Literary Narratives of the Past: Generations of Memory and Everyday Life Under the Romanian Communist Regime

ABSTRACT

In Romania, the literary approach to the recent communist past centred on everyday life under the communist regime is usually associated with a nostalgic communist perspective. By reading communist nostalgia in the context of the communist politics that pervaded every aspect of everyday life, this paper traces the connections between narratives and moral responsibility at the level of Romanian literary productions. Many of the topics included in the collective volumes that bring together personal narratives of the past resonate with and influence the fictional creations of the past; in many cases, combining personal testimonies with fictional characters offered an improved mechanism for dealing with the past. The paper argues that the topic of daily life experiences under the communist regime can be further developed, raising awareness of the lack of discussions about moral responsibility at the societal level in post-totalitarian Romania. Even if the younger generations can use the literary narratives of the past to re-appropriate their predecessors’ life stories, the reduction of the past to visual or linguistic stereotypes deepens the separation between public and private memory.     

Representations of Jewish Childhood From 1950s Communist Romania in Memoirs by Women Émigré Authors to the United States

ABSTRACT

This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women – Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar – to understand how they remembered childhood in 1950s communist Bucharest. I first show how Marianne Hirsch’s part-memoir, part-critical book, Family Frames, uses her personal experiences to theorize tropes of transcultural dislocation as specific features of post-World War II Jewish children’s identities in 1950s Romania. I analyze how these tropes equally permeate the memoirs by two of her generation’s peers, Anca Vlasopolos and Haya Leah Molnar, highlighting how the two authors deploy them in their narratives. Overall, I show that writings of one’s 1950s childhood experiences in Bucharest by Jewish emigrées to the US offer new alternative discourses about facing the past and the present in Eastern Europe and the US by the tropes of initial transcultural, dislocating experiences at the start of their lives.     

The rhythms of social movement memories: the mobilization of Silvio Meier’s activist remembrance across platforms

ABSTRACT

This article presents a temporal analysis of the activist remembrance of Silvio Meier, a prominent member of Berlin’s radical left scene, who was stabbed to death in 1992. It asks: when has Meier’s activist remembrance occurred and been remediated, with what rhythms, and how has it been influenced by different platforms? To answer these questions, the article draws on the literature dedicated to the interface between social movements and collective and connective memory, and applies Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis approach. Within this approach a diverse set of material is used to visualise the timing of the digital and non-digital remediation and mobilisation of Meier’s remembrance across different platforms of memory including commemorative events, newspapers, websites and social media. Thereafter the various temporalities of use associated with these platforms and how they can influence the mobilisation of remembrance by social movements is discussed using Lefebvre’s concepts of polyrhythmia, arrhythmia, isorhythmia, eurhythmia and with respect to, firstly, a fifteen-year period between 2002 and 2017 and secondly, a fifteen-day period between 15 November and 30 November 2012 around the twentieth anniversary of Meier’s death. The article concludes by introducing another Lefebvrian concept – dressage – in order to consider which rhythms of activist remembrance might most benefit social movements and their goals. Overall, by demonstrating the importance of attending to the when and not only the what, who, where and how of social movement memories and by highlighting the need to consider the temporal influence of the different digital and non-digital platforms that activists use, as well as, by indicating the broader potential of applying rhythmanalysis approaches to instances of activism, the article has broader relevance for the further study of social movements, their use of different media and their mobilization of memory.     

UN genocide commemoration,transnational scenes of mourning and the global project of learning from atrocity

This paper offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse‐historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities. UN commemorative discourse characteristically links memories of Holocaust and Rwandan trauma in a ‘chain of communication’ with those of other episodes of brutality (e.g., Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur) chiefly to convey the continuity of human barbarity across time and endorse certain presuppositions regarding the fate of a fallen humanity in this more ‘post‐secular’ age. As scenes of mourning, UN commemorations unite participating international delegations in their expressions of grief for the victims of ‘preventable tragedies’ in the past but also, it must be said, their uncertainty regarding new horrors likely to occur in the future. The duty to remember is reiterated continuously as both a mark of respect to those who have already perished and as a warning of atrocities yet to unfold. This paper explores how the historical constancy of violence is interpreted by the UN through a detailed critical analysis of its recently inaugurated ‘remembrance through education’ programme aimed at a transnational collective learning from atrocity.     

Braided geographies: bordered forms and cross-border formations in refugee comics

ABSTRACT

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter-geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.     

Collective Memory and Collective Fear: How South Africans Use the Past to Explain Crime

The past is a resource that individuals can draw upon as they try to make sense of the world around them, and scholars have long assumed that individuals internalize and utilize collective memories in their daily lives. Yet capturing and analyzing the deployment of collective memory has proven elusive. This paper offers a novel approach for tapping whether, and how, individuals selectively draw on their collective pasts to explain the present. Analyzing interviews with young South African managers and professionals, this paper demonstrates racial variation in how respondents organically introduce the country’s apartheid past as an explanans for current crime, and suggests how these differences are related to divergent levels of commitment by blacks and whites to the South African nation-building project. In so doing, the paper offers a method for examining how individuals selectively use the past to construct, justify, and explain their present-day attitudes and behaviors. The study further highlights the importance of attending not only to what people remember, but also to how they think through and with collective representations of the past.     

Ambivalent memories of imperial legacies: Asmara as ‘beautiful' and ‘segregationist' from Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how the capital town of Eritrea, Asmara, is depicted alternately as Italian, Eritrean and Ethiopian thus showing the competing claims of ‘ownership’ that traverses its colonial and postcolonial histories and a multifaceted identity. It focuses specifically on how the Italian architecture of Asmara is depicted both as a sign of modernization and oppression. Literary and oral- sources are analysed to illustrate Asmara as a site of cultural encounter and a historical palimpsest such as the poems Asmara (1958, included in the collection Esat Wey Abeba) by Tsegaye Gebremedihin, and And Nebis (1992, included in the collection Efta 60 Tirekawoch) by Haile Melekot Mewael. The novels Oromay (1984) by Bealu Girma, Ye Burqa Zimita (1992) by Tesfaye Gebreab. These contemporary literary and oral reminiscences of Asmara show how Asmara’s architectural legacies are remembered to express memories of ambivalence between beauty and inhibition; being modern and segregated. Whereby, Asmara gets represented as a model town for other African cities, and a city of colonial decay and segregation, in these contradictory accounts of memories of Asmara, a de-colonial method of engagement seems to emerge.     

Unravelling Memories of Family Separation Among Sri Lankan Tamils Resettled in Australia, 1983–2000

Abstract

Using life story interviews with 10 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees resettled in Australia, this article shows how family separation in experiences of civil war and resettlement produce long-lasting and emotional memories of fear and determination. The findings explore how young Tamil people gave meaning to family when they interacted with key individuals and negotiated cultural practices in different spaces. Moreover, intergenerational family narratives emerged as a key practice through which Tamils preserved the family identity. The analysis demonstrates how and when family separation can manifest in personal memories to reveal stories of agency and resilience. A critical engagement of the past can help to better understand concepts of childhood in relation to family and family separation in war affected diaspora communities.     

Conjuring up traditions: atmospheres,eras and family Christmases

Despite some macro level concern with the concepts of tradition and ‘detraditionalization’, sociologists for the most part have paid relatively little attention to the everyday realities of family traditions as they are experienced and narrated in people's lives. Based on a qualitative study of ‘Family Backgrounds and Everyday Lives’, this article explores people's experiences and narratives of family Christmases, and examines how traditions are conjured up and evoked in multi‐dimensional, embodied, emplaced and sensory ways. The article argues that in recognizing and conjuring up family practices and happenings as ‘traditions’, people create a vivid and potent sense of generational eras, atmospheres and family styles. These have a moral currency that matters – sometimes quite profoundly – in people's lives, and are the subject of debate and negotiation between, as well as within, generations. Christmas traditions, it is argued, are central in the constitution of eras not least because they enable the bundling up of time – past, present and anticipated for descendant generations – into packages of generalized ‘time out of time’, characterized by distinctive atmospheres, and around which memories can coalesce and about which stories can be told. These atmospheric eras – more than broad or macro understandings of ‘tradition’ – are central in how generational dynamics and personal family histories take shape, and how memories are ‘indexed’ in and through time.     

Rewritten in stone: imperial heritage in the sacred place of the nation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between architectural transformations and the reshaping of memory in post-imperial urban space. It reflects on two forms of symbolic violence: first, iconoclastic acts of reshaping space to reflect national self-determination and moving away from empire, and second, acts that embody the recovery of imperial legacies. It analyzes the recent restoration of the Habsburg-built Alba Iulia citadel in the eve of Romania’s Centennial celebrations of the 1918 Alba Iulia assembly which proclaimed the unification of Transylvania with Romania. It interrogates the intentionality of architectural transformations and how this heritage project expresses the frictions between memory narratives centred on the nation and forms of imperial duress and nostalgia. It traces how the after-lives of empire materialize in the built environment, as they do in the attitudes and yearnings of the cultural elite. Moreover, it reflects on parallels between European post-imperial and Global South post-colonial nation-building.     

‘To talk or not to talk?’: Foster youth's experiences of sharing stories about their past and being in foster care

Sharing stories about the past and about being in care, can help adolescents placed in foster families to make meaning of their experiences and connect with their conversation partner. However, what obstacles and opportunities for sharing stories are experienced by foster youth has not been researched, while this holds important implications for research and practice. In an episodic interview, thirteen adolescents and young adults (16–23 years) talked about their experiences with sharing their memories about their past and being in foster care. Using a thematic analysis, two themes were constructed, each containing three sub-themes. The theme ‘When’ included references to the prerequisites for talking and considerations made by participants, and contained the sub-themes ‘How often do I talk’, ‘Conditions’ and ‘Ownership of my story’. The theme ‘Why’ included references to the rationales for sharing or not sharing memories, which contained the sub-themes ‘Protection’, ‘Understanding’ and ‘Processing the past’. The stories of the participants highlight both the opportunities and obstacles for talking. Foster parents and foster care workers should be aware of the needs foster youth have with regard to conversations about their experiences and should try to facilitate the meaning-making processes, although some foster youth prefer managing their memories in a more private way.     

Conflicting and Reinforcing Identities in Expanding Europe: Individual‐ and Country‐Level Factors Shaping National and European Identities, 1995–20031

This study examines how, within the context of the expansion of the European Union, various multi‐level factors circumscribe individuals’ national and European identity. Focusing on the differential impact of new opportunities that Europeanization offers to people with different backgrounds, we propose hypotheses regarding the effects of individuals’ geopolitical, ethnic, class, and national historical backgrounds on their national and European identity. Drawing on theories on sociopolitical identities, we hypothesize that minorities are more likely to identify with the European Union, but are less likely to identify with their nation and that more local lower‐level geopolitical attachments can enhance broader higher‐level ones. We also combine these individual‐level arguments with macro‐level theories and examine the impact of country‐level factors such as having a communist past, the duration of EU participation, and the levels of economic development and international integration. We test these hypotheses using ISSP survey data from 15 European countries for the years 1995 and 2003. Overall, the results support our predictions about minorities’ identification patterns and about the reinforcing relationships between local and macro identities in general. Our macro‐level analyses indicate different effects in postcommunist nations than in Western‐democratic states, indicating widespread disillusionment with the European Union in postcommunist countries.     

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

It's more than just news: Print media,the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Collective Memory among African Americans

This study examines how media can influence and shape collective memory through cultural objects such as magazines. Examination of Jet and Ebony magazines' coverage of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, as well as, changes in the narrative over time, reveal potential mechanisms that might have influenced African Americas' collective memory surrounding this event. Data for this study come from news articles about The Tuskegee Syphilis Study in Jet and Ebony magazines from 1972–2016 (N = 49). Content analysis was used to analyze and discover themes in each of the 49 news stories. Findings show that the journalistic coverage of The Tuskegee Syphilis study by these magazines centered around themes of exploitation of uneducated victims, racism and blame, genocide, medical mistrust and deliberate injection with syphilis, reflecting past and current beliefs of African Americans' remembrance of the study.     

Common Beliefs About Child Sexual Abuse and Disclosure: A College Sample

ABSTRACT

Adults’ common beliefs about child sexual abuse and disclosure were explored. Participants (N = 670) were questioned about key areas of child sexual abuse that could affect decision-making processes of jurors evaluating child sexual abuse cases. These areas included victim and perpetrator characteristics, medical and behavioral indicators of child sexual abuse, memories for the event, and disclosure of the event. The scientific literature pertaining to these same areas are reviewed. While individual beliefs were consistent with some areas of the scientific literature (e.g., victim and perpetrator characteristics), they strongly contrasted the literature in other important areas (e.g., memories for the event, indicators of child sexual abuse, and the likelihood of denial and recantation). Implications, including the option of providing expert testimony to reduce discrepancies, are discussed.     

Demonizing the Sensible and the ‘Revolution of Our Generation’ in Rosia Montana

Abstract

‘Save Rosia Montana’ is an emblematic socio-ecological movement in post-communist Romania. It started in 2000 as a local reaction against what was projected to be the largest open-cast gold mine in Europe; it has gradually grown into a national movement with global networking. Activists have been consistently accused of acting under the impulse of an emotional luggage which could function as an impediment to understanding the ‘real’ issue, that of Romania's development. While the corporation claims to present the ‘real’ story articulated in the supposedly objective discourse of rational science, the choice to take a stance out of other beliefs has been demonized as emotional. This article will make a critical discourse analysis of corporate texts and Rosieni's testimonies to highlight what appears as ‘legitimate’ versus ‘illegitimate’ discourse, how some phrases are presented as self-evident rationales while others are dismissed as inappropriate or ‘emotional’. Rosieni have created visibilities for new things, objects, languages, and projections that have been downplayed by the post-communist political context. The conflict is not just over cognitive aspects or valuation languages but also over how one is allowed to feel, what one is allowed to enjoy (doing), how is one supposed to live (spend time), what Ranciere calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’.     

Collecting loss

ABSTRACT

‘Collecting Loss’ develops themes from Pleasures Taken (Mavor, Duke University Press, 1995) with an emphasis on the fetishization of photographs and old clothes (exemplified, on the one hand, in Elin O'Hara Slavick's own girlhood dresses that she has stitched with haunting memories of her childhood, and on the other hand in the lush photographs taken by Sally Mann and the Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden). As Christian Boltanski has written: ‘What they [clothing and photographs] have in common is that they are simultaneously presence and absence. They are both an object and a souvenir of a subject, exactly as a cadaver is both an object and a souvenir of a subject.’ Reading an old photographic album made by her own grandmother against other maternal collections of plenitude (whether they be old clothes or photographs or domestic bric-a-brac), Mavor reveals how such accumulated goods are made to fill in for the pangs of loss: lost childhoods, lost family histories, lost memories, lost friends. Mixing corporeality and critical theory, Mavor engages with Emily Apter's notion of ‘maternal collectomania’ as a site of provocative meanings worthy of placement alongside more conventional discourses on visual representation and collecting.     

The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post-colonial and post-traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland

The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East-Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post-communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post-communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re-composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non-Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non-Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.     

Are children better witnesses than adolescents? Developmental trends in different false memory paradigms

Abstract

The current study compared older children’s (11/12-year-olds) and adolescents’ (14/15-year-olds) vulnerability to false memory creation using two different methods (i.e., the Deese/Roediger-McDermott [DRM] and memory conformity paradigms) involving neutral and negative stimuli. In line with previous research, a developmental reversal effect was found for the DRM paradigm, which means that when employing this method children displayed lower false memory levels than adolescents. However, when using the memory conformity paradigm, the opposite pattern was found, with adolescents forming fewer false memories than children. This indicates that in a co-witness context, adolescents are less prone to memory errors than children. The emotional valence of the stimuli used in both paradigms did not notably affect the production of false memories. There was no statistically significant correlation between false memories as measured by the DRM and the memory conformity paradigms. Altogether, the current study indicates that there is no single type of false memory as different experimental paradigms evoke different types of erroneous recollections. Additionally, our study corroborates past findings in the literature concerning the issue of developmental reversal, strengthening the idea that under certain circumstances children might indeed be better witnesses than adolescents.