Risdon Vale: Place, Memory, and Suburban Experience

This chapter engages with the potential for historical personal archives to prompt autobiographical memory through discovery, digitisation, and processes of sharing. It uses one specific archive of photographs, accumulated by the writer's grandfather over 30 years and spanning different configurations of family and place, to analyse how personal memory and meaning are reproduced through photographs over time. Digitising analogue photographs draws them into new dialogues through the application of contemporary ways of seeing and presenting. This chapter interrogates how by extending possible audiences and enabling photographs to be seen in the present, personal and collective memories are renewed and altered as the memory text is changed. Personal archives generate different forms of autobiographical memory. This multiplicity is engaged with furthering understanding of how histories of seeing as well as belonging are recorded. Through these processes, this text examines what futures for archives such as these could look like.

Reviewed by: Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War by Amy L. Hubbell Mary E. McCullough Hubbell, Amy L. Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War. U of Nebraska P, 2020. Pp. vii- 165. ISBN 978-1-4962-1402-7. $50 (hardcover). This engaging and eminently readable book on historical, literary, artistic, and personal memory examines representations of the complex, ongoing, and multilayered relationship between Algeria, France, and the Algerian War (1954-1962). This six-chapter study (including chapters of introduction and conclusion) begins by explaining psychological approaches to hoarding objects and transfers these theories to the analysis of memories and post-memories, and concludes by the acknowledging the difficulties of honoring the dead, "codify[ing] loss" (132), and how the two are inextricably linked with issues of "excessive trauma or excessive loss" (132). Chapter One, "Too Much Memory and the Algerian War," explains that "French Algeria is a lost colony whose debris is still carted around by the many people displaced at the end of the Algerian War for Independence and during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s" (25). This chapter frames the study in stating that it "looks across texts and tableaux to show how memory proliferates in both the individual and the collective histories of the Algerian War, and how memory might be obscured and forgotten under the layers of artefacts put on display" (26). In chapters One and Two, Hubbell uses theoretical concepts from Agnès Varda's film The Gleaners and I (2000) as a lens through which to examine literary texts. Through the metaphorical act of gleaning in the fields, the chapter titled "Marie Cardinal, Gleaning, Collecting, and Hoarding the Lost Homeland" investigates how pied-noir author Cardinal's "obsessive recreation of Algeria" (27) in her first two novels Écoutez la Mer (1962) and La Mule de corbillard (1963) contributes to literary memorial remains of Algeria that are heavy, obsessive, and impossible to sort through. Chapter Three, "Leïla Sebbar: Churning Memory Debris," considers Sebbar's "identity [as] one of negotiations that can only be summed up [End Page 180] by exile" (55), focusing on the multiple and almost excessive autobiographical weavings that are central to, and at the same time, surround Sebbar's works. Moving to chapter Four, "Benjamin Stora: Gangrene and the Memory of the Algerian War," Hubbell examines how Stora's massive corpus of works on the Algerian war started out as historic and historiographic yet has recently become more personal. "Despite his wishes, Stora is continually drawn back in to sift through piles of personal memory." In chapter Five, "Hoarding Visual Debris from the War," Hubbell transitions from studying fictional, autobiographical, and historical texts to examining works by three contemporary visual artists: Nicole Guiraud, Patrick Altes, and Zineb Sedira. All three artists retain "personal and collective memory trauma from the Algerian War," which is reflected in their art. Hubbell's meticulous, thoughtful, and mindful analysis of the layers that compose each work of art (whether it be installations, mixed-media paintings, works that use "borrowed and recycled images" (115) such as postcards and/or photographs, or video installations) analyzes the complicated transmission of memory, especially as the artists "explore new ways for France and Algeria to move beyond historical trauma and to understand each other today" (127). In investigating how different genres and media investigate the lasting and intertwined representation of memory, history, and trauma, Hubbell's intimate, careful, scholarly work creates a captivating, convincing, and multifaceted study of the ways in which the texts of individual authors and artists honor and contribute to the ever-evolving complexities of the relationship between Algeria and France, while acknowledging and emphasizing its traumatic past. This engrossing book opens nuanced questions about the haunting relationship between former colonized and colonizer, between personal recollections, memory, history, and collected narratives, and how intertwined they are when writers and artists engage in their production. Hoarding Memory is a must-read for scholars of Algeria; students and specialists of history, memory, literature, art, and postcolonial studies will find it of interest, and will no doubt want to explore further the works analyzed within. Mary E. McCullough Samford University Copyright © 2021 Women in...

On U.S. Election Day 2016, thousands of people gathered at Susan B. Anthony’s grave in Rochester, NY. They were there to commemorate Anthony’s women’s suffrage activism over a century prior and to celebrate the presidential candidacy of Hilary Clinton, the first woman nominated by a major U.S. American political party. A thirteen-hour livestream of the gravesite by a local journalist captured the unprecedented crowd at the cemetery and drew a much larger crowd online. In the hours before election results were announced, the livestream gained millions of viewers and thousands of comments. While existing research has begun to examine the complex relationship between personal and collective memory, memorialization, and social media, less attention has been devoted to the ways that history and politics become tools for users and professionals to represent themselves. I examine the gravesite livestream as an illustrative case study of the ways that actors with different levels of access and control over a media event use commemoration as a vehicle for political self-representation. I conducted a textual analysis of the entire livestream, including the video and comment feeds. Through the analysis, I traced how four actors built upon a shared collective vision of U.S. American women’s history and future to contribute to the livestream and find themselves within it, including the city mayor’s office, gravesite visitors, the journalist who captured the stream, and commenters. Ultimately, I suggest that in commemorating women’s historical political action, these self-representational narratives present livestream creators, viewers, and subjects as political actors.

Reviewed by: Prairie Bohemian: Frank Gay's Life in Music by Trevor W. Harrison Justina Watt Prairie Bohemian: Frank Gay's Life in Music. By Trevor W. Harrison. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2015. ix +217 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper. In Prairie Bohemian: Frank Gay's Life in Music, Trevor Harrison weaves multiple accounts of Frank Gay's life as a luthier, musician, and local character, together with his own personal memories. Using these personal accounts along with interviews, transcriptions, and family photographs, Harrison strikes out to distill fact from the mythologies and the anecdotes concerning Gay in Edmonton's music community that have been circulating for years. Harrison tends to indulge in speculation throughout the book rather than letting the accounts of Gay's life speak; at times the narrative is a little disjointed with what seems like unnecessary detail and too many anecdotal snippets. However, this does not entirely detract from the strengths of the book, such as the quotes from Gay's contemporaries, other guitarists, people in the music business, and visitors to his garage; for example Dave Hamel and Evelyn Popwich's accounts (38, 41). While Harrison warns the reader of the possibility of false memory (ix), these colorful personal accounts are what inspired the author's interest in his subject. Through Harrison's exploration of Gay's life, Prairie Bohemian also illuminates the social and musical history of the prairie towns and cities that Gay called home. His upbringing in rural Saskatchewan is documented in the early chapters, and Edmonton's musical-social history is woven into the account of his adulthood in the city, providing glimpses of the places and people that came in and out of Gay's life, and the dive bars and classy hotels like the Hotel MacDonald that still exist today. As an Edmontonian, I found especially interesting the history of the Ninety-Seventh Street and Chinatown neighborhoods, Gay's south-side 1960's bungalow (93), and Gay's travels across Canada, migrating east early in life but returning to the prairies. While documenting Gay's history, Prairie Bohemian also provides an account of the built and social history of Edmonton in the early to mid-twentieth century. Harrison's effort here is an enjoyable read that includes compelling images of his subject. Harrison compiles fact, mystery, and multiple personal retellings of Gay's life into one volume, and, while attempting to separate fact from fiction, he comes to the somewhat comforting conclusion that no life, here Frank Gay's, is totally uncomplicated (181). Despite Harrison's struggle for accuracy, he does not try to reconcile the various personal perspectives, lived experiences, and memories shaped by emotion and time. Harrison presents his version of fact but also allows other accounts to exist side by side. While this lack of firm, fact-based conclusion could be unsatisfying to the reader, Harrison's account of Gay's life, awash with personal, emotional, and creative struggles, reminds us that speculation and subjective exploration of a life can be as valuable as the fact-finding mission that began it all. Justina Watt Edmonton Arts Council Edmonton, Alberta Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

This article examines grassroots initiatives for the preservation of local cultural heritage through the example of the casa mare - the guest or "great" room of the traditional Moldovan household. The emergence, in the years of independence, of numerous grassroots initiatives such as private museums and collections indicates the growing importance of maintaining local cultural identity. Most of these museums are organized around the concept of casa mare, yet their collections typically encompass objects representing the entire peasant household, including not only traditional items but also those from the interwar, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. Such diversity raises questions about collective local memory and the ways it is preserved. For the purpose of analyzing these local heritage preservation practices, the author employs the term grassroots museumification. The study is based on fieldwork conducted in several villages of the Republic of Moldova. Analysis of the case studies highlights several key features of this phenomenon, which also point to the relevance and insufficient scholarly exploration of the topic. First, there is a growing demand for the preservation and promotion of local culture and history, often manifested through the reconstruction of the museum curators' personal memories. Second, there is a noticeable idealization of traditional lifestyles, reflecting a broader quest for an adequate representation of history. Third, these museums raise questions about authenticity - its meaning, boundaries, and role in representing local culture.

Animation has frequently engaged with trauma, whether depicting political oppression as seen in the work of Soviet film-makers such as Dmitry Babichenko or via the Disney studio portraying childhood loss. Persepolis continues the trend, including the link with children, by focussing on the autobiographical observations of the young Marjane Satrapi as she experiences the personal and collective traumas of being an Iranian girl growing up in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. Although the graphic novels on which the movie is based have been discussed in respect of trauma, the film has experienced less scrutiny. This chapter explores the film’s construction of history via collective and personal memory, with a focus on its malleability in relation to the recollection of trauma. From a perspective of exile, Persepolis visualises the network of collective memories that situate Marji as a witness to national traumatic events, whilst the communal rememberings coalesce with the localised experiences of the individual; in doing so, elements are forgotten, are too painful to articulate, or are rewritten. This process of erasure and renewal, I argue, manifests itself both within the text and intertextually. Moreover, the film’s aesthetic provides a representational strategy for this, with the animation medium central to the process of formalising competing histories of trauma, as it enables slippages between various states. Thus, I will set out its aesthetic of trauma, which appropriates the film’s fantastical and constructed features to seamlessly combine events, imaginings and memories from multiple storytellers; through such an arrangement, the film articulates the ways in which we negotiate pain and distress as lived experiences and so produces a testimony of the subjectivity of trauma.

This article conceptualizes the notion of crisis through psychological, social, and cultural forms, examining how photography in Turkey after September 12, 1980, particularly through the medium of self-portraiture, transformed into an indirect, allegorical, and multi-layered form of expression. The study analyzes symbolic imagery forms such as shadow, silhouette, void, layer, and reflection, which emerged as a result of the abandonment of socialist realist documentary photography due to censorship and suppression, through the self-portrait photographs taken by Ahmet Öner Gezgin between 1980 and 1988. A qualitative analysis based on iconographic reading, which focuses on the conceptual dimension of self-portraiture, was used as a method; the use of elements such as cups, pocket watches, curtains, glass, mirrors, and shadows was interpreted in the context of the uncertainty of time, the blurring of space, and the existential positioning of the subject between visibility and invisibility. The findings show that Gezgin's self-portraits are based on a practice that merges the subjective with the political rather than a narcissistic presentation; the photographic representation surface itself is transformed into a kind of battlefield consisting of a diagnosis, expression, confrontation, invitation, and challenge related to the crisis through elements such as tears, marks, shadows, and reflections. In conclusion, the study argues that Ahmet Öner Gezgin’s self-portraits after 1980 serve both as an archival record of society and as a means of subjective expression; that they highlight the transfer between personal memory and collective memory; and that self-portraits played a foundational role in the transition of Turkish photography from documentary to conceptual/fictional narrative.

Memory typically refers to an individual’s representation of what he or she has experienced. In this respect, memory is a continuous though fragmented process, from the initial encoding of an event to its recall, albeit through constant revision. Then too memory is a symbolic representation and value-laden emotive force that suggests that personal memory is not the sole expression of behaviour and the interpretation of self. Memory is social as well, ‘transmitted and sustained through the conscious efforts and institutions of groups’ (Yerushalmi 1982, p. xv). Social or collective memory thus provides ‘a point of transit of unparalleled import, most significantly perhaps between the social and the personal’ (Mageo 2001, p. 2). In tracing and interpreting memories, it is therefore necessary to observe both the personal and social expressions or repressions of memories as this has important implications for the kinds of inferences and nuances that go into identity formation and the nurturing of belonging. Such an approach can be particularly useful in exploring the identities of transnational migrants through the interplay of the individual and the collective.

In the previous chapter I have argued that in the later systematics of Hegel’s philosophy the justice of contradiction replaces the “ethical memory” of the Phenomenology as the principle that immanently shapes the dynamic development of world history. Memory, however, although no longer the grounding principle of history, has not disappeared. At the threshold of the transition from objective to absolute spirit, looking back to the path that spirit has heretofore followed, Hegel has shown that spirit is capable of two forms of recollection. On the one hand, Erinnerung has appeared, at the level of subjective spirit, as the personal memory of the individual and the condition for all personal, subjective history. On the other hand, however, the sphere of objective spirit has proved that individual memory is based, in turn, on the collective memory of spirit taken in its social, intersubjective, and institutional actualization. The move that at this point gives precedence to collective over personal memory is similar to the one accomplished in the chapter “Geist” of the Phenomenology and later brought to the forefront of the debate by Halbwachs’s concept of “collective memory.”1 Neither form of memory, however, can be the basis of world history. Hence, the question that we need to address at this point regards the relation between world history and memory.

Summary History and memory have been the conceptual core of many Lithuanian photography based contemporary art works as well as international curatorial art projects, including authors from different Baltic countries. On the one hand, this indicates the relevance of the subject related to photography and memory; on the other hand, it also shows the overexploitation of personal and historical memory in contemporary photography and in contemporary art in general. In this context the article analyses Romualdas Požerskis’ personal album photographs from the years 1971–1975 and his written diaries from the years 1965–1985. The photographs captured Požerskis’ and his friends’ leisure activities, mainly rides on motorcycles across Lithuania and one trip to Tallinn, Estonia. The diary reflects the key historical events of the time, describes Požerskis’ attitude to it and reveals his personal emotional, intimate experiences. The beginning of the seventies was the time when the now famous Lithuanian photographer Požerskis was still a student, who did not consider himself a creative photographer. However, his photographs and diary from this period have been published in a book “Restless Riders” in 2017 putting this visual and written material in between the private and the public, and in between creative photography field and visual history of the country’s past. The aim of the article is to show how personal photography can help to restore or even create collective memory. To reach this aim the article addresses the respective tasks of explaining the importance of photography’s emotional content in building up a collective memory and revealing how the way in which Požerskis’ personal photo album and private diaries relate to collective memory is distinctive in the context of photography-based Baltic contemporary art. The article claims that the “Restless Riders” case is different because of its emotional content unmediated by interdisciplinary presentation, art’s conceptual framework or amendments to its visual form. Although it is impossible for the beholder to restore the emotional experience of the author, it is not difficult to let the photographs trigger his or her own memories or imaginary vision of the past. This in turn fills the personal story of photographer with emotion and lets it be seen as part of a liveable historical narrative. This narrative, visualized and made public has the potential to add up to the cultural myth, or in other words, common memory and assumptions, which support the identity of community and nation.

Reviewed by: Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance ed. by Díaz de León, et al. Julia Riordan-Gonçalves Díaz de León, Aída, Marina Llorente, and Marcella Salvi, eds. Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. Pp. 177. ISBN 978-1-4985-0778-3. The power of memory—to reclaim, to alter, to challenge, to reshape—links the present and the past in a continuous cycle of remembering, forgetting and reconstruction. In Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance, editors Aída Díaz de León, Marina Llorente and Marcella Salvi gather a series of essays that aim to inform the present by reevaluating the past, through the recuperation of historical memory. Building on Pierre Nora’s study of lieux de mémoire as well as Maurice Halbwach’s concept of collective memory, this collection explores the plurality of memory sites and their dynamic connection to the past and the present. The section titled “From the Repertoire to the Archive: Memory in Chile after Pinochet” includes two essays that take a close look at the performative nature of memory in Chile’s past and present. Liliana Trevizán highlights the importance of the practice of democratic ideals, particularly among women’s social movements and political groups, during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship. She finds that the memory of democracy through its everyday performance allowed for a more inclusive post-dictatorial democratic system that has committed to remembering the past and prioritizing human rights. An interview with Ricardo Brodsky, the Executive Director of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile, is included in the following chapter. Brodsky shares with interviewers Oscar D. Sarmiento and Liliana Trevizán the museum’s mission to educate the public by providing a plurality of memories, with the common goal of fostering respect for human rights. The next section considers the role of literature and other artistic and cultural products in the recovery of “forgotten” memories. Marcella Salvi analyzes how literature, film, songs and other mass cultural products enable the recovery of personal and collective memory in Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás. For Marina Llorente, Antonio Crespo Massieu’s Elegía en Portbou is a literary site of memory, recapturing and recognizing the Spanish Republican exile that was erased from the official collective memory for many years. She explores how the poems [End Page 680] locate traumatic memory in Spain by linking it with the exile and death of Walter Benjamin and the haunting monument to him in the cemetery of Portbou, Spain. Reflecting on the role of literary translation in the recuperation of historical memory, Steven White offers examples of his translations of Spanish, Nicaraguan and Chilean poetry. Here, translation is an important tool in preserving literary testimony and revitalizing it. Mallory N. Craig-Kuhn explores how memory and identity are linked in Osvaldo Soriano’s Una sombra ya pronto verás. In post-dictatorship Argentina, because a shared memory of past violence goes unacknowledged in favor of economic development, individual and collective identity are destabilized, as an uncertain future looms in the distance. The following two essays give voice to those who have been pushed to the margins of collective memory in order to legitimate a particular historical narrative. George Ciccariello-Maher looks back to the Caracazo of 1989 in Venezuela, showing how this event catalyzed a new process of continued struggle and renegotiation that depends upon the preservation of memory, despite the objections of those who would prefer to bury it. Turning to Mexico, Martha I. Chew-Sánchez and Alfredo Limas Hernández examine the nature of contested historical memory as embodied by the Cotton Field Memorial in Ciudad Juárez. The memorial was built by the Mexican state only after it was legally compelled to do so, in the face of a judgment finding the state negligent in its response to the hundreds of women murdered in the city. For the women’s families, the memorial is incomplete in its representation of historical memory, and insufficient as it...

In this article we examine Gloria Naylor’s novel Linden Hills, articulating the concepts of the neoarchive and the neo-slave narrative with the notion of archive as proposed by Derrida (2001) and developed by other authors (Osborne,1999; Bradley,1999; Johnson, 2014) with whom we seek to dialogue in this space. Linden Hills’s counterdiscursive narrative revisits the past by excavating the palimpsest of forgotten memories, once unidentified or not compiled, thus establishing its relationship to the neo-slave narrative. We argue that the link between the neo-slave narrative and the archive is both concrete and productive, given that it foregrounds non-sanctioned archives as counternarratives to the historical archive (mainly, but not exclusively, that of slavery), through the articulation of history and both personal and collective memory – calling to question, in this way, colonizing documented history and its official guardians.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the specificity and transformation of the research field of the collective memory of migratory communities. It was shown that the era of multiculturalism, which contributed not only to an increase in the number of studies, but also to the expansion of the very aspects of the study of the topic, played a key role in the study of the memory of migratory communities. Three main areas of research were identified and analyzed: a) personal and group memories of migration, as well as the specificity of the collective memory of various migration groups; b) the study of collective perceptions of the past of migrants in the context of the politics of incorporation and the politics of memory of host societies; c) study of the representation of the historical experience of migrations and migratory communities in museum practice. The idea was substantiated that the theoretical and practical potential of addressing the memory of migratory communities contributed not only to the transformation of the research optics of memory studies, but also showed the inevitability of significant changes in the understanding of ontology of collective memory. This found expression in the actualization of the transcultural turn, focused on overcoming methodological nationalism and considering collective memory not only within the framework of certain cultures or communities, but also it’s dynamic beyond cultural and social boundaries. The article analyzes the significance of the transcultural turn for research into the collective memory of migrants.

Muslim marriages have gained much attention in public debates and academic research. This article examines marriage practices among displaced Iraqi Shia migrants in the UK. Only a few studies have examined this group and fewer by investigating their marriage practices as a way to preserve their religious and cultural memory (Halbwachs 1992). The article is based on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, which refers to spaces, objects or events that have a significant meaning to a particular groups’ collective memory (Nora 1989, 1996). I argue in this paper that the transnational aspects of cultural memory expressed in Shia marriage practices such as rituals, images, and objects among the Iraqi Twelver Shia women in the UK can be regarded as examples of transnational Shia lieux de mémoire. These marriage practices, although appropriated for various personal, social, and religious memories outside of any national framework, are still highly politicized. The article focuses on the practice of sofrat al-‘aqd (for short sofra) that provides women with the ability to articulate their religious and social identity through material objects placed on the sofra that act as women’s transnational Shia lieux de mémoire.

Collective memory can be viewed as consisting of two complementary components: one being the abstract knowledge and conceptions held by individuals about the past, and the other the concrete mnemonic signifiers which are thought to shape these perceptions (Bar-On, 2001). However, collective memory research has focused mostly on public representations of memory, paying far less attention to the shared memories of individuals (though see Volkmer, 2006). This gap in research stems partially from a prevalent assumption that media representations necessarily affect the memories of individuals.1 As Huyssen asserts: ‘one thing is certain: We cannot discuss personal, generational or public memory separate from the enormous influence of the new media as carriers of all forms of memory’ (2000: 29). However, as media scholarship has shown that direct effects of the media may often be weaker than anticipated, there is need for a method to empirically test the assumption of an ‘enormous influence’ of the media on the shaping of public memories. This essay proposes the application of a classic media theory — agenda-setting — in order to analyze media’s impact on the construction of collective memory.2