Nostalgic Memories Research Articles

‘Accessing something that’s meant to be inaccessible’: pornography viewers’ reconciliation between early pornographic memories and pornography’s perceived risk

ABSTRACT Is pornography more dangerous than ever before, or is there a gap between nostalgic memories of pornography and today’s landscape of pornographic risk? In this study, the memories of pornography viewers are re-situated against a cultural backdrop in which pornography is understood as more dangerous than ever before. Using a combination of survey and interview data, the current empirical study works to understand how pornography viewers themselves reconcile their memories of early experiences with pornography within a contemporary environment that focuses on pornography’s negative powers. The results suggest that adult pornography viewers do this through two primary mechanisms: by describing contemporary pornography as dangerous for ‘other’ people (but not themselves); and by accounting for their early experiences with pornography as positive, thereby perpetuating pornography’s supposed effects as a problem for ‘other’ people. This article concludes with a discussion of how discourses of pornographic danger to young people engender a discursive environment in which young peoples’ pornography viewing is simplified to a notion of risk, thereby foreclosing the sorts of considerations of pleasure and excitement allowed to adults.

‘Something to be haunted by’: Adaptive monsters and regional mythologies in ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman

Since Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) was first released more than 25 years ago, there has been a great deal of scholarly commentary on the film’s treatment of class, race, gender and urban legends. To a lesser degree, Clive Barker’s short story, ‘The Forbidden’ (1986), has received some critical attention largely because of its status as the source material for the film’s general premise and now-iconic central monster. This article expands on such existent scholarship by analysing regional mythologies and the cross-cultural adaptation of place-specific monsters within and across both texts. To develop these primary arguments, this article extracts a theory of adaptation and location from Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods ([2001] 2011), and applies that theory to the acts of adaptation pervading ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman. In complementary ways, all three of these texts explicitly reflect on the complexities of adapting monsters to precise locales. Notably, both American Gods and Candyman take place in the American Midwest; this regional setting greatly impacts the conceptualization of each narrative’s supernatural beings (Gaiman’s cohort of gods and the Candyman, respectively). Within popular culture, the Midwest is regularly depicted as both a site of nostalgic memory and a cultural space defined by the willful forgetting or elision of history. This article asserts the importance of recognizing the Midwest as a recurrent staging ground for horror narratives, particularly those featuring monsters who embody forgotten, misremembered, suppressed or denied pieces of history. Further, by examining such regional dynamics in American Gods and Candyman, this article develops the concept of ‘adaptive monsters’, which describes horrific beings who assume symbolic attributes of the historical, cultural and/or spatial environments into which they are adapted. Overall, through analyses of ‘The Forbidden’, Candyman and American Gods, this article demonstrates how regional mythologies (especially those of the Midwest) shape the adaptation of monstrous beings in horror narratives and across textual forms.

Urban revitalisation with music and dance in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico

The paper portrays the Plazuela de la Campana, a historical small square in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico that fell into ill-use and was revived with a strategy of music and dance events. The case demonstrates how music and dance became a new tradition that nurtures a collective attachment to the Plazuela and contributes to it being regarded as heritage. The privately initiated revitalisation borrows potency from prior nostalgic memories and traditions to overpower the past notoriety of the square. Dance and music, besides creating pleasant associations, effectively build a network of friendships that engages people in the square and through which the history of the place becomes remembered. All these effects deepen the meaningfulness of the Plazuela, which fosters personal affection towards the square and ultimately, it is proposed, translates into a general appreciation—a lesson to be learned for emerging urban planning practices.

Nostalgia and well-being in daily life: An ecological validity perspective.

Nostalgia is a mixed emotion. Recent empirical research, however, has highlighted positive effects of nostalgia, suggesting it is a predominantly positive emotion. When measured as an individual difference, nostalgia-prone individuals report greater meaning in life and approach temperament. When manipulated in an experimental paradigm, nostalgia increases meaning in life, self-esteem, optimism, and positive affect. These positive effects may result from the specific experimental procedures used and little is known about daily experiences that covary with nostalgia. To address this gap, we aimed to measure nostalgia in ecologically valid contexts. We created and validated the Personal Inventory of Nostalgic Experiences (PINE) scale (Studies 1a-1d) to assess both trait and state-based nostalgic experiences. When measured as an individual difference, the nomological net was generally negative (Study 2). When measured in daily life (Studies 3 and 4), nostalgia as a state variable was negatively related to well-being. Lagged analyses showed that state nostalgia had mixed effects on well-being at a later moment that day and negative effects on well-being on the following day. To reconcile the discrepancies between these studies and the positive effects of nostalgia from previous research, we showed that experimentally induced nostalgic recollections were rated more positively and less negatively than daily experiences of nostalgia (Study 5). These studies show that nostalgia is a mixed emotion; although it may be predominantly positive when nostalgic memories are generated on request, it seems predominantly negative when nostalgia is experienced in the course of everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Shamans and nativism: postcolonial trauma in Spirits’ Homecoming (2016) and Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013)

ABSTRACTThis article examines the figure of the shaman in contemporary South Korean cinema. By taking a close look at Cho Jung-rae (Jo Jeong-rae)’s feature Spirits’ Homecoming (Gwihyang, 2016) and Park Chan-kyong (Park Chan-gyeong)’s documentary Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (Mansin, 2013), the article argues that the figure of the shaman is deployed in such a way as to articulate South Korean postcolonial anxiety in two diverging ways. Whilst the former film draws on shamanism and nostalgizes the Korean past in relation to the issue of the ‘comfort women’ (military sex slaves) in contemporary South Korean politics, the latter eschews a coherent historical national narrative in favour of a more fragmented and interrogative account of not only South Korean shamanism but the country’s troubled relationship with the Korean War and the post-war modernization project. The article argues that where Cho Jung-rae’s film employs ethnocentrism as the primary lens for a nostalgic memory, Park Chan-kyong’s documentary disarticulates the historical trajectory of nationalist invocations of a shamanist past, as it aligns the nativist tradition with the wider pro-democracy minjung movement.

Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema by Amanda Holmes

Reviewed by: Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema by Amanda Holmes Paul Merchant Holmes, Amanda. Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 162 pp. ISBN: 978-3-319-55191-3. In this study of the political role played by architecture in six Argentine fiction films, Amanda Holmes contends that “[i]n Argentine cinema since the mid-1990s, architecture has become a political signifier of contemporary socioeconomic conditions” (2). After this point in Argentine history, Holmes argues, architecture on film largely abandons representational or symbolic functions, but rather evokes political and nostalgic memories, marks economic marginalization, and explores the possibility of community in an increasingly fragmented urban context. The book makes a persuasive case for its focus on politics and architecture as a means of elucidating the social significance of the works studied. It is surprising, therefore, that there is no fuller consideration of the changing relations between Argentine cinema, society and the state in the period covered, or of the circulation of the films themselves. There are hints of this in the discussion of media landscapes in Chapter 6, but it could have been productively extended into other areas of the analysis. The films selected cover a range of genres and geographical locations, from Buenos Aires to Salta and Patagonia: Pizza, birra, faso (Caetano and Stagnaro 1997), Mundo grúa (Trapero 1999), Nueve reinas (Bielinsky 2000), La niña santa (Martel 2004), La antena (Sapir 2007), and El hombre de al lado (Cohn and Duprat 2009). This selection allows the author to address topics including the intersection of architecture and the media, class divisions, and globalization. There is, however, relatively little consideration of relations between these films, either in the introduction or in the main chapters: it is strange, for example, that the shared interested in hotel spaces in Nueve reinas and La niña santa is not addressed more fully. A reader might also wonder, given the book’s stated aim of addressing “contemporary” Argentine cinema, why the corpus reaches only 2009, and consists in large part of films that have already garnered significant critical attention. Briefer reference is made to other works, including Buenos Aires vice versa (Agresti 1996) and Medianeras (Taretto 2011), but one is nonetheless left with the impression that a different selection of material might have strengthened the book’s principal arguments. It is surprising, given the importance of gated communities in the framing of the arguments in the introduction and conclusion, that cinematic representations of these are not dealt with more fully. The analysis makes good use of historical detail (for instance in its evocation of the past of the Hotel Termas in Salta in Chapter 5, and the discussion of the Obelisco in Chapter 2). This information grounds the close readings of the films, which [End Page 176] are attentive to formal detail and make original observations. The book draws on a range of critical writing concerning the relationship between film and architecture, with the evocation of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in the discussion of Nueve reinas (Chapter 4) being particularly effective. The author’s relationship to existing critical writing on Argentine cinema of this period is somewhat less productive: the analysis draws quite heavily on existing readings, especially those of Joanna Page (Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 2009), and does not always make clear how these are being built upon or contested. The clarity of the author’s argument is, at times, hampered by awkward expression: take, for example, the statement that films such as Los rubios (Carri 2003) and Bar El Chino (Burak 2003) are “characterized” by “distinctions between documentary and fiction” (5), when it is rather a blurring of the boundary between these categories that emerges most strongly in the films cited. There is, nonetheless, considerable value in the book’s conclusion that architecture in films from this period points towards new forms of community, family, and social interaction, which resonates with James Scorer’s discussion of inclusive urban futures in Argentine culture (City in Common, 2016). Holmes’s book will be of use to students of Argentine culture and Latin American cinema, especially for its integration of historical architectural detail. Its conclusions...

Трансонимизация антропонимов в названиях кафе и ресторанов города Москвы

The article deals with anthroponymic names of Moscow cafes and restaurants. The reuse of anthroponym as an ergonomic name is one of the cases of transonimization. In addition to the nominative function the names of catering enterprises have informative and influential functions. Titles-antroponyms can carry the following types of information about the institution: 1) national cuisine, 2) origin of the owner, 3) concept of the institution: target audience, room interior, animation, etc. The function is manifested in associations caused by anthroponyms: nostalgic memories of the homeland, iconic historical figures, favorite literary works, films and their characters. Anthroponymic names most often indicate the origin of the cuisine. As the analysis of the material has shown, the most informative are the precedent personal names. As a rule, they belong to famous people of Russia and Western Europe and are used as names of institutions offering dishes of Russian and European cuisine.

Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan by Benjamin Gatling

Reviewed by: Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan by Benjamin Gatling Nicholas M. Seay (bio) Benjamin Gatling, Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). 216 pp., ills. ISBN: 978-0-299-31680-8. Commenting on a 2013 article and radio segment on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Tajik service, a user uploaded a low-quality clip of capture footage of men writhing on the ground, while another "growled like a wounded animal." Others were seen in the background, dancing erratically. The footage was a response to a radio segment, "Does Tajikistan Have Any Sufi Pirs" (Tojikiston piri tariqat dorad?) (P. 1). The initial article and the video-upload response serve as the opening vignette for Benjamin Gatling's Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan. As responses to the video revealed, Sufis in contemporary Tajikistan are approached with skepticism and confusion. They are seen as potentially heretical by Muslim reformists, uncivil by secular Tajiks, and dangerous by the Tajik state. More sympathetic to Sufis in Tajikistan, Gatling's work seeks to understand how they use various forms of expressive culture to navigate the complexities of a politically and economically fraught environment. Eschewing an approach that looks at Sufi culture through the lens of "resistance," Gatling demonstrates how Sufis in Tajikistan employ "alternative temporalities" to draw connections to the Sufis of the past, allowing them to transcend the present and develop their own agency, even in the midst of an increasingly lurking and hostile state and security apparatus. Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan speaks to two main audiences: scholars of post-Soviet Central Asia and those engaged in folklore studies/ethnography. Gatling first addresses the former. In this regard, the book as a whole, speaks to the potential limitations of "post-Soviet" as an analytical framework, precisely because it restricts the type of questions one can explore. Somewhat related, Gatling also posits the book as a critique of conducting ethnography of Central Asian Muslims with an emphasis on historical continuities and discontinuities. To both expose the limits of the "post-Soviet" lens and move beyond the focus on continuities and discontinuities, Gatling explores how Sufis employ tradition (the "persistence of the Sufi past in the present") by inscribing both the sacred Persian past and the more recent Soviet past into the present, intentionally occupying an asynchronous present. The organization of the book is well-suited to this end, as each chapter looks at one of the various expressive forms (memories, stories, [End Page 387] artifacts, rituals, and embodied behaviors) employed by the Sufis featured in Gatling's ethnographic work. Chapter 1 ("Sufis in Tajikistan") introduces Tajikistani Sufis' engagement with the past in order to demonstrate how they evaluate and place value on religious authenticity. Chapter 2 ("Nostalgia and Muslimness"), as the title suggests, looks at nostalgic memories of Sufis in order to show how men like Firuz and Khurshed, two of the author's interlocutors, use nostalgia to craft a sense of Muslim identity and bridge the paradoxes in their lives. In a similar vein, chapter 3 ("Narrating the Past") explores how Tajikistani Sufis use historical narratives (stories) to connect with the sacred past and transform their understanding of the Sufi present. Chapters 4 ("Material Sainthood"), 5 ("Remembering God"), and 6 ("Learning to Be Sufi") look at the material and performative modes of expression employed by Sufis in Tajikistan. Chapter 4 explores how the books of Sufis bridged asynchronous time and, for some Sufis, even served as a materialized form of sainthood. Chapter 5 looks at ritual performances like zikr (a ritual that includes poetry, singing, and dancing meant to invoke "remembrance of the divine") provided a way for Sufis to connect with the sacred past. Finally, chapter 6 brings the earlier chapters together to demonstrate how the Tajikistani Sufis embodied the sacred past (through labor, anachronistic dress and manner, and self-devotion) as they learned how to be Sufi. Central Asian scholars will benefit from Gatling's creative use of these expressive forms to demonstrate how the centrality of alternative temporalities and asynchronies exposes the limits of "post-Sovietness" as a potential framework. In chapter 2, for example, Gatling focuses on the active use...

Haydar ErgülenPomegranate Garden by Mel Kenne Saliha Paker Caroline Stockford

and space, into the special world of his memories that still evoke fervent longing for his roots. Busailah’s journey unites him with his family, village, and with the apple, pear, cherry, orange, and grapefruit trees of his childhood, which represent inseparable constituents of his contemporary persona. He assimilates himself with the fruit and the landscape, expressing vivid memories of the simple yet passionate child that he was, saying, “I was peeling an orange to eat / on the Ides of March / it bore the bright gold of a steep sunset.” His thorough, luminous recollection of the aroma of thyme, lemon, and cardamom represents an unmistakable depiction of a nostalgic memory. Busailah resurrects the forgotten Palestinian village and gives voice to the people who thrived and carried on a simple, ordinary life. Before the British occupation of Palestine, his village existed safely and happily. It was the rooster that “had a sense of curious habit which spread / a sense of security and reassurance / all over the neighborhood and beyond.” He unapologetically condemns the occupation that ruined his boyhood as well as the lives of his people. It is the “Beasts of the West [who] bit them with unusual rage / and drove them yet deeper into their apartness / beasts of dogma / beasts of greed / beasts of race at its beastliest.” Writing nearly eightyfive years after the 1936 revolution, the Palestinian resistance resonates in Busailah’s poetry. He envisions the hopeful future of Palestine because of the younger generation . It will follow on the footsteps of their parents as mothers continue to give birth to “the new life / with the blood of the olive / and the flesh of wheat.” Busailah is that new life which immortalizes Palestine through memory and poetry. Busailah’s mastery of language resonates on every page of his collection. His vibrant portrayals such as the children’s “eyeballs looking like cherries” and “the wave curl / like passion furling up in the falling cool” portray a creative, poetic imagination. He utilizes his exuberant knowledge of Palestine ’s history and paints brilliant, lively images that make his memories glitter despite some dark moments. His poems are a bridge that leads to the arena of his boyhood, bringing the village to life in his verses, where we meet his father, mother, and others like his aunt, whose “voice is the sum total / of seven modern decades / her voice skirts the straight deaf course / and zigzags down to her niece / for a new set of decades.” Busailah’s loyalty to the people and longing toward the land are intertwined with his powerful sentiments toward the idyllic life of the Palestinian village. The trees and the wheat ears will always be a testimony to a boyhood and a life that once flourished in peace. Mohammed Kadalah Santa Clara University Haydar Ergülen Pomegranate Garden Trans. Mel Kenne, Saliha Paker, Caroline Stockford, et al. Cardigan, UK. Parthian Books. 2019. 115 pages. HAYDAR ERGÜLEN, born in 1956, is from a stripe of contemporary living poets who have deftly streamed their peculiar national consciousness to the level of global literature (see WLT, March 2018, 20). Turkey, famous for raising Nâzim Hikmet to world readership , is rich soil for new poetics. Pomegranate Garden is an achievement in translation as much as it is an important contribution to international poetry. Ten years in the making—and against the political irascibility of Turkey’s censorial culture—thirteen translators collaborated on Ergülen’s first book in English. In 2006 the project to translate Ergülen into English began at the Cunda International Workshop for Translators of Turkish Literature . With twenty-one books of poetry published in Turkey, Ergülen was ideal as a well-rounded academic in a long line of eccentric Turkish poets. As one of the translators, Saliha Parker writes in her foreword to Pomegranate Garden: “At the core of Ergülen’s work is the pervasive sense of poetry-writing as an inseparable part of life. . . . Poetry, goodness and love is indispensable to the poet as a human being.” Parker is eminent WORLDLIT.ORG 107 Nicholas A. Christakis Blueprint:The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society New York. Little, Brown Spark. 2019. 520 pages. IN...

Пам’ять не може помирати: осмислення каральної психіатрії в СРСР у романі С. Процюка «Травам не можна помирати»

Reconstruction of the USSR`s life memory is extremely relevant, as it awakens awareness of the past traumas: the realities of the Soviet everyday life (standardization, patience, adaptation) and the cruel destruction of any attempt to uphold national identity. The interest in this topic is caused by the understanding of the modern problems in the development of the Ukrainian independence, especially in times of Russian military and ideological aggression. The works about the Soviet past appear in the Ukrainian literature one by one. Writers are driven not by the desire to immerse themselves in nostalgic memories of childhood or adolescence, but by the need to expose the destructive impact on the worldview, culture, language of the Ukrainians, and ultimately on our statehood. The article is devoted to a topic of memory about the struggle for the national freedom of the Ukrainians in the 1970's, which is represented in S. Protsiuk's novel “The grass cannot die”. The main focus of the analysis is the reconstruction of the Soviet past, the horrific systematic methods of the authorities against citizens who asserted their national identity in particular. Special attention is paid to the artistic comprehension of such phenomenon as punishment of «dissenters» by treatment in psychiatric medical institutions. The representation peculiarity of «punitive psychiatry» which is little known for the general public is traced. The author shows how real events of the past are reflected in the artistic text. She briefly analyzes the work of former Soviet political prisoners, including L. Pliushch’s memoir “At the Carnival of History”. At the center of the study is the image of a psychiatric hospital in Dnepropetrovsk. It is a contrast to the figure of the Ukrainian poet Maksym Tomylenko, a victim of punitive psychiatry. The author's ability to show the authenticity of events, the inner state of the characters and the surrounding circumstances are analyzed. Ideological and semantic role of the work is specified as a reminder of the past heroes, of the difficult way to fight for Ukraine, of its spiritual heritage. The author of the article proves that S. Protsiuk's novel opens the tragic pages of the past and dispels myths about the well-being of the Ukrainian nation in the USSR. Problematic issues of the work, its ideas and appropriate stylistics are essential in the complex study of the artistic vision of the Soviet past in contemporary prose.

El espacio insumiso. Memoriales y otros monumentos a partir del Observatorio Europeo de Memorias

This text main topic revolves around tree main ideas: the need to consider the memory and its physical/symbolic spaces as a common European heritage; the challenge of transmission and re-signification of this memory in nowadays social and contemporary values; the way to do about comparative and transnational sphere from the case study of European Observatory on Memories. The text tries to merge a more conceptual and theoretical reflection with some practical examples and case studies as an example about the debates and conflicts around memorial places and projects. Concepts as the multiplicity of memories, nostalgic memories, resistance, and uncomfortable and uneasy conflicts on memory public policies are approached as such and through practical cases of interpretation, transmission and cultural usage of memory. The text also tries to analyze the European debates and programs about European public policies on memory and presents the controversial debate about the competition on memories between Nazism and Stalinism as case studies. Finishing with some ideas about the Spanish case around how to promote a social memory.

“But what a place / to put a piano”: Nostalgic Objects in Robert Minhinnick’s Diary of the Last Man

In 2003, Martin Rees referred to the present as “mankind’s final century.” A few years later, Slavoj Žižek wrote that humankind is heading towards “apocalyptic zero-point,” when the ecological crisis will most probably lead to our complete destruction. In his 2017 collection, Diary of the Last Man, Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick offers readers a meditation upon Earth at a liminal moment—on the brink of becoming completely unpopulated.
 Imagining a solitary human being, living in the midst of environmental collapse, Minhinnick yet entwines different voices—human and non-human—operating across vast spans of time. The speaker of the poems moves freely through different geographies and cultural contexts, but the voice that starts and ends the journey, seems to be the voice of the poet himself: he is the last man on earth, a survivor of ecological disaster.
 The paper discusses Minhinnick’s collection as a projection of the world we now inhabit into a future where it will exist only in the form of nostalgic memories. The analysis focuses on the role of objects in the construction of the world-within-the poem, where the fragments of human civilization are being claimed by forces of the environment—engulfing sand, progressive erosion—forming a retrospective vision of our “now” which will inevitably become our “past.”

Nostalgic memories and human rights: Integrating subjective experiences with universal needs

In this comment, I focus on the integration of memories and human rights. The claim for the “self-evident” declares the claim for human rights not only of minorities, or oppressed and forgotten groups but, more broadly, of the self and different others. I consider human rights as they emerge from the content of intergenerational nostalgic memories and are reflected on the right to remember, the right to forget, the right to long for the past, and the right to life. I give a brief account of studies on intergenerational nostalgic memories and I argue for remembering processes as a fundamental human right. Finally, I discuss theoretical implications of integrating memory studies and human rights debates.

Landscapes of Loss: Responses to Altered Landscape in an Ex-Industrial Textile Community

Geographically located at the heart of Carpetvillage in West Yorkshire, Carpetmakers had once been a thriving manufacturer of fine woven carpets since the late 1880s. From my own experience of growing up there in the 1970s, its inhabitants had held a sense of ‘communal being-ness’ through the shared experience of living there and of making carpets. After the factory was closed, Carpet Mill was demolished in 2002, leaving a void where there had once been a handsome Victorian building. Interested in responses to architectural, spatial, and sensuous change in an ex-industrial landscape, this article asks: what were the subjective consequences for the affective ties that hold together an ex-industrial community? Using sensuous ethnographic mobile methods, the study draws on ex-Carpetmakers employees and local residents. The research found nostalgic memories of Carpetmakers as a paternalistic employer operating in a thriving and largely self-sufficient community. Photographs were collected from respondents, which chart a vast number of social clubs and events that offered an important dimension to the ‘way of life’ offered to workers in this ‘company village’. It found that while the importance of works buildings is acknowledged by writers on de-industrialization, missing from their accounts is an embodied analysis of how people interact in situ with landscapes of demolition. Respondents told of the emotional trauma of the demolition process, the effects of spatial change through the erasure of the village’s architectural past and the almost total decline of a community which, for them, no longer holds a sense of place. The decline in the social structures of an industrial community meant that ageing ex-workers and residents found it difficult to generate communal ties with newcomers to the village.

The numbing effect of mortality salience in consumer settings

AbstractNationwide Insurance and Johnnie Walker Scotch aired advertisements that encouraged people to contemplate death. What are the immediate emotional and perceptual outcomes of such advertisements? With five studies, thinking about death was found to attenuate emotional reactions and perceptions, a novel finding in the literature. This attenuation was observed with neural and self‐report measures along with retrospective and prospective assessments of emotion and is an outcome not yet investigated in mortality salience research. Contemplating death dampened people's expectations of emotion in a future consumption experience and diminished the attractiveness of the experience. Similarly, contemplating death affected backward‐looking assessments of emotion, for example, when nostalgic memories are brought to mind. Importantly, this dampening effect of mortality salience was replicated with advertisements that portrayed death‐related concepts and attenuated emotional reactions to subsequent advertisements.

Palestinian Postmemory: Melancholia and the Absent Subject in Larissa Sansour's In Vitro, Saleem Haddad's "Song of the Birds," and Adania Shibli's Touch

Palestinian PostmemoryMelancholia and the Absent Subject in Larissa Sansour's In Vitro, Saleem Haddad's "Song of the Birds," and Adania Shibli's Touch Layla AlAmmar (bio) Introduction The dystopic film In Vitro, by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Larissa Sansour, takes place in a bunker many years after an eco-disaster in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. The protagonist, Alia, is a clone that was created after the traumatic event but has been implanted with the memories of those who lived through it. Consequently, she bears the effects of the trauma as a transgenerational transmission: "I was raised on nostalgia … My own memories replaced by those of others … The pain these stories cause are two-fold because the loss I feel was never mine." Calling her existence a "congenital exile," she argues that constant recounting of traumatic history reduces it to "symbols and iconography," such that her very being becomes "a liturgy chronicling our losses."1 With this film, Sansour argues that the Palestinian identity is "an identity that's in trauma," whereby individuals are raised on memories of the past to maintain resistance for a possible future of self-determination, which, in turn, can void the present of meaning.2 In the film an eco-disaster stands in for the traumatic events that form the backdrop of the majority of Palestinian art and literature, namely the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa.3 These historic traumas loom large over [End Page 1] artefacts of Palestinian cultural expression, solidifying a sense of collective identity in a present reality of fragmentation and displacement. Furthermore, nostalgic memories of a pre-1948 Palestine can sustain resistance and motivate return to a past unity. In Vitro deftly interrogates the goal of recovering a long-lost "golden age." In addition to the fact that the new generation was created as clones of those who experienced the catastrophe, the bunker also contains a large orchard planted using seeds salvaged before the land became uninhabitable. Consequently, the older generation attempts to re-create their past existence while neglecting to consider the sense of alienation this engenders in the new generation. This causes a fundamental temporal disconnect between the two generations: a skeptical Alia says, "What we are doing here will not restore the past," to which Dunia, who lived through the disaster, replies, "There is no need to. The past is still there, as intact as ever." In other words, while Alia desires leaving history behind in order to fully embody the present, thereby allowing for some viable future, Dunia asserts that the present does not exist in any meaningful way because they all remain locked in an atemporal sphere of trauma. Thus, the film cogently illustrates the burden of postmemory while extending the paradigm to contexts where trauma is not strictly past but remains present. Consequently, it shows how repeated activation of traumatic histories, and refusal to fully work through them, can lead to a state of transhistorical absence and suspended identity formation. This article argues that Sansour's In Vitro, Saleem Haddad's short story "Song of the Birds," and Adania Shibli's novella Touch present a uniquely Palestinian postmemory, or what I call a postmemorial absence, which critiques the viability of a future when individuals feel trapped by memories of a traumatic past that prevent a meaningful present from materializing. I argue that these works further invite the question of a Palestinian identity that moves beyond the Nakba and what form such an identity might take. The first section discusses how Haddad's and Sansour's works exemplify the burden of collective memory, using the medium of science fiction to explore spatial imaginaries and the precarity of the Palestinian present. The second section illustrates how Shibli's Touch constitutes a powerful imagining of an identity unanchored to a collective traumatic past, whereby severing the inter- and transgenerational traumatic link is attempted. Her work, through its experimental form and style, suggests that negation [End Page 2] of subjectivity—a breaking down to build anew—may be necessary to realize an identity unencumbered by past trauma. The Burden of Collective Memory They nurse us on memories formed before us and raise us only for...

O JB é que era jornal de verdade

O artigo analisa depoimentos sobre o Jornal do Brasil e seu suplemento cultural, o “Caderno B”, produzidos e reproduzidos em diferentes circunstâncias ao longo de décadas. Para isso, mobilizamos o conceito de nostalgia. Trata-se de um tipo específico de memória, caracterizado por certa maneira de apropriação do passado. Esta memória nostálgica dos profissionais de imprensa que lembram nos diz do presente, do contexto atual da lembrança, do momento que vive o jornalismo brasileiro. E nos diz também do lugar ocupado pelo JB como instituição na história da imprensa, como movimento de valorização e idealização do passado, que sustenta a áurea mítica e a importância do diário para muitos profissionais que nele trabalharam. A análise aponta que o que se valoriza no passado é um modo de fazer jornalismo, ancorado numa série de preceitos e valores hoje postos em xeque.

THE TROUBLES WITH A LOWER CASE t: UNDERGRADUATES AND BELFAST'S DIFFICULT HISTORY

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

Recipe Names as a Gateway to Interpersonal Communication

An examination of Japanese cookbooks from the early twentieth century to date demonstrates that changes in the nature of recipe names over the past 87 years have made the relationship between the writer and the audience closer. Recipe names have come to be more informative and creative through the rich use of mimetics, metaphors, and word play. Furthermore, they have become more personalized and stylized. The personal stories behind these recipe names help the author elicit in readers a sense of camaraderie and/or nostalgic memories that specific food items in a given historical period evoke. This article demonstrates two things: what seem to be simple names for recipes can be regarded as a gateway to interpersonal communication between the author and audience; and recipe names have evolved into an increasingly enriched form of communication over time by ingenious use of various tools available in the language.

REPRESENTATION OF NOSTALGIC MEMORIES FOR HOME IN AFRICAN DIASPORIC POETRY: CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED POEMS OF MAHTEM SHIFERRAW

Nostalgia for home has been a common subject in African diasporic literature. In past four decades the African continent has witnessed an increase of movements of people leaving their home places to new places around the world. These movements whether voluntarily or forcibly have resulted to displaced communities in the world and diasporic community being one of those communities. This paper critically analyses the representation of nostalgic for home in selected poems in of Mahtem Shiferraw and how do such nostalgic memories contribute of in (re)defining the identity of the poet. Central to the analysis it can be argued that nostalgic memories are reflective and restorative of past experiences of home [land] crafted from diasporic sensibilities. As depicted in the selected poems, namely, Fuchsia, Synesthesia and Talk about Race the poet represents both the pleasant and unpleasant past life experiences she has gone through while in Africa and later in America. Also nostalgic memories re/defines the inseparable forged identity of the poet from reconstructed past as an African in America. However, according to the discussion, the traditional sense of nostalgia is challenged as the poet yearns for the significant moments of home [land] while remaining in the foreign land.Keywords: diasporic literature, home; nostalgic memories