Roadside Memorial Research Articles

Ribbon Remembrances at the Tokai Forest Gender Based Violence Roadside Memorial: Mapping Materiality, Artivism and Multimodal Afterlives in Cape Town

ABSTRACT A multitude of brightly coloured ribbons tied along a barbed wire fence blow wildly in the Cape South Easter wind giving kinetic energy to the Ribbon Gate Gender Based Violence (GBV) roadside memorial bordering Tokai Forest in Cape Town. The memorial was created after the violent murders of Sinoxolo Mafevuka (d. 02.03.2016) and Franziska Blöchliger (d. 07.03.2016). It is continuously recreated by the public, whereas other sites of GBV, such as Unineye Mrwetyana’s (d. 24.08.2019) memorial in Claremont, also in Cape Town, are no longer memorialised. GBV protest is multimodal encompassing, performance art, artworks, slogans, internet archive images, #protest movements, social media, exhibitions, poetry, audio-visual productions, podcasts and differentiated material forms, including ribboning. The Ribbon Gate contests the official South African post-transition memorial landscape by appropriating roadside memorial practice, GBV artivism and the accrued cultural power of cause ribbons. Since the 1980s increasingly ribbons evoke compassion, empathy and hope in the context of the underrepresentation of women, women’s rights activism and symbolise violence perpetrated against women, children and L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+. Ephemeral GBV memorial practice, such as the Ribbon Gate, utilising the theoretical lens of public critical potency, as theorised by Lutheko Modisane, is redefined as multi-gendered, creatively subversive, and a social protest form where ribbons represent a language of resistance.

Roadside Memorial Crosses: Highway to Healing or Crossroads of Conflict

Roadside Memorial Crosses: Highway to Healing or Crossroads of Conflict

Vernacular sacred spaces: rethinking the roadside memorial in the United States

ABSTRACT This paper examines and theorizes the vernacular sacred as a different type of space, neither entirely private nor public, created by spontaneous memorials found along the side of the road in the United States. These memorials exist in public space yet are constructed by and serve a private audience of mourners. The bereaved act as agents of production when they build and maintain the memorials which exist in a type of bubble of private sacred space – existing simultaneously with and in public space.

Desert Gothic: Cormac McCarthy, Paul Bowles, and Don Waters

Abstract By comparing the work of Cormac McCarthy, Don Waters, and Paul Bowles, I will show similarities that might be recognized as constitutive of a subgenre of the Gothic, the “Desert Gothic.” In Paul Bowles's 1947 story “A Distant Episode,” a professor of linguistics is captured and cruelly tortured by the Reguibat in Morocco. The story is set against the ruins of a marabout (shrine or tomb) silhouetted in the desert night rank with foetid smells and mystery. McCarthy's West is likewise full of strange ruins and deserted churches, and the violence in the fiction can be extreme and often shocking. Inscrutable and hooded figures abound in the work of both authors, and the supernatural shimmers in and out of view. The desert makes monsters of men in the Saharan as it does in the Chihuahan. Don Waters's collection of short stories entitled “Desert Gothic” has already laid out the literary ground. Waters replaces the European Gothic of the pre-modernist churchyard with the postmodern Gothic of the swiftly crumbling roadside memorial, complete with curled photograph, decaying flowers, and a fading, poorly spelled letter. This article is a first step toward offering a critical definition of the Desert Gothic.

Inscriptions on roadside memorials in Poland

This paper focuses exclusively on inscriptions on roadside memorials. We conducted a review of studies of roadside memorial inscriptions and a field study of 29 inscriptions found on 156 roadside memorials in Poland to understand the similarities and differences between these inscriptions and those in other countries. The uniqueness of Polish inscriptions is their religious meaning. They reflect the inscription authors’ and/or the deceased’s relationship with Catholicism. We proposed a typology of inscriptions (limited and developed) that may be useful in further comparative studies on roadside memorialization.

The anonymity of roadside memorials in Poland

ABSTRACTIn Poland, the majority of roadside memorials erected at the site of fatal accidents are anonymous. The purpose of this article is to explain the reasons for their anonymity. It was assumed that a roadside memorial is anonymous when it is not marked in any way with letters identifying the person who it is devoted to or who erected it (e.g. names or nicknames). Based on six semi-structured interviews, it was concluded that the main reasons for the anonymity of roadside memorials were of social and not private nature. The main reason for the anonymity of roadside memorials is the lack of the need to share information, through an inscription, about the deceased and their death, in a neighbourhood where everybody knew the person and most of the inhabitants have heard about the victim and the circumstances of the accident. Some respondents referred to the general rule of not inscribing roadside memorials, partly resulting from the cult of the dead, strongly rooted in the Polish culture and commonly observed at cemeteries.

Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway

Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway

Artist's Statement

THE IMAGES OF MY ART included in the Journal of the Academy of American Religion are part of a larger series of work I have developed over the last twenty years that reflect my ongoing interests in land, spirituality, and memory. Many of my works were inspired by my own cultural values of the spiritual and the sacred connected to ancient beliefs and indigenous practices revered in the early Chicano/a Movement. My search for the spiritual has been both a personal practice and an artistic form born out of traditional spirituality concerned with home altars, ofrendas for the dead, and vernacular forms such as the capilla yard shrines and descansos, a roadside memorial that is a resting place that marks the site of a death. In the passing years, my interest has spread to gardens, libraries, laboratories, and “cabinets of curiosity” as forms of artistic intervention and community knowledge. The themes associated with land and nature have often been expressions of my concern with Mesoamerican origins, colonial resistance, and contemporary issues of social justice and rights, as well as the personal memories of an agricultural life in the Santa Clara and San Joaquin valleys.

A new car-following model with consideration of roadside memorial

In this Letter, a car-following model with consideration of roadside memorial is proposed. The numerical results show that the proposed model can qualitatively describe the impacts of roadside memorial on traffic flow and the traffic risk coefficient. It is also shown that roadside memorial can enhance the traffic safety.

Roadside memorials

The roadside memorial has become a popular way for bereaved families and communities to commemorate their loved ones. However they pose a tricky public safety issue for highways authorities. Is it ...

Roadside memorial policies in the United States

Roadside memorials in memory of a fatality dot the landscape of the nation's highways. The appearance of memorials varies as much as the policies and practices states employ to manage them. The purpose of this research is to ascertain whether or not the states of the US have policies regarding roadside memorials and, if so, what the policies are. A postal questionnaire survey was sent to the director of the Department of Transportation in each of the 50 states of the US. Only the state of Alaska did not respond. Twenty-three states have policies regarding roadside memorials; some states' policies are more specific than others. Though sometimes controversial, roadside memorials typically do not bring complaints, yet most states remove the memorial if complaints occur. Overall, the nation's states are sensitive to the role roadside memorials play in expressing survivors' grief, balancing those needs with any safety hazards that memorials may pose.

Rip by the Roadside: A Comparative Study of Roadside Memorials in New South Wales, Australia, and Texas, United States

The comparative study of roadside memorials in New South Wales, Australia, and Texas, United States, raises questions about the consistency in memorial form and practice between societies with diverse ethnic and religious profiles and different historical backgrounds. This article compares roadside memorials in two societies, and suggests that ethnic and sub-group affiliation accounts for local and individual differences in what is essentially an international phenomenon powered by developments in motoring culture, postmodernism, and globalization. The roadside memorial reclaims public space for the celebration of the individual in a period and place of overwhelming technological and cultural change.