Memories Of Violence Research Articles

Revisiting Chinese Indonesian Violence in Indonesian Post-New Order Fiction

May 1998 saw one of the worst cases of racial violence in Indonesian history. During 13th to 15th May 1998, there were acts of expropriation, looting, arson and sexual assault targeting the Chinese community in Indonesia. Using two specimens of Indonesian post-New Order fiction, Sekuntum Nozomi 3 (SN3) by Marga Tjoa and Putri Cina (PC) by Sindhunata, this study investigates how cultural memories of the May 1998 Tragedy were shared with the post-event generation. The method employed is a qualitative narrative with a narratological approach. The results showed that literary works function as a medium for the spread of memory. Through SN3 and PC, the memory of violence against ethnic Chinese Indonesians between 12th and 15th May 1998 is transmitted, especially for the post-event generation who did not experience it firsthand. Despite the differing representation strategy, there was substantively one voice to be conveyed, namely that of “discrimination, violence and human rights violations” against Chinese Indonesians. Memories are institutionalised and distributed as part of the national memory in these works. Both works mediate the politics of cultural memory to memorialise the past “sins” of the Indonesian people. These literary works can be viewed as tools for minorities to articulate discrimination.

Multivocality and Its Implications for the Representation of Heritage: A Case Study of the Slavery Heritage in Mikindani, Tanzania

This article, by using evidence from the old town of Mikindani in Tanzania, explores multivocality in the memorialization of the slavery heritage in Mikindani. It also looks at how multivocality perpetuates dissonance and shapes cultural negotiations and the people’s strategies for coping with violent memories. It employed the notion of heritage dissonance and integrated heritage discourse and a qualitative case-study design. Thirty-three respondents were interviewed and three focus group discussion sessions were held. The findings support the argument that multivocality is an inherent part of heritage that shapes the dissonance regarding what should be conserved and heritage meaning-making processes. Multivocality and the resultant dissonance are further shaped by a complex mix of demographic dynamics, socio-cultural contexts, including religious values, identity struggles, the community’s articulation of the theoretical apparatus, political contexts, including power relations, the local or state political standing, the cultural heritage management (CHM) approach in place, and economic contexts, including the forward-looking nature of the younger people based on the tourist potential of the heritage. Although the resultant dissonance may be passive, it is embedded with the inert social tensions that may not necessarily be harmful to the heritage, but which provide potential spaces for conducting cultural negotiations that strive to defuse the boundaries of identities and the moral superiority–inferiority dogma. This article notes that multivocality should neither be ignored nor evaded, as it could be embraced as a medium for unlocking the sedimentation of a single discourse, understanding and addressing different experiences and expressions and resolving conflicts. The article also provides practical suggestions to the CHM authorities in Mikindani and related sites, as well as suggestions for further research.

The Role of Fear and Memory in West Papua's Ethnonationalist Conflict

In the West Papua conflict, fear fuels both Papuan ethnonationalist and Indonesian nationalist sentiment. We argue that this reciprocal fear and memoria passionis plays a significant role in fuelling political violence. On the one hand, it provokes Papuan activists to respond violently to Indonesian military operations. Fear of losing future generations of indigenous Papuans has strengthened their identity as Papuans and encouraged them to join armed movements against Indonesia. On the other hand, fear of West Papuan independence leads the Indonesian military and police to conduct operations against members of the Free Papua Movement and affiliated groups and other activists not in the independence movement. This results in a "reciprocal fear-fuelled nationalism," whereby Indonesian security forces and Papuan separatist activists are drawn into increasing conflict. In this context, fear becomes institutionalized and socially constructed. By understanding the unending violent conflict in Tanah Papua as related to the transfer of emotions across generations, it becomes clear a military operations approach will not be effective in the long term. Non-violent approaches, especially dialogue with separatist groups, will be more effective in breaking the chain of violent memories, resulting in more positive outcomes for conflict resolution in Papua. Learning from negotiations between the government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement in 2005, we support the proposition that dialogue is the best entry point by which to end this prolonged separatist armed conflict.

Na Today?

Abstract The Lekki Tollgate massacre, which was part of the brutal tactics used to put down the #EndSARS protests, underscored the incorrigibly violent nature of the Nigerian state. It also ruptured the sense of linear progressive time which governs the hegemonic conception of history and memory in Nigeria—for instance, time as post-civil war, post-dictatorship, etc. The boundary of this idea of a nation on a progressive march, made up of people healed of all traumas, and cured of their historical scars is fiercely and violently policed. A case in point is the fervour with which Biafra as a form of collective memory is being resisted and silenced. However, the murderous incident at the tollgate brought to the fore the fact that each violent moment in Nigeria’s turbulent history has created a fractured sense of history for many victims, and consequently hampered the possibility of forging a settled sense of belonging and national unity. One site where this sense of history as violently fractured has been adequately imagined is the creative arts, especially poetry. Poems have archived, mediated, and remediated memories of violence that are mostly excised from official history. Thus, in this article I read selected poems from Soro Soke, a poetry collection curated by Brittle Paper in collaboration with James Yeku and Jumoke Verissimo. My aim is to examine how the poetic responses to the Lekki massacre generate alternative, unvarnished historiographies that call attention to the haunting and brooding presence of Nigeria’s brutal past in the present. I am also interested in the ways in which the selected works act as archives of violent memories and how they seek to recover the humanity of those killed by naming them and grieving their loss.

Transported Memories: How “I Remember” Poetry Became an International Form

Abstract This essay examines the history of “I remember” poetry, which began with Joe Brainard’s volume I Remember (1970). The form, which consists of simple, declarative sentences beginning with “I remember,” draws in readers with generational nostalgia, for the objects, brands, and consumer objects common to those born in the same time-space. However, Brainard’s original and subsequent texts continuously subvert this nostalgia by juxtaposing it with hyperpersonal, sexual, or troublingly violent memories. This article argues that the form’s reception and translation was fundamentally altered by one of its adopters, Georges Perec, who eradicated themes based in individuated memory, like Brainard’s sexual confession, transforming the genre exclusively into a document of generational and cultural identity. This foundational split—between the sexual-social and the generational—dictated the history of the genre, as it traveled nationally and internationally, and was taken up by authors and artists in the United States, France, Spain, South Africa, and Lebanon. Writers and visual artists like Shane Allison, Denis Hirson, Zeina Abirached, Floc’h, Jesús Marchamalo, Juan Bonilla, and Elías Moro take interesting liberties with the form by adapting it to a different cultural context or fully rewriting its rules. In the end, “I remember” poetry becomes not just a vehicle for documenting an obsolete past but for testifying to war and times of crisis.

HOW THÖŊ PINY BECAME JUBA NA BARI: Naming and Place‐Making in Urban South Sudan

AbstractFollowing South Sudan's independence in 2011, a myriad of local, regional and global actors have flocked to its capital city, Juba, to influence and benefit from the ongoing state‐making process. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Juba between 2012 and 2015, this article demonstrates how urban ‘space’ in Juba is rendered into ‘place’ through everyday practices of naming that articulate urbanites’ contrasting experiences of the Sudanese civil wars, the city's tumultuous history, and their position within its—and the new nation's—present and future. This is most visible in a growing and contested Juba neighborhood that has come to be called by two different names, each tied to distinct experiences of conflict and displacement within and beyond the city. These and other namings and place‐makings index historically‐rooted ethno‐spatial understandings of South Sudan, memories of violence, and the sense of differential access to the city's economic potential in the face of ongoing upheaval. Urban naming and place‐making in Juba (and in other cities similarly impacted by conflict), it is argued, is a central domain through which urbanites disrupt official mappings and mitigate disorienting violence. These discursive practices are a vital means by which people forge stable lives and productive futures in the face of a precarious political present.

Memories of violence in the Rwandan diaspora: intergenerational transmission and conflict transportation

ABSTRACTHow are memories of a violent past in the country of origin reproduced, contested and reinterpreted by younger diasporic generations? And what consequences do processes of memory transmission of a violent past have on younger generations’ identities and patterns of mobilisation? Based on an exploration of the transmission of memories of the 1994 genocide in the Rwandan diaspora in Belgium, this article demonstrates that the intergenerational transmission of conflict memories shapes the mobilisation of second-generation diasporans in significant ways, and largely explains patterns of conflict transportation in the country of residence. However, a reframing of issues related to Rwanda’s past, as well as a reorganisation and rethinking of diaspora cleavages and/or solidarities, from one generation to the next can also be observed. Such patterns can be explained by the need to translate memories of a painful past so that they can make sense and resonate in the country of residence.

The Fallacies of Bridging the East and West in Tayeb Salih’s 'Season of Migration to the North' and Laila Halaby’s 'Once in a Promised Land'

Objectives: The paper examines the role of two contemporary Arab novelists, Tayeb Salih and Laila Halaby, who depict the fallacies of bridging the East and West. Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) tackle the social, cultural, political, historical, and religious factors and obstacles that resulted in widening the gap between the East and West. The aim of this study is to also trace how Salih’s and Halaby’s characters' attitudes towards this harmony between both cultures develop throughout the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Methods: This paper employs a socio-political and cultural approach to discuss the role of the contemporary Arab intellectual in presenting the possibility of bridging the cultural and humanitarian gap between the East and West. Results: This study finds that there are two groups of Arab intellectuals: those haunted by violent memories of Western colonization, who are incapable of creating a harmonious relationship with the West, and the liberal Arab intellectuals who reflect a great readiness to assimilate into Western culture. Conclusions: This study concludes that all attempts by these characters to create harmony between the East and the West are futile.

(Re)signifying the Past of Violence: Emerging Memories and Voices at Colombia’s National Strike in 2021

ABSTRACT The 2021 National Strike in Colombia laid bare social discontent exacerbated by structural inequalities in its society. It provided a much-needed platform for those historically excluded voices, including those of young people. They raised their voices to challenge the meanings of the violent past to construct an activist and politicized citizenship. I will analyze from a discursive-performative stance the meanings that emerge in the protest taking as corpus two graffiti. These materials’ irruptions give room to doubts, complaints, demands of justice, and new questions about the memories of violence as they open the space to a political we.

The Role of Personal Centrality of Ingroup Victimhood in Intergroup Relations and Political Agenda in Northern Ireland

Even though the violent conflicts during the Troubles officially ended decades ago, the memories of violence and division between Catholics and Protestants linger in Northern Ireland. We argue that the personal centrality of collective victimhood, which is formed by the memory and perception of past and ongoing victimization, may play an important role in people's attitudes in postconflict societies. The current study investigated both the antecedents and outcomes of the personal centrality of ingroup victimhood in Northern Ireland and examined the vital role it plays in the aftermath of a violent intergroup conflict among Catholics and Protestants. The results demonstrated that ongoing experiences of victimization such as personal and group‐level discrimination and memories of personal and close others' suffering are strongly related to people's personal centrality of ingroup victimhood. The centrality of ingroup victimhood, in turn, predicted various strategies for intergroup interaction and policy preferences such as collective action, support for nonviolence, and attitudes toward reunification of Ireland, which were moderated by group membership. The findings provide empirical evidence for the role of the centrality of ingroup victimhood as a link between experiences of victimization and intergroup interactions as well as policy preferences.

Inherited Revolution. Narratives in Transgenerational Memory Transfer

AbstractOur essay deals with narratives of social upheaval that act as vehicles for transgenerational memory transfer. We look at narratives of collectively experienced processes of emancipation and the subsequent possibility of remembering things not experienced firsthand under the prism of the political event of revolution understood as an inherently violent process (Arendt 1990). In this context, we inquire about postmemory along similar lines to those staked out by Marianne Hirsch, while also considering whether the term can be separated from trauma and linked to other emotional responses of comparable affective intensity. Memories of violence are frequently disjointed and impressionistic. The connection of fragments to a narrative context is often severed while the action of linking the threads into a coherent narrative faces vehement resistance. In principle, this is not different from the experience of violence in revolutions and their remembrance. However, narratives on revolution tend to exert a strong force of attraction upon their recipients. Considering the figures ofcycle,linear progression,iteration,disruptionandirreversibilityas the time modes of revolution, we look at how these have enabled entirely new understandings of time since the nineteenth century. New forms of temporality, in turn, are entangled with the roledisplacementplays in the relationship between a transgenerational transfer of narratives and the construction of narrative time.In order to explore how a generation deals with the dominance (Hirsch 2012) of the narratives transmitted to them by the preceding one, we deal with two models in which affective states charged with both suffering and pleasure are developed into terms of cultural and literary theory: Bini Adamczak’s reading ofdesireas fetish in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, and Svetlana Boym’s work onnostalgiaas an emotional disposition characteristic for modernity. Taking into account that both models are more or less constructed by cultural practices, historical events, and transformations in the history of ideas, and thus cannot always be precisely distinguished from one another, we present two main narrative strategies: The reception of the stories of one generation by another involves either contracting the affective intensity of their narratives at the expense of linear time or expanding narrative time far beyond individual life spans. For our analysis we mainly refer to Rodolfo Usigli’sEnsayo de un crimenand Heinrich Heine’sLudwig Börne: A Memorialas post memory narratives on revolution. We understand them as examples of each narrative strategy and as part of the dialectic of this way of remembering.

Our lives and bodies matter: memories of violence and strategies of resistance among migrants crossing the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT This article addresses the counter-effects of the politics of externalization of European frontiers in Libya through a qualitative analysis of a case study concerning a group of Somali asylum-seekers who, after being held and tortured in Libyan detention centres, managed to cross the Mediterranean and arrived in Italy where they accidentally met and, thus, pressed charges against their torturer. Based on the information provided in the judicial files containing their testimonies, which led to the first recognition by a European court of the unbearable forms of violence suffered by migrants in Libya, this article offers a critical reflection on the implications of migration control enforcement promoted at the EU’s borders on the European civil and political community. Moreover, it provides a reflection on the challenges raised for migration studies by survivors’ testimonies on the wider implications of subjective experiences and biographical narratives in illuminating emerging domains of social responsibility and political action.

Narrativ intelligencii v epohu GULAGa (na osnove dokumental'noj literatury i istoricheskih faktov)

The purpose of this study is to revise and comprehend the historical significance of the intellectuals who survived the Gulag era and succumbed to repression in the camps, and the intelligentsia who did not compromise and firmly followed their beliefs. Throughout the entire period of the Gulag, the intelligentsia maintains the mentality of the victim, and we can say that this period is a period of violent memories with a reassessment of the relationship between intelligence and power.

Katixa Agirre y Los turistas desganados: las dos caras del País Vasco

This article proposes a reading of Katixa Agirre’s (1981) work Atertu arte itxaron (2015), translated as Los turistas desganados (2017). The analysis will include two different aspects: first a consideration of the road-movie structure and then the work will be analyzed through the recuperation of the conflictive memory of violence in the Basque Country. The chapter situates the novel in the context of Katixa Agirre’s narrative work represented in two books of short stories, Sua falta zaigu (2007) and Habitat (2009), and the novel that follows the one in the present study, Amek ez dute (2018), translated as La madres no (2019). Furthermore, certain aspects related to the translation of the works will be studied.

Prowokatorka: Fascynujące życie Marii Dąbrowskiej [The provoker: The fascinating life of Maria Dąbrowska

<i>Prowokatorka: Fascynujące życie Marii Dąbrowskiej</i> [The provoker: The fascinating life of Maria Dąbrowska

The ex-PKI Political Prisoners Motive to Produce the Memories of 1965/66 Mass Violence in West Sumatra

This article analyses ex-PKI political prisoners' motive to produce their memory about mass violence and detention in 1965/66. They joined the YPKP (Yayasan Penelitian Korban Pembunuhan/Institute for Research on the victims 1965/65). In this organization, they expect justice for what they experienced in 1965. This article uses qualitative research. We acquire the data by interview and literature study. There are six interviewers –five of them are ex-PKI political prisoners, and one is the chairman of the YPKP branch in West Sumatra. Besides the interview, we also use relevant books, articles, newspapers, archives, and web pages. We employ the social memory approach to analyse this subject. The ex-PKI political prisoners' memory of violence had shaped the same vision between them to produce the memories of what they have experienced during 1965/66. Therefore, the old ex-political prisoners expected to straighten history to reconcile the government and the victims. They attempt to counter the state narration that mentions they had a part in the 30 September 1965 Movement to hold the coup and prove that the state victimized them for decades. Along with the straightened history, there are two primary purposes in this reconciliation they are fighting for; 1) Confession of the state that human rights violations had taken place; 2) Recovery and rehabilitation for those who had become the victim of human rights violations.

The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which the violent Anabaptist rising at Münster in 1533–5 was reinterpreted in Restoration England. Historians have often recognized that the incident was used to attack English Baptists in the seventeenth century, but there has been little systematic exploration of the processes behind this. This article suggests that recollections of Münster in later seventeenth-century England were a species of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ – an internationally shared memory of trauma put to distinctive local uses. References to Münster served as ways for English writers to tie nonconformists to specific acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Thomas Venner's 1661 rising in London, without directly recalling these events. Historical discussions of the Münster rising therefore often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists. Condemnations of the violence in the German city were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist writers responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster rising. This article demonstrates these points through a range of sources, including sermons, letters, commentaries, controversial literature, and almanacs.

Collective memories of political violence of health-care providers in Ayacucho, Perú

The article presents a study about collective memories of the Internal Armed Conflict (IAC) in Peru (1980-2000) from the perspective of a group of health-care professionals providing services in the region that was most affected by political violence. A brief historical analysis of the IAC is presented. A qualitative design with 15 interviews based on Grounded Theory is used for analyzing the discourse of the participants, and accounting for collective memories of the conflict and the scares that the experience and memory of violence have left in the population and the health-care providers. The analysis focuses on four interrelated axes: (1) collective memories of conflict and its social and psychological consequences; (2) costs and benefits of narrating versus the costs of absence of narrating; (3) recovering memories as a way to overcome psychosocial trauma; and (4) direct experience, personal meanings and effects of exposure to victims’ stories on the health-care providers. Results suggest a scenario of unrelenting psychosocial effects and possible re-traumatization, both in those directly affected and, in the health-care professionals treating them. In addition, central to the participants’ discourse is the importance of acknowledging and claiming the right to construct the memory of the violent period as an act of justice, restoration, mental-health recovery, and strengthening of the social fabric.

Archival operations in post-dictatorship novels: memory and Chilean human rights records

ABSTRACT The junction between the memory of violence of the past and fictional registry is a dimension of post-dictatorial society’s cultural dynamics. While the testimonial narrative is dominant in the literary sphere, the archive as a repository of memory and documental inscription, with the capacity to iterate and transit from one social field to another, challenges regimes of truth and lineal temporality of official memory. This article identifies, characterises and compares the way in which records are employed in contemporary Chilean post-dictatorship narrative. The archive enables us to problematise and contextualise the relation to the recent dictatorial past and the opening up of new fields of reflection. The incorporation of records in four recent Chilean post-dictatorship novels (Puño y Letra by Eltit; Sprinters, Los Niños de Colonia Dignidad by Larra; La Dimensión Desconocida by Fernández and Monte Maravilla by Lafferte) is achieved through quotes or theme development. Such resources bring to light the fascination as well as the scepticism that archives generate in literature, as well as their effectiveness for expressing the intricate, and even contradictory, mechanisms of memory.

Book Reviews

Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 264 pp., (ISBN 9780812251753). Salih Can Açıksöz, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, Oakland: University of California Press, 2020, 272 pp., (ISBN: 9780520305304). Reviewed by Marlene Schäfers, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Andrew Bush, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020, 240 pp., (ISBN: 9781503611436). Reviewed by Metin Atmaca, Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey Mneesha Gellman, Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic minority rights movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, 226 pp., (ISBN: 9781138597686). Reviewed by Vera Eccarius-Kelly, Siena College, United States Seevan Saeed, Kurdish Politics in Turkey: From the PKK to the KCK, London and New York: Routledge, 2017, 150 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-138-19529-5 (hbk); 978-1-315-63848-5 (ebk)). Reviewed by Michael M. Gunter, Tennessee Technological University Mohammedali Yaseen Taha, Media and Politics in Kurdistan. How Politics and Media are Locked in an Embrace, London: Lexington, 2020, 145 pp., (ISBN: 9781793611031). Reviewed by Kerem Schamberger, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Yiannis Kanakis, "God First and Last": Religious Traditions and Music of the Yaresan of Guran. Volume I: Religious Traditions, by Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. XIV+188 pp., (ISBN 9783447114240). Reviewed by Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, Netherlands Seyedeh Behnaz Hosseini, The Yārsān of Iran, Socio-Political changes and Migration, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 229 pp., (ISBN 978-981-15-2634-3). Reviewed by Hamidreza Nikravesh, Free University of Berlin, Germany Mohammed Ihsan, Nation building in Kurdistan: Memory, Genocide and Human Rights, New York: Routledge, 2017, 194 pp., (ISBN: 9781472466792). Reviewed by Ugur Ümit Üngör, NIOD Institute, University of Amsterdam