Politics Of Cultural Memory Research Articles

John T. Lowney (1957–2022)

This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.John’s work explored the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in the literary history of the United States. His first book, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell UP, 1997), focused on Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 and elaborated the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s. His scholarship on twentieth-century American poetry and literary culture continued in History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (U of Iowa P, 2006).Over the years, his writing on Williams included other essays and reviews—including, most recently, “Williams: The New Poetries and Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams (Cambridge UP, 2016) and “Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography” in the William Carlos Williams Review (2018). In addition, John’s scholarship in African American literary and cultural studies, and jazz literature, includes Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (U of Illinois P, 2017) as well as essays in American Literature, The Langston Hughes Review, Melus, and The African American Review. His intellectual work was recognized with grants from the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant.During our PhD studies, writing about Williams, we both read John’s work. We also remember John as approachable and engaging, quietly spoken and sharply intelligent, with a sense of humor amid the often overly serious atmosphere of academic conference. Moreover, he was a generous and sensitive reviewer, including a review of Ian’s first book that came out of the PhD studies his own work had helped along. We celebrate his contributions as we mourn the loss of a colleague and friend. Though we are confident that John’s voice will continue to inspire continuing explorations of Williams’s ongoing presence in the tradition of American poetry and poetics.

Spectrality in Pa negre/Black Bread (Villaronga 2010): Queer aesthetics and its politics of memory

Since the 1960s, Latin American and Iberian filmmakers have embraced the child’s gaze as a cinematic tool to mediate and understand the historical and political memory of war and dictatorial violence. During the transitions to democracy in the 1990s and the twenty-first century, cinematic representations of children became key in the cultural politics of memory. Pa negre/Black Bread () is one of the films that problematize the past. Through its queer aesthetics, the film depicts a vision of the war and the dictatorship that rejects dogmatic, formulaic readings and shows how the pervasive effects of political injustice nurture social and gender violence. Villaronga’s film challenges the spectators and their expectations by questioning who the real monsters are and how lies fabricate a particular vision of history and the demonization of the other. In this article, I argue that through the spectres of the past, and the monsters in the present, Pa negre evokes a moral and aesthetic complexity that resists the politics of consensus and avoids essentialist views on queer identity, the Catalan resistance to the Francoist state and the treatment of the past as a mere ideological commodity in the contemporary politics of memory in Spain.

‘This sense of freedom’: sculpture and architecture together

This special issue explores the changing status of architectural sculpture, sculptural architecture, and artistic and political identity in a global context, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In recent years, sculpture studies within art and architectural history have grown exponentially, increasingly taking diverse themes into account, including materiality, gender, postcolonialism and affect. In the rapid transformations of state power and imperial activity in the eighteenth century, through into the post-revolutionary political atmosphere of the nineteenth century, nations appeared to sponsor the celebration of the public citizen and actively projected imperial stability in the midst of change and resistance. Despite its association with permanence, sculpture was charged with representing change: materializing new identities and formulating representational traditions. Architectural sculpture in particular marked sites of urban modernity, such as railway stations, cultural institutions, civic landmarks and sacred structures; these large and prestigious commissions often sparked public debate around identity and artistic production. As the onset and outcomes of the First World War shaped the power and politics of cultural memory, sculpture took centre stage, with new responsibilities amid global tensions. Interwar architectural sculpture negotiated and articulated increasing anxieties regarding ornament, historicism, modernism and minimalism. With the arrival of modernism worldwide, some believed architectural sculpture was anathema. Others looked to it as the vehicle to facilitate and embody vitality in bold new architectural experimentation. Architectural sculpture was a crucible for artistic and wider cultural dialogue concerning modern life and modern subjects.In our own century, the relationships between sculpture and architecture have come to public prominence in many different ways. Conflict, regime change and terrorism in the Middle East have seen the destruction of monuments to rulers both ancient and modern. In New York, architectural remnants of the World Trade Center towers have been transformed into monumental forms, reminiscent of the obelisks and cenotaphs of earlier centuries. At the same time, sculptors have been working on increasingly large, architectural scales. Anish Kapoor's Orbit, in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, created in collaboration with the engineer Cecil Balmond, is now known as Britain's largest sculpture. Made entirely of prefabricated parts, it was manufactured by a team of over 100 people. In this regard, its production values and complexity recall the sculptural anima of Victorian industrial forms produced on a mass scale using numerous complex techniques.1 As of summer 2016, Carsten Holler's Slide runs around Kapoor's tower, transforming the sculpture into an interactive visitor attraction by merging two artists' perspectives on monumental forms. Holler, whose sculptural signature is the architecturally integrated metal tube slide, populated Tate Modern's turbine hall with his metal spiral artforms in 2006-07, shifting the way that visitors could relate to the cascades of vertical space in this massive industrial hall. In a sense, Holler's sculptural intervention in the turbine hall was in dialogue with recent commissions by two other artists in particular. One was Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, in which the artist cut jagged cracks into the floor, mapping out the consequences of some long-forgotten earthquake and fragmenting the smooth concrete surface into projections that allowed visitors to question the relationship between surface and depth. The most entertaining images of this installation were those taken directly from above of visitors clinging on to the cracks, which were then rotated to suggest that the turbine hall's floor had become a precarious series of ledges. The sublime lurked around the saw-edged corners of this installation, the traces of which can still be seen in Tate Modern's concrete floor, like so many old scars. …

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramírez

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramírez

Intergenerational Mapping and the Cultural Politics of Memory

A key objective of the paper is to rejuvenate our understanding of time. The focus is on how the knowledge and memories of times past are transmitted collectively and intergenerationally, and why this is important for children's political formation. The objective is pursued through a short philosophical discussion of time, memory and forgetting, drawing primarily on the work of Bernard Stiegler and others investigating these questions with an emphasis on contemporary technologies. The study and philosophical framing also engage a larger geo-economic and historical context in which all subjects, including children, are faced with critical challenges related to the recent development of new technologies of control; these formulate drives and/or a temporal consciousness of 'hyper' attention that renders deep attention and the formation of long-term desire increasingly difficult. In the face of this historical moment, the paper calls attention to the importance of thinking about time holistically as well as historically in terms of the intergenerational transfer and transformation of collective memory. Using material from two years of research with children, the claim is made that intergenerational education, involving the technics of mapping and writing and drawing on the archives of the past, can enable a critical relearning of history, thus laying the groundwork for imaginings of alternative futures.

In/Visible: The Political and Sexual Regimes of Databases

This text focuses on the politics and sexual regimes of databases and archives (and art histories) and their relation to human rights, equality and democracy. The main goal is to question, problematize and analyze the cultural and political regimes and strategies deployed in the processes involved in the storage of databases of cultural, artistic, and historical works and events, and, in particular, the regimes of visibility by means of which non-normative sexual experiences and cultural practices are in/excluded from official archives and institutionalized databases, and their consequent influence on the politics of cultural memory and heritage. Setting sexuality and gender as points of investigation, as they are being lived and experienced on the social margins, this text aims to open up for discussion the very foundations of how databases are being conceived and what counts as an archive.

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

Review: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramírez

Book Review| August 01 2011 Review: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramírez The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. By Catherine S. Ramírez. (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2009. xxvi + 229 pp.$79.95 cloth, $22.95 paper) Gigi Peterson Gigi Peterson State University of New York at Cortland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2011) 80 (3): 489–491. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2011.80.3.489 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gigi Peterson; Review: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramírez. Pacific Historical Review 1 August 2011; 80 (3): 489–491. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2011.80.3.489 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by the Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramirez.

"The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramirez.." Canadian Journal of History, 45(3), pp. 666–667

The woman in the zoot suit: Gender, nationalism, and the cultural politics of memory

The woman in the zoot suit: Gender, nationalism, and the cultural politics of memory

Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” and the Politics of Cultural Memory: An Apostil

In 1998, an Atlanta Federal District Court judge ruled that Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech was part of national history and that CBS did not need to seek permission to air it in an hi...

From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America by Vicki L. Ruiz The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory by Catherine S. Ramírez

From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America by Vicki L. Ruiz The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory by Catherine S. Ramírez

Argentina: Stories for a Nation , and: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Argentina: Stories for a Nation, and: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory Adela C. Licona (bio) Argentina: Stories for a Nation by Amy K. Kaminsky. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 282 pp., $67.50 hardcover, $22.50 paper. The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory by Catherine S. Ramírez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 229 pp., $79.95 hardcover, $22.95 paper. In Argentina: Stories for a Nation, a book about trans/national imaginaries, representation, and the possibilities of representation as a productive process, Amy Kaminsky examines cultural artifacts to meticulously consider Argentina as it is represented from within, as well as how it is represented by, and exists in the minds of, others. Throughout, Kaminsky considers why those in Argentina are so interested and invested in what others believe about it as a nation. Through a thorough examination and analysis, the author demonstrates how Argentina's own understanding of itself is deeply related to what others imagine and believe it to be. It is in this relational play across boundaries that Kaminsky introduces [End Page 201] the notion of a trans/national imaginary. Revealed trans/national and transcultural relations demonstrate a reciprocal and relational productivity contributing to the trans/national myths that constitute Argentina over time and space. Importantly, Kaminsky demonstrates how contexts that produce a postcolonial subject ultimately do "violence to the indigenous people," who are made invisible throughout the productions and representations of Argentina (31). Catherine Ramírez also explores trans/national imaginaries and how they invisibilize resistant, transgressive, and ultimately gendered identities. In The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, Ramírez simultaneously considers U.S. nationalism and Chicano cultural nationalism, particularly as these have served to obscure, if not altogether erase, the pachuca from the historical record. The Woman in the Zoot Suit, Ramírez explains, is a book about history as a contested production with competing interpretations. The distinction of and engagement with these two competing nationalisms makes this work uniquely compelling. Ramírez approaches nation as "official" and "unofficial," as well as racialized and gendered, in order to consider multiple and competing myths of nation, particularly for the pachuca. Like Kaminsky, she considers a multiplicity of cultural productions and artifacts, as these are implicated in contradictory nationalist imaginaries. Both Kaminsky and Ramírez complicate the historical record and, therefore, understandings of the social actors who populate these records, not only to resist historical silences and/or misrepresentations, but also to resist the homogenizing tendencies that can occur when matters of nation and identity are considered. Each author carefully reflects on the discursive mis/representations of nation as a spatialized location constituted by myths that contribute to trans/national identities. In reading these works in tandem, I recalled the work of Emma Pérez (1999), whose decolonial imaginary is, for me, at play in both texts. According to Pérez, it is the decolonial imaginary that often makes room for revisioned histories that resist and can serve to transform historical misrepresentations in order to consider not only a historical presence, but also diverse historical roles for those previously obscured or silenced in and by dominant historical narratives. I have become increasingly interested in how spaces and social discourses converge to reproduce and/or resist dominant narratives. As I argue elsewhere, in order to ascertain how different discourses and spaces are implicated in the production and subversion of historical narratives and their produced invisibilities, we must attend to the ways in which such discourses and spaces are imbued with and shaped by ideologies and relations of power (Massey 2005). Kaminsky and Ramírez each prove adept at creatively and critically attending to such matters. The chapters in Argentina give readers an understanding of the trans/ national imaginaries that have been constructed and that construct Argentina. In addition to considering the ways in which Argentina has existed and exists in European and American imaginaries (and how important such imaginaries [End Page 202] are to Argentina), Kaminsky includes considerations and distinctions among filmmakers, writers, visual artists, and academics. She carefully...

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (review)

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (review)

The woman in the zoot suit: gender, nationalism, and the cultural politics of memory

Preface ix Acknowledgments xxi A Note on Terminology xxv Introduction: A Genealogy of Vendidas 1 1. Domesticating the Pachuca 25 2. Black Skirts, Dark Slacks, and Brown Knees: Pachuca Style and Spectacle during World War II 55 3. Saying Nothin': Pachucas and the Languages of Resistance 83 4. La Pachuca and the Excesses of Family and Nation 109 Epilogue: Homegirls Then and Now, from the Home Front to the Frontline 137 Notes 149 Bibliography 197 Index 225

Bringing back sweet (and not so sweet) memories: the cultural politics of memory, hip‐hop, and generational identities

This article examines the salience of collective ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’ among a group of students in Hip‐Hop Lit, a hip‐hop centered English literature course that I co‐taught at ‘Howard High School,’ an urban high school in the Northeastern United States. Specifically, this article examines the memory work that occurred within Hip‐Hop Lit in response to the students’ interactions with one of the course texts, Things Done Changed by rapper Notorious B.I.G. From this and other classroom texts, students were able to construct, contest, and reinscribe memories about the past. Through these memories, students were able to reaffirm and challenge particular social identities that informed and reflected their lived experiences.

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory Anthony Macías The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. By Catherine S. Ramírez. Durham: Duke University Press. 2009. This unique, important book comes out swinging and packs a punch. In pithy prose Ramírez reassesses pachucas—everyday, working-class female zoot suiters, and la pachuca—iconographic, symbolic figure. Both "pachucas as agents and la pachuca as icon," (xiv) she argues, were "silenced" and "rendered invisible by Chicano cultural nationalism." (12) Using gender as a category of analysis from start to finish, she convincingly shows how "the conflation of the ideal Chicano subject with the male Chicano body erases Chicanas." (13) Ramírez places pachucas at the center of history, reversing the accusatory tropes of vendida ("sell-out") and malinche ("traitor"), and skillfully answering her own question, "who has betrayed whom?" (21). The book is thus a critical "intervention" presenting "alternative interpretations." (xviii) and a self-confident, "self-conscious recovery project" (xv) that reinserts Chicanas into the historical record, particularly regarding the wartime Los Angeles Sleepy Lagoon incident and zoot suit riots, and Chicano expressive culture. Her main arguments are that pachucas have been mostly invisible in twentieth-century Chicano history, and that la pachuca has much to teach us about both U.S. nationalism and Chicano cultural nationalism, Americanism, full or first-class "citizenship, and resistant cultural, gender, and sexual identities and their contradictions." (xv) Structurally, the book's "dual perspective" encompasses the World War II and Chicano Movement eras, statist and insurgent nationalisms, thereby allowing her to "use one nationalism to relativize and shed light on another." (xvi) To substantiate her arguments, Ramírez draws from numerous sources, including archival special collections and personal papers, oral history interviews, periodicals and newspapers, poems, plays, films, short stories, novels, paintings, photographs, corridos (ballads), etiquette guidebooks, patriotic propaganda posters, trial court testimony transcripts, and Lowrider magazine cartoon strips and advertisements. Engaging with feminist and queer studies, Ramírez analyzes bourgeois conventions of proper domesticity and respectability, the performance of oppositional masculinity and "dissident femininity," (110) the blurring of public and private spheres, and the politicized "heteropatriarchal" familia of Chicano power ideology. (113) Her fresh rereadings of the [End Page 224] secondary literature contribute to conversations in American studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies, especially work on visual culture, hipness and coolness, and spectacular subcultures marked by conspicuous consumption "and conspicuous occupation of public space." (23) Some critics may question the notion of "style politics" or "style as resistance," (56-57, 84-85) but Ramírez persuasively provides ample examples, ultimately proving the power of culture "not only to reflect but to produce history, narrative, and meaning." (xv) After a preface, an introduction, and four research chapters, an epilogue links the participation of U.S. Latina soldiers in the war on terror to her larger rumination on nationalism, violence, homegirls, and the home front. In the end, Catherine Ramírez's informative, illuminating book responds respectfully to one of the Chicana historical actors she quotes, who said, "We have not been able to have our side of the story told." (44) With an ear for language and an eye for fashion, the author validates the legacy of once vilified women who shook up the status quo with panache, impudence, insolence, insouciance, and insubordination. Anthony Macías University of California Riverside Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Revisited: Combat Cinema, American Culture and the German Past

This article discusses the ways critical debates in West Germany—about the increased production of war films and whether such films were ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’—raised central issues about the relationship between US popular culture and the politics of German cultural memory in two significant war films of the late fifties: David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (USA/GB 1957) and Bernhard Wicki's Die Brucke (The Bridge, FRG 1959). Whereas Kwai was heralded as an ‘anti-war’ epic in Columbia Pictures’ publicity campaign for the film in West Germany, many German commentators saw things differently. They made Kwai the centre of a critical discussion about the ways ostensibly anti-war US productions were ambiguously pro-war in the West German context, focusing attention upon the ways the film's music, its characters, and the symbolic function of the bridge ultimately encouraged a glorification of militarism as German commentators understood it, based upon their own past experiences. In contrast, Wicki's Die Brucke offered a filmic ‘response’ to Kwai’s ultimately ‘Cold War anti-war’ formula through an implicit visual contrast to and critique of the bridge, men and music in Kwai. Overall, an analysis of these two films in terms of the pro-war versus anti-war film debates of the time reveals cross-cultural and transnational dynamics at work in the heretofore exclusively German discussion of the politics of cultural memory in West Germany. Ultimately, this essay argues, these debates encouraged an expansion of West German memory culture rather than a denial of the past.

Borderland spaces of identification and dis/location: Multiscalar narratives and enactments of Seto identity and place in the Estonian-Russian borderlands

This article explores the cultural politics of memory and the reconfiguration of commemorative landscapes as one of the principal arenas within which the interiority and exteriority of place and identity are being re-narrated, contested, and re-enacted by actors and institutions representing a wide range of scalar stances. We treat place and identity as mutually constituted, dynamically interactive discursive and practical categories of becoming, and identify borderlands as multiscalar sites of imminence, where the interiority and exteriority of place and identity are re-narrated and re-enacted. Using a multiscalar network approach, we focus on the actors engaged in the cultural politics of memory in the southern Russian-Estonian borderlands. We conclude that borderlands are central multiscalar nodes where power, place and identity intersect, where the interior and exterior not only of Setomaa and Seto-ness, but also of Estonia and Estonian-ness, Russia and Russian-ness, and Europe and European-ness are reconfigured.

Islam, memory, and morality in Yemen: ruling families in transition

Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen tells a story of a Yemeni hereditary elite which was overthrown in the 1962 revolution in North Yemen. For over a millennium, they had enjoyed exclusive rights to the leadership of the Imamate, the religiously sanctioned state. Following the violent removal from power of King Faysal of Iraq in 1958, the overthrow of the Yemeni Imamate - the longest lasting Hashimite rule in the Middle East - confirmed the decline of Hashimite power (held by ruling generations claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad). However, rather than concentrating on recent political history, Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen highlights the personal predicament of those targeted by the revolution, in which they served as the foil for the new regime's moral and political ascendancy. Focusing on the cultural politics of memory, the book explores how members of the elite remember in the process of making sense of their current lives and formulating responses to adversity.