Official Memory Research Articles

Monuments and Counter-Monument Sights in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Case Study of Gavrilo Princip’s Monuments

The ever-present need of remembering and reimagining the memory through the culture of building memorial sights, as markers of identity, at the places of extreme violence in the immediate aftermaths of the conflict deescalation was a light motive for writing this paper. By allocating the empirical research on the ground of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is a great opportunity to re-examine the dense perplexity of issues that are enhancing the momentum of the memory juxtaposed with the counter-memory, whereas different interest groups (political or civil) are simultaneously producing competing memories. The case study of BiH allows us to notice and highlight the multidimensionality of memory and counter-memoryalong the way of Bosnian postwar society towards the reconciliation, how it enables the identity building and the nation re-building during the processes of political consolidation and its didactic use for further conflict prevention. Using the discourses, visual materials and interviews from the field research adjusted on the post-conflict memory sites in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Republika Srpska(case study monuments of Gavrilo Principe in Sarajevo vs East Sarajevo), I would like to pinpoint the chasm between the actual purpose of memory sites that are built there after the conflict and the danger of them miscommunicating the conflict inflicted past that could possibly lead to a restoration of that latent conflict. Therefore, my research is concentrated on the coupled counter-memorial sites, which are of enormous importance for the process of reconciliation because of their role of keeping balance to the official narratives and memorials, despite of the fact that this role of them is usually neglected by scholars.

Propaganda und Gedenken

Nazi propaganda and its use of gendered images changes substantially between 1933 and 1945, i. e. poses the question of how fascist aesthetics could actually be defined. The theatricalization of Volk and Fuhrer during National Socialism shifts from soldier-like mass reenactments of the Nazi takeover and the respective use of speaking choirs to mute mass ornaments performed by school girls and finally to the feminine allegorization of the Volksgemeinschaft in film. Since the later formats of Nazi propaganda are often dismissed, their slight aesthetic correspondence to personalizations of memory politics are sometimes overlooked today. However, at the same time there are performative interventions into public discourse by activists that underline the necessity of remembering the nameless and counter official memory politics. Linking the recent discussion on refugees to German history, these activists are calling for a revision of current border politics in Europe and our notion of human rights that could be read as a new form of feminist politics.

Haunting memories of war in Chinese cinema and diaspora: Visions of national trauma, power and autoethnographic collage

The transgenerational ghosts of trauma from war, death and injustice within Chinese twentieth century history are carried through the remembrances and silences of mediated, diasporic visions of memory. These ghosts are visible through Chinese cinema at the intersection of modern China’s national interests, issues of power and the transnational distribution/production of official memory. These relations also suggest an insistence to produce particular national, unified identifications within the collective imaginations of spectators across generations in the Chinese diaspora. While some national wounds are ‘chosen’ and remembered (for example, Western colonialism, Imperial Japanese invasion), other collective traumas continue to be disavowed through cinematic memory productions. In response to these issues of historical rewriting and memory production, I propose alternate ways of seeing cinema through a critical autoethnography that juxtaposes other mediations of memory. I explore how this approach to cinema spectatorship enables diasporic subjects to interrogate how affective trauma transmits unconsciously across generations.

Absence of the present: the reburial of Adnan Menderes and the condition of possibility of public memory in Turkey

ABSTRACTThis essay analyzes the status of public memory surrounding the 1990 exoneration and reburial of former Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who was executed by a military junta in 1961. During this revision of official memory of Menderes's legacy, a coordination of the concepts state, nation, and military produce the meaning of the reburial ceremony at the same time that these concepts are themselves constituted through the event of the reburial. Approaching this event of public memory as an “inscription” in Derrida's sense, this essay argues that events of public memory simultaneously produce and rely on the conditions of their own possibility.

Integrated Care Model Developed by the Rwanda Biomedical Center for Decentralization of Psychological Interventions during Commemoration of Genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda

Global and national burden of mental disorders has been increasingly recognized in terms of responding to the need for explicit, cost-effective, evidence-based yet culturally sensitive interventions (WHO, 2013). In 2004 the first official commemoration of genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda, which included mental health interventions, was held in Kigali. At that time the mental health support was reactive, centralized, and overwhelmed by the need for their services. In 2013 the Rwandan Biomedical Center (RBC), of the Ministry of Health, created a decentralized network of well-trained mental health responders throughout Rwanda. The objective of this decentralized network was to provide most of the care in the community and avoid using higher levels of care. This article reviews the infrastructure and evaluates the new decentralized community-based system that is now utilized throughout Rwanda during commemoration of Genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. Key words: Integrated Care Model, psychological Interventions, genocide, Rwanda

The Bandung legacy and the People's Republic of China in the perspective of global modernity

The most important question concerning the 60th anniversary commemoration(s) of the Asian-African Congress of 1955 is what voices will be heard, and which voices will prevail. This may also be the most significant difference between this year's commemorative gatherings and the event that provides the occasion for them. The delegates from 29 Asian and African nations that met in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 shared a sense of common experience in recent struggles against colonialism and racism. The hundred plus nations invited to this year's official commemoration come with quite different experiences in the intervening years since then. More significantly, whereas it was states that spoke in 1955, this year's commemoration has opened up political space to the voicing of public concerns by groups of activists, and representatives of diverse ecological, social, economic, political and cultural causes that are products of the present, many of them with only a tenuous discursive linkage to the original conference. It would be silly to expect common ground even of a ritual kind among these constituencies. Extra-state voices add a whole new dimension to the commemoration. Whether they are heard in a substantial sense or simply ignored with verbal platitudes will determine the historical significance and meaning of the conference. This essay was written before the actual conference in April 2015.

‘What to do starting from this place’: documentary film and official memorialization in Argentina and Chile

This article examines post-dictatorial documentaries from Argentina and Chile in the context of their use of particular places that held significance during the dictatorships and which have since been converted into official memorial spaces. Often these are sites that were used for detention and execution of prisoners. I argue that the creative deployment of these sites in the films I consider productively unfixes memory and multiplies the uses and heterogeneity of memories in their relation to place. I read several films, El Mocito , Reinalda del Carmen, mi mamá y yo, El predio and Tabula rasa alongside the memorial spaces that they inhabit, represent and comment upon. This article both reveals the ways in which documentary filmmakers have participated in the work of memorialization in the Southern Cone and presents a case for the value of the study of documentary film in relation to the particularities of place.

Reframing “official memory”: Don DeLillo’s Libra and the House Select Committee on Assassinations

Critics have examined DeLillo’s appropriation of The Warren Commission Report in Libra , but the novel responds to more than this fundamental document of the assassination archive. Libra should also be situated within the investigations into the activities of the CIA in the 1970s. These investigations conducted by the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the Pike Committee provide the historical background crucial for comprehending DeLillo’s fictional intervention into the lingering JFK assassination controversy. These investigations also spawned the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, whose work leaves “the blank spaces in the known record” (457) that Libra attempts to fill, primarily Lee Harvey Oswald’s connections to American intelligence and the secret war against Castro. In doing so, Libra provides a summary of the very real efforts of the CIA to overthrow Castro, from the joint CIA-Mafia assassination plots and the Bay of Pigs invasion to Operation Mongoose.

‘Ghosts of Songs’: The Haunting Soundtracks of the Black Audio Film Collective

Throughout its existence as an innovative and influential collective of artists, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) produced a number of films that are consistently concerned with archival images and sounds. Seen (and heard) from the perspective of this black British collective, the archive is understood not only to reveal an official memory of the past but also to signal the absence of certain narratives. BAFC's works interrogate these gaps in the archives, finding within them narratives and moments that speak of the black British experience. Reworking the archive in particular through their thoughtful and provocative soundtracks, BAFC present new ways of seeing and hearing the past, and new ways of conceiving of the present. Focusing on their most famous work Handsworth Songs (1986), this paper examines how the soundtracks resound with and against the archival images seen on screen. BAFC sample and distort voices and songs from the past, dubbing, versioning, and remixing them with discordant, unexpected sounds such as industrial noise and whale song. These splintered and haunting soundtracks open up the images to reinterpretation. Ultimately, this paper suggests that in a diasporic life characterised, as Derek Walcott describes it, by an ‘absence of ruins’, music and the collective memories heard within it can be considered as alternative archives: the intangibles of sounds and words acting in part as monuments to a history that is not registered in official books or buildings.

Marshalling Memory: A Historiographical Biography of Ernest Alexander Cruikshank

E.A. Cruikshank was one of Canada’s most influential and respected historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As chairman of Canada’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board for 20 years, he played a central role in constructing Canadian historical memory. In this sense, Cruikshank’s historical works reveal the mutual interplay of historical research and public memory in framing national sentiment; yet, although he had a national reputation, Cruikshank was primarily a local historian who translated local Niagara sentiments into a national history, principally through his interest in the War of 1812. Traces of his influence can still be seen. What is most striking, though, is that sympathy for Cruikshank’s vision has persisted even into this century, as the messages surrounding Canada’s official commemoration of the War of 1812’s bicentennial suggest. Thus his works continue to be instructive for understanding how history and memory reinforce one another.

Tank Man, Media Memory and Yellow Duck Patrol

Tiananmen Square is a compressed and repressed space of memories and histories. It is symbolic of different forms of collective forgetting and remembering for the Chinese state and a monumental space of global spectatorship. In 2013, the commemoration of the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 in Sina Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter), demonstrated how people negotiated state censorship to remember the event. This social media commemoration was both an act of resistance against the state’s imposition of an official memory and equally a means to thwart censorship through creative expression, particularly in the form of the image. The commemoration of Tiananmen online nevertheless highlighted the hegemony of media memory where it was entrapped through the iconic image of the Tank Man. The Tank Man as a meme on social media was both a phantom place memory of Tiananmen as well as a cultural artefact re-imagined through the ludic and visual architecture of Web 2.0.

States of Disturbance: Representation of Adolescence and Politics in Rūta Mežavilka’s Dzimuši Latvijai and Kathrin Aehnlich’s Wenn ich groß bin, flieg ich zu den Sternen

In the following article, the correlation between the representation of adolescence and political reality in memory fiction will be analysed using the example of two novels: Rūta Mežavilka’s Latvian novel Dzimusi Latvijai ( Born for Latvia ) and Wenn ich gros bin, flieg ich zu den Sternen ( When I Grow Up I Will Fly To The Stars ) by the German author Kathrin Aehnlich. The link between politics and adolescence that is created in these novels becomes a means to normalize the representation of the socialist past in the official memory culture of Latvia and of Germany. Key to such an interpretation is a differentiated understanding of adolescence as a productive crisis: a period of transformation and disruption as well as creation of new versions of reality. Through the introduction of adolescence as a time of transgression against the ruling system, the novels put the simple distinction where East is associated with socialism and negatively equated to totalitarianism whereas the West and capitalism are positively linked to democracy. The images created in the novels run against the official memory cultures into which they are inscribed and are part of a new counter-memory, despite their geographic and temporal differences.

Rwanda, Twenty Years On

Twenty years after the RPF came to power in Rwanda, the record of the country’s incumbent authorities remains a matter that divides public opinion. The intent of this article is to complement existing assessments by drawing attention to the marginalised views of the young generation of the African Great Lakes Region. The analysis presented in this article is based on the results of a qualitative survey that was recently conducted among hundreds of secondary school students in the region, seeking to explore how the area’s new generation views Rwanda’s historical trajectory and the changes the country has experienced since the end of the 1994 genocide. The findings of the analysis demonstrate the success of the Rwandan government in inculcating an official memory and vision of the future in its citizens. Across the border, however, alternative versions of “the truth”, including narratives critical of the government, were found to be thriving. In Burundi and the DR Congo, Rwanda under the RPF was often considered both to have failed to resolve its longstanding internal problems and to have exported its troubles abroad, causing suffering to its neighbours. This paper ultimately both gives cause to hopes and raises concerns about the future legacy of the RPF’s governance in Rwanda and the wider region.

Olei Hagardom: Between official and popular memory

This article examines the interaction between official memory and popular memory through the case study of Olei Hagardom – Jewish underground fighters executed by the British in Mandatory Palestine. Studies of collective memory usually maintain that the ruling elite, with its control of state resources, dominates collective memory formation. However, the case of Olei Hargardom demonstrates the potentially limited power of institutional commemoration and exclusion in a democratic society. David Ben-Gurion and his government's attempt to exclude these right-wing heroes from the national pantheon had limited impact. Menachem Begin's persistent, partisan political efforts to include them were only partially successful. Ultimately, Olei Hargardom became entrenched in Israeli collective memory as a result of apolitical literary works, popular culture, and the establishment of a site of memory by spontaneous, grassroots efforts.

The Soviet study of the Barefooted Flight of the Kazakhs

The defeat, devastation and exile of the Kazakhs in the early eighteenth century, commonly known as the Barefooted Flight, was the nation's most distressing pre-Soviet calamity. Kazakh nation-building and official remembrance projects – commemorated in state ceremonies, public education and popular culture – portray an uninterrupted, centuries-old practice of tribute to local heroes who challenged the foreign aggressors. Twentieth-century Kazakh and Russian intellectuals in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras studied and enshrined these events based on published, secondary sources, rarely giving attention to the thin trail of documents preserved in state archives. The historiography of the Barefooted Flight exposed a trend in how politically convenient historical lessons shaped the interpretation of events. By the end of the Soviet Union, some archival material was introduced, it was but misquoted so as not to challenge the current interpretation.

Tendentiousness and Topicality: Buchenwald and Antifascism as Sites of GDR Memory

This article examines two chapters from Martin Sabrow's 2009 edited volume Erinnerungsorte der DDR, one on antifascism and one on Buchenwald. These two case studies exemplify the complexities of the contemporary German memorial landscape. In particular, they thematize the remembrance of the Nazi past in the German Democratic Republic and how this GDR past has, in turn, been tendentiously remembered since unification. By examining the layering of memories in these two chapters, we argue that the theoretical models which often underpin contemporary German memory work, Sabrow's volume included, serve to obscure the role of the state as carrier of official memory. On the basis of this study, we show that concepts dominant in today's Germany promote a unified national narrative. In particular, terms such as the “culture of memory” (Erinnerungskultur) and cultural memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis) downplay conflicting, contentious and diverse memories relating to the GDR past. As such, the article provides a timely note of caution for memory studies and memory work, which increasingly applies these models to wider, non-German contexts.

Social and Psycho-political Impacts in the Social Construction of Political Memory of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship

This article refers to a research on the political memory of the military dictatorship in Brazil, held in three Brazilian cities (Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Sao Paulo) in which we analyzed the social and psychopolitical impacts caused by the dictatorship as well as the redemocratization process in building the political memory of community and union leaders. The study revealed two important legacies that were found in the reports of interviewees: the first one refers to police repression, impunity, and authoritarianism still present in Brazilian society; the second legacy refers to the existence of a political memory built by social movements and communities that care about passing on, to the new generations, the events that occurred during the military dictatorship. Research has clearly shown that there is no single memory but several underground memories (Pollak, 1989), built by the popular classes, which contradict the versions disseminated by the official memory and enhance the social movements capacity of action as a strategy of resistance and political struggle of the movements today. To the extent that this fight is assumed by other spheres of Brazilian society it may contribute to memory policies in the fight against forgetting.

Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution

This article takes a discourse analytical approach to elements of the 40th commemoration of the Portuguese Revolution, focusing specifically on the absence of themes and participants by groups who were most directly involved in the Revolution, either as actors (the “Captains of Abril”), the retornados (Portuguese nationals “returning” to Portugal in the aftermath of the 1974 coup) and retornados-emigrantes (those who left Africa during this period but went on to live outside Portugal). The analyses center primarily on the speech by Portuguese President Cavaco Silva, given as the official opening of the 40th anniversary of the military coup of 25 April 1974, which brought the authoritarian regime of 48 years to an end. This examination, combined with other speeches of Cavaco Silva, newspaper reports, analyses of the integration of retornados , and a commemorative TV miniseries on the Revolution, provide the evidence for the argument that important voices of the Revolution were muted or silenced in the official commemoration of 2014. Finally, the relevance of actor-centered perspectives on commemoration is laid out for educators.

Painting Images of the Past out of the Embers of War

Much of contemporary society's memory of war is built on artistic interpretations of the historical experience of conflict and trauma, rather than the official commemorations that often take centre stage.

Editorial Comment

Editorial Comment Joanne Tompkins This issue begins and ends with “the end.” The first essay’s ending is the untimely death of playwright Federico García Lorca in 1936, whereas the final essay tackles the staging of the ultimate end, the Apocalypse. In each, there is a sense of a haunting, whether of the past or, in the final essay, the future. This semblance of haunting links all the essays, each returning to something that has appeared before. At one level, this is not surprising, given that theatre as an art form continues to rehearse and perform versions of what has come before; but its articulation in this issue is remarkable, as each essay enacts a “return” that reminds us of the critical and cyclical endurance of the form. In “Memory, Silence, and Democracy in Spain: Federico García Lorca, the Spanish Civil War, and the Law of Historical Memory,” Maria Delgado explores the ways in which Lorca’s death continues to influence the politics of memory in Spain. She traces the story of both Lorca’s physical remains and his artistic legacy through General Francisco Franco’s lengthy dictatorship and its aftermath to explore how the national imaginary continues to pursue a willingness to forget. She argues that Lorca was considered to be “non-grievable” (to use Judith Butler’s terminology) during the Franco regime because to mourn his death would compromise the regime’s narrative of the past. When Lorca’s literary capital did come to be exploited, it was carefully curated and expurgated, such that he continued to be “contained” in a circumscribed form of sanctioned “Spain.” Then, neither his political preferences nor his homosexuality was permitted to be discussed in any way. Spain’s return to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975 saw not a reconciliation with/of the past, but a further articulation of this politics of forgetting. This pacto del olvido (the pact of forgetting) continues to haunt Lorca’s legacy. The specter of Lorca’s body—its literal presence and absence, and the cultural commodification associated with his work—calls into question Spain’s approach to the past, and even the concept of official memory itself. Like Delgado, Christin Essin also addresses the materiality of performance in her essay, “Unseen Labor and Backstage Choreographies: A Materialist Production History of A Chorus Line.” The ghosts in her materialist critique are the invisible workers who move scenery and operate lights behind the actors of long-running Broadway musicals like A Chorus Line. She pairs the production about trying to get work onstage with the actual work behind its scenes, without which there would be no performance. Yet, more than simply shining a spotlight on the work of these technicians, she charts the important transition in work practices that occurred during the lengthy run (and return) of A Chorus Line: the musical marks the shift to computerization in the industry. She interviews the electricians and technicians who worked on A Chorus Line to investigate their practices and what were then revolutionary changes in lighting management: the move from cumbersome lighting equipment (using what was known as the “piano board”) to computerized lighting boards, the precursor to contemporary electronic lighting boards. Essin’s essay charts what she calls an offstage “parallel choreography of counting rhythms in unison,” an act that needs to be as precise as [End Page ix] each dancer’s action. Combining conventional research materials with her account of the stagehands and electricians, Essin offers a thorough alternate performance text for this landmark musical. The examination of A Chorus Line from this alternative perspective leads neatly to Donatella Galella’s essay on another well-known American musical in “Redefining America, Arena Stage, and Territory Folks in a Multiracial Oklahoma!” She provides a history of Oklahoma!, in particular the mixed-race dynamics in the 1930 play by Lynn Riggs, which addresses indigenous dispossession quite differently from the more famous and celebratory 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein vehicle. Galella interprets Molly Smith’s production of Oklahoma! at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., which deployed a multiracial approach to casting, in terms of what it sought to achieve, before exploring the further racial matters that its multiracial...