Vernacular Memory Research Articles

Erosive durability: underground architecture of hideouts and their vernacular memory in today’s Poland and Ukraine

ABSTRACT War-time Jewish hideouts are rare material witnesses of past violence and struggle for survival. Over the years, the issue of hiding appeared in multiple contexts in Holocaust research, but we know very little about their materiality and architecture. The article is an introductory summary of an artistic research project conducted by Natalia Romik and Aleksandra Janus on the materiality of hideouts and the contemporary vernacular memory of them. The article contains descriptions and spatial analysis of three underground hideouts located in Poland and Ukraine and offers an overview of how the vernacular memory of them functions in various local contexts.

Portrait Photography as a Visual Repository of Vernacular Memory: Interplay of Memory, Identity and Culture

Portrait Photography as a Visual Repository of Vernacular Memory: Interplay of Memory, Identity and Culture

Labour as a Right, Duty, Matter of Honour and Repression in State-Socialist Bulgaria

The idea of labour free from exploitation has a fundamental place in communist ideology and was a constant slogan in the public rhetoric of the ‘peoples’ democracies’. This paper aims to examine how labour is defined in the official discourse of state-socialist Bulgaria, how it is associated with the ideas of freedom, coercion, the new communist moral order; and how labour is used as a repressive measure for annihilation the political opponents immediately after the seizure the political power by the Fatherland Front on September 9th ,1944 until the closure of the labour camps in 1962. The juxtaposition of the official state discourse of free labour without exploitation of workers and the people’s accounts reveal whether the ideologemes imposed by the state-party propaganda were accepted and became part of the people's thinking and vernacular memory. My thesis is that the ideologemes of free labour are accepted or at least not problematized in the narratives of the majority of ‘ordinary’ people who lived during the communist regime without being subjected to political repression. The other group, however - the victims of such repression - challenges the regime's propaganda ideologemes of freedom and free labour under socialism, and do so by recounting their own lives and speaking from the undeniable position of witnesses. Thus, in terms of remembering labour, freedom and coercion, the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s is divided into two ‘generational units’ (using Mannheim’s term), that remain on irreconcilable opposing positions.

Exceptional and banal constructions of British muslims in Grenfell: Social boundaries, twitter, superdiversity and online vernacular memory

AbstractThe Grenfell fire catapulted North Kensington into the spotlight, an area both synonymous with immigration and social policy innovation for over a century. However, it remains under examined how this extraordinary event re‐defined the discursive landscape around British Muslims and how they have been situated in the national landscape. To do this it analyses the twitter activity in the 96 hours after the fire and also the victim profiles published in the Guardian Newspaper. It finds that the narratives that emerge blur British Muslim social boundaries through narratives both around the exceptional and banal narratives which emerged during and after the fire. This constructs British Muslims as both saviours during Grenfell, and also as a super‐diverse population that resists topologizing as pre‐dominantly South Asain. This article also raises broader questions about the not only the role that social media has in the creation of vernacular memory, and also that in this case twitter was importantly not a conduit for the fake news and hate speech created against British Muslims during Grenfell.

Understanding Conservation Conflicts in Uganda: A Political Ecology of Memory Approach

Political ecologists have linked conservation conflicts in post-independence Africa to the continuities and legacies of colonial policies that displaced and dispossessed people to create ‘wild places’. This paper introduces a political ecology of vernacular memory to discuss the Basongora people’s vernacular memories of their historical dispossession to create the Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) in Uganda. It explores how these events spurred multidirectional memories of resilience, heroism, victimhood, and resistance that the Basongora pastoralists deploy to reclaim social-political autonomy and agency. Using archival data and historical ethnography, I examine how the Basongora mobilise vernacular memory in contemporary contestations with the state and conservation authorities in QENP. Vernacular memory provides a moral authority that helps subordinated groups contest the hegemonic dominance of conservation authorities. A political ecology approach to vernacular memory reveals how people use memory politics to legitimise their claims in contested environments—an essential fact of contemporary conservation conflicts. This paper is the first to conceptualise how vernacular memories can legitimise the decolonisation of conservation narratives and community resistance against conservation.

Transforming Non-Memory into Memory: Photographic Representations of Korean Pipokja in Kim Hyoyeon’s Gamgak isang (Abnormal Sense)

Abstract: This essay examines Kim Hyoyeon’s photographic series Gamgak isang (Abnormal sense) (2018–2021), which explores the memories of Korean A-bomb victims ( pipokja ) living in Hapcheon, South Korea. Starting from the artist’s own memory of her grandmother, Kim’s work focuses on the lives of the victims and their descendants, who retain painful memories as a form of physical and psychological suffering. The essay examines the historical contexts in Japan and South Korea that rendered memories of Korean A-bomb victims invisible and mute. On the basis of such historical analysis, it discusses the ways in which Gamgak isang breaks down grand narratives into units of personal memories in order to make sense of what happened to the individual victims. Focusing on the ways in which the series sheds light on the realm of the familial, the essay also analyses how it suggests the potential for creating a new form of postmemorial kinship through visual means. Such discussions will lead to the proposition that vernacular memories can eventually offer a transnational lens to view the memory of the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, thus letting us think outside the traditional boundaries of nation-states.

Vernacular memories: recalling Rwanda’s 1943–44 famine during the Covid-19 hunger crisis

This article explores how the vernacular memory of the 1940s-era Ruzagayura famine was deployed to critique the contemporary Covid-19-induced hunger crisis in Rwanda. It methodologically advances memory studies scholarship by emphasising the importance of textual analyses of oral histories, poetry, proverbs and panegyrics, especially when transmitted on social media. This crucial revision can begin to redress the Eurocentric knowledge production approaches prevalent in memory studies. Transgenerational vernacular memories run parallel to, in relation with, and in competition with Rwanda’s official memorialisation of historical crises. While the Ruzagayura famine and related narratives are forgotten in the official rewriting of history, they re-emerge and find new life online to be transmitted across generations and geographies. I consider how ‘born-digital’ youth revitalise oral histories of the famine as a form of resistance against official policy, and how powerful actors attempt to suppress these narratives. Thus, this paper contributes to broader literatures on resistance and memory politics in Rwanda and beyond.

State Institutions as Building Blocks of China's Infrastructures of Memory – The Case of Intangible Heritage

The past is continuously reinterpreted to serve the interests of the present. Over the last two centuries of turbulent Chinese history, the past has been redefined through narratives and categorisations. How does the party-state manage the diversity and complexity of China's past, and what implications does this have for state–society relations in China? Based on a case study of China's adoption of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, this article argues that the Chinese party-state creates “infrastructures of memory,” which enable it to actively manage China's diverse past through selective institutionalisation. This process creates a “cognitive map” of tangible and rationalised relations and boundaries between vernacular memories as interpreted by the state. Although this map is to shape and direct Chinese collective memory and identity, it also sparks contestation among members of the populace who seek to preserve vernacular and multiple memories of their socio-cultural past.

Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion, and Historical Politics

Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion, and Historical Politics

Contested disaster nationalism in the digital age: Emotional registers and geopolitical imaginaries in COVID-19 narratives on Chinese social media

AbstractThis article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

Vernacular memory and implicated communities

Abandoned sites of trauma in Poland appear to be forgotten, but their removal from social and cultural circles is only superficial. Frequently, these sites are inscribed into the local culture of memory and members of the local Polish communities can usually locate them and share stories about them. However, as they are not commemorated, there is an ambivalent aura around them. In 2017 two foundations (Zapomniane Foundation, The Matzevah Foundation) carried out an intervention into the landscape of Poland by marking thirty burial sites of Jewish victims of the Holocaust with simple wooden markers. The effects of that intervention shed light on the vernacular local memory of the Holocaust and the folk-traditional roots of the practices and behaviors related to these sites.

Agaciro, vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda

Abstract Recent debates in post-genocide and post-war Rwanda have explored how official commemorations of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in many ways borrow and ‘mimic’ the Holocaust memory ‘paradigm’. The academic canon on post-1994 Rwanda focuses the mostly on politics around this official memory that has evolved into hegemonic memory and on how it has been mobilized to promote a selective memory of the past. However, there is little analysis of vernacular, bottom-up memory practices that have evolved alongside the official one. Using observation, semi-structured interviews, and secondary sources, this article examines vernacular memory practices of mourning the wartime missing in Rwanda. Through the concepts of ‘multidirectional’ and ‘traveling’ memory, this study examines how survivors of these interconnected violent histories that unfolded in two different countries claim multi-faceted Agaciro (dignity, self-respect, and self-worth) through two different memory approaches. The article argues that while actors in official memory approach claim Agaciro through borrowing from another global hegemonic memory, respondents in this study created vernacular avenues to remember their missing loved ones. The article finds that while hegemonic memory might appear to only compete with vernacular memory, there are also ‘knots’ that connect these two memory forms in Rwanda’s context and beyond. In its conclusion, the article proposes an Agaciro-centred approach to examine the relationships between official and unofficial memory practices that have been reenergized through protests both offline and online in Rwanda and beyond. The article contributes to scholarship on Rwanda’s post-genocide memory politics, transcultural memory, and decolonial perspectives on dignity.

A County Town in Ruins: Memories, Emotions, and Sense of Place in Post-Earthquake Beichuan, China

Ruins serve as symbolic sites at which to re-examine people’s relationships with the past and bonds with places. In the context of the ruination caused by earthquakes and the displacement and resettlement of local residents post-disaster, this paper explores vernacular (residents’ and survivors’) memories, emotions, and senses of place triggered by the ruins of Beichuan county town, China. Results show vernacular memories of specific ruins were highly fragmented and multi-temporal. Interwoven before- and after-quake memories gave rise to complex emotions, mainly including traumatic feeling of sadness, fear, and painful nostalgia. The study further identifies people’s sense of place towards the ruined county town and finds that locals’ sense of place was not accompanied by the loss of physical dependence to the negative side; locals still expressed high levels of place identity (physical uniqueness, self-esteem, and meanings), place attachment (rootedness and emotional attachment), and positive consequences of place behaviours (protection intention and revisiting) post-earthquake. Moreover, it found that sociodemographic variables of age and length of residence in Beichuan and the variables of disaster loss had significant effect on people’s sense of place. This study balances the overriding focus on visual and representational concerns common in ruin scholarship and further reveals the complex psychological processes impacting on sense of place after large-scale disasters. The findings reflect on the relief practices of post-disaster planning and can serve to guide ruin preservation.

›Hard Times but Our Own‹. Post-Socialist Nostalgia and the Transformation of Industrial Life in Poland

By analysing oral history interviews with industrial workers in Poland, this article adds some nuance to the study of post-industrial and post-socialist nostalgia. It presents diverse vernacular memories of the post-1989 systemic change from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism, and shows that nostalgia for an industrial ›golden age‹, although significant, is not the only way of making sense of this change. Rather, a distinctive feature of vernacular memory is the ambiguity about both socialism and capitalism. Recognising the variety of memories, the article underlines the critical potential of nostalgic currents for highlighting what is felt to be wrong with contemporary work culture. The article also differentiates between the vernacular memories of industrial communities recorded in oral history and institutionalised political memories in order to stress that the critical potential of nostalgic memories has been largely absent in the latter. In Poland, nostalgia for industrial life has been given little opportunity to become a reflective and critically useful mechanism to protect values that remain relevant in the present, such as the importance of sociability and agency in the workplace.

Evolving Exhibits: Struggles Over Public Memory in Developing “The Willowbrook Mile”

In 2016, the College of Staten Island held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Willowbrook Mile, a walking path across the campuses of the college and the Office of Persons with Developmental Disabilities’ Institute for Basic Research that would document the history of the notorious Willowbrook School. The Willowbrook School was a state institution for the developmentally disabled that was closed in part because of an expose about the School’s horrific conditions. It took more than a decade for the groundbreaking to occur, and 4 years later, the Mile remains unbuilt. This article traces the development process by examining planning documents and recollections of key participants at the groundbreaking and makes two findings about the development and evolution of memory exhibits. First, the Mile’s slow process reflects that public memory is a contest of identity and difference. Memorializing Willowbrook pits vernacular memory of activists and laypeople committed to social justice for the developmentally disabled against an official public memory that deflects attention away from the state’s role in maintaining the Willowbrook School. Second, the competition between official and vernacular memory led to a both-and compromise where official and vernacular memory appear equally. This compromise appears to be untenable for many involved, leading to continued development delays after the Mile’s groundbreaking. This analysis not only traces the conflict between official and vernacular memory of Willowbrook, but how conflict creates new proposals for memory even as their development remains impeded.

‘The Dreaded Pneumonic Influenza Has Made Its Appearance Amongst Us’: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Gippsland, Victoria

This article contributes to our understanding of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic from a regional perspective. It covers the Gippsland region in the southeast of Australia, which traverses the area from Melbourne to the New South Wales border, with a focus on detailing pandemic history at a finely-grained community level. While the public memory of the influenza pandemic is patchy I explore local and family histories to show a vernacular memory of its impact. I also argue that the capacity for Gippsland to respond to the crisis was based on mobilisation and activity carried out during World War I. The role of women in the voluntary sector was crucial in responding to this crisis, especially the Red Cross. At the same time the crisis revealed sometimes-hidden divisions, and I also consider examples of disagreement on issues such as the location of temporary hospitals or the impacts on border areas.

News that Isn’t New: March for Our Lives and Media Mobilization of Historical Precedent

ABSTRACTMedia coverage of the March 24, 2018 March for Our Lives has been voluminous, including notable coverage framing the march in relation to historical precursors. Analyzing two chronotopes, or implicit orientations to space and time, embedded in this coverage, this essay contributes to efforts to understand journalism as a space of vernacular public memory. I argue that journalists and commentators mobilize historical precedent in ways that constrain the possible outcomes of teen activism in the present.

The Treachery on YouTube: The Politics of Memory on New Media in Indonesia

This article discusses the problematic process of the remediation of social memory on and through YouTube, focusing on the 1965/66 massacre in Indonesia. Despite being a new media and an arena for contesting vernacular memories of the 1965/66 massacre, YouTube is also often used to advance the State narrative, as seen in how YouTube users replicate the film Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI) annually to promote anti-communist agendas, as well as how Indonesian filmmakers title their works that deal with the 1965/66 massacre. More broadly, the monumental memory of 1965/66 on YouTube involves three actors: state actors, film communities, and vigilantes.

World heritage and the local politics of memory: the Miike coal mine and fu no isan

This article investigates the complex relations between heritage and memory through an analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’ and its component Miike coal mine. When discussing this World Heritage Site, scholars and the media have focused on the diplomatic controversy over the history of forced labour between Japan and South Korea, interpreting it as a new example of a dispute over history in East Asia. However, this understanding oversimplifies the relations between heritage and memory. Based on fieldwork research and documentary analysis, this article investigates the diversity and complexity of the collective memory of Miike coal mine from a local perspective. The results show that there is a sharp dissonance between the World Heritage story and some of the ex-miners’ memories, which focus on the negative past, fu no isan. Documentary analysis shows that fu no isan has two different but closely related meanings: negative legacy and negative heritage. Fieldwork research reveals that the various commemorations of fu no isan in the local community, mainly based on ex-miners’ social networks, constitute a form of vernacular memory, independent from the official memory of the World Heritage. Finally, I conclude that heritage can be public memory, rather than just official memory, as long as it is open to plural memories of the past.

Memory in the margins: The connecting and colliding of vernacular war memories

This article examines how war memory circulates, connects and collides on digital media platforms driven by digital publics that form around popular culture. Through a case study of vernacular memory discourses emerging around a game inspired by the Yugoslav war, the article investigates how the commenting practices of YouTube users provide insights into the feelings of belonging of conflict-affected subjects that go beyond ethnicity and exceed geographical boundaries. The comments of 331 videos were analysed, using an open source tool and sequential mixed-method content analysis. Media-based collectivities emerging on YouTube are influenced by the reactive and asynchronous dynamics of comments that stimulate the emergence of micro-narratives. Within this plurality of voices, connective moments focus on shared memories of trauma and displacement beyond ethnicity. However, clashing collective memories cause disputes that reify identification along ethnic lines. The article concludes that memory discourses emerging in the margins of YouTube represent the affective reactions of serendipitous encounters between users of audio-visual content.