Notion Of Memory Research Articles

A Discursive Analysis of the Photo Essay Madres Terra

The present work analyzes the representations of the mourning of mothers of Soacha, Colombia, in the series of 15 photographs entitled Madres Terra, by the photographer Carlos Saavedra and the anthropologist Sebastián Ramírez, exhibited at the “Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación”, Bogotá, in 2018. Also called “false positives”, aged between 16 and 33 years old, hundreds of innocent young people were executed by the Colombian army on the grounds that they were in the service of illegal armed groups such as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The analysis pointed to the fact that, in addition to being a space for denouncing state crimes and fighting for justice, the photo essay works as a symbolic place for the elaboration of the mothers' mourning, as well as a way of resistance/persistence of memory, that is, a way of remembering in order not to forget. The theoretical basis is constituted by the Discourse Analysis of a materialist line, which works in the middle between Language, Unconscious and History. Methodologically, the notion of memory, discourse and text (Orlandi, 1999; 2001) are mobilized.

“Memory Shot Through Holes”: The Idea of Postmemory in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees

ABSTRACT The emergence of postmemory in recent decades has opened various tangents around which the frameworks of memory, trauma, and nostalgia can be reimagined and reexamined. The notions of memory and postmemory and the complex relation underlying their mutual interaction is a recent development in memory studies. In this light, the questions arise: What happens when people with traumatic memories are forced to flee their homelands? How do the subsequent generations of the survivors deal with the traumatic intergenerational memories of the past? Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees is set in Cyprus, a place divided by a border, destroyed by ethnic conflict, and years of violence and bloodshed. Shafak not only incorporates the idea of inherited pain and silence but also further explores the ways in which families with traumatic histories transfer these experiences of suffering, grief, nostalgia, and melancholy from one generation to another. Through the character of Ada, the daughter of Kostas and Defne, the researcher attempts to delve into the terrain of intergenerational memories and further attempts to analyze the various tenets of the notion of postmemory by undertaking a textual analysis of The Island of Missing Trees.

BALANCE OF PRIVATE IMAGE AND MEMORY

The invention of photography was followed by its extensive usage as visual documentation of any possible scene, by nature, human, object or event. The watchful eye of the camera was hailed as an impassive observer of facts, a witness that tells no lies entrusted with the preservation of public and personal histories. Under these assumptions it was connected with the crystallization of collective memory as well as the wide initiation of private archiving in the form of the family album, especially when easy-to-use camera technology became commercially affordable. In this short essay, accepting a line of continuity between snapshots and networked photographs despite technological and cultural ruptures, their attributes and uses will be held accountable for providing a mediated, visual shelter to notions of personal and collective memory. Although this kind of imagery is deemed non-art, my approach is conducted as an art-fuelled investigation, with a mind to set a field of potent exchanges between memory function and images for cultural negotiation. For that, using interdisciplinary discursive analysis I will look at the evolution of photographic imagery from snapshot to networked within a branch of personal, self-produced representations that have affected both our autobiographical referencing and collective remembrance. The notion of memory, as the performative interaction between person, technology, media and narrative will be seen against snapshot and networked photography as an informal, meaning-making tactic. In particular, network photography is acknowledged mainly through its manifestations on visual posts on Facebook or Instagram. While snapshots as a genre satisfied the need to handle privately the visual documentation of our past and allegedly keep time frozen, networked photographs establish memory in fluidity as remembrance of the present moment just-turned-into-past. The above positioning prompts a bipartite question: (a) do networked photographs support memory on a personal and collective level in ways similar to snapshot culture, and (b) in the advent of changes has the flow of memory been altered?

Monumental Bodies

Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe’s Jerba paintings were first exhibited in Addis Ababa in 2015. Jerba, a word that means “back” or “background,” is a series of mixed media and acrylic paintings concerned with historical memory and the political and cultural accounts attending to that memory. Abebe’s jerbas explore the contemporary predicaments of Ethiopia, where ethnic tensions have proliferated and where the trademarks of the human body are objectified to one’s ethnic identity rather than to the body’s lived experience as a human being. The evocative power of the composition, texture, and detail of Abebe’s paintings in representing the human image is exquisite while adding a conceptual component that conjures up, for instance, notions of memory and nostalgia, conflicting imaginations of the nation, and the place of Ethiopia in the passage of history. While the Jerba series skillfully navigates the perspective of the past and its remnants in the interpretation of the present, the visual metaphors connect personally with the spectator. Seemingly faint voices transpire from individual panels, and sounds communicate with the viewer through particular stories. Likewise, impressions of silence also materialize, as if the jerbas are telling the viewer that there are histories and stories one cannot comprehend. Abebe’s critical engagement through these works responds to the changing pressures of time and place, particularly the ambiguities of modern citizenship in the Ethiopian state.

“I wanted to become an Abyssinian”: Rewriting Indro Montanelli’s memories of colonial Africa in Francesca Melandri’s Sangue giusto (2017)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on journalist Indro Montanelli’s memories of Destà/Fatìma or Fatuma, the 12-year-old child he bought as his “wife” while he was a volunteer in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, and on a colonial narrative echoing his story in the 2017 novel Sangue giusto by Francesca Melandri. It considers the roles of race, gender, sexuality, and national memory in the texts, moving from the debate around the monument dedicated to the prominent journalist in the city of Milan to the analysis of the power dynamics in the novel. John Akomfrah’s notion of memory as “a deconstructive gesture against white mythologies” and Aimé Césaire’s and Michel Foucault’s idea of memory as counter-cartography are used to analyse both Montanelli’s recollections of Destà and the relationship between Attilio Profeti, the main character of Melandri’s novel, and Ababa, the girl he turned into his servant and lover during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia.

Aeneas: Rust verification by functional translation

We present Aeneas, a new verification toolchain for Rust programs based on a lightweight functional translation. We leverage Rust’s rich region-based type system to eliminate memory reasoning for a large class of Rust programs, as long as they do not rely on interior mutability or unsafe code. Doing so, we relieve the proof engineer of the burden of memory-based reasoning, allowing them to instead focus on functional properties of their code. The first contribution of Aeneas is a new approach to borrows and controlled aliasing. We propose a pure, functional semantics for LLBC, a Low-Level Borrow Calculus that captures a large subset of Rust programs. Our semantics is value-based, meaning there is no notion of memory, addresses or pointer arithmetic. Our semantics is also ownership-centric, meaning that we enforce soundness of borrows via a semantic criterion based on loans rather than through a syntactic type-based lifetime discipline. We claim that our semantics captures the essence of the borrow mechanism rather than its current implementation in the Rust compiler. The second contribution of Aeneas is a translation from LLBC to a pure lambda-calculus. This allows the user to reason about the original Rust program through the theorem prover of their choice, and fulfills our promise of enabling lightweight verification of Rust programs. To deal with the well-known technical difficulty of terminating a borrow, we rely on a novel approach, in which we approximate the borrow graph in the presence of function calls. This in turn allows us to perform the translation using a new technical device called backward functions. We implement our toolchain in a mixture of Rust and OCaml; our chief case study is a low-level, resizing hash table, for which we prove functional correctness, the first such result in Rust. Our evaluation shows significant gains of verification productivity for the programmer. This paper therefore establishes a new point in the design space of Rust verification toolchains, one that aims to verify Rust programs simply, and at scale. Rust goes to great lengths to enforce static control of aliasing; the proof engineer should not waste any time on memory reasoning when so much already comes “for free”!

Harold Pinter's Old Times and the play of indistinction

AbstractThis article analyses the fluid frontiers of imagination, memory and the real in Harold Pinter’s Old Times. While the latter notions of memory and the real in Pinter’s works have been extensively explored, the concept of imagination has not. In this article I argue that the concept of imagination as it has been interpreted since the mid‐1900s—which exactly tries to grasp or even dissolve these fluid frontiers—offers a way of rethinking both Pinter’s discussion of dramatic truth, the notion of ‘the real’ as it appears to his characters, and how memory is presented in his plays. An attentiveness to the concept of imagination as an analytical approach, will also allow us new ways for understanding how the text implies a potential engagement with his audience.

Travelling Gods, Ritual Memory, and Slavery in Contemporary Benin

Abstract For more than two centuries the Bight of Benin participated in the Atlantic trade. Today, along the same coastal region, it is possible to encounter Tchamba, the spirits of foreign slaves from the northern savannah. Tchamba ritual practice, part and parcel of the Vodun religion, narrates peculiar stories of domestic slavery and the Atlantic trade, of struggles for emancipation, love and trade, women and men, slaves and masters. Most of all, the worship of Tchamba questions the notion of memory in both discursive and embodied forms, and the ways in which we create linkages between practices, narration, history, and the experience of time.

LA VERDAD EN EL AULA. UNA APROXIMACIÓN TEÓRICA

This paper delves into the theoretical analysis and delimitation of the doctoral research titled: "Does the school embrace the truth?: Tensions, opportunities, and challenges faced by teachers in high-conflict rural areas of Colombia during the implementation of pedagogical strategies centered on truth". The document provides an in-depth exploration of theoretical challenges based on the debate around the category of "truth", especially in rural schools that have endured the devastating consequences of armed violence in Colombia. Throughout the text, diverse perspectives are incorporated, and the notion of memory and truth is critically examined.

Forget-me-not: Giving Voice to Memory in Mark Z. Danielewski's "The Familiar" and Elsa Morante's "La Storia"

Among the many, intertwining motifs spanning the volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, the repeated reference to forget-me-nots is not one that leaps off the page to the reader. Its presence in Xanther’s seizure in Volume 4: Hades speaks to larger notions of memory of tragedies such as the Armenian Genocide, or even the chronomosaic timelines present in Danielewski’s earlier novel, Only Revolutions. This paper, while exploring notions notions of memory through Adriana Cavarero’s theory of the narratable self, will argue that their root is in Elsa Morante’s 1974 novel La Storia, which centers on a Jewish mother and her son, both epileptic, in Rome during World War II. Yet, while both works utilize their characters’ epilepsy as a way to better acknowledge the suffering and tragedies occurring around them, Morante’s articulation of the crushing wheel of history differs from the more hopeful presentation Danielewski provides. Through her epilepsy, Xanther instead emerges as a character who highlights the importance of giving voice to others, especially those unable to speak for themselves.

The Ghost of Remembrance

ABSTRACT In a quest after the essence of memory, a crucial distinction is made between the notions of memory and remembrance, following Plato’s distinction between mneme (memory) and hypomnesis (archive). The article’s main argument is that memory has to do with the technical aspect of life, while remembrance has to do with what we live for. This is because the unwilled event of remembrance, which un-joins time, is always remembrance of one thing alone, i.e. the Thing. The notion of the Thing—addressed both by Heidegger and Freud—is analyzed in its psychoanalytic, theological and historical sense, as located in un-archiveable time, and as appearing in a spectral, violent fashion in our daily lives. Discussion is accompanied with examples taken from Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time and François Ozon’s film “Frantz.”

Mahmoud Darwish: The Politics of Mourning and Catastrophe

This article examines the ways in which Mahmoud Darwish's contrapuntal notion of memory, catastrophe, and mourning exhibit an aesthetic of freedom, intransigence and resistance. Darwish's intellectual and aesthetic project is primarily premised upon the pleasures and pitfalls of memory and catastrophe as a site of spatial and cultural resistance. For Darwish, memory and catastrophe are not only about the absence and presence of geography and home, but they are also metaphorical in every way. In The Presence of Absence (2011), Darwish argues that metaphors form a peculiar mode of geography and space. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of late style and Judith Butler's argument on the politics of mourning, this article sets out to examine the ways in which Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence embody a radical form of aesthetic and intellectual praxis, writing against the grain and the politics of mourning.

Reparation policies in Colombia: Memory as a Repertoire

Colombia is one of the countries that has opted for a model of restorative justice to repair the victims of the armed conflict. To accomplish this, it has created a series of reparation laws which involve building scenarios to foster a call for remembrance (duty of memory) and in which the truth can be cleared up. The objective of this study is to provide a discourse analysis of how the notion of memory is constructed within the official reparation policies in Colombia. A discourse analysis of Law 975, Law 1408, and Law 1448 was carried out, using the logic of interpretive repertoires. As a result, it was possible to identify four repertoires: Institutional, Archival, Commemorative, and Reparative. The increasing globalization of reparation policies and the use of memory for the purpose of institutionalization that hinders the possibility of interpreting the past in another way, is discussed.

Addressing Parsons in Sociological Textbooks: Past Conflicts, Contemporary Readers, and their Future Gains

The paper provides insights on the contemporary relevance of Talcott Parsons’s writings by analyzing 20 textbooks from Austria, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, published in 1999–2019. Whether having knowledge of Parsons is helpful to today’s students and other interested readers, and what knowledge, deserves consideration. Therefore , the paper asks: Which future gains of readers did textbook authors envision when they chose, in their own present, to discuss (or not) sociological writings from long ago? In order to understand what future opportunities authors wanted to create for readers, as well as how they chose to discuss Parsons to this end, the paper draws on Niklas Luhmann’s notion of memory. The analysis reveals several key competencies that student and other interested readers might acquire through having knowledge of Parsons’ writings and its critiques. These potentials would have gone unnoticed if authors had assessed Parsons’s relevance only according to whether he adequately considered conflict or not, as has been done in many debates about his work until today. Moreover, through analyzing how authors remembered Parsons, I distilled two key selective criteria: First, what must be remembered in order to enable readers to acquire those competencies? Second, which memories would be impeding for readers and thus be better left out? These criteria are relevant for research, as well. Looking at the future, it would be desirable that sociologists let Parsons assist them in their research in many different ways, if possible. As a result, we might see a revival of Parsons that enables genuine advancement.

História e memória: a doutrina de segurança nacional e a cultura escolar da Escola Técnica Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (1968-1985)

No âmbito educacional, a ideologia da Ditadura, por meio da Doutrina de Segurança Nacional, foi um forte mecanismo de legitimação dos governos militares reverberando em reformas de todas as modalidades e níveis. Especificamente no caso da Educação Profissional, houve mudanças no currículo e acentuação, na rotina escolar, de regras, horários e disciplinamento. Além da forte aproximação com o modelo tecnicista que imprimia uma atmosfera de empresa à escola. Nosso objetivo neste artigo é realizar uma discussão teórica acerca da história oral e memória relacionada a cultura escolar da Escola Técnica Federal do Rio Grande do Norte-ETFRN (1968-1985), durante a Ditadura Militar. Dialogamos com Maurice Halbwachs, Michael Pollack e Ecléia Bosi, no que se refere a noção de memória, esquecimento e silêncio. E, no caso da história oral, as obras de Verena Alberti, Sebe Bom Meihy e Suzana Ribeiro, Alessandro Portelli, Ana Maria Mauad, nos deram as bases para a compreensão dos usos da história oral como arte da escuta e integrada aos novos tempos, ao fazer registros não só auditivos, mas também visuais/imagéticos. Associado a oralidade usaremos também outras fontes: escritas e visuais, como jornais da época, fotografias, diários de classe, currículos e etc. Consideramos que não há uma realidade unívoca, a mesma escola que regulava e disciplinava era a que, por meio de vivências múltiplas construía sujeitos críticos e capazes de ir além do saber fazer.

Paul Creyssel: The ‘Forgotten’ Voice of Vichy

Paul Creyssel, Vichy’s high-profile Director of Propaganda between 1 April 1942 and 3 March 1943, then Secretary-General for Propaganda until 13 January 1944, is nowadays an all-but-forgotten figure. Found guilty of undermining national morale at his trial in June 1948 after almost four years in detention awaiting judgement, he thereafter faded from public and historical scrutiny. That shift from prominence to obscurity is the focus of this article. It explores the forgotten Creyssel and argues that history’s amnesia on such a major player of the Vichy regime was what he himself wanted to engineer. In particular, the article examines how, at his trial, Creyssel’s defence was an attempt to reimagine his wartime identity and actions in order to downplay the profile of the man in public memory and record. To develop its line of argument, the article analyses Creyssel’s trial papers ― an archive that historians have generally overlooked ― supplemented with reference to his radio broadcasts, which have never previously been comprehensively examined. It identifies specific points that the defence chose to emphasise or understate, or where it was selective with or distorted the truth, and signposts evidence that was disregarded or manipulated in the account given. However, the importance of the case study of Creyssel stretches beyond the individual, for it opens up another version of wartime France and illuminates broader discussions about how collaborators subsequently explained away their activity. Equally, the article sheds light on notions of memory and forgetting in the context of the French experience of the Second World War and beyond, and so connects to discussions on the writing, and ‘righting’, of narratives of the past. In that light, the article also reflects on how the post-Occupation environment and the shifting context of historical writing contributed to the forgetting of Creyssel. A coda discusses the central place of France’s archival holdings for our continuing investigation of Vichy, and reflects on the potential damage caused by recent state-sponsored restrictions on the consultation of such materials.

Belonging, Memory and Subaltern Voices: Reflecting on Sindiwe Magona’s To my Children’s Children

ABSTRACT For many black people, the act of writing and expressing one’s thoughts was an exercise of resistance and defiance, one that often meant risking losing one’s freedom or one’s life. Sindiwe Magona’s works challenge the commonly held assumption that writing is a male preserve, and illustrate how, for a black woman, writing is a form of rioting, of speaking back, of reclaiming one's voice and of breathing. I focus on Magona's book, To my Children's Children (1990) to highlight the ways in which she engages notions of memory, voice and belonging. I further point to ways in which Magona shows how writing one's story is a form of protest, and of connecting the past, the present and an unknown future. For Magona, the public cannot be separated from the private. Through her life story, we are confronted with what it meant to live under the oppressive apartheid system in South Africa.

History Education in the Anthropocene

As much as history education is supposed to be about the past, it is oriented towards the future. History teachers are guided by a variety of purposes, such as cultural inheritance, critical and disciplinary thinking, identity formation and personal development, or activism and social change. Each of these purposes is imbued with particular notions of memory, citizenship and other values relevant to preparing young people for the future. While it may not always be explicit, a prevailing assumption in history education, as with Canadian curriculum, generally speaking, is that the future is a place and time to which we should look forward, as it will improve upon the past. But as we are coming to know, that may not be a responsible or accurate frame to pass on to the next generation. What theoretical and practical supports can help history educators renew their teaching in light of the Anthropocene, and particularly the climate crisis? In seeking to attune history education to a relational, ecological and ethical future orientation, we turned to the fields of Indigenous studies, environmental history and climate change education. We suggest some new, and even radical, directions we might look as a community of history educators. In doing so, we hope to nurture solidarity in navigating uncertainty together. With a set of common questions, assumptions and goals to guide us, we may find ways of teaching and learning that respond more meaningfully to the precarity of our times.

Constelaciones metafóricas de la memoria: Sumar de Diamela Eltit

En este artí­culo me propongo analizar la novela Sumar (2018) de Diamela Eltit a partir de la configuración discursiva de tres tópicos que funcionan como metáforas asociadas a la problemática de la memoria: el cuerpo de la narradora, el desplazamiento de los ambulantes hacia La Moneda y la idea de nube/archivo. Sostengo, a modo de hipótesis, que la noción de memoria se presenta en esta novela como un punto de exploración estética y como una preocupación polí­tica central para pensar el presente.

Patricio Guzmán y la (est)ética del agua

La relación entre historia, política y memoria ha sido un elemento unificador en la obra del director chileno Patricio Guzmán. Con El botón de nácar (2015), el director se propone reflexionar sobre esta relación bajo el prisma del agua. Este elemento resulta ser el hilo conductor de dos relatos principales que Guzmán considera en una misma dinámica: los pueblos de Patagonia y su exterminación por un lado, y las víctimas de la dictadura de Pinochet por otro lado. Además de cumplir con una evidente función narrativa, veremos cómo el agua tiende a tener un alcance simbólico y se convierte en un vector de memoria. El artículo plantea una reflexión organizada en torno al protagonismo del agua para resaltar su ambivalencia a nivel nocional y formal en la concepción del documental. Se abordarán la noción de memoria que atravesó la obra de Guzmán, la historia de Chile, ambos relacionados gracias al agua que alcanza una simbología inédita.