Popular Memory Research Articles

The image of the Russian peasantry in A. Platonov’s the stories and plays during the Great Patriotic War

Fiction embodies the diverse cultural and historical memory of society and offers its own answers about the impact of war on a person, the long-term humanitarian consequences of the war. In his military stories and plays A. Platonov presented a wide panorama of images of the fighting people, among which the image of peasantry occupies a central place. Memory is considered as the leading concept of the writers creativity. Features of perception of war, life and death, good and evil by ordinary soldiers are revealed. A. Platonovs military stories are very significant for the cultural memory of Russian society. Focusing on the peasant roots of the fighting people, the writer warned of the danger of forgetting this. Platonovs constant interest in the memorial aspects of culture is realized in his military prose largely from the point of view of the world picture of Russian peasants. Village and its inhabitants, faith and family, land, bread, labor-symbols of the Motherland in Platonov, the embodiment of historical continuity. These aspects were reflected later in popular memories of the war, in the peasant perception of the war as sacrificial heroism.

Classicising ‘Pindar’: Quotation, Canonisation and Early Reception

AbstractThis essay examines the earliest quotations of Pindar in order to shed light on the social and historical dynamics through which he first emerged as a classic author. Pindaric quotations from the classical period point to his stratified and multi-faceted reception: as a figure within popular memory, as an emblem of elite culture and as an intellectual ancestor. Indeed, a capacity to appeal to different audiences for different but interconnected reasons was integral to his canonisation. The earliest Pindaric quotations already bespeak his culturally privileged status, which was expressed and perpetuated in different ways over the centuries but which was established as a social fact from remarkably early on. A search for the deepest roots of the classicisation of Pindar, it is argued, has to go all the way back to his poetry.

O massacre dos libertos: Sobre raça e república no Brasil (1888–1889)

Historians of Atlantic slavery live in a brave new world. Some years ago, books crossing national borders via comparison, connection, or synthesis were considered pioneering works at best and mere oddities at worst. That is no longer the case. While the traditional concerns and approaches of the different national historiographies of Brazil, the United States, and Cuba continue to be alive and kicking, these historiographies now exchange topics and approaches more often. Matheus Gato's O massacre dos libertos (The freedpeople's massacre) is part of a new Brazilian historiography seeking to understand how racial projects were key to not only social inequality but also political debates at the time of abolition in 1888—a concern that echoes those of historians such as Tâmis Parron, Flávio Gomes, Maria Helena Machado, and Petrônio Domingues.Gato investigates a shooting that took place in São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, on November 17, 1889—18 months after Princess Isabel signed the Golden Law abolishing slavery. While the incident has remained poorly understood ever since, for Gato it was a key expression of, and a penetrating window into, the process of racialization taking place in Brazil during the immediate postabolition years (pp. 27, 104, 117–18). After a methodical analysis of how journalists, historians, and memorialists presented the incident, the author discusses Maranhão in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Like other Brazilian provinces Maranhão had a thriving plantation economy in the early 1800s, but in Maranhão, unlike in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, that economic sector did not survive the end of slavery. By the time of abolition, most of Maranhão's plantations, dedicated to cotton, were either in decline or extinct, and the province hosted a large free Black population who primarily stayed in the countryside, owned land informally, and did not have access to the means for agricultural modernization.While under slavery Brazilian elites always made sure to create multiple and overlapping hierarchies—Brazilian-born versus African, free Black versus slave, urban versus rural—in order to avoid the formation of racial identities, by the mid-to-late nineteenth century the proximity of abolition racialized public debates. Former slave owners and state officials started referring to freedpeople as a “social problem,” a primitive and anticapitalist type of worker who was to blame, they argued, for the decadence of the province's agriculture (p. 60). Maranhense elites pushed for vagrancy laws and other coercive measures after 1888, maintained physical punishment for labor control, and aggressively lobbied the imperial parliament to compensate former slave owners for the loss of enslaved labor. They also organized the republican movement in Maranhão, an elite-led attempt at creating a republic that brought order and technocratic rationality to Brazilian institutions without the participation of popular groups. To planters and white elites in the province, Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II's sympathy for abolitionism felt like a betrayal, and it gradually pushed them toward republicanism. To Black Maranhenses, Dom Pedro II's sympathy had the opposite effect. In a move that recalled when Rio de Janeiro's freedmen organized the Black Guard to support Princess Isabel in a context of increasing republican agitation, in Maranhão the free Black population became devout monarchists. The republican cause came to be seen as the whites' freedom, while most Black Maranhenses saw the imperial family, and by extension the monarchy, as the guarantors of abolition in the Brazilian empire.When the first and somewhat confusing news of the republic's proclamation in Rio de Janeiro on November 15, 1889, reached São Luís, the province's army officers chose to wait for official confirmation. A crowd of mostly Black workers (stevedores, market vendors, artisans, urban dwellers) marched on the morning of November 17 to the city government's headquarters, where the republic was supposedly going to be publicly proclaimed—and, according to rumor, slavery was going to be reinstated. Facing popular and Black hostility toward the public proclamation, however, local authorities canceled this event. When the same demonstrators marched to the republican newspaper O Globo that afternoon to defend the imperial family and reject the republic's proclamation, the troops stationed there opened fire, killing at least three in the crowd and injuring eleven, in what became ingrained in popular memory as “the freedpeople's massacre.”The republican government in Maranhão took steps over the following years to whitewash its image, such as creating a red, black, and white state flag to symbolize racial fraternity in the new era. However, as Gato emphasizes, such symbols could not erase the idea that the new government's alleged racial fraternity was built on a massacre embodying multiple forms of racial and social exclusion. While the author occasionally abuses block quotations and tables, which at times prevents a more fluid narrative, this book is a much-needed and excellent analysis of the politics of abolition in the understudied but fascinating northern state of Maranhão.

Research on maintenance spare parts requirement prediction based on LSTM recurrent neural network

Abstract The aim of this study was to improve the low accuracy of equipment spare parts requirement predicting, which affects the quality and efficiency of maintenance support, based on the summary and analysis of the existing spare parts requirement predicting research. This article introduces the current latest popular long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithm which has the best effect on time series data processing to equipment spare parts requirement predicting, according to the time series characteristics of spare parts consumption data. A method for predicting the requirement for maintenance spare parts based on the LSTM recurrent neural network is proposed, and the network structure is designed in detail, the realization of network training and network prediction is given. The advantages of particle swarm algorithm are introduced to optimize the network parameters, and actual data of three types of equipment spare parts consumption are used for experiments. The performance comparison of predictive models such as BP neural network, generalized regression neural network, wavelet neural network, and squeeze-and-excitation network prove that the new method is effective and provides an effective method for scientifically predicting the requirement for maintenance spare parts and improving the quality of equipment maintenance.

Popular memory and gender in medieval England. Men, women, and testimony in the Church courts, c.1200–1500. By Bronach C. Kane. (Gender in the Middle Ages.) Pp. viii + 304. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019. £60. 978 1 78327 352 2

Popular memory and gender in medieval England. Men, women, and testimony in the Church courts, c.1200–1500. By Bronach C. Kane. (Gender in the Middle Ages.) Pp. viii + 304. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019. £60. 978 1 78327 352 2 - Volume 72 Issue 4

MacArthur Julie (ed.). — Dedan Kimathi on Trial : Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Reb

Fameux « Marechal » mau mau autoproclame au cours de la guerre civile qui a ensanglante le Kenya central de 1952 a 1956, Dedan Kimathi hante ce pays depuis lors. Apres avoir tente d’unifier l’ensemble du mouvement mau mau sous son commandement autoritaire au moyen de la creation d’une bureaucratie kafkaienne emaillee de titres ronflants inspires par le florilege — non moins ronflant — de titres de noblesse ou de grades militaires britanniques, il dut affronter une decheance progressive. Aband...

Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850-1939, by Victoria Kelley

Reviewed by: Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c. 1850–1939 by Victoria Kelley Judith R. Walkowitz (bio) Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c. 1850–1939, by Victoria Kelley; pp. xiv + 224. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, $118.00. In Cheap Street: London’s Street Markets and the Cultures of Informality, c.1850–1939, a well-written and richly illustrated book on London street markets, Victoria Kelley challenges conventional narratives of Victorian street markets as imaginative and material relics of the past. She points to major surveys on poverty, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth to the New London Survey of the 1930s, which successively documented the vast expansion of street markets in the metropolis between the 1850s until the onset of the Second World War. Throughout this period, market stalls were essential food distribution spaces for London’s poor. Market sellers continued to purvey the basic staples of fruits, vegetables, and fish that were available in the 1850s, although a distinctive minority of stalls diversified into nonperishables, thus offering poor Londoners access to the cheap luxuries commodity market. The fact that these barely regulated sites of exchange proliferated amid the brick-and-mortar retail revolution of the Victorian era is just one of many historical dialectics identified by Kelley. Following the lead of cultural theorists and historians, Kelley shows how street markets occupied space on the ground in defiance of urban planning and developed in tandem with a rationalized urban economy. She also establishes the cultural impact of the markets, tracing printed descriptions and music hall performances that ultimately configured the street trader as the quintessential “Cockney,” a small entrepreneur who resisted authority but remained committed to mutual support and self-regulation (133). Thanks to powerful stage renditions, along with what Kelley calls “popular memory,” market people and their performances helped to frame how certain plebeian Londoners saw themselves (139). The first chapter offers a “narrative history” (12) of the street market’s “informal economy” (9). While metropolitan inspectors kept a sharp eye on authorized food markets engaged in wholesale trade and occupying off-street premises, municipal authorities virtually ignored street retail trading to the poor. As a result, street market traders might be subject to sporadic policing, as established in the Metropolitan (Streets) Act of 1867, but they paid no rent and enjoyed a steady yet fragile tenure on urban space. The disregard of municipal authorities ended in 1927, when street markets became subject to a licensing system that concentrated on space, time, and activity (meaning the type of commodity for sale). Even so, most of the informal conventions of the street markets continued until wartime conditions disrupted them. Subsequent chapters of the book are ordered thematically and devoted to “Things,” “Streets,” and “People.” In these sections, Kelley gives some attention to diachronic shifts in the commodities purveyed, the increasing Jewish presence in the East End markets, the growing reputation of the street markets as tourist attractions, and the cultural popularity of market types in music hall performances. Overall, however, her emphasis is less on differences over time or between markets than on enduring patterns and configurations. Kelley’s astute discussion of the architecture of market street represents her most original contribution to the history of the street market. Exploiting her skills as a design historian, she outlines the “fragile architecture” constructed out of the street’s barrows and stalls (95). Even though the street market was transient, appearing and disappearing from day to day, with no permanent facilities, the double line of barrows assembled [End Page 451] along the street afforded a cumulative sense of enclosure and “filled a customer’s field of vision” (97). This fragile architecture shaped the bodily experience of visitors. Visual representations of the markets predominantly reproduce the perspective of shoppers immersed amid crowds and stalls. Compared to the “scopophilic effects” of the shopping emporia of the West End, with their bright lights and shining glass, a visit to the market represented a multi-sensory experience of sounds, smells, and sights (103). As Kelley notes, Cheap Street is the first book-length scholarly study of London’s modern street markets. It builds...

The New Fascism Syllabus: Networked Knowledge in the Digital Public Sphere

This article analyzes the New Fascism Syllabus private Facebook discussion group, which came into being in the months following the 2016 US presidential election. Through the use of several scraping, data mining, and visualization programs and Facebook’s own platform analytics software, the article posits ways we might analyze Facebook fora as a mediated digital public sphere. It argues that digital spaces like these, however fraught, help users craft arguments and points of contention around how to oppose resurgent authoritarianism. Online discussion creates affective communities that help bond participants, who in turn shape the construction of popular memory around the history and legacy of fascism.

‘Scrupulous and Timid Conformism’: Ireland and the Reception of the Liturgical Changes of Vatican II

The Second Vatican Council and, in particular, its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, changed much in the daily life of the Church. In Ireland, a country steeped in the Catholic tradition but largely peripheral to the theological debates that shaped Vatican II, the changes to liturgy and devotional practice were implemented dutifully over a relatively short time span and without significant upset. But did the hierarchical manner of their reception, like that of the Council itself, mean that Irish Catholics did not receive the changes in a way that deepened their spirituality? And was the popular religious memory of the people lost through a neglect of liturgical piety and its place in the interior life, alongside what the Council sought to achieve? In this essay, Dr Gary Carville will examine the background to the liturgical changes at Vatican II, the contribution to their formulation and implementation by leaders of the Church in Ireland, the experiences of Irish Catholic communities in the reception process, and the ongoing need for a liturgical formation that brings theology, memory, and practice into greater dialogue.

Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts, c.1200–1500. By Bronach C.Kane. Boydell & Brewer, 2019. viii + 301 pp. £60.00

Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts, c.1200–1500. By Bronach C.Kane. Boydell & Brewer, 2019. viii + 301 pp. £60.00

We Are Not Going Back: Migrant Music as the New Folk Music of Italy

This article concerns the “Roma Forestiera” project that has been carried out for the last ten years by the independent Circolo Gianni Bosio organization, which is devoted to the study of popular memory, folk song, and oral history. The author describes the experiences gathered while recording witnesses to history on the streets and in the migrant centres.

CoCEC: An Automatic Combinational Circuit Equivalence Checker Based on the Interactive Theorem Prover

Checking the equivalence of two Boolean functions, or combinational circuits modeled as Boolean functions, is often desired when reliable and correct hardware components are required. The most common approaches to equivalence checking are based on simulation and model checking, which are constrained due to the popular memory and state explosion problems. Furthermore, such tools are often not user-friendly, thereby making it tedious to check the equivalence of large formulas or circuits. An alternative is to use mathematical tools, called interactive theorem provers, to prove the equivalence of two circuits; however, this requires human effort and expertise to write multiple output functions and carry out interactive proof of their equivalence. In this paper, we (1) define two simple, one formal and the other informal, gate-level hardware description languages, (2) design and develop a formal automatic combinational circuit equivalence checker (CoCEC) tool, and (3) test and evaluate our tool. The tool CoCEC is based on human-assisted theorem prover Coq, yet it checks the equivalence of circuit descriptions purely automatically through a human-friendly user interface. It either returns a machine-readable proof (term) of circuits’ equivalence or a counterexample of their inequality. The interface enables users to enter or load two circuit descriptions written in an easy and natural style. It automatically proves, in few seconds, the equivalence of circuits with as many as 45 variables (3.5 × 10 13 states). CoCEC has a mathematical foundation, and it is reliable, quick, and easy to use. The tool is intended to be used by digital logic circuit designers, logicians, students, and faculty during the digital logic design course.

‘Dominant’ First World War memory: race, nation and the occlusion of Empire

ABSTRACT Surveys carried out in the UK have revealed a marked lack of awareness of the contribution of non-white, non-European soldiers during the First World War. For many, the First World War is understood as an exclusively white, European conflict that was confined to the battlefields of the Western Front. This article considers how British cultural memory of the First World War was formed over the course of the 20th century, and asks why dominant memory came to exclude the experiences of the non-white soldiers of Empire. Drawing on the scholarship of Jay Winter, this article re-considers the two major ‘memory booms’ during which popular cultural memory of the First World War developed, and argues that each of these memory-making periods was shaped by interrelated forms of exclusionary racism. In the immediate postwar period, the experience of non-white soldiers was differentially commemorated according to imperial, taxonomic racial hierarchies. In the late twentieth century, meanwhile, First World War remembrance coalesced around a fundamentally white British national memory at the expense of the non-white ‘other’. Finally, this article considers how far the recent First World War centenary may have reshaped public understanding of the conflict and integrated non-white, non-European experience into British cultural memory of the war.

Coffee Frontier in Proto-Colonial and Colonial Angola

Coffee plantations were unquestionably one of the defining features of Angola’s colonial landscape. From the 1870s to independence, coffee was the main export of this former Portuguese colony, barring a couple of intervals during which rubber and diamonds held first place. During this time, Angola ranked consistently among the world’s largest robusta producers, which it might still have been today had the country’s civil war (1975-2002) not made commercial farming all but impossible. In Angolan popular memory, coffee occupies an ambivalent position: for some people it brings up memories of colonial forced labor, while others recollect stories of successful family farms. My research project, “Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960,” aims to reconstruct the multiple, intertwined realities behind these contrasting memories. Focusing on northern Angola, where smallholding and estate farming always coexisted, it investigates how African farmers, colonial settlers, foreign traders, and global consumers shaped one of the oldest commercial coffee frontiers in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it reflects on the question to what extent “colonialism” is the proper lens through which to study the history of coffee cultivation in Angola.

“The Epitome of Black Masculinity”: Isaac Hayes, Black Moses, and the Long Freedom Struggle

Isaac Hayes provides a vital public figure through which scholars can analyze, evaluate, and more fully understand the comprehensive nature of the black freedom struggle as it progressed into the 1970s. Hayes merged the integrationist political objectives of mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders with the notions of racial pride, assertiveness, and autonomy that characterized the popular appeal of the black power movement. Hayes, through his “Black Moses” persona and LP of the same name, moved those freedom struggle promises and opportunities into the cultural realm, where he personified African American artistic self-determination. In doing so, he demonstrated that the contemporary conceptualization of black masculinity was not monolithic, as Hayes introduced and embodied an ideal that countered the prevailing notion of black manhood which pervaded popular culture and remains a central component of popular memory concerning black power. Most importantly, Isaac Hayes embodied a model of black masculinity that contradicted the prevailing “black macho” ideal. “Black Moses,” therefore, embodied the freedom of African Americans to move beyond contemporary racial classifications in a cultural capacity and presents scholars with an intriguing model through which to examine the evolution, possibilities, and accomplishments of the post-1960s American black freedom struggle.

“No Country Will Rise above Its Home, and No Home above Its Mother”: Gender, Memory, and Colonial Violence in Nineteenth-Century Texas

Abstract This article examines Anglo-American colonization in nineteenth-century Texas and the construction of its historical memory, highlighting the interwoven roles of kinship, women’s labor, and gendered ideology. Building upon social, economic, and cultural roots in the U.S. Southeast, settler colonialism in Texas was a multi-generational project structured heavily by kinship. Anglo-Texan women served as active colonial agents through their productive and reproductive labor, which bound them firmly to more overt forms of colonial violence by men and the emerging state. In the face of Native resistance, Anglo-Texans highlighted Indigenous acts of violence against White women and families in order to invert responsibility for colonial violence and to justify the dispossession and destruction of Native peoples. Beginning as early as the 1830s, direct Anglo participants, including many influential women, wrote the first histories of Texas colonization, interpreting that process and its violence from within the deeply gendered and personal framework of kinship. Their efforts have marked both popular memory and historical scholarship to the present day.

Defending the Right to Work: The 1983 Timex Workers’ Occupation in Dundee

In January 1983 the US-owned multinational Timex, a prominent employer in Dundee since 1946, announced it would cease production of mechanical wristwatches in the city. Substantial redundancies would accompany closure of the Milton of Craigie production unit where 2,000 mainly male skilled engineers and toolmakers were employed. About 2,000 mainly female assembly-line workers would be retained at another factory in the city, at Camperdown, as Timex completed its diversification into subcontracting work in electronics. With this announcement Timex violated the workforce’s moral economy. Significant changes were only permissible where negotiated with union representatives and where the security of those affected was preserved. Capital was leaving Dundee, despite the firm’s receipt of many grants from national and local government. On 8 April Milton workers resisted compulsory redundancy by occupying their plant. Timex was not stopped from ending watchmaking, but compulsory redundancies were averted and a union voice was preserved. Those who wished were transferred to Camperdown. The occupation was a crucial episode in Dundee’s deindustrialization, but has been obscured in popular memory by the bitter dispute accompanying the firm’s final departure from the city in 1993.

MAU MAU AND POPULAR MEMORY IN KENYA - Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya's Mau Mau Rebellion. Edited by Julie MacArthur. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017. Pp. 432. $34.95, paperback (ISBN 978-0-89680-317-6); $90.00, hardcover (978-0-89680-316-9).

MAU MAU AND POPULAR MEMORY IN KENYA - Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya's Mau Mau Rebellion. Edited by Julie MacArthur. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017. Pp. 432. 90.00, hardcover (978-0-89680-316-9). - Volume 62 Issue 1

Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c.1200–1500, by Bronach C. Kane

Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c.1200–1500, by Bronach C. Kane

Troubled Generations? (De)Constructing Narratives of Youth Experience in the Northern Ireland Conflict

This article explores how youth experiences of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ have been dominantly imagined within post-conflict memory. Tracing representations of the young as innocent targets or potentially endangering combatants, it concentrates on those imaginaries which characterise individuals who grew up in the conflict as the members of ‘troubled generations.’ Drawing on oral history interviews with those who grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, it addresses how such representations may obscure the broader ‘messiness’ of everyday youth experience in popular memory and in doing so contribute to a hierarchy of the ‘speakable’ and the ‘hearable’ which affects the articulation of memories at a personal level. The article concludes by suggesting scholars pay closer attention both to how dominant memory discourses may de-limit the complexities of lived experiences of violence, but also the (de)constructive potential of personal narratives spoken alongside, through, and in excess of, dominant historical imaginaries.