Vision Of Memory Research Articles

Deeply rooted in the present: Contemporary street art and palimpsest memories on Réunion Island

Abstract This article explores the work of street artists Kid Kréol and Boogie whose creative endeavours with visual texts constitute (re)articulations of memory and identity in Reunion Island. In abandoned industrial zones and urban locations, their work consistently features Zamérantes (creole for wandering souls) who serve as the protagonists of tales and legends from the island’s oral and written traditions. The public venues chosen for their works catalyse the meanings and messages of the works while the works reconstitute the meaning of spaces and places of exhibition. These artists purpose is to manipulate the traditional in ways that are emphatically contemporary and designed to superimpose the real and imaginary, the past and present. This article argues that these (re)visions of memory take the form of a superimposition of traces that come to constitute a new composite structure. This layering can be a superimposition of not only two moments in time but also of places, spaces and cultures that produce a chain of signification. Hence, considering KidKréol and Boogie’s art as palimpsests leads to new understandings of memory as transcultural and intertextual. It is a critically dynamic and open space composed of interconnected traces of different voices, sites and times.

Haunting memories of war in Chinese cinema and diaspora: Visions of national trauma, power and autoethnographic collage

The transgenerational ghosts of trauma from war, death and injustice within Chinese twentieth century history are carried through the remembrances and silences of mediated, diasporic visions of memory. These ghosts are visible through Chinese cinema at the intersection of modern China’s national interests, issues of power and the transnational distribution/production of official memory. These relations also suggest an insistence to produce particular national, unified identifications within the collective imaginations of spectators across generations in the Chinese diaspora. While some national wounds are ‘chosen’ and remembered (for example, Western colonialism, Imperial Japanese invasion), other collective traumas continue to be disavowed through cinematic memory productions. In response to these issues of historical rewriting and memory production, I propose alternate ways of seeing cinema through a critical autoethnography that juxtaposes other mediations of memory. I explore how this approach to cinema spectatorship enables diasporic subjects to interrogate how affective trauma transmits unconsciously across generations.

African spirituality in black women's fiction: threaded visions of memory, community, nature, and being

African spirituality in black women's fiction: threaded visions of memory, community, nature, and being

Austerlitz's Memory

The article explores the weave of memory, time, and narrative as it unfolds in the autobiographical process. It offers a reading of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz as a book that outlines a new narrative vision of memory and autobiographical time. In this book Sebald, in a break with the traditional model of memory as an archive, describes remembering as an uncertain and speculative search movement which defies chronology, sequentiality, and linearity. What emerges instead is an idea of time as a mode of simultaneously co-existing moments and episodes from very different periods of clock and calendar time. This reading of Austerlitz leads, on a more general plane, to reflections about the autobiographical process as a way of narrative meaning-making that constitutes what Ricoeur has called human time.

The short-term/long-term memory distinction: Back to the past?

The view that short-term memory should be conceived of as being a process based on the activation of long-term memory is inconsistent with neuropsychological evidence. Data from brain-damaged patients, showing specific patterns of impairment, are compatible with a vision of memory as a multiple-component system, whose different aspects, in neurologically unimpaired subjects, show a high degree of interaction.