Public Memory Research Articles

Perceptions of death and memory transmission among residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan: A qualitative study.

The understanding and materialization of grief and loss in a community are contingent upon cultural norms, historical processes, and dominant political narratives. The processes of public mourning create a localized memory of the deceased which contributes to a collective narrative formation around loss. When death is made public, politicized, or collectively grieved, there exists great momentum for enacting policy change through restorative justice practices. This momentum for resistance is amplified when collective grieving takes place following political or mass deaths. The present study aims to develop a holistic understanding of mourning and memorialization practices as they are locally enacted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. These two cities were chosen based on their shared history of mass violence and their diverging cultural customs of mourning. Twelve qualitative interviews were conducted with residents of both cities. The purpose of the interviews was to gain insight to how Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents make meaning out of loss and public memorialization. Narrative interviews based on the Miyabayashi Grief Measurement (MG) allowed participants to explain and reflect on the links between their public and individual mourning practices. Themes identified in the interviews include (1) a routine and automatic engagement with grief rituals specific to Japanese culture; (2) connection and gratitude towards ancestors; (3) methods of engaging with memorial sites to transmit personal memories of the deceased; (4) a sense of duty in passing on the first-hand accounts of survivors of the atomic bombing; (5) recalling memories of the deceased when making decisions; and, (6) transmitting memories of loss in a way that is celebratory and joyous. These results ask us to look past simplified depictions of cultural grief and consider the individual elements that may impact a person's remembrance and memory transmission within societies.

‘Budapest’s Gift to the Movies’: Franziska Gaal’s Film Career in 1930s Europe and Hollywood

Abstract Hungarian-born actress Franziska (or Franciska) Gaal was an interwar star whose film career spanned different countries and continents. Contemporary trade press and newspaper articles reveal her international fame during the 1930s, and trace her attempts to conquer Hollywood, where the studio system dictated that she lose weight and dye her hair. As she was unable to continue her career in Europe due to her Jewish heritage, this article examines her trajectory in Europe and the United States in the context of exile. It also interrogates how one of Europe’s top stars for an entire decade could fade from public memory and drift into oblivion, especially in the German-speaking countries where she was once so successful.

On the geographies of monuments and migration memory-making

Within the burgeoning geographical literature on public memory, a subset centres on what monuments can inform us about the complex realities of migrants whose lives often straddle between two (or more) nations, thus giving rise to trans-cultural and trans-local dynamics that exceed (and may even potentially challenge) the nation. This paper examines monuments established to presence the former-exiled-turned-migrant Moluccan community in the Netherlands to proverbially fold them into the Dutch population, and celebrate alterity in the context of pluralism. And yet, it also frames how these monuments reflect the limits and paradoxes of such an endeavour particularly by virtue of the fraught relationships – due to hitherto unresolved pasts but also tense presents – between the Moluccans and their host societies; as well as fault-lines – owing to myriad intersecting geographies astride religion, generational axes, socio-spatial variations, political affiliations or connections to original homelands – that exist among these Moluccans today, even as they may be born into (or have attained) citizenship status. More broadly, the paper puts into question the extent that public monuments, as a specific material commemorative genre, may in fact be appropriate for remembering phenomena typically associated with postcolonial mobility, diversity and flux.

‘Eminescu is everywhere:’ charting the memorial spatialization of a national icon

ABSTRACT Mihai Eminescu features prominently at the core of Romania’s pantheon of cultural heroes. Soon after his death in 1889, Eminescu was canonized as the ‘national poet.’ Drawing on several strands of scholarship, this article examines the spatial politics of Eminescu’s memorial cult in Romania. In particular, integrating four complete datasets of commemorative artefacts dedicated to Romania’s national poet (public monuments, street names, school nomenclature, and the toponymy of cultural centres), this study charts the regional spatialization of Eminescu’s memorial posterity. In accounting for the spatial differences underpinning this geography of public memory, the paper outlines two main factors: (1) Eminescu’s bio-topic presence, i.e., the memorialization of his journeys within the current day territory of Romania, and (2) the cultural politics of spatial appropriation, which implied the memorialization of Eminescu in the provinces incorporated in the Romanian Kingdom after the WWI (e.g., Transylvania) as a symbolic means of Romanianizing the landscape.

Forgotten Refugees and Erased “Multicultural” Subjects: The Vietnam War and South Korea's Subimperial Nation-Building

This article revisits South Korea's mostly forgotten involvement in the Vietnam War and examines lingering effects of the war on South Korea's subimperial nation‐building in general and on its contemporary multicultural policies in particular. The Vietnam War served as a stepping stone for South Korea to transform itself from a war‐torn country to an economic subempire in Asia. Encounters with Vietnamese refugees in the aftermath of the war helped form South Korea's subimperial gaze, solidifying the racial inferiority of South Koreans to the United States but establishing their superiority over the Vietnamese. Further, the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees laid the foundation for the practices of contemporary South Korean multiculturalism. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, South Korea presented itself as a benevolent protector of Vietnamese refugees. The brutal acts committed on the battlefields and the neglect of the Vietnamese refugees living at the margins of South Korean society have been effaced from public memory. Through the work of selective memory, the “multicultural” South Korea presents itself yet again as a caring supporter of Vietnamese migrant wives. It is through this cultural amnesia that the myth of ethnic homogeneity was maintained, allowing the contemporary multiculturalism discourse and practice to be advertised as a novel cultural globalization project that is free of historical guilt or responsibility.

Contesting public forgetting: Memory and policy learning in the era of Covid-19

This article examines scholarship on public forgetting and its implications for post-disaster recovery and policy learning to theorize how tendencies toward structural amnesia risk limit policy learning as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold and as the climate crisis exacerbates the risk of new global health crises. This article will contribute to memory studies by advancing a theory of how public forgetting leads to a cascade of impacts on policy and social well-being. Building on Beiner’s work on social memory, scholarship on the politics of memory, and research on post-disaster policy learning, I show that institutional forgetting implicitly places individual and collective memories outside the public sphere in which policymaking occurs. This discourages commemorative practices that constitute the traumatic past and present of the pandemic as creating responsibilities on the part of policymakers and governments for increased protections in the present and policy learning in the future. Constituting the Covid-19 pandemic as a necessary subject of public memory, in contrast, allows individuals and communities to assert rights to restitution and accountability for the policy failures that led to profound racial and socioeconomic disparities in risks of infection, severe illness, and death. Through engaging with the memory advocacy by the nonprofit groups the We Must Count Coalition, Marked by Covid, and the Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, I illustrate how commemorative practices by social movements illuminate the policy implications of contesting how collective traumas will be remembered.

The Realignment of Poqo as the PAC: A Remedial to South Africa’s Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Liberation Historiography

Post-apartheid South Africa’s liberation historiography has been constructed and curated in a manner that influences public and collective memory to assume that only one specific liberation movement (the African National Congress) was involved in the South African liberation struggle. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and its military wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), have largely been given perfunctory attention or ignored because of bias and the selective politics of memory. In instances where the history of PAC or APLA is given some attention pre and post-apartheid, the focus has been mainly on uPoqo as the paramilitary wing of the PAC, or on the leadership conflicts within it, at the expense of interrogating other important aspects within the movement. This article explores the development of the term Poqo, mapping its roots from the shorthand for “Umbutho wama-Afrika Poqo.” It then shows that the prohibition of the PAC in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre led the movement to operate under the auspices of Poqo, an underground name. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that Poqo was not a paramilitary wing of the PAC but is/was the PAC itself in another form. Ultimately, this historical and historiographical contribution seeks to achieve a re-alignment of Poqo in South Africa’s post-apartheid history writing and public memory.

13 de maio: História de um feriado lisboeta e da memória de Pombal na capital portuguesa

More than two and a half centuries after the 1755 earthquake, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo is a name still indissociable from the history of the Portuguese capital. Few Lisboners will know, however, that the date of his birth (May 13th) was once a municipal holiday. When this happened, in 1926, by decision of the City Council, the figure of the Marquis of Pombal had been the object of political worship since the early days of the constitutional monarchy and, when it came to electing the date for the municipal holiday, the City Council chose the man who was considered the «rebuilder of Lisbon». This option was only one of several municipal initiatives that culminated in an 19th century spirit strongly related to Pombal. Over 100 years and spanning three different regimes, the Marquis was considered to be a heroic figure and one who unified an idea of Portugal. 1926 was a destiny-year for such historical reverence to the minister of King José, a moment as decisive as it was ephemeral in the management of this controversial figure’s public memory.

Thalidomide: The journey from curse to boon

The tragic spectacle of thousands of infants born with deformed arms and legs at the beginning of the 1960s stunned the entire globe. The public's memory has been permanently scarred by the sight of those young people struggling with limb deformities. The medicine thalidomide, which pregnant women use for morning sickness and insomnia, was found to be responsible for the deformities in limbs and other organs. Thalidomide was sold in over 40 nations and was authorised for prescription usage in Canada from April 1961 to March 1962. Although the true number was likely greater due to spontaneous miscarriages and stillbirths, it resulted in around 115 occurrences of deformities in this country.Due to its expulsion from the medical toolbox, this medication became a term of demeaning for many years. However, thalidomide has emerged from the darkness of unimaginable tragedy. Though under stringent restrictions, it has made a remarkable recovery and entered the current therapeutic regimen. As a result of the discovery that thalidomide and its derivatives have beneficial effects on a variety of cellular functions, they are currently recommended for the treatment of a number of diseases, including leprosy and multiple myeloma. Before returning the medication to the market, the US FDA conducted a number of clinical trials. Additionally, the deaths connected to this agent stimulated legislation that expanded patient informed consent processes, redesigned the FDA regulatory process, and required more openness from pharmaceutical companies.

Postsocialist Statuary Politics in Romania and Bulgaria: An Ambivalent Socialist Heritage

AbstractUsing an approach situated at the intersection of cultural memory studies and (critical) heritage studies, with a focus on the ambivalent socialist heritage of socialist statues and monuments and their changing role in postsocialist public spaces, this article engages with the postcommunist strategies of reckoning with the past in Romania and Bulgaria in the period 1990–2020. Comparing the kinds of monumental memory of communism that were established in these countries, the author discusses how each dealt with their ambivalent socialist heritage through a public memory policy comprising three combined strategies: removal; preservation; and the replacement of communist heroes with anticommunist counter-monuments. The author concludes that stances toward the socialist heritage manifest various tensions in terms of the types of statues that were removed or, alternately, allowed to remain; of the opposition between local and national decisions as well as between the official approach and citizens’ perspectives; and, finally, of aesthetic versus political criteria.

Commemorating the Fascist Empire: The Public Memory of Rodolfo Graziani in Modern Italy

This essay will analyze the public memory of Italy’s most prominent colonial general, Rodolfo Graziani, in light of his recent commemoration in his hometown near Rome. During Graziani’s lifetime, fascist propaganda and censorship praised him as a colonial war “hero” and omitted the countless atrocities he committed during Italy’s colonial wars in Libya and Ethiopia in the 1920s and 1930s. As the colonial campaigns proved unanimously popular in fascist Italy, Graziani’s positive reputation was only jeopardised due to his polarising role as Chief of Staff in the Republic of Salò during Italy’s Civil War between 1943 and 1945. After the war, he was tried and acquitted for Nazi collaborationism whilst his colonial crimes went completely unquestioned, sparking grave consequences for the public memory of Italian fascism and colonialism. Since his death, neofascist parties and communities have persistently rehabilitated their “heroic” remembrance of Graziani through sites of memory which resulted in a publicly funded monument in 2012. The Italian government’s continued denial of Graziani’s colonial atrocities and censorship of foreign films in recent decades demonstrate the suppression of his colonial crimes and are reflective of the lack of public awareness and mass protest to Graziani’s recent monument. Whilst Ethiopian, British and American journalists met the news with public condemnation, the Italian press barely mentioned it and the only domestic protests to the commemoration came from directly affected communities and organisations. The essay will therefore contrast Graziani’s commemoration in Italy to counter memories of Graziani in Italy and abroad in order to analye that which has been publicly commemorated, contested, ignored and suppressed in postfascist and postcolonial Italy.

Local Confederate Memorialization and Gender-Ethnic Variation in Mental Health among Black Residents

Memorials romanticizing the short-lived Confederate States of America remain scattered across public spaces. Yet, little research examines whether memorials are consequential for residents that live proximate to them. This study relies on insights from social stress theory to examine associations between the local presence of public Confederate memorials and the mental health of African American and Afro-Caribbean adults. Data for this study are merged from the National Survey of American Life (n=4,740) and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s census of Confederate memorials. We examine associations between counts of local Confederate memorials and depressive symptomatology, self-rated mental health, and substance use disorder. Results from gender-stratified generalized models show that logged memorial counts are curvilinearly associated with mental health among Black women such that psychological adjustment is typically poorest in counties with an average number of memorials. In these spaces, African American women experience significantly greater depressive symptoms than Afro-Caribbean women. Moreover, social cohesion—familial support, membership with a pro-Black organization, frequent contact with neighbors, and ethnic closeness—modifies associations between memorials and mental health such that women with high levels of cohesion typically experience buffered mental health impacts when residing proximal to memorials. This study highlights the importance of critically investigating stressors extending from white supremacy across social statuses and theorizing resourcefulness against antiblack racism.

<em>Filega</em>/In Search: Embodying Community in Ethiopia

This paper offers a decolonial reading of Filega, an annual grassroots street performance organized by Ethiopian dance artist Melaku Belay in the context of an Orthodox Christian religious festival Timket. Our contextualized reading illuminates Ethiopian artists’ capacity to create beauty, joy and community; they do so by disrupting the dichotomies between discipline and freedom, the sacred and the profane. Filega’s decolonial significance also lies in its potential to transform public spaces and collective memories in service of community. In constructing this paper, we seek to decolonize our writing practice by unsettling the theory/practice dichotomy, and by experimenting with modes of co-authorship. Along with Filega participants and witnesses, we search for decolonized understandings of self, community, and discipline.

Медиаобраз СССР в измерении хештег-динамики: контекст российских реалий

The article analyzes the processes of constructing the media image of the USSR in the space of the social network «VKontakte». The Soviet Union, being the central political institution of the twentieth century, has left a huge legacy in the public memory and for the modern man. In today's digital society, the central topos of storing this kind of memory is social media, dictating new rules for the informational agendas of reality. The main methodological solution for this study is to turn to the analysis of the hashtag «#nazadvssr», which contains an element of social nostalgia and collective memory of the Soviet period. By analyzing the statistical graph, as well as using the socio-philosophical interpretation of the current hashtag, the authors derive a conceptual picture of the vision of the Soviet past through the eyes of contemporary Russian social media users.

“Dismantle or Step Aside”

While there have been tremendous advancements in HIV prevention, treatment, research, and care, vast health disparities still exist across race and ethnicity, as Black and Latinx people continue to have disproportionate rates of new HIV cases. Despite this fact, funding toward and implementation of policies that meet the needs of most impacted communities are virtually non-existent. Moreover, meaningful and impactful discussions about HIV have always required analyzing interlocking systems of privilege and oppression. Thus, in 2017, a group of scholars and activists of color developed HIV Racial Justice Now!, a nationwide grassroots coalition dedicated to advancing a racially just framework for the domestic HIV epidemic. In addition to developing The Declaration, a framework that can be used to push for racial liberation, HRJN disrupts traditional notions of HIV rhetoric, racial justice, and public memory by decentering whiteness in the domestic HIV movement.

Iconoclasm, Speculative Realism, and Sympathetic Magic

AbstractIn the current American iconoclash, certain monuments are subject to vandalism and municipal removal from their pedestals. Phrases such as “the erasure of history” and “damnatio memoriae” point to concerns that iconoclasm is an attempt to censor history or even remove certain individuals from public memory altogether. Because these phrases beckon the past, this wave of iconoclasm calls for a close examination of previous image-breaking to establish motives. Drawing first from art history, we analyze Byzantine iconoclasm and anxieties over the nature of icons’ power, before contextualizing these findings within image destruction from the Paleolithic to the present day. Each comparison is suggestive of an enduring aesthetic principle: that what appears inanimate is not always inert. Next, drawing from cultural anthropology, we argue that principles of sympathetic magic are at the heart of contemporary iconoclasms, but not in the way media outlets often suggest. Instead, the fear of history’s erasure betrays a deeply rooted equivalence between the representation and the represented. In perceiving their fates as shared, sympathetic magic is seen to persist in the way humans create, interpret, and desecrate images. We conclude with the speculative realist proposition that iconoclasm can produce new, original artworks, which carries implications for the autonomy of art and its distribution between artist and artwork.

Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell

Reviewed by: Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era by Sarah J. Purcell James J. Broomall (bio) Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era. Sarah J. Purcell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-4696-6833-8. 352 pp., paper, $34.95. Sarah J. Purcell’s remarkable book, Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era, adds depth and clarity to an ongoing debate about the claims of post–Civil War memory. By examining competing meanings of public [End Page 94] funerals and mourning rituals, Purcell considers how the living mourned and remembered the dead to better understand the shifting ground of American nationalism and Americans’ self-identities. Although historians have generally agreed that four strands (reconciliation, Lost Cause, emancipation, and Union Cause) framed postwar memory, they have disputed which paradigm dominated public discourse. Building on recent scholarship, especially work by Nina Silber, Purcell contends that “American identities were built out of competing and sometimes opposite ways of thinking and being” (5). Gracefully written and deeply researched, Spectacle of Grief explores politics through culture to demonstrate how memory and mourning created imagined communities. Through five thematic chapters and with sweeping chronological breadth, Purcell connects mourning rituals from the early Republic to the Reconstruction era. Nine public figures underpin the study and are considered through a variety of source materials including newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, published accounts, and government documents. The author’s thoughtfully layered reconstruction of public discussions and deliberations is an especially rewarding aspect of the study. Chapter 2 sets the book’s tone. Upon the death of Henry Clary, Americans mourned the passing of a public figure that “provided a safe but high-stakes way to claim a part of national memory” (13). To many, Clay’s death signaled the end of sectional compromise. By the war years, martial sacrifice underpinned the formation of Confederate and American nationalism. Elmer Ellsworth and Stonewall Jackson, the subjects of chapter 2, illustrate how collective mourning “contributed to polarization and opposed versions of American and Confederate national identity during the Civil War” (93). Despite a climate of reunification, sectional tensions lingered during the postwar era, at least among many white Americans. Purcell clearly illustrates in chapter 3 how both the Lost Cause and the Union Cause, as seen in mourning events for George Peabody and Robert E. Lee, each formed parts of the public discourse. Here the author productively engages recent scholarship (see especially work by Caroline Janney and Brian Matthew Jordan) that has revealed the deeply contested ground of postwar memory. As Reconstruction waned between the 1870s and 1890s, an unsteady memory of the Civil War continued to frame the creation of American national identity. Charles Sumner and Joseph E. Johnston, the figures of chapter 4, urged the public to forget elements of the Civil War in the interest of sectional reconciliation. Johnston proved a particularly complex figure who touted the Lost Cause but also worked toward reunion with a pro-Union flare. In the end, Purcell writes, “their funerals show how their sectional partisans could not afford to let them lie in peace” (176). Instead, promoters of Lost Cause mythology vocally claimed Johnston as a Confederate symbol, while Black orators emphasized Sumner’s fight for racial equality. [End Page 95] Between the 1850s and the 1880s, white men populated the pantheon of national heroes who were recognized by public mourning. Yet, the 1890s witnessed two unprecedented events. Upon the deaths of Frederick Douglass and Winnie Davis, a Black man and white woman were elevated into national symbols and mobilized in the cause of memory. As Purcell perceptively remarks, the mourning of Douglass signaled “that emancipationist memory of the Civil War had not faded away in 1895 and that the national identities created by public funerals had expanded enough to include an African American subject” (178). Davis’s memory proved deeply layered, as she was mourned at once as a symbol of the Lost Cause but also national reconciliation. Taken together, Purcell’s fifth chapter powerfully traces the lingering and overlapping strands of Civil War memory. Spectacle of Grief is a careful study of...

Sport Spectacle, Billie Jean King, and the Battle of the Sexes Tennis Match in Public Memory

Abstract The 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs provides an example of what I call “sport spectacle.” I define “sport spectacle” as a staged encounter in which the institutions of sports and media conjoin with the activities of individual athletes and the gaze of interested audiences to co-produce narratives in which athletic endeavors reflect, shape, or intervene upon social will in material and symbolic ways. Sport spectacle involves a contested co-production of meaning about a sporting event's social importance that occurs before, during, and—through the rhetorical processes of public memory—after the sporting event. I analyze how King and Riggs understood the match within women's movement discourse and the cultural evolution of tennis, in addition to how King and others have treated the match as a cultural touchstone that can be redeployed in public memory. Recent films When Billie Beat Bobby (2001) and The Battle of the Sexes (2017) offer very different characterizations of King's role as a social movement actor and the Battle of the Sexes as a social movement act. While When Billie Beat Bobby credits King with wide-ranging transformation of women's lives in a universe largely devoid of political context, The Battle of the Sexes anachronistically champions King as a closeted LGBTQ+ icon with a more nuanced understanding of sport spectacle as a transformational gathering that prepares spectators for political contestation. This case study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that attends to the nuanced rhetorical dimensions and political contexts of spectacle.

Memory or History?

Reviewing the the so-called “Second Historian's Debate”, in which he had played such an important role, in February 2022, Michael Rothberg wrote that the opponents to his multidirectional approach were confusing history and memory. “Naturally, history and memory cannot be entirely separated from each other, but the target of my own work and also of Moses's catechism essay is public memory, not historical scholarship.” I understand what he means about not targeting the discipline. Rothberg and Moses are both aware that many positions controversial in the German public sphere have long been accepted in the academy, a distinction they clearly make in their critiques. But the comment did prompt me to wonder whether part of the problem of the debate is that Rothberg's and Moses's critique of memory practices is actually more about history than it lets on.

Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia's Most Notorious Shoot-Out by Travis A. Rountree (review)

Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia's Most Notorious Shoot-Out by Travis A. Rountree (review)