Popular Memory Research Articles

Séraphin (1747-1800), "the facetious hunchback": How ankylosing spondylitis contributed to the success of his shadow puppet theatre.

Séraphin (1747-1800) is considered the founder of shadow puppetry in France. This "facetious hunchback", well known to Parisians in the late 18th century, ran his own theater until his death in 1800 at the age of 53. His deformity seems to have left its mark on popular memory, and was an integral part of the "Théâtre Séraphin". Part of his skeleton was preserved in the Dupuytren Museum in Paris. In 1897, it was described as a "particular kind of ankylosis, probably different from ordinary kyphosis". Then, in 1899, Dr. André Léri, a pupil of Pierre Marie, hypothesized from skeletal analysis that Séraphin must have suffered from rhizomelic spondylosis (the first french name for ankylosing spondylitis). In this article, we present the recent analysis of his skeleton, restored at the Dupuytren Museum, as well as old documents, a graphic representation and texts that allow us to make the diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis. These documents show how this deforming disease contributed to the success of Seraphin's theatre.

The Memory of Rebellion (Lyon, 1529)

The first half of the sixteenth century saw an explosion of popular revolts throughout Europe. Focusing on the French city of Lyon, the article analyses written expressions of revolt, including street bills, posters and, indirectly, oral relays. In April 1529, the city was devastated by the Grande Rebeyne (great revolt), triggered by a placard accusing the municipality of incompetence and corruption and calling for a riot. Despite the harsh repression, others appeared in the following years in an effort to rekindle the flame of rebellion. How did these writings come down to us and under what conditions were they produced? Despite the anonymous popular signature, did they really express the views of subaltern people? Can the precedents and customs on which they rely be reconstructed, given that the archives were jealously preserved by the municipal councillors? How does a chain of insurrectionary writings take shape over time and is there evidence of re-use in popular memory? Drawing on rare traces produced chiefly by political elites (handwritten consular archives and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century histories of Lyon), the article seeks to answer these questions and to counterbalance the dominant discourse by articulating the written protest and the social memory emerging from it.

Writing, Memory and Subalternity in the Early Modern World

In this introduction to the JEMS collective volume Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World, the editors provide a historiographical and theoretical survey on the history of subaltern forms of literacy, as well as of popular modes of remembrance, mainly focused in the early modern period. While providing examples of the ways in which literacy has been carefully policed in different societies, giving way to structures of exclusion, it also points to the more or less fluid relation that common men and women from different backgrounds established with writing, occasionally using it to record personal memory and participate in the collective shaping of the past. The essay tackles the difficulty of recovering the written traces of common men and women, while surveying the ways in which this archive of subaltern writing and memory has been creatively constructed by subsequent scholarly interventions from very different disciplines, including anthropology, paleography, sociology, epigraphy, gender and sexuality studies, and social and cultural history.

Historical Controversies and Collective Memory: Reassessing the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This article explores the complex historical and public memory controversies surrounding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focusing on the National Air and Space Museum’s Enola Gay exhibition. It examines how different historians interpret the use of atomic bombs and the varying narratives presented to the public. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s theory on popular memory, the study highlights the tensions between official narratives and revisionist perspectives. The analysis reveals how national patriotism and historical revisionism shape collective memory, questioning the ownership of historical truth. The Enola Gay controversy exemplifies the ongoing debate over historical representation, public history, and the ethical implications of wartime actions. By revisiting this controversy, the paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how history is constructed and contested, emphasizing the importance of inclusive and critical engagement with historical events.

Liberation, Re-Education, Democratisation: The Politics of Gratitude in German-American Relations after 1945

The US-American presence in postwar Germany and its role in West Germany's re-education and democratisation have fuelled a discourse of gratitude that has lastingly shaped the transatlantic alliance. German politicians and other policy actors continue to rely on proclamations of ‘thankfulness’ as a means of what Todd Hall has termed ‘emotional diplomacy’. In the process, they affirm a collective memory of the postwar years that emphasises friendship and contains social conflicts, political tensions, and ambivalent affects. They draw on iconic tropes and powerful narratives – ranging from the GI handing out chewing gum to CARE packages and the ‘gift’ of democracy – which have cast German-American relations in terms of generosity, gift-giving, and gratitude. This article traces the roots of this discourse to (the popular memory of) the postwar moment and situates it vis-à-vis the multifaceted affective landscape of early postwar Germany with a specific focus on its gender logics and with an eye to its benefits and the risks it entails.

Legacies of Colonial Violence in Contemporary Transitional Justice: Memories of Mau Mau, the ‘Kapenguria Six’ and the ‘Ocampo Six’ in Kenya

ABSTRACT∞ This article assesses the enduring impact of colonial violence in responses to modern conflict by transitional justice mechanisms. It presents an example of how societies continue to be structured by racial and colonial injustice and how this influences contemporary transitional justice. This is done through an analysis of the popular memory of the Mau Mau insurgency from 1952 to 1960 in Kenya, the trial of the six Kenyan nationalists known as the ‘Kapenguria Six’ by the British colonial administration and the trials of six Kenyans alleged to be most responsible for orchestrating the 2007–2008 post-election violence in Kenya, known as the ‘Ocampo Six’ before the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the Kenyan context, the influence of memories of colonial violence enabled the promotion of political agendas and arguably coloured public debate surrounding the two Kenya cases before the ICC. Transitional justice mechanisms such as the ICC do not operate in an ahistorical vacuum and international criminal trials as a form of transitional justice may be contested where there is no genuine accountability, redress or reparations for victims of colonial crimes. However, the juxtaposition of colonial crimes and the ICC prosecutions in Kenya also raises important questions relating to accountability for historical crimes in former colonies, the temporal limitations of transitional justice mechanisms and their unequal application.

South Africa, 1994 + 30: A Conversation About History After Apartheid

AbstractIn this wide-ranging conversation, six scholars of South Africa detail threads of continuity and change in the historiographies, popular memories, archives, research agendas, methodologies, and within the South African academy and historical professional since the end of formal apartheid in 1994.

An Account of Systematic Review of English for Medical Purposes (EMP) Vocabulary Memorization

A high volume of global medical information exchanges has escalated due to the recent pandemic that has hit the world. In addressing international demands of sorts, it is imperative that students improve their English language proficiency, especially for medical purposes. Sufficient vocabulary knowledge is vital for language skills to be employed effectively. However, in China, limited attention has been given to vocabulary learning over the years, especially English for Medical Purposes (EMP) vocabulary since it is very large, complex and filled with jargon. Research shows that students perceive the difficulty of EMP to lie in the learning of vocabulary itself. Faced with problems and challenges in the process of EMP vocabulary learning through memorization technique, theoretical research is urgently required to comprehensively reveal the research status of EMP vocabulary memorization. Therefore, this study adopts the systematic literature review method to evaluate related research on EMP vocabulary memorization in China and abroad from 2011 to 2021. The main characteristics of EMP vocabulary memorization research, the factors that affect EMP vocabulary memorization, and the most popular memory strategies are elaborated in detail in order to integrate the existing fragmented knowledge and demonstrate the development of EMP vocabulary memorization technique(s).

Casual culture and football hooligan autobiographies: popular memory, working-class men and racialised masculinities in deindustrialising Britain, 1970s–1990s

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of an important subculture which has received scant academic attention: football’s casual movement of the 1980s. By analysing hooligan autobiographies, it investigates how the casual look spread from Merseyside and Manchester in the late 1970s to encompass every major city and town in Britain by the middle of the following decade. It delineates the attractions of the hooligan firms and shows how, through their use of ritualised violence they fought to become hegemonic in working-class communities. It explores how two key myths about football hooligans became dominant in the popular memory of the 1970s and 1980s. First, the hooligan became uniquely associated with racism in the popular imaginary. The second dominant myth was that the widespread consumption of the drug ecstasy during the acid house and rave years between c.1988 and 1992 saw the end of terrace violence. While the autobiographies largely provide support for the latter, the former is more complex. Via the analysis of the testimony of black and white football hooligans, I show that the racist/hooligan couplet did important ideological work to conceal the degree to which racism continued to figure in British football, into the 1990s, despite the decline in football-related violence.

Unreconciled: Indigenous Presents/Presence & Settler Memory

Abstract This essay explores race, racism, history, and popular memory from the vantage point of the Indigenous world, and, specifically, Native peoples colonized within the present-day United States. Over the course of the past decade, Indigenous movements for land and life have shed light on the incomplete nature of conquest in Native North America and the instability of settler colonialism. “Unreconciled” explores the ongoing tension between Indigenous presence and the settler colonial “logic of elimination” in the context of land acknowledgments, commemoration, popular culture, and federal policy. We show that, despite changes with regard to the ways in which non-Indigenous people in settler states collectively remember or imagine community, elements of settler memory continue to reside within and limit public conversations on race, remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation. (DMC and MLC)

Babri retold: rewriting popular memory through Islamophobic humor

ABSTRACT The strategic mobilization of humor by Hindutva groups online contributes to the mainstreaming of supremacist ideologies that inform extremist behavior. Analyzing the social media recontextualizations of the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition as case studies, this paper examines how online instantiations of Islamophobic humor contribute to the Hindutva revisioning of popular memory. This paper expands the understanding of how Islamophobia is normalized through the shifting affective framing of the Babri Masjid demolition, from shame to schadenfreude, from tragedy to comedy, and from a threat to Indian secularism to a necessary act of paternalistic disciplining. Studying these shifts through specific examples of Islamophobic humor builds upon previous insights into: (1) the affective regimes by which Islamophobic ideas are made palatable to a wider audience, (2) discriminatory speech as an act of pleasure, and (3) how both of these work toward the reworking of popular memory in service of the Hindutva political project.

BOLLYWOOD AS A SITE FOR CREATING COLLECTIVE MEMORY: A CASE STUDY OF SELECT MOVIES

Memory like history have and will always remain sites for discursive struggle wherein institutional mechanisms will continuously try to control and shape it. Throughout history, mass media has been one of major tools that various actors have used to shape the discursive struggle of history and memory simultaneously. Both of them serve as crucial sites of resistance for the disenfranchised groups.Mass media in the form of cinema has always been a crucial site for this discursive struggle for both memory and history. In the present-day visual culture, Television and cinema have emerged as major sources from where we get to know about glorious histories, past struggles, and triumphs. Be it biographical series or movies, fictionalized accounts of war memorialized into blockbuster movies, or state commissioned actualities/documentaries; the cinematic representation caters to collective re-imagination of past events and renders them into sites for shaping collective memory and thus identity.During WWII, both Hitler and Stalin used films as tools for propaganda as this medium has potential to shape one’s understanding of history. State and non- state actors throughout history have used cinema to establish, reinforce and even mold historical events into hyper-emotionalized audio-visual texts, which over a period naturalizes or blurs the lines between real and represented history.This paper will focus on how content and transmission of popular memory via cinema in India takes place. The focus will be on how mass media in the shape of cinema reinforce the existing mnemonic hegemony, which in turn shapes collective identities and pasts of the public.Engaging with political economy the paper will further examine how economic conditions shape popular memory simultaneously leading to erasure of certain histories. The concept is to investigate how social, economic, and political circumstances indirectly encourage and exclude specific narratives in order to sustain dominant power dynamics in collective recollection across different races, classes, and genders through the medium of cinema.The premise is to not only understand mass media content act as an agency to the production and sustaining of memory but also highlight the various factors behind this materialist approach of memory leading to erasure and disenfranchisement of other histories and memories. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of memories propagated through television and cinema in India.

‘A salvage exercise for Aboriginal rights’: human rights and social justice in Indigenous political responses to the Mabo (No.2) decision

ABSTRACT The Mabo (No.2) decision in 1992 has been described as a historical turning point for the nation. In popular memory, it is associated with Eddie Mabo, then Prime Minister Paul Keating, and Indigenous activist and public intellectual Noel Pearson, who played an important role in seeing Mabo (No.2) embodied in Native Title law. Inasmuch as it is understood within the long history of Indigenous demands for rights, it is generally seen as pivotal in the turn to Indigenous rights. Mabo (No.2) put Indigenous sovereignty on the table like never before and emphasised its connection to self-determination and land rights in the Indigenous political agenda for rights. In this paper, I aim to expand understanding of this moment by demonstrating the ways in which human rights were deployed by Indigenous political actors, particularly those associated with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, both during their discussions with the government as to the implications of the decision for Indigenous people on the Australian mainland and more generally in relation to Australia’s international human rights obligations.

History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis, Paul A. Cohen (2017)

Review of: History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis, Paul A. Cohen (2017) New York: Columbia University Press, 279 pp., ISBN 978-0-23116-637-9, p/bk, $27

Screening difficult women: 21st century reclamations of women’s history

ABSTRACT Historical fiction has long been one of television’s most prominent genres. It was not until the advent of streaming TV in the 21st century, however, that the genre reached its radical feminist potential. Written, directed, produced by and starring women, contemporary women’s historical fiction has exploded as both a marketable and an ideological genre. Three series - Good Girls Revolt (Amazon, 2016), Mrs. America (Hulu, 2020), and Halt and Catch Fire (AMC, 2014–17)—exemplify women’s challenge to the orthodoxy of male-driven historical fiction. These three shows not only reclaim women’s 20th Century American histories, but they also refute accepted conceptualizations of the genre and of History itself. Through circular storytelling, the blending of fact and fiction, and new female archetypes, these three series narrate coherent and consistent women’s histories heretofore missing in popular memory. From this foundation, these series discuss, debate, and fantasize about women’s lived experiences in the past, as well as commenting on the present and dreaming about the future of women’s lives and desires.

Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives

Playing That Crystal Flute:Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives Kristin Moriah (bio) Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 608 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 408 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $27.00 (paperback). Black women and Black musicians have a contentious relationship with archival practices and popular memory. Take Lizzo, for example, and the moment she played James Madison's previously untouched two-hundred-year-old flute at a concert in Washington, DC, in fall 2022. In that instance, she was, as the kids say, her ancestors' wildest dreams. She certainly seemed to be creating a full circle, reaching toward the eighteenth century and grasping hold of a powerful symbol of the Enlightenment cherished by a founding father whose most notorious achievements would be used to disenfranchise women like Lizzo for generations. Common wisdom tells us that she was not meant to touch it. The crystal flute's very status within the Library of Congress calls attention to its symbolic power and its distance from Black women's marginalized position in society. Can you be Lizzo, a Black musician, and play the flute? More specifically, can you be Lizzo and play that flute? In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. They write from a cultural context in which the roots, nuances, and implications of Black musical life have often been obscured and whose continued existence, in the [End Page 395] case of Black musical archives, is often tenuous. Their scholarship represents a deep engagement with a diverse set of sonic archives and innovators. The need to theorize work so foundational to American popular culture, to mine sounds always seemingly present and in motion, arises from a sense of urgency spurred by the fascination with and furor over Black popular musicians. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne Brooks argues that "Black women of sound" have "a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and simultaneously devalues them" (1). Brooks takes "seriously the centrality of sound in Black women's lives as a foundation for developing and sustaining pivotal, profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another" (12). In doing so, she recalls the work of scholars like Jayna Brown when she argues that "what these Black women musicians offer, in short, is another way of hearing, reading, theorizing, making the modern. Black women of sound sign and sing themselves through their listening such that they reframe archaic philosophies of the 'Self' born out of high Enlightenment—thought that never had them in mind" (17). In Brooks's work, readers will also find echoes of Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye and their interrogations of Western Humanism and modernity. What is more, while rigorously engaging with critical theory from a range of fields, Liner Notes is structured like a vinyl record. Thus the text speaks to the influence of material culture on Black sound studies. Black media form part of the message. Side A of Liner Notes is "a meditation on the importance of intellectual labour and Black women's sonic cultures" (45). Side B is "an exploration of elusive Black women musicians and the critics and artists who have focused their attention on their legacies in a variety of ways" (45). Side B takes inspiration from the experimental nature of B sides and moves more fully into "the speculative terrain of revolutionary possibility" (45). Taken together, each side is a reminder that listening is a central critical practice. Liner Notes is a manifesto that offers a blueprint for the work that Black feminism can accomplish in the field of sound studies. While Brooks is interested in how theory and cultural criticism can...

A Prosthetic Popular Feminism in Postfeminist Times: Mrs. America’s Cool Feminism and Antifeminist Celebrity

In the conclusion to her study of feminist history in popular culture, Dana Heller calls for feminists “to seize aggressively onto and restock the cultural memory banks” to counter a historical amnesia and a retrograde historical revisionism bedeviling feminism in popular memory. The recent Emmy-nominated television drama Mrs. America is an attempt to do this restocking in culturally hospitable, but politically difficult, times. Mrs. America offers a new televisual rendering of American second-wave feminist history, refracted through the women who mobilized for and against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and one woman in particular: Phyllis Schlafly. This article argues that Mrs. America mobilizes two key and entwined idioms of postfeminist culture, cool and celebrity, to construct a language of second-wave feminist remembrance attractive to, and legible for, a postfeminist audience. This produces a prosthetic memory, enabling a feminist remembrance and therefore a critical historical consciousness for contemporary neoconservative times. Mrs. America dramatizes what happens when antifeminist forces are ignored and/or underestimated—too uncool to be a threat—and younger women viewers are urged to take this history into account, thereby associating the then of the ERA with the now of a United States shaped by Donald Trump. This occurs through the series’s organizing principle of parallelisms—whether in editing techniques, narratives, or imagery—that bring together and into relief the uncanny similarities as well as the differences between feminist and antifeminist forces, then and now.

Once upon a time in Turkey: the sex influx, gender inequality, and revisiting past pornographies

ABSTRACT In Turkish cinema culture, something akin to a ‘golden era’ dates to the years 1974–1980. During this time, some of the most prominent figures in mainstream Turkish cinema, directors included, shot various sorts of sex films: almost half of the 1091 features shot during these years were designated as sex films. This article asks: how did this era end? What happened to its performers? What kinds of gendered realities appeared on-screen and off-screen? In what ways have these films reappeared in popular memory? In order to address these questions, the article introduces debates and testimonies concerning the sex influx and discusses how its materials are revisited today. In conclusion, the article points out some future research directions.

Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Barbara A. Gannon Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 244. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6534-4.) The Civil War ended in 1865; the battle for its memory continues. The struggle persists both in popular memory and in scholarly monographs engaged in pitched historiographical debates over the legacy of America’s deadliest conflict. Jill Ogline Titus, the associate director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, examines the Civil War’s centennial at the site of its most famous battle. Scholars including David W. Blight and Robert J. Cook have assessed this commemoration at the macro level. In contrast, Titus’s microstudy assesses the Civil War’s contested memory in “America’s most famous small town.” As her title suggests, there were several agendas at play in 1963 that had little to do with the events of 1863. Many white Americans wanted to use the centennial to encourage national unity. Titus notes that “Gettysburg’s 100th anniversary enlisted both the battle and Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address in the service of the anticommunist crusade” (p. 1). But despite this eager embrace of unity by white Americans, African Americans did not stand idly by. Instead, they struggled to recruit Civil War memory as “[v]ibrant campaigns for equal rights, north and south, shone an unstinting spotlight on the hollowness of ‘freedom’ and the unfinished work of the Civil War” (p. 1). While earlier studies at the national level support Titus’s findings, her contribution to this vital subfield demonstrates the value of microhistory. Previous examinations of this milestone assessed how state and national organizations, including the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, shaped this anniversary. In contrast, Titus examines how grassroots organizations shaped a local commemoration. While National Park Service personnel and their interpretation of the battlefield reflected national discourse, local citizens, Black and white, also shaped this commemoration mostly through civic organizations. Notably, these groups ranged from the NAACP, one of the oldest and best-known civil rights groups, to one of the newest and least-known organizations, the Congress of Racial Equality. Like all studies of Civil War memory, this study tells readers more about the era it examines than it does about the Civil War itself, documenting how these civil rights organizations operated at the grassroots level in northern states. Most studies examine these organizations’ actions in the de jure Jim Crow South, and not in the de facto Jim Crow North. In this book’s greatest irony, in the place where Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a “new birth of freedom,” African Americans struggled to realize emancipation’s promise. While Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town is a tremendously important local study, it might be valuable to examine other small towns and larger cities and their commemorations. The most obvious factors in the Gettysburg commemorations, tourism and commercialization, shaped residents’ memory. What about the centennial at Sharpsburg/Antietam? Did the people remember the Emancipation Proclamation issued in its aftermath? The Civil War’s [End Page 387] bloodiest day occurred far from the type of road system that made the Gettysburg battlefield accessible to tourists. Did that matter? What happened in cities like Philadelphia, which was central to both the Black and the white Civil War experience? How did other northern cities with populations of native-born Black Americans and foreign-born immigrants commemorate? In Civil War memory, forgetting matters. Did western communities, such as those in Colorado or California, even observe the centennial? This call for more research in no way diminishes the value of this outstanding study. No one town, regardless of its iconic landscape, represents the final word on memory studies, particularly since Americans seem willing to continue to fight and even kill at places like Charlottesville, Virginia, sixty-four years after Gettysburg remembered the centennial of its three bloody days. Barbara A...

Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954

Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954