This article discusses the role of biographical memory in three contemporary ritual-musical appropriations of the psalms in Dutch and Flemish contexts. We observe that, in performances of psalms, participants (intend to) either forget or recall different biographical memories. Nostalgic narratives of religious, cultural and individual change and continuity inform both the way that they interpret their experiences of these psalm performances, and their motivations for attempting to forget or recall particular memories related to the psalms. By using the notion of sacrality — that which is set apart, non-ordinary — we show that particular non-negotiable desires and non-ordinary experiences recur multiple times in these nostalgic narratives. Analysis of these desires and experiences leads us to conclude that contemplative experiences are desired by many, but experienced by only a few. We suggest the combination of Aleida Assmann’s theory of forgetting and remembering with the notions of nostalgia and sacrality as a way to successfully overcome the unproductive dichotomy between religious and cultural heritage.

Archives of the 5·18 Gwangju People’s Uprising—a 1980 pro-democracy protest in South Korea—entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011. UNESCO’s inclusion provided international recognition for the Uprising after censorship under the Chun Doo-hwan regime; however, the narrative clarity presented through photographs, documents, and testimony in the museum now defines and limits memorialization. By contrast, Ch’oe Yun’s 1988 novella There a Petal Silently Falls imagines what lies beyond archives. With its silent protagonist and fragmented, sometimes illegible prose, Petal interrogates the coherence of memory when stripped of testimony. Reading Petal and the Archives as distinct memory sites, this article questions how memory projects privilege evidentiary archives, which might perpetuate the very patterns of violence such projects seek to uncover. As human rights ideologies become increasingly predominant, Ch’oe’s novella reasserts not only that the agony of memory can exceed the intelligibility of the archive, but that it must.

This essay analyzes two American memorials that were built in the post-9/11 era: the National September 11 Memorial in New York City, which opened in 2011, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018. Both of these memorials pay tribute to victims of terrorism, the first to victims of foreign terrorism and the second to victims of lynchings, a form of racial terrorism within the United States. This essay argues that these two memorials define the beginning and end of the post-9/11 era, from memorialization as a nationalist enterprise to memorialization as a reckoning on race that demands the destruction of racist monuments and the construction of memorials to victims of racist violence. It looks in particular at how the modern designs of these two memorials produce very different kinds of experiences of memory to tell distinct narratives of victimhood, loss, and nation.

In this article, we apply Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” to an empirical setting, by analyzing qualitative interviews with 124 educators in the field of memory work, such as museum and memorial site employees, teachers, volunteers of non-governmental organizations, and civil society initiatives. We analyzed where they come across memory conflicts and commonality, and what the respective “enabling conditions” were, that is, the influencing factors that promoted or prevented developments toward multidirectionality in the sense of a “differentiated solidarity.” We found only a few examples of this kind of multidirectional memory in educational settings. It was fostered by four factors: personal autobiographical experiences, political positions, structural/institutional aspects, and certain pedagogical principles. By contrast, different forms of competitive memory were dominant: first, “Conflicting Memory” characterized by differing politics; second, “Divided Memory” characterized by a perception of resource competition; and third, “Fragmented Memory,” consisting of a form of sympathetic ignorance by which memories of other groups or events are tolerated, but not actively interlinked. Central topics that emerge within memory conflicts and entanglements are the history of National Socialism, World War II and the Shoah, the history of the state of Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Armenian Genocide, the history of the Ottoman Empire and—to a lesser extent—the history of colonialism. We argue that much can be gained by applying Rothberg’s concept to contemporary empirical settings, both in order to understand its current implications but also to help flesh out its underlying theoretical notions. These are regarding possible “negative” forms of multidirectional memory, as well as the implications and ethics of historical comparisons.

This article tracks the memory of East Timor’s Santa Cruz massacre across time and space, attending to the multiple scales at which it is imbued with meaning. While footage of the massacre initially had a strong impact in the west, helping to mobilise new audiences and spark a new wave of international solidarity for East Timor’s independence, the memory of Santa Cruz has now come ‘home’, increasingly solidifying as a foundational narrative of the Timor-Leste state. Ethnographic attention to the intimate scale, including the home and the neighbourhood, reveals, however, that Santa Cruz exceeds its ‘national’ meanings. In these spaces the families and friends of the dead communicate with, and care for, them, and the spirits of those whose bodies have not been recovered activate a questioning of continuous losses and absences. The case study demonstrates that an analysis of ‘travelling’ memory through a multiscaler lens can provide a fuller picture of its social and political import. It also shows how ethnographic methods can generate rich insights into the intersections between the transnational, national and intimate and shed light on the affective power of lived, embodied memory.

This creative non-fiction piece explores my research and writing practice as it relates to my research on intergenerational haunting among women of the Cambodian diaspora. It describes my process towards capturing affective traces of the past, and my attempts to (re)imagine an archive of haunting.

This piece explores why and how the praxis of disobedience, as articulated by the daughters of the perpetrators of state terrorism during Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976–1983), might be read as an instance of queering memory. The analysis focuses on the trajectories of Liliana Furio (a founder member of the Historias Desobedientes collective) and Mariana Dopazo (ex-daughter of one of the dictatorship’s most infamous perpetrators) to illustrate the differing ways in which the mandate of blood has been challenged through public acts of defiliation. Based on our documentary project material, we consider the ways in which the emergence of these disobedient daughters enacts a collective ‘coming out’ and unprecedented disruption of the normative imaginaries of bloodline ties that have traditionally shaped the local aftermath of violence. We argue that their performance of defiliation puts forward a queer arrangement that unsettles the established landscape of human rights activism in Argentina and beyond.

This essay explores the meaning of the representation of Anne Lister, historical figure (1791–1840), for contemporary audiences, in the 2019–2022 series Gentleman Jack. Produced by HBO and BBC, the series is a very high-quality TV show, but certainly not the first, even English period piece, centering on lesbian desire. Still, the fan response was quite intense and heartfelt. Part of the power it has had on audiences is the way Anne Lister is characterized as an actual early nineteenth-century woman claiming her desires and place in the world, without shame or apology, and the fact that most viewers had never heard of her before the series. The fact that such a force of nature, who left 5 million words documenting her life, could be erased as a queer presence in popular imagination, until now, has a profound effect on many contemporary queer viewers.

Characteristic of contemporary, Nazified Ukraine is its shapelessness and ambivalence, which makes it possible to disguise Nazism as the aspiration for 'independence', for a 'European' (Western, pro-American) path of 'development' (in reality, towards degradation); [it makes it possible] to claim that there is no Nazism in Ukraine, only particular, stand-alone excesses. 1 -Sergeitsev, 2022

Although Lebanon and South Africa are often treated as exceptional cases, the use of geographic analogies like ‘bantustans’ and ‘Lebanonization’ signals their relevance to many other places. These analogies point to the recognition of a spatial mode of mnemonic war in which struggles over the past are also struggles over land. Such analogies signal recognition but also require forgetting: as narrative chronotopes, they are limiting. To look beyond these limits, we name this shared condition ‘mnemonic land war’ and trace its workings through territorialization, property regimes and planning in South Africa and Lebanon. Understanding these processes as memory-work allows us to see what the places analogized to Lebanon and South Africa share in their mnemonic land wars, and link them into a transnational memory constellation. Understanding this constellation can guide a comparative understanding of mnemonic war ‘on the ground’.