History, Writing and Memory

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century.
eds. Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle

The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals’ versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war.

Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it the ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative.

The worlding of South Asian cities has brought deep structural transformations in their governance and planning paradigms, and in the cultural bases of what constitutes desirable urban habitats and livelihoods. Contemporary literature in English on these cities tends to reflect these pervasive changes: they manifest most visibly as an abiding tension between form and content, medium and message in writings from across the region. With specific reference to literature on Delhi, this is potently apparent in Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. Published in 2010, Trickster City is a unique literary artefact: originally in Hindi, it is a collection of anecdotes, recollections, and musings from and on various bastis in Delhi. The book emerged from the Cybermohalla project, an innovative alternative education programme which de-territorialized information and communications technology by providing open platforms to young people from bastis in Delhi to generate life narratives on their experience of and role in urban life. Operating at the cusp of the formal and informal, the materiality of these narratives in Trickster City as product, as record, and as archive of ways of life and of settlements is what interests this paper. In a context wherein regular demolition erases all tangible trace of marginalised settlements such as bastis, compilations such as Trickster City act as substitutes for the materiality of built form by narrating the unnarratable. Hence, this paper is interested in engaging with the psychosomatic wreckage of the experience of urbanisation in cities like Delhi so as to understand how their articulation acts as a publicly available, tangible record of vulnerable urbanisms in South Asia.

Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in the history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state.

Sovyet Sosyalist Cumhuriyetler Birliği’nde tarih yazımının, sosyalist ideolojiye göre olduğu ve ancak sansür kurulundan onaylanınca yayımlanabildiği, bilinen bir gerçektir. Sosyalist doktrin ve sistemin tesis edilmesi ve devam ettirilebilmesi bakımından ülkede tarih ve tarih yazıcılığına büyük önem atfedilmekteydi. Türkistan’daki Türk Cumhuriyetlerinde tarih yazımının önemi bu sebeplerden ötürü artmaktaydı…
        Sovyet devrindeki Kazakistan’da tarih yazıcılığı sancılı bir süreçten geçmiştir. İlk Kazakistan tarihi kitaplarını yazan yazarlar, Stalin döneminde ya kurşuna dizildi, canlarından oldu, ya da toplama kamplarından nasiplerini aldılar. Gerçeklerin dile getirilemediği, örtbas edildiği, farklı bir şekilde yansıtıldığı, ideoloji çerçevesinde gerçek olgu yerine mitlerin üretildiği Sovyet dönemi tarih yazıcılığının izlerinin silinmesi vakit alacak bir süreçtir. Sovyetler Birliği’nin dağılmasına yakın bir vakitte gerçekler gün yüzüne çıkmaya başlamış, bağımsızlıktan sonra ise hız kazanmıştır. Bütün karanlık noktalar henüz tamamen aydınlatılamamışsa da, mitlerin yerine gerçek tarihin ortaya çıkarılma süreci devam etmektedir. Elinizdeki bu kitap, Kazakistan tarih yazıcılığındaki mitlerle gerçekleri karşılaştırmalı bir şekilde ele alıyor.

                Güljanat Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun

Following a brutal nine-month siege, the militarily strategic city of Suiyang fell in 757 to rebels against the Tang dynasty. When the siege commenced, the city’s population consisted of roughly ten thousand fighters and over thirty thousand residents, but when the city fell, only about four hundred survivors remained, and none of them civilians. Rather than surrender the city to non-Han Chinese “barbarian” rebels, the Han-Chinese defenders had chosen instead to kill and eat all the residents, whom they were supposed to protect. But the siege of Suiyang also slowed down the rebels and gave the dynasty a much-needed reprieve. Thus, when the matter of commemorating the event came before the throne, the Tang emperor faced a dilemma—should he brand these defenders as mass murderers, or as war heroes? The survival of the dynasty depended on loyalty, but whose loyalty should the emperor honor and inspire, the people’s or the armies’? This paper illuminates the politics and morality of commemoration by analyzing the fierce debate at court over how the biographies (and hence the judgment) of the commanders who ordered the cannibalism should be written; it further follows the subsequent deification of these commanders and explores how the accounts of their cannibalism became incorporated into Daoist rituals of exorcism.

‘This book is a very welcome addition to the new historiography on
memory and the crusades. In focusing closely on particular texts and
contexts, it brings innovative and important insights into how the crusades
were represented and remembered in a variety of ways during the Middle
Ages and beyond.’
Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch, University of Queensland

‘This engrossing volume highlights the exciting work of a new generation
of historians of the crusades. Focusing on the way the crusades were
reflected in a variety of writing genres, the chapters show how crusading
was embedded in broader networks and modes of composition, in
continuous dialogue with larger cultural discourses of gender, status,
emotion, and trauma.’
Professor Nicholas Paul, Fordham University

Exploring Latin texts, as well as Old French, Castilian and Occitan songs
and lyrics, Remembering the Crusades in Medieval Texts and Songs takes
inspiration from the new ways scholars are looking to trace the
dissemination and influence of the memories and narratives surrounding
the crusading past in medieval Europe. It contributes to these new
directions in crusade studies by offering a more nuanced understanding of
the diverse ways in which medieval authors presented events, people and
places central to the crusading movement. This volume investigates how
the transmission of stories related to suffering, heroism, the miraculous and
ideals of masculinity helped to shape ideas of crusading presented in
narratives produced in both the Latin East and the West, as well as the
importance of Jerusalem in the lyric cultures of southern France, and how
the narrative arc of the First Crusade developed from the earliest written
and oral responses to the venture.

Andrew D. Buck is Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
University College Dublin.

Thomas W. Smith teaches history at Rugby School, and is a Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society.

Cover image: The contingent of Godfrey of Bouillon, travelling on the First Crusade.
Miniature from historical roll (late fifteenth century), BC MS 100/28, reproduced by
permission of Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

Created in a period of political transition, as England moved from the end of Henry III’s reign towards that of Edward I, British Library Add. MS. 30079 is an important witness to the historical events of the late thirteenth century. This manuscript was one of the first chronicle rolls written in Latin recording the history of England through a genealogy of its kings, a model which would then acquire popularity in the Anglo-Norman world during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An investigation surrounding the manuscript’s context of origin will show how Add. MS. 30079 can be a relevant source for a broader historical analysis of the period. This paper considers the dating and provenance of this chronicle roll, putting particular emphasis on the implications of scribal choices and of the circumstances of manuscript transmission.

M.P. Pattoni, Le consolazioni della memoria (e dell’oblio): declinazioni di un tema nel teatro euripideo, in M. Capasso (a cura di), Quattro incontri sulla Cultura Classica. Dal bimillenario della morte di Augusto all’insegnamento delle lingue classiche, I Quaderni di “Atene e Roma” 6, ed. PensaMultimedia, 2019, pp. 445-68

Although the chronicle commonly referred to as the ‘Dutch Beke’ (Nederlandse Beke) is constructed as a regional history of Utrecht and Holland, it is possible to see in its narrative the beginnings of urban history-writing in the Northern Low Countries before 1400. This article sets out to analyse the urban character of the chronicle, building on
Antheun Janse’s argument that it was written in Utrecht city government circles and aimed at an audience of the city’s elite families. Textual analysis shows that the author voiced a civic discourse in which the city and burghers of Utrecht were indispensable in defending the bishop’s territory. He can also be shown to engage in the construction of a
collective memory of local party strife, in which he supported the city council’s discourse around 1393. This provides an argument for its function and strengthens Janse’s hypothesis that the town clerk Jan Tolnaer Jr († ca. 1403) was the author of the chronicle.

“Hay que tener la mente un poco abierta, y pensar que quizá la historia no es como la hemos contado en los últimos cuarenta o cincuenta años” ―Dr. Eduardo García-Alfonso, Universidad de Granada, documental, “El Neolítico: puerta de la civilización” (Junio de 2016).

Análisis epigráfico-lingüístico de varias agrupaciones de posibles signos fonográficos y propuesta de interpretación y traducción de los mismos.

La actual campaña de demonización y represión de las reivindicaciones indígenas en Argentina revela con toda su fuerza la persistencia de los lugares de memoria
donde lo indio y la nación se entretejen de modo inextricable. Las memorias de domesticación, de conquista y de reparación configuran una topología fetichista donde lo indio debe ser incesantemente conmemorado para ser olvidado. Pero el retorno de esta figura de negatividad denuncia una tensión fundamental en los discursos de identidad, origen y destino nacional que se resuelve la mayoría de las veces a través de la represión de esa otredad. ¿Es posible habitar de otras maneras los lugares de memoria nacional de lo indígena evitando la celada de un recuerdo que es olvido?

This book focuses on Reconstructing Historical Memories of critical historical occurrences that have had a dramatic impact upon the development of human history. While the essays in this book analyze a range of circumstances that foreground issues of memory, history and narrative, this book offers primary approaches to understanding the reconstruction of historical memories. Moving across geographical borders and political boundaries, this book seeks to link the past with the present as this linkage is essential for a good understanding of the condition of being human. It also highlights that reconstructing historical memory, which redefines the past and national identity, significantly affects the interpretation of the present and the perspective about future. This book increases public consciousness in changing the narratives around what reconstruction of historical memories means and what we can learn from it. There is much in the book that has never been explored in books of this ilk. As such this book offers a wide range of arguments and approaches and provides a powerful case for the importance of reconstruction of historical memories.