Vernacular Memory Research Articles

History, Memory, and Historic Districts in Chicago

Abstract Across America, National Register Historic Districts have done a better job helping to preserve building stock and stabilize communities than they have of meeting the articulated goal of With a Heritage So Rich, the foundational 1966 study that gave birth to the National Register of Historic Places. According to that report, historic sites were to “give a sense of orientation to our society” and help to implant in people “values of time and place.” This article looks at the evolution of historic districts in Chicago, Illinois through the lens of public memory. It explores the relationship between “official” memory and gentrification, “vernacular memory” and community preservation through the story of two waves of National Register District creation in Chicago, first in the 1980s led by real estate developers and a second in the late 1990s.

Narratives of Victims and Villains in Kosovo

This article uses ideological criticism to examine how and why victimage, identity and nationalism are produced through everyday discursive practices of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Wander contends that the ideological turn in criticism confronts and studies what is professed and obscure, and Greene argues that part of this criticism involves unmasking forms of domination. Examining cultural or rhetorical narratives is part of ideological criticism. The narratives in this study can be regarded as competing vernacular memories representative of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. The participants invoke personal and collective memories with official national histories to explain contemporary victimization as a continuance of historical victimage. This use of the past can serve to legitimize their national and political claims, as well as to justify violence against the other group, since historical victimage provides a rationale for hating the other group and perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence.

Landscapes of Remembrance: Home and Memory in the Nineteenth-Century Bürgertum

This article examines the ways in which the nineteenth-century German middle class turned their homes into sites of family memory as part of a vibrant vernacular memory. The highly segmented organization of middle-class homes contributed to and grew out of this memory culture. The divisions of domestic space ascribed heightened meaning to particular zones, especially festive spaces like the “Christmas room.” Families filled domestic spaces with memory, putting family portraits and heirlooms on prominent display in the home. Middle-class Germans also filled the pages of personal memoirs with recollections of their childhood homes that almost always portrayed an idyllic environment. Ultimately, this article argues that family memory offers a window into the emotional universe of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and that the sanitizing narratives of family memory were used to impart a sense of stability and control.

In digital remembrance: vernacular memory and the rhetorical construction of web memorials

In this study, I examine four web memorials to explore the material construction of memory on the internet. Using Blair's arguments about the rhetorical materiality of memorials, I seek to understand the vernacular responses to 9/11 in the form of individually crafted web memorials. I argue that vernacular web memorials contain dual rhetorical functions of being memorials themselves as well as the tributary markers found at other national monuments. Additionally, webmastered memorials highlight the vernacular strategies of narrative memory, which recall the individual responses and calls to action after 9/11. The internet both fosters the use of vernacular commemoration and hampers it through the use of commercially registered domain names. First, web memorials assist in the creation of vernacular commemorative communities in the form of web-rings. Second, however, the durability of the digital monuments is challenged by the very form they take due to their potentially ephemeral nature.

Resisting the creation of forgotten places: artistic production in Toronto neighbourhoods

This article analyzes semi‐structured interviews with contemporary visual artists from Toronto, Canada, to explore the relationship between artists, memory, and place. The focus of the article is on three neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto that have the potential to become forgotten places of artistic production: Yorkville, King Street West and The Junction. Through an analysis of artists' spatially grounded narratives about these three neighbourhoods, I reveal how the intense emotional and material connections that artists have to places have the potential to challenge the loss of collective urban memory. This article contributes to intersecting literatures on neighbourhood change, artistic production and the importance of vernacular memory in urban cultural geography.