Memory walk: an interaction-oriented project to interrogate contested histories

This article focuses on a novel concept that involves having young people make films about contested historical monuments and discussing them in classroom settings with their peers. This concept, called ‘Memory Walk’, builds on insights within intercultural education and theories on commemorative practices that point to the importance of addressing controversial issues and histories rather than ignoring them. We start by discussing the challenges of introducing controversial issues into classroom teaching. Then, we turn to how the creation of monuments and memorials is a reflection of power relations in society, focusing on the complex and difficult way the past is being dealt with in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Finally, we describe how such insights can be translated into the concrete Memory Walk method.     

Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women During the Harper Government Years

Abstract

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 4.5 times more likely to become victims of homicide than other women. Over the last 30 years, more than 1000 women identified as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis were murdered in Canada, and more than 100 are still missing. However, the Canadian government has not acknowledged the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. Focusing on activism around the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada during the years of the Conservative Harper Government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge Canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. Specifically, Twitter campaigns, memeing, the REDress Project, and Walking With Our Sisters are studied. Engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, this article, in turn, discusses how activism can disrupt violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces.     

The Sunday Times Heritage Project: heritage,the media and the formation of national consciousness

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the landscape of memory in South Africa has undergone significant changes. While most new monuments, memorials and heritage sites have emerged under the aegis of the government, this article focuses on a private sector initiative, the Sunday Times Heritage Project (STHP), sponsored by the Sunday Times newspaper in celebration of its centenary in 2006. The project involved the installation of 30 small-scale memorials commemorating key moments in the history of South Africa, with each memorial being accompanied by a website entry. The article focuses on the role of the media in shaping a new national consciousness in South Africa and specifically investigates how a new, supposedly shared history emerges through the work of the Sunday Times journalists in selecting stories and negotiating with stakeholders. With reference to specific examples, significant differences are highlighted between the newspaper’s heritage initiative and the state-initiated memory projects, but ultimately, it is argued, the STHP reveals a calculated or unconscious acceptance of the state-endorsed historical discourse structured around resistance narratives, which has become hegemonic since 1994.     

Remembering Vasco da Gama: Contested histories and the cultural politics of contemporary nation‐building in Lisbon,Portugal

The quincentennial year of Vasco da Gama's arrival in India, 1998, was pivotal in new efforts to reimagine and represent Portuguese national identity, as Lisbon hosted the country's first international exposition, Expo ‘98. The iconography of Da Gama and the golden age of the Portuguese maritime “Discoveries” permeated new urban development and official cultural events at the fair, calling attention to the relevance of Portugal's past to its present and future roles in emerging European and global economies, claiming special national expertise in brokering cross‐cultural exchanges, especially between Europe, Africa, and Asia, and highlighting cosmopolitan Lisbon's historic and continuing importance in such encounters. Newer liberal reinterpretations of Portuguese history were challenged by leftist and anti‐imperialist elements within Portugal, by critics in India, and by the Portuguese right wing. This controversy over historical commemoration also offered implicit commentary on the quality of Portuguese democracy, especially over how much Portugal has superseded the ideologies of the right‐wing Salazarist “New State,” which officially ended in 1974.     

Black monument matters: Place-based commemoration and abolitionist memory work

Discrete monuments remain in the domain of the symbolic, land as mnemonic shifts to a more materialist commemorative praxis. This paper proposes a turn toward land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place-making. Reviewing the scholarship on memoryscapes, I show that the critical insights of Black ecologies and geographies scholarship has moved further than traditional scholarship and offers multiple openings for new monuments and commemorative practices in honor of Black life. Black socio-ecologies scholarship centralizes the place-based epistemologies, spatial histories, and experiences of Black communities and clarifies the form and function of land or plots as mnemonics of the Black freedom struggle, place-making practices, and spatial epistemologies. Black plots are, therefore, ideal for orienting a new mode of Black commemoration. While much of the paper centers monuments to Black people, if Black commemoration is foregrounded in abolitionists thinking and practices, such memorialization must grapple with the histories of Indigenous dispossession and settler-colonialism. The paper concludes with a consideration of what the argument for land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place-making might mean for future avenues of research.     

Québec in France: towards an understanding of the trans-Atlantic French-Québec subject

This paper examines the events commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec City in 2008 and, in particular, the ways in which the Québec 400 was celebrated in Western France. The author argues that the events provide an instance of trans-Atlantic subject formation. Through analyzing a series of public events that took place in the La Rochelle region of France in 2008, the author argues that this extra-national raciality was constituted through two specific modes: practices of territoriality that signify a ‘cartography of origins’ and tropes of family that affirm the racialized dimensions of Québécois belonging in France.     

试论清代诗人寿苏雅集及其文化心理

寿苏雅集源于清人宋荦，被翁方纲、毕沅等人发扬光大，至乾嘉年间逐渐风靡全国。寿苏雅集的流行既与组织者及参与者的个人心态密切相关，又有着深刻的社会文化背景。这种特殊的集会活动一方面要求组织者自身有一定的文坛影响力和经济实力，使活动能够顺利开展并持续下去；另一方面也要求祭拜对象具备强大的感召力，能够满足祭拜者的精神需求，引发心灵共鸣。在雅集中所展示的画作及诗人们的唱和作品中频繁出现的头戴斗笠、脚着木屐、洒脱不羁的苏轼形象，正是诗人们在繁忙的世俗官场之外渴望拥有的乐观豁达、潇洒从容的另一个自我。虽然清人亦曾为白居易、欧阳修及黄庭坚等人祭祀生日，但其规模、持续时间及影响力都不能与寿苏相提并论。清人寿苏传统还被日本学者长尾雨山传到京都，并有《寿苏集》流传于世。     

“Without women,the war could never have happened”: representations of women’s military contributions in non-state armed groups

Feminist international relations theory argues that male consolidation of power in the aftermath of armed conflict often occurs as men gain the status of heroes in the post-war appraisals. Explorations of republican commemoration in the North of Ireland have uncovered the dominance of the male protagonist with a notable relative absence of militant republican women. Militarized masculine narratives and patriarchal understandings of what is deemed a combatant role, and therefore deemed worthy of commemorating, consistently fail to value or recognize women’s multiple and vital wartime contributions. This article argues that conventional definitions of military contributions and combatant roles are imprecise, highly gendered and ultimately function as a mechanism to denigrate and exclude women’s wartime labor. Based on in-depth interviews with former combatants, the article critically explores the ways in which republican women themselves conceptualize their contributions to armed struggle. Emerging from this is a theoretically rich narrative of women’s multiple and diverse military roles which firmly challenge the limited definition of “a person with a weapon.” It is suggested that by paying careful attention to the lives of combatant women, feminist scholars can use their experiences, narratives and meanings to challenge existing frameworks and discourses, and redefine combatant roles and wartime contributions.     

Patches of grief and rage: Visitor responses to the NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt

This paper presents an analysis of comments written on signature square panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. In our paper we explore how collective memory regarding AIDS deaths emerges from conflict among members of vernacular, mainstream and official culture. The cultural contest waged over how individuals who have died from AIDS-related illnesses will be remembered in society fits within the realm of the sociology of collective memory. Visitor responses to the Quilt illustrate that as a form of commemoration the Quilt is interpreted as a therapeutic device and a political tool. Like other memorials, especially those for which there is social disdain or conflict (e.g., the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial), signature square comments provide an alternative conception of public memory. The fact that the Quilt is used to symbolically commemorate the dead, providing an outlet for collective grieving and inspiring social action, is what makes it an important sociological phenomenon. In our paper we put forward a conception of the politics of collective memory that extends previous work in this area. In doing so this paper contributes to an emerging understanding of public commemoration and to the debate over how different segments of society are to be remembered.     

War remains: contributions of the Imperial War Graves Commission and the Australian War Records Section to material and national cultures of conflict and commemoration

The Imperial (subsequently the Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established in 1917 comprising member countries of the former British Empire. The organisation was charged with providing appropriate memorials to commemorate the Empire’s war dead, individually and equally, without regard for military rank, class or nationality. This was no easy task given the numbers of dead from multiple theatres of war, the variety and oftentimes competing demands of imperial and national war offices, and the uncertain aesthetics arising from individually attuned and publically oriented commemorative intentions. Equally caught up in the mix of agencies and design practices were hordes of war trophies, captured artillery and military relics retrieved from battlefields across Europe, items carefully catalogued and preserved by the British War Office (BWO) and offspring agencies to provide artefacts for building memorials in Commonwealth states. This paper describes the work of the IWGC during and immediately following the years of the First World War. It relates the Commission’s activities building war cemeteries in view of changing geopolitical circumstances and commemorative conventions. The paper highlights tensions that appeared in the near routine collection of trophies for memorials and war cemeteries between British imperial offices and those of dominions and former colonies, specifically the Australian War Records Section which gained independence from the BWO in May 1917. The paper examines the mutual engagement of war’s material culture with patterns of sentiment shaped by mass conflict, an engagement mediated by administrative practices of war and remembrance.