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century literature in which a dystopian Cuba seeks to combat historical amnesia and anchor a drifting national imagination. Participants in this wave of dystopian fiction, novels like La nada cotidiana by Zoé Valdés (1995), La novela de mi vida by Leonardo Padura (2002), Otras plegarias atendidas by Mylene Fernández Pintado (2003) and Muerte de Nadie by Arturo Arango (2004) express “la indigencia y la indignidad” (Sklodowska 33) of the Special Period and/or the disenchantment that many of the grandchildren of the Revolution felt toward Cuba’s socialist project.1 In the case of Todos se van, protagonist Nieve Guerra intuits the creeping paralysis that awaits her when she comments, “A la deriva viajo poco a poco hasta la inmovilidad total” (285). Nadia Guerra, the main character from Nunca fui primera dama, for her part, affims that: “El día en que perdemos la memoria viajamos a la deriva” (130).2 Both novels recreate Havana’s stultifying atmosphere in which female characters subsist, trapped between “lo obligatorio y lo prohibido” (Todos se van 137) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like insects trapped in tree resin, they inhabit decades in which gestures of memory constitute Parkinsonian movement—vibrations that mimic progress. Influenced by the instability of personal and historical memory, as well as by state prohibitions against acts of dissident memory, the autobiographical element of the [End Page 65] Alzheimer’s diagnosis that Guerra’s mother receives and the dissolution of the memory of female collaborators in national history, Guerra’s novels show that the would-be subject’s struggles congeal, eventually, into nearly complete hibernation and immobility. Guerra demonstrates paradoxical attempts to consecrate historical and personal events to memory in both novels; Todos se van employs elements of the anti-Künstlerroman, in which the narrator’s artistic development is incomplete, and she fails to find a readership for her work within the narrative diegesis. With Nunca fui primera dama, the powerful metaphor of Havana as a museum and mausoleum provides the basis for examining a necrotic national memory and for exploring the city as a democratized, heterotopic feminist palimpsest. Guerra’s first two novels, the award-winning Todos se van (Premio de Novela Bruguera) and Nunca fui primera dama established the author’s international credentials as a novelist who critiques authoritarian Cuba from within. Both novels’ diegetic worlds revolve around women’s experiences in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century in Cuba. Through the childhood and adolescent diaries of an abused girl (Todos se van) and radio transmissions and personal stories from three marginalized women (Nunca fui primera dama), the novels give voice to national amnesia and hibernating historical memory from key eras of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Cuba. The works depict a nation frozen by fear and involuntary consensus during decisive moments of the post-Revolutionary period and of the author’s childhood. The result is that these novels, the anti-Künstlerroman Todos se van, and the ambulatory, necropolis-based Nunca fui primera dama, ask: how does voluntary forgetting constitute a response to unfulfilled utopias, and how do we address the gaps in national memory? They make us complicit in the comforting act of constructing the novel’s readership as an exegetic activity. The study at hand argues that Guerra’s novels are significant expressions of the current generation’s need to interact with groundbreaking, feminist, post-Revolutionary, literary perspectives on Cuban identity. Responding to this need, Todos se van and Nunca fui primera dama dissect and partially re-assemble elements of Cuban identity from the perspective of feminist and resident exiles. The novels are grounded in Cuba’s literary history, as they converse with the literature of Cuban insularity and the heritage of testimonial literature by women. By dismantling insularity and patriarchal, Revolutionary discourse, I demonstrate that Todos se van uses...

Claudia Rankine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Untimely Present

Claudia Rankine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Untimely Present Abram Foley (bio) A discourse of timeliness haunts the marketing and reception of recent writing by African American authors. A quick review of a few works shows just how much. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's marketing description for Angela Flournoy's The Turner House (2015), a novel about post-recession Detroit, assured potential buyers that it was "A powerful, timely debut" ("Angel Flournoy"). Blake Butler of Vice praises John Keene's Counternarratives (2015), which collects stories of black life in the Americas from early colonization to present, as "one of the most vitally timed books of the year" (Butler 2015). Jabari Asim's Only the Strong (2015), set in a fictionalized version of St. Louis in the 1970s, bears a front-cover blurb praising the novel's "eerie timeliness" (Bell 2015). In a compilation of reviewer blurbs for Paul Beatty's Man-Booker-Prize-winning novel The Sellout (2016), three separate reviewers praise the book as "timely" ("The Sellout"). Ron Charles's Washington Post review of T. Geronimo Johnson's Welcome to Braggsville (2015), a satire on race, lynching, and liberal America, applauds the novel for forcing Americans to confront their "national amnesia" concerning the history of lynchings and racial violence in the U.S. "Welcome to Braggsville," he concludes, "It's about time" (Charles 2015). Charles's idiomatic conclusion suggests that something belated has—at last—come to pass. It's about time, that is, that implicitly white, novel-reading Americans remember the deep history of racial violence in America. And yet, as Charles's review somewhat inadvertently points out, timeliness itself works by way of cultural amnesia, in the operative privilege of forgetting that racial violence has been the status quo since colonization and so this or that book seems particularly relevant just now. This is the bind of the timely: it attempts to make literature relevant by attaching it to cultural events, but the attempt is predicated on a forgetfulness that should remain troubling. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric—a surprise bestseller in 2014 that has made Rankine one of the foremost figures for thinking about race in America—did not escape the discourse of timeliness in its reception. This is hardly surprising, given that Citizen's poems chart the correspondence between the microaggressions of everyday racism and the fatal aggressions [End Page 225] of highly visible police violence and hate crimes in the United States and elsewhere. Perhaps the most famous passage of Rankine's book records the names of those recently killed by hate crimes and police violence, a macabre list that has grown with over subsequent printings of the book, literally keeping time with America's ongoing racial violence..1 Rankine's close attention to racism in America led Dan Chiasson, poetry critic for The New Yorker, to comment that Citizen is "An especially vital book for this moment in time" (Chiasson 2014). Recall, too, that Blake Butler described John Keene's Counternarratives as a "vitally timed" book. Chiasson's remark, like Butler's, adds an important nuance to the timely by drawing a connection between timeliness and vitality, that is, between timeliness and life. While Chiasson's description of Rankine's "vital book" speaks rather straightforwardly to his perception of the book's importance, his word choice also follows Rankine's writing back to a modernist philosopher of life and untimeliness, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his preface to "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," the most renowned of his four Untimely Meditations published between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche characterizes the "untimely" as that which "acts counter to our time and thereby acts on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come" (1997, 60). Following from Nietzsche's definition, does it not seem possible that the supposed timeliness of African American writing has more to do with "untimeliness," in acknowledging an ongoing disjuncture between amnesia and racial memory that continues to take shape along the rift of the color line? I propose over the course of this essay that Rankine's poetry re-envisions Nietzsche's philosophy of life, particularly his notion that life emerges from a...

La amnesia nacional de las víctimas de la tortura

Liberar de la amnesia gubernamental la tortura sufrida por una parte significativa de mujeres y hombres en México, en específico, un segmento de la población en Ciudad Juárez, requiere un compromiso académico. Me sitúo en los años 2006 – 2015, y hago un nexo entre las teóricas chicana/latinas feministas de las narrativas de la amnesia nacional de Nicole Guidotti- Hernández; de los sujetos inelegibles para ser personas de Lisa Marie Cacho; con el necropoder de Achille Mbembe; y los cuatro dispositivos que ofrece Tzvetan Todorov para el control de la memoria por parte de los gobiernos. Con este andamiaje teórico pretendo comprender por qué algunas mujeres y hombres son convertidos en sujetos torturables y sus torturadores permanecen desconocidos para el Estado.

PRANCŪZIJOS ISTORIJOS POLITIKA: ALŽYRO ATMINTIES UŽMIRŠIMAS

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama Prancūzijos identiteto krizė dėl arabiškosios tapatybės dalies neigimo. Identitetas charakterizuojamas per Alžyro koloni­zavimo ir nepriklausomybės karo atminties vietą Prancūzijos nacionalinia­me mite. Į atminties ir mito sąveiką žvelgiama atliekant atvejo, atspindinčio Prancūzijos valdančiųjų politiką Alžyro atminties atžvilgu, analizę. Pagrindi­nis analizės objektas – Prancūzijos istorijos politika. Straipsnyje pateikiama atminties ir mito teorinių sampratų apžvalga, aptariami jų skirtumai ir sąvei­kos būdai; išaiškinamas ryšys tarp Prancūzijos valstybės vykdomo Alžyro atminties neigimo ir Prancūzijos tapatybės krizės; atskleidžiama dabartinė Prancūzijos valstybinio mito ir Alžyro atminties santykio dinamika, pasireiš­kianti Prancūzijos tapatybinėmis įtampomis dėl jos arabiškosios populiacijos dalies.

Concrete economics: the Hamilton approach to economic growth and policy

an excellent new -- Paul Krugman, The New York Times History, not ideology, holds the key to growth. Brilliantly written and argued, Concrete Economics shows how government has repeatedly reshaped the American economy ever since Alexander Hamilton's first, foundational redesign. This book does not rehash the sturdy and long-accepted arguments that to thrive, entrepreneurial economies need a broad range of freedoms. Instead, Steve Cohen and Brad DeLong remedy our national amnesia about how our economy has actually grown and the role government has played in redesigning and reinvigorating it throughout our history. The government not only sets the ground rules for entrepreneurial activity but directs the surges of energy that mark a vibrant economy. This is as true for present-day Silicon Valley as it was for New England manufacturing at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The authors' argument is not one based on abstract ideas, arcane discoveries, or complex correlations. Instead it is based on the facts--facts that were once well known but that have been obscured in a fog of ideology--of how the US economy benefited from a pragmatic government approach to succeed so brilliantly. Understanding how our economy has grown in the past provides a blueprint for how we might again redesign and reinvigorate it today, for such a redesign is sorely needed.

The Functions of Forgetfulness in 1 Henry IV

In 1 Henry IV , William Shakespeare proposes judicious forgetfulness as a positive strategy for achieving power despite its pathologized position in early modern culture as well as its seeming incompatibility with the recording of history. Nietzschean ideas of forgetfulness and plasticity, Langerian concepts of comedy, and the notion of a unifying national amnesia inform a contrast of the functions of forgetfulness for Henry IV, Prince Hal, and Falstaff in 1 Henry IV .

Silencing the Echoes of Tiananmen

Journalist Louisa Lim describes how the Chinese Communist Party has compelled a country to forget the bloody crackdown around Tiananmen Square in 1989. To create this national amnesia, China repressed political ambitions and funneled aspirations toward the economic sphere—a worrying fact for the Communist Party as the country’s economy slows.

Remembering Slavery, Again

IN 2015, A YEAR OF DEBATE OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG and intense meditation on the meaning of race in America, it would be a shame to miss the equally public memories of race-slavery in Britain. Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, a twopart BBC documentary,1 publicised the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS), a University College of London database of all the slave owners in Britain who were awarded compensation when slavery was abolished on 1 August 1834. A Broadway musical, Grace, dramatised the story of the British slave-ship captain, John Newton, who wrote the hymn that would become associated with African-American culture and civil rights struggles - and which President Obama sang at the eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, killed in June 2015 by a white supremacist who shot six other members of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the literary sphere, British novelist Caryl Phillips published The Lost Child, partly a prequel to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, in which he draws on the long critical speculation that Heathcliff, brought from the slave port of Liverpool to the Yorkshire moors, is black.2 It appears that both the US and the UK are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison says of Beloved (1987),3 something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia.4Aside from the fact that these are actually two cases of national amnesia, what is striking is how much people keep remembering, and, more, how often it is the same icon remembered repeatedly as though with all the power of the first time. The hymn Amazing Grace plays as the signature music in both the BBC's Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners and an earlier documentary, the 2009 independent film A Regular Black: The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights,5 which speculates on Heathcliff's racial identity in the context of Yorkshire's historical connections with slavery, and Amazing Grace is the title of both the aforementioned musical about the moral awakening of Captain (later Reverend) John Newton, and a 2006 film about William Wilberforce, who led the successful fight in Parliament in 1807 to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire (but not slavery itself, which happened much later, in 1833). Yet, despite the circulation of these four productions across the Atlantic, it is safe to say that most Americans would not recognise the British roots of this black spiritual - and that few readers anywhere would recognise a 'black' Wuthering Heights. Looking at 2015, a year of transatlantic memories of the New World racial past and its legacy in the present, may therefore give us insight into national amnesias, plural - how two nations continue to grapple differently with their intertwined histories, the global institution of nineteenth-century slavery.The history of slavery is of course neither new nor unknown, yet its afterlives seem to be repeatedly rediscovered at particular moments in time. Some of these coincide with obvious anniversaries, such as the 2007 bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (when the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was, symptomatically, the Wilberforce biopic Grace). And vice versa, as the voluminous work in the field of memory studies shows, the legacy of slavery is subject to periodic erasure of different kinds in public space and public memory as well as in popular literary and academic discourse.6 In the US, seeking roots can be tantamount to rejecting them: Henry Louis Gates Jr, host and executive producer of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, has been embroiled in controversy over its capitulation to actor Ben Affleck's request that the programme not reveal his ancestor's slave-holding history in a 2014 episode. (PBS put the series on hold after determining that the episode violated its editorial standards. …

The Urgency of Establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Aceh: Against National Amnesia

ABSTRAK: Sejak sepuluh tahun perjanjian damai (MoU Helsinki) antara Pemerintah Indonesia dan Gerakan Aceh Merdeka pada Agustus 2005, telah mendapat tantangan dalam pembentukan Komisi Kebenaran dan Rekonsiliasi (KKR), sebagai lembaga penting untuk dugaan pelanggaran hak asasi manusia selama konflik bersenjata di Aceh. beberapa isu politik dan hukum telah menarik perhatian serius untuk kepentingan kedua belah pihak. Kebijakan melalui program uang tunai untuk korban tidak akan mencegah urgensi pembentukan KKR. Oleh karena itu tulisan ini membahas bahwa KKR ini penting tidak hanya bagi para korban yang mencari kebenaran dan keadilan, tetapi juga untuk mengembangkan kembali landasan untuk Indonesia sebagai negara berdaulat yang beradab. Urgensi Pembentukan Komisi Kebenaran dan Rekonsiliasi di Aceh: Melawan Lupa Nasional ABSTRACT: Since ten years of the peace agreement(the MoU Helsinki) between the Goverment of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement on August 2005, has posed a challenge over the establishment of the Truth and Reconcilition Body (TRC), as an esential institution for the suspicious of violation of human rights during armed conflict in Aceh. Several political and legal issues have attracted serious attention to both parties’ interests. The imposing policy of cash programt for the victims would not prevent to the urgency of the TRC establishment. This paper therefore highlights that the TRC is esential, not merely for the victims who seeking the truth and justice, but also for re-developing a foundation for Indonesia as a sovereign civilised state.

Pentagon, VA Lack Data to Assess PTSD Care Systems

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Government NewsFull AccessPentagon, VA Lack Data to Assess PTSD Care SystemsAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Jul 2014https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2014.7b16AbstractThe Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs have expended huge sums caring for troops and veterans with PTSD, but they are unable to determine how successful their programs are.The time, money, and effort expended for managing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among U.S. veterans and service members may or may not be working, but it is almost impossible to make that determination, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released June 20.An IOM committee spent two years gathering evidence from the departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA), following up on an earlier report by the same group (Psychiatric News, August 17, 2012).“Neither department knows with certainty whether those many programs and services are actually successful in reducing the prevalence of PTSD in service members or veterans and in improving their lives,” concluded the IOM committee, chaired by Sandro Galea, M.D., Dr.P.H., a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.The DoD could supply almost no data on outcomes of either short- or long-term treatment care, which it mainly provides on an outpatient basis, the committee noted in its report.Even when a specific program appears to work well, it is hard know if that is actually the case without good data, said committee member Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, M.D., M.P.H., chief medical officer of the District of Columbia Department of Behavioral Health and a former Army psychiatrist. “So you get a good local effort but without the top leadership support to track it.”The Pentagon’s primary job is preparing for and fighting wars, but the VA is in part intended to be a health care system. The VA offers a wider array of screening, therapeutic, and ancillary services (such as job counseling) than the military, but has collected no data about results in its general mental health clinics, Vet Centers, or outpatient PTSD programs. Only the 39 specialized intensive PTSD programs could provide outcome information, and the data they provided showed just modest improvements following treatment.Neither department has used standard tracking measures to determine whether the PTSD care it provides is “effective, appropriate, or adequate,” said the committee.Both departments are large, centrally controlled bureaucracies, but nevertheless they have produced fragmented systems on the ground. “DoD’s PTSD management appears to be local, ad hoc, incremental, and crisis-driven, with little planning devoted to development of a long-range, population-based approach,” the IOM committee concluded.“The DoD is and is not a centralized bureaucracy,” said psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis, M.D., a retired Army brigadier general who served as a reviewer for the IOM report. “There’s a real tension between the [Pentagon’s] Health Affairs office and the surgeons general in each of the service branches. No one wants to be subordinated to someone else, so things are not well coordinated.”The committee raised other issues as well in its report: the continuity of care as troops make the transition from active military service to care in the VA’s health system, the need for standardized tracking measures, and the creation of a central database to catalog programs and services.The report, however, did not address other conditions that are relevant to people with PTSD, such as traumatic brain injury, sleep problems, or chronic pain, said Xenakis. “These confound symptoms and the effectiveness of treatments.”Both departments have expanded their workforces in recent years, but they also need to know more about what therapies those clinicians and outside contractors are using and how patients are faring in response. “DoD and VA should develop and implement clear training standards, referral procedures, and patient monitoring and reporting requirements for all their mental health care providers,” the IOM committee stated.Finally, the DoD and the VA would do well to retain some of the lessons learned over the years from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said committee member Douglas Zatzick M.D., a professor and associate vice chair for health services research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.“There’s a national amnesia for the health care system that is part of fallout of military downsizing,” said Zatzick in an interview with Psychiatric News. “With all the military rev ups and downs, you need someone who can look at these issues longitudinally and understand what we’ve learned from these wars.” ■“Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations: Final Assessment” can be accessed here. ISSUES NewArchived

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (review)

Reviewed by: War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Isabelle Thuy Pelaud (bio) War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work, by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 244 pp. $22.50 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8166-7096-3. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work advances a strong theoretical framework informed by the literature of trauma and memory, Asian American literary criticism, and cultural studies to interpret the cultural production of Cambodian Americans. This book argues that because of the enormity of the scope of the “killing fields,” Khmer Americans’ cultural production cannot be [End Page 345] read and interpreted solely from a domestic lens. Rather, it necessitates a transnational perspective. The fight against racism on U.S. soil comes simultaneously with how Cambodian history is presented in the United States. The book examines a period of time when artists and intellectuals were brutally targeted for assassination, resulting in the death of 1.7 million Cambodians. It is no coincidence, Cathy Schlund-Vials argues, that Cambodian American artists engage tirelessly with genocide, human rights, and civil rights and the cultural aphasia produced by this period. She urges readers to see, hear, and validate what is being expressed and to take action. Schlund-Vials’s introduction, theoretical framework, and close reading of Khmer American film, literature, hip-hop, and art is an ambitious project. Contrary to how this event is represented in the United States, the author insists that the U.S. role in the genocide in Cambodia be remembered. Schlund-Vials challenges the claim of U.S. exceptionalism and the rhetoric depicting itself a fighter of the free world. The author reminds the reader that these atrocities, where near 25 percent of an entire population died, were a direct consequence of American military and financial involvement in the region. Through a diverse means of national amnesia and selective representation, what Schlund-Vials calls “schemes of strategic remembering,” the United States effectively evaded both “culpability and accountability” at the expense of those who were victims of the atrocities in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. In order to restore these memories, Schlund-Vials introduces the historical context from which these pieces emerge. Her close reading of Cambodian American cultural production shows how Cambodian American experiences and the identities they produce have been and continue to be heavily impacted by Cold War politics. In order to understand Cambodian American art and literature, the author argues that one must consider the recent history of Cambodia in relation to geopolitics and racial dynamics in the United States. For instance, unlike how the movie The Killing Fields is often regarded as an authoritative account of what took place in Cambodia after the end of the Vietnam War, the author shows that it is actually filled with inaccuracies, gaps, and biases. The ahistorical representation of the genocide leads to a pathologizing interpretation of the Khmer Rouge. This movie elides the role played by the United States in helping the Khmer Rouge come into power in the first place, something she insists is absolutely necessary to understand Cambodian American identities articulated in literature, art, and film. In another example, Schlund-Vials examines how discourses about the genocide continue to focus on the perpetuators of violence. Through dark tourism, the author argues that the genocide has been commodified at the expense [End Page 346] of legal justice and collective healing. Her discussion of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where three hundred detainees were executed daily between 1977 and 1978, specifically serves foreigners’ incredulous and nonreflexive gaze. In contrast, Schlund-Vials examines Cambodian American cultural production as a site of resistance and an alternative to these dominant narratives by framing them from the survivors’ perspective. By focusing on survivor memory, her work engages in a renegotiation of history. According to the author, memory plays a central role in resisting national investments in forgetting, erasing, or truncating the past. Khmer American cultural production embodies what Schlund-Vials calls a “tripartite identity formed by way of catastrophic collisions with U.S. cold war foreign policy, traumatically shaped by Khmer Rouge totalitarianism, and problematically fixed to post-Vietnam humanitarianism” (25). These...

Remembering and Disremembering in Africa

In remembering the attainment of political emancipation, post-independence African countries have learned to narrate the official national narrative and to forget other stories. Commemoration of the nation’s past almost always goes hand in hand with officially decreed national amnesia. Therefore, the story of the nation has to be narrated and remembered by forgetting certain aspects of the colonial past. By implication the dual act of remembering and forgetting sets the pattern for how the postcolonial African nation narrates itself in the postcolonial moment. Focusing on Kenya as an example, this paper argues that the national commemoration of political emancipation from colonial rule tends to silence narratives of opposition and political incarceration that emerge in the postcolonial moment. The outcome is a remembering-and-forgetting battle that has implications for how diverse individuals conceive of themselves collectively as a nation and how they forge or fail to forge a coherent collective memory.

Sea-change or Atrophy? The Australian Convict Inheritance

This paper is an offshoot of a larger project which explored the possibility for the erstwhile settler-colonizer undergoing the sea-change into settler-indigene emergent through a study of selected novels of Patrick White. It became apparent to me that the convict figure, who played an ancillary role in these works, could lay claim to the status of white indigene well ahead of the main protagonist. Robert Hughes (in The Fatal Shore) discredits the idea of any bonding between the convict and the Aborigine but acknowledges examples of “white blackfellas”—white men who had successfully been adopted into Aboriginal societies. Martin Tucker’s nineteenth century work, Ralph Rashleigh, offers surprising testimony of a creative work which bears this out in a context where Australian literature generally reflected the national amnesia with regard to the Aborigine and barely accorded them human status. Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), based broadly on the history of her own ancestor, appears to support Hughes’ original contention but is also replete with ambivalences that work against a simple resolution. This paper will explore some of the ambivalences, the ‘food for thought’ on aspects of the Australian experience highlighted by these literary texts, and glances briefly also at variations on the theme in Carey’s Jack Maggs and the The True Story of the Kelly Gang.

Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions across the American Empire

Pacific Islanders seldom figure prominently in discussions of the United States empire, itself a frequently disavowed apparatus of white economic, military, and political supremacy. Whether construed as products of genocidal removal, national amnesia, or political marginalization, Pacific Islanders frequently remain in the fringes of this nation-state. Yet they will play vital roles in the making and unmaking of American empire from the late nineteenth century to the present, prompting scholars to engage these indigenous peoples as having their “own history, not autonomous and separate from the United States, but integral and intersecting, blending local and global connections.” What accounts, then, for the erasure of Pacific Islanders from the historical record, national memory, and political economy of America? What kinds of Pacific Islander interventions—that is to say, indigenous vernaculars for “self” and “other,” “village” and “city,” “land” and “sea” — occurs because of America's colonial presence ...

On the Idea of In(ter)dependence: <i>Paradise</i> and Foreign Policy

Since the publication of Toni Morrison's Paradise in 1997, critics have carefully excavated the complex national allegory running through the novel, finding in the story of the fictional town of Ruby a reframing, retelling, and critique of the foundational myths of American settlement and expansion. (1) Other critics have read the novel as a critical recording of the project of Black Nationalism, focusing, for instance, on the novel's use of the exodus narrative. (2) Both of these readings fail to grasp fully the allegorical content of Monison's novel by ignoring its complex account of foreign relations. Highlighting the relationship between Ruby and the Convent--analogous to the relationship between the United States and the developing world in the 1970s--I interpret Morrison's novel as a millennial text that reminds readers of the forgotten lessons of the 1970s, and especially of the economic lessons the US could have learned from that decade concerning the dependence of the national economy on the third world. Morrison has long been interested in what she calls an Africanist presence in key works of American fiction, (3) and I read Paradise as her account of how economic questions raised in especially vivid ways in the 1970s demand that we think beyond the nation-state. Paradise exposes the presence of the global third world in even the most apparently national of settings and significantly extends Morrison's project of revealing the blindness at the heart of national narratives, both by considering questions of American empire abroad and by returning us to a decade that has been largely forgotten. (4) If the 1990s are imagined as an era in which the problems of the Cold War had been erased, Morrison's novel signals that even during that period, dissenting voices reminded us that the US had forgotten important lessons about global life and the fragility of the US economy. More than simply a lament for what has been forgotten, however, Morrison's novel is also a cautionary tale that explains how this process of national amnesia was enacted and how the introspection of the 1970s erased geopolitical truths made visible during those years. Occurring between 1968 and 1976, the key events of the novel should attune us to how these events intersect with American history, especially since the act of violence around which the novel is structured occurs in 1976, the bicentennial anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. While critics have seen a version of the United States in Ruby, national allegory is only half the story the novel tells. By taking seriously the novel's historical setting and focusing on the relationships between Ruby and the Convent, we can see the novel as an expression of the limits of the nation-state as the ultimate economic horizon for conceptualizing human activity. I am interested less in national independence than in transnational interdependence, and I identify how Morrison critiques the idea of the self-sufficient nation-state through the politics of food and energy. My argument has five parts: the first part concerns the utility of reading the novel as a straightforward national allegory; the second suggests the limits of that approach and why the novel can instead be thought of as an allegorical account of the narrowness of nationally circumscribed understandings of political economy; the third concerns Morrison's interest in one of the most pressing questions raised by the early 1970s, the question of natural resources; and the fourth reveals Morrison's account of just how these lessons were erased from cultural memory. Finally, I suggest that Paradise's troubled allegorical content should be read as a reflection of the difficulties of arriving at a truly global consciousness and the necessity of continuing to work toward that goal; indeed, the myriad ways in which Morrison invites and then complicates allegorical readings suggest the complexity of contemporary geopolitics. …

The Emperor Jonesand National Trauma

This essay interprets The Emperor Jones as a Benjaminian allegory, a traumatic confrontation between the audience and the shocking scenes from America's racial history in which the sudden shifts of reverse chronology as well as the rhythmically induced physiological tension disrupt the expectations of realism to dramatize the genealogy of the national trauma which, as David Blight argues in Race and Reunion, resulted from slavery and the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Using trauma theory, especially that as articulated by Ruth Leys in Trauma: A Genealogy and Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, the essay considers the ways in which O'Neill disturbed the master narrative of naturalized racism and national amnesia and the dramatic and theatrical ways in which the trauma to the nation is both embodied in the trauma to Jones and extended to include the audience.