Popular Memory Research Articles

Nationalism, Mourning, and Melancholia in Postcolonial Korea and Japan

This study approaches postcolonial cultural representation in South Korea and Japan, using the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning and melancholia. By exploring the cases of two famous comic series, one South Korean and the other Japanese – Nambul and Zipang – this essay delves into the triadic structure of non-western colonialism, which has affected popular memory, interpretation, and the representation of colonial history in Korean and Japanese societies. Both the series are alike in that they deal with imaginary war stories, (re)construct alternative history, and present nationalist revisions of historical experiences. Moreover, their view of colonial history involves mourning and melancholia, specific response and reaction toward loss. Their melancholic despair and the mourning practices of the imaginary revision of history in both Nambul and Zipang lead us to focus on the triadic structure of non-western colonialism in Northeast Asia. By introducing the idea of a triadic colonial structure forged between Japan, Korea, and the West, this essay highlights and explain the differences in the sentiments of postcolonial representation.

Archivo oral de la Comisión Provincial por la Memoria. Memorias encontradas: el archivo y el testigo

Esta conferencia formó parte del encuentro “Archivos Sonoros y cultura popular” realizado el 17 de septiembre de 2019 en el marco del Coloquio sobre Memorias Populares organizado por Doctorado en Historia y la Maestría en Historia y Memoria de la FaHCE junto a la presencia del historiador italiano Alessandro Portelli. En dicha conferencia, las autoras presentaron el archivo oral “Memorias encontradas” de la Comisión por la Memoria (CPM). Por un lado, relataron la historia de la producción y recolección de entrevistas surgidas a partir de los distintos trabajos de la CPM y, por el otro, reflexionaron sobre algunas particularidades de la serie “El archivo y el testigo”: el contexto de producción, el diálogo entre el relato oficial/policial y la voz de las y los testigos, los distintos modos de narrar, de contar.

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock

Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock

“To Ask Freedom for Women”: The Night of Terror and Public Memory

On the night of November 14, 1917, 31 suffragists and members of the National Woman’s Party (“NWP”) were taken to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia and tortured and beaten. This so-called “Night of Terror” captured national headlines at the time and has been memorialized through digital sites today. This article examines versions of the Night of Terror from the NWP’s official newspaper, The Suffragist, national newspapers of the day gathered from the Chronicling America database, and modern digital memorials of the event to understand the ways that the mediated telling of events create the fractured popular memories that are retold as the authoritative version of events. In the case of the Night of Terror, the NWP’s media strategies appealed strongly to pathos and captured public imagination then and now, making these retellings the narrative embedded in history as the authoritative version.

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

Julie MacArthur (ed.), <i>Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion</i>

DISCUSSING THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT SECTORS IN PRESENTING THE EGYPTIAN FOLKLORE

Popular culture is all the spoken expressive forms and other arts of expression that are stored in popular memory, and it is the sum of the elements that constitute the dominant culture of the society in any country or a limited geographical area, this culture results from the daily interactions between the elements of society in addition to its needs and desires that constitute the daily life of the sector Most of the society, this culture includes all the social practices that the individual practices every day in his daily life. The study of the forms of popular culture makes us strive to highlight what distinguishes folk arts from primitive arts and cultured arts on the other hand, and these three types are among the most important types known to man since his earliest times, in prehistoric times there were primitive arts, and when civilization began and history began The human being has become to man his popular art, and after many centuries of the emergence of civilization, but in our modern era itself, we find the relics of cultured art, folk art traditions, and evidence of primitive art. Grammar Folk traditions fall between two influential circles.

Caesar Rex

Julius Caesar has been remembered in popular memory as a tyrant whose death serves as a warning to future despots. However, this image of Julius Caesar is skewed by several factors that do not acknowledge the unique context of Caesar’s rise to power. The image of Caesar created after his death by his political opponents, alongside modern concepts of government and leadership, portray him as a despot. This paper will examine how this concept is misguided by demonstrating how Caesar’s rise to power was consensual and disproving the claims of his opponents.

James J. Broomall. Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers.

White men of the Civil War–era South often appear in popular memory as stock figures with limited emotional ranges: hotheaded bullies, stoic warriors, or pious defenders of hearth and home. With Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers, James J. Broomall cuts through these condescending caricatures in a methodologically sophisticated study of Confederate soldiers, which offers nuanced analysis and embraces the ambiguity and diversity of emotional experience. Grounded in close readings of selected letters and diaries, mostly written by slaveholders, Private Confederacies shows that the Civil War marked a personal as well as political crisis for white southern men. Before the war, they were expected to restrain their emotions and project an image of mastery over themselves as well as their households. Yet for all their power and privilege, these public personas masked doubts, anxieties, and fears, which men confided to the diaries they used for self-shaping as well as self-expression. Then came the war. A militaristic regional culture spurred white southern men to enlist, but few were thoroughly prepared to subordinate themselves to rigorous discipline or endure the fatigues of campaigning; still fewer were ready for the grisly horrors of battle. While attending to his subjects’ wide range of responses to the wrenching challenges of soldiering, Broomall illuminates revealing patterns. Most importantly, soldiers who struggled to express themselves to civilians turned to each other for support, building powerful bonds and sharing feelings that they would have suppressed in civilian life. Indeed, notes Broomall, men’s wartime experiences led them to “express levels of emotionality and vulnerability that society once saw as the purview of women,” even as they fostered a “virulent, martial masculinity” and encouraged violence (5).

Outline Extraction with Question-Specific Memory Cells

Outline extraction has been widely applied in online consultation to help experts quickly understand individual cases. Given a specific case described as unstructured plain text, outline extraction aims to make a summary for this case by answering a set of questions, which in fact is a new type of machine reading comprehension task. Inspired by a recently popular memory network, we propose a novel question-specific memory cell network (QSMCN) to extract information related to multiple questions on-the-fly as it reads texts. QSMCN constructs a specific memory cell for each question, which is sequentially expanded in recurrent neural network style. Each cell contains three specific vectors to first identify whether current input is related to corresponding question and then update question-specific case representation. We add a penalization term in the loss function to make extracted knowledge more reasonable and interpretable. To support this study, we construct a new outline extraction corpus, InjuryCase, 1 which is composed of 3,995 real Chinese occupational injury cases. Experimental results show that our method makes a significant improvement. We further apply the proposed framework on two multi-aspect extraction tasks and find that the proposed model also remarkably outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods of the aspect extraction task.

Remembering Kamuzu: The Ambiguity of the Past in Malawi’s Central Region

There is now a well-established literature on the relationship between memory and politics in southern Africa, but little work has looked at memory and politics in Malawi. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that nostalgia for former President Hastings Kamuzu Banda in Malawi’s Central Region is not only a product of dissatisfaction with politics in Malawi in the present but also a consequence of the way in which Kamuzu ruled the country in the past. Kamuzu cultivated a political culture that made the hardships that people experienced under him appear to have more proximate, personal causes. The ambiguity fostered in this respect enables people in rural Lilongwe district to remember Kamuzu with fondness more than two decades after his fall. In making this argument, the article demonstrates how paying close attention to personal experiences and life histories can shed new light on the historical basis of popular memory.

Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. By Judah M. Cohen

In his new book, Judah Cohen promises a thorough examination of Jewish musical practices in the United States in the nineteenth century, a place and time that are largely overlooked and heavily misunderstood by scholars of music and Jewish history alike. For the most part, Cohen delivers on this promise, although there are several notable caveats and omissions that raise significant further questions even as they shape and give focus to his narrative. Cohen’s story is fascinating and full of colourful characters. One can learn a great deal from this book, even as it leaves the reader wanting to know more. The great migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States between 1880 and 1924 was a hugely influential cultural event that permanently changed the face and the ethnic makeup of the American Jewish community. The cultural influence of this migration has been so powerful that the popular memory has lost track of the Jewish communities that existed in the United States prior to 1880. Cohen uses this book to reintroduce the rich cultural developments of a prior wave of Jewish immigrants. Largely German and Central European, this wave of immigrants arrived in the 1830s and 1840s and shifted American Jewish cultural life away from its earliest, British- (and, through this line, Spanish- and Portuguese-) derived practices. Cohen focuses intensely on this phase of American Jewish musical life, narrowing the span of his study from ‘the nineteenth century’ as a whole to a period spanning roughly 1840 to 1903, which he describes as the ‘German period’ (p. 14). Many of the musical foundations for contemporary American Jewish musical life were laid during this ‘German period’, so this book provides an invaluable resource by documenting this history.

Between Propaganda and Cao-Mienism

The generation of soldiers, advisors, politicians, and civilians who participated in Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia between 1978 and 1989 had diverse, colorful, and powerful experiences. Their impressions and reflections as immortalized in diaries, songs, poems, plays, short stories, and even novels form the core of popular memory of Vietnam’s long involvement in Cambodia, which I term Vietnam’s Cambodian Decade. I argue that all Vietnamese literature on this period exhibits some combination of state propaganda to justify the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia on the one hand, and exoticization of Cambodia and Cambodians on the other. This latter tendency I term “Cao-Mienism,” drawing the connection between Edward W. Said’s critique of Orientalism and the old Vietnamese term for Cambodia, Cao Miên, which carries many outdated connotations of a mystical, uncivilized, violent, and hypersexual other. I divide Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade into four distinct groups, based largely on the chronological order of their publication, but also on the distinct literary characteristics of each group, thereby charting the evolution of Vietnamese views of the Cambodian Decade through the years. My main finding is that Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade started out largely to serve the needs of state propaganda, but has in time shifted decisively to Cao-Mienizing Cambodia. I conclude by warning that both strands of propaganda and Cao-Mienization remain relevant in contemporary Vietnamese literature and can serve to perpetuate and legitimize a hegemonic discourse on Cambodia that is detrimental to bilateral relations.

Torremolinos 73 de Pablo Berger: una mirada posmoderna a la España tardofranquista

En 2003 Pablo Berger estrena su primer largometraje, Torremolinos 73, comedia ambientada en la España del franquismo tardío. Este filme es la transposición cinematográfica del auténtico itinerario de un aspirante cineasta español de los años 70, autor de una película pornográfica que acabó siendo comercializada en Dinamarca. El contexto temporal en el que se desarrolla la historia del protagonista es pretexto a la recreación de una época pre-democrática de la que Berger conserva ante todo la cultura consumista, haciendo de la cinta un lugar de memoria popular. Este trabajo pretende examinar cómo el director de cine se apropia de los fragmentos de una memoria esencialmente mediática, excluyendo voluntariamente todo discurso histórico o político abierto, para ofrecer una representación estilizada, atomizada y distorsionada del periodo re-imaginado en clave posmoderna. El reciclaje de los referentes musicales y cinematográficos está regido por estrategias de deformación y reescritura paródica que inscriben de lleno la película de Berger en el cine posmoderno español, a la par que la construcción abismal del filme produce un discurso autorreflexivo.

Beyond the legacy of 1976: Morris Isaacson High School, popular memory and the struggle for education in central Soweto

ABSTRACT Morris Isaacson High School in Jabavu, Soweto, has often been described as the epicentre of the June 1976 Uprising. It has become a focal point for memorials and annual commemorations. Few South Africans know anything else about the school. This paper argues that, while the school did in fact play an important role in the Uprising, it has a longer and possibly more important history as an educational institution catering to often extremely poor, working class families in the heart of Soweto. I discuss Morris Isaacson in historical memory, including an analysis of the filming of Sarafina! and conclude that in educational terms, Morris Isaacson has been much neglected. Astute leadership and committed alumni in recent years have managed to leverage the school’s political fame to attract state and private sponsorship. But this material assistance has not entirely resolved the school’s problems, which are mostly rooted in the deeper deprivation of its neighbourhood.

Black creative genius matters: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Jazz and People’s Movement, and the politics of “black classical music.”

ABSTRACT The Jazz and People’s Movement, led by multi-instrumentalist and Atlantic Records recording star Rahsaan Roland Kirk, began disrupting network television talk shows in 1970. The movement aimed to stop the erasure of “black creative genius” not only from the nation’s television airwaves, but from its collective history and memory – to make that which was practically invisible visible once again. But Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Jazz and People’s Movement do not fit neatly into the usual categories historians use to describe the politics of the “long Sixties.” Kirk occupied a hybrid position – equal parts radical, reformist, and countercultural – and fashioned himself as what scholars such as Elizabeth Jelin and Lorena Oropeza have called “memory entrepreneurs”- men and women who give voice to those disappeared or otherwise silenced by the state. Rahsaan Roland Kirk acted as jazz’s foremost memory entrepreneur not to expose state violence, exactly, but to reveal the whitewashing – the disappearing – of black creative genius out of American popular memory. That whitewashing falls into another category of violence – cultural violence – executed in service of the maintenance of American racial hierarchies. This essay restores both Kirk’s and the Jazz and People’s Movement’s places in the respective histories of the long civil rights movement, Black Power, and the counterculture. It shows how easily the cultural politics of the three – so often treated separately by historians – overlapped and were intertwined. As such, the essay argues for Kirk as a prominent black political artist who illuminated the intersection of popular music and civil rights politics over the long Sixties.

Dancing between Pedagogy and Performance: Guerreiros do Passo and the Case of Brazilian Frevo

Frevo dance comes from the cities of Recife and Olinda in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. We expand on previous research by Valéria Vicente to apply Homi Bhabha’s concepts of pedagogy and performativity to a study of how frevo dancers fight for multiplicity and individuality. We explore how the group Guerreiros do Passo (Frevo Dance Warriors) preserves and disseminates frevo through distinct teaching methods and performance projects, arguing that their work enables the performative enactment of popular memory and the subversion of frevo’s own official discourse. We examine how Guerreiros do Passo provides a new perspective on common challenges in dance pedagogy and performance, including the tensions between tradition/innovation and cultural/individual expression.

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

Reviewed by: Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 by Bronach C. Kane Katie Barclay Kane, Bronach C., Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women, and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500 (Gender in the Middle Ages, 13), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 309; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781783273522. How do we remember? In Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England, Bronach Kane explores how memory is deployed by lower-status people in church court testimony, particularly attending to memory as an embodied, material practice. As the gender in the title suggests, this book considers how men and women remembered the past differently from each other, but its achievement is much more significant than this might suggest. In writing a history of how ordinary people remember, we learn of memory as not just a process of thought but as bound up with and emerging through the body, environments, and everyday life. Memory studies is a huge area of research, but attention to memory practices amongst medieval and early modern people has been a more modest endeavour. Popular Memory can be situated alongside works such as Andy Wood’s The Memory of the People that move from memory as an exploration of what is retained and forgotten and its relationship to power and nation-building, to memory as something of the everyday and the local. [End Page 218] Popular Memory is a substantial book, with seven chapters, and a scholarly introduction and conclusion. It begins with a discussion of how canon law, the legal context of the evidentiary base of the volume, understood and acknowledged memory as a form of legal proof and the (limited) role it allowed for women in providing legal testimony. The remainder of the book explores the different ways that memory was presented within the courts by witnesses to legal cases and how it was given authoritative force. Ranging across themes of sexuality and sex, gendered and especially reproductive bodies, birth, marriage, and death, written memory and orality, and finally place and landscape, Popular Memory highlights how the legal evidence—accounts of things seen, thought, felt—were articulated through the mundane and embodied experiences of everyday life. The birth of a child or a wedding became ways to assuredly affirm the dating of a particular event; courts recognized these social facts as memorable for the individual and so they could become anchors that other pieces of evidence could be tied to and made legally compelling. Similarly, descriptions of place and landscape or material items gave weight to testimony, offering explanations as to why certain types of information were known and retained. In doing so, memory was made authoritative through being embedded in the personal and, in particular, in the rhythms of family life and labour. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that memory was a gendered practice. The lives of men and women, their experiences of sex, reproduction, marriage, work, and property use, were shaped by gender, and so the contours of their testimony, and capacity to speak authoritatively in particular areas, reflected these gendered experiences. As Popular Memory suggests, this was not entirely transparent. Men were not only allowed to speak to a wider range of topics and types of legal case, but had greater literacy levels, enabling them to use writing more readily to affirm their memory practices, and were generally considered more reliable witnesses. At times, this allowed their memories to be given greater weight than those of a wife or similar female family member, even in cases where women might have been thought to have more reliable memory experiences (such as a husband countering his wife’s dating of childbirth). Yet, as this book shows, if patriarchal norms gave broad shape to the operation of the law, testimony and the gendered experience of memory also offered opportunities to contest, resist, and negotiate power structures. Personal stories, recounted through embodied histories, offered a type of agency for the lower orders. This overview does not do justice to this book. What makes it a rich and fascinating contribution to the field is not just the larger...

Bronach C. Kane, Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England, Gender in the Middle Ages, 13

Bronach C. Kane, <i>Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England</i>, Gender in the Middle Ages, 13

¿Historia o leyenda? Lectura de fuentes y obtención de evidencias en el alumnado de Educación Secundaria

In this study, we define as an objective to determine the preference of the students for history or for legends when they work evidence that is opposite to the version of the narrative transmitted by the popular memory. With this purpose, we conducted qualitative research with 83 students aged twelve to thirteen years about their narratives. For the analysis, we delimit categories related to the reading of sources, the obtaining of evidence, and the creation of discourses. The results show that a conflict between the evidence tends to be solved by the conservation of the legend. Thus, it is essential that students work on their historical thinking skills in order that emotional aspects do not falsify the image of the past.

Bronach C. Kane. Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500. Gender in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 309. $99.00 (cloth).

Bronach C. Kane. Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts, c. 1200–1500. Gender in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 309. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 59 Issue 1