History, Writing and Memory

Pages as Stages: A Performance Approach to Visitor Books

by Chaim Noy

This article deals with visitor books as a dynamic medium of communication, and explores how material aspects of such... more This article deals with visitor books as a dynamic medium of communication, and explores how material aspects of such a book including its physical affordances and the spatial and institutional environment in which it is located affect its capacity to create and mediate social meaning. In line with recent studies that set out to rematerialize communication and its devices, and, more specifically, to examine writing as an embodied communicative practice, it is argued that material considerations, while frequently overlooked, constitute preconditions of communication, and are organic to semiotic processes and formative in shaping them. The data analyzed are entries in, and observations on, a visitor book located in a war commemoration museum in East Jerusalem, Israel. It is demonstrated that, within the context of a national commemoration site, the visitor book proves to be a fascinating medium of inscriptive communication which is manipulated to serve as a cultural site of nationalist participation, commitment, and performance. The article draws on sensibilities from material and technological literature in order to shed light on the ways in which individuals interact with written environments and technologies.

A Mechanism for Multidisciplinary Dialogue: The Memory & . . . Series

by Hilton Kelly

Essai sur la nature du Grand cartulaire de l'Eglise Saint-Julien de Brioude

by Berger Jean

Epreuves extraites de : Brioude aux temps carolingiens (actes du colloques international organisé par la ville de Brioude, 13-15 septembre 2007), A. Dubreucq, Ch. Lauranson-Rosaz, B. Sanial (dirs), Le Puy-en-Velay, 2010, p. 209-235.

What the Sands Remember

by Vanessa Agard Jones

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2012 Volume 18, Number 2-3: 325-346.

Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne sit on opposite shores—both territorially and symbolically—of Martinique, a French... more Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne sit on opposite shores—both territorially and symbolically—of Martinique, a French territory in the Caribbean Sea. During the nineteenth century, Saint-Pierre was known as the “Sodom” of the Antilles, as a cosmopolitan city where decadence and liberal sexual mores were at the heart of bourgeois and elite culture. In 1902 Mount Pelée, the volcano that sits just above the city, erupted—killing Saint-Pierre's population of over thirty thousand within five seconds. Today, the black, volcanic sand beaches that line the coast remind visitors to Saint-Pierre of the city that once was. Sainte-Anne is a town with a far different reputation. During the 1950s it was known as a refuge for rebels, for people who contested the continued dominance of white and mixed-race elites in the lives of ordinary (mostly black) Martinicans, and was the center of the island's small cultural nationalist movement. Nearly fifty years later, the town retains that reputation—but Sainte-Anne is known for another reason, too, for it is home to one of Martinique's few meeting spaces for men who have sex with men, a secluded section at the end of the commune's most popular beach, Les Salines.

This essay seeks to cross temporal, scalar, and disciplinary boundaries while revisiting tropes of queer invisibility that mark representations of same-sex desire in the Caribbean. Cycling from the world described in the 1901 erotic novel Une nuit d'orgie à Saint-Pierre, Martinique to field notes taken in 2010 among men who frequent Les Salines, this essay unites, in a provisional way, a scattered archive of same-sex desire on the island, while relating these desires critically to place. These archives ask us to reconsider a narrative that insists on movement—away from Martinique, away from the Caribbean, away from the global South—as the grounding force for a radical queer (of color) politics. Instead of privileging diasporic subjectivities, these markers of local presence and emplacement offer an alternative framing of what it means to stay put. They give us access to modes of queer relationality that resist documentation, but are indicative of the kinds of lives that certain subjects live: shot through with ambiguity and grounded in a refusal of fixed identity politics. Sand emerges as a compelling metaphor for this kind of theoretical and ethnographic intervention, as its ability to be diffuse yet still irreducibly material provides a model for one way to understand the memory of same-sex desire and gender transgression. Making use of fragments, then, this essay thinks simultaneously through the sexual politics of memory and landscape, linking queer presence to the sands of both Saint-Pierre and Sainte-Anne.

“Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17 October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory,” French Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 21, no. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 21-50.

by Joshua Cole

Servire l'Ideologia: Storiografia e Nazionalismo nella Romania di Ceausescu

by Francesco Zavatti

This article originally appeared on Modena History Institute's "Annale 2011", Edizioni Artestampa, Modena, 2011, pp. 44-51. Written in Italian (English version will come soon).

REFLEXÕES SOBRE MEMÓRIA, ESQUECIMENTO E RECALQUE DO GENOCÍDIO ARMÊNIO1 REFLECTIONS ON MEMORY, FORGETFULNESS AND …

by Daniela Spinelli

“Ancient Mesopotamia” chapter including entries on Ur, Tell Asmar, Babylon, Khorsabad, and Development of Writing

by Ömür Harmansah

Archaeologica: The World’s Most Significant Sites and Cultural Treasures. Aedeen Cremin (ed.). London: Frances Lincoln Publishers, 2007: 214-223.

Los límites de la maleabilidad de la historia nacional en Cacha, una jurisdicción indígena en los andes ecuatorianos

by Sergio Miguel Huarcaya

Revista Andina, No. 40, 2005.

Following the fallacious historical narrative of the Kingdom of Quito (1780), by Juan de Velasco, the Ecuadorian State... more Following the fallacious historical narrative of the Kingdom of Quito (1780), by Juan de Velasco, the Ecuadorian State has depicted the indigenous jurisdiction of Cacha, in the Province of Chimborazo, as the birthplace of Ecuadorian mestizo nationality. Through archival and ethnographic research, I demonstrate that Cachans had an ambivalent stance towards the official account not only because it is not part of their social memory but also because, as a social charter of the dominant mestizo society, it excluded living indigenous peoples from the Ecuadorian nation.

La pérdida de la memoria: El presente absoluto en la blogonovela

by Daniel Escandell Montiel

2012. “La pérdida de la memoria: El presente absoluto en la blogonovela”, en Hans Lauge Hansen y Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez (eds.) La memoria novelada: Hibridación de géneros y metaficción en la novela española sobre la guerra civil y el franquismo (200-2010). Suiza: Peter Lang, 2012. pp. 247-258. ISBN: 978-3-0343-1088-8

La narración digital se divide en una amplitud de géneros y subgéneros hibridados, entre los que se encuentra la... more La narración digital se divide en una amplitud de géneros y subgéneros hibridados, entre los que se encuentra la blogonovela, formato narrativo con unos rasgos distintivos que presentan un tratamiento del tiempo específico en el género, así como un narrador avatárico que devora al autor mismo de la ficción narrativa.

En la blogonovela (como oposición clara a la novela por entregas sobre blog) el autor no sólo se convierte en un actor que interpreta el papel protagonista de un bloguero contando sus experiencias, fingiendo ser un anónimo habitante del mundo digital que expresa sus inquietudes y vivencias en un formato popular de diario digital. Pero este mismo concepto del protagonista resulta en la eliminación del pasado y, de hecho, de todo lo que no sea presente: la blogonovela se desarrolla en un presente absoluto, real, dictado por el mismo reloj y calendario que nos rige a todos.

En este sentido, una blogonovela de acuerdo a las convenciones prescritas por autores y especialistas, debe prescindir del pasado: no hay espacio para la memoria histórica, en términos comunes. Sin embargo, la memoria puede encontrar subterfugios para penetrar en la obra. Estudiamos los recursos historicistas de Casciari en su blogonovela Más respeto que soy tu madre y, también, cómo la novela a imitación de un blog El blog del inquisidor, de Lorenzo Silva. En la primera obra, el pasado es un recurso humorístico que aprovecha recursos no narrativos, que logra permear un momento concreto de la obra; en la segunda, el autor muestra las técnicas narrativas que permiten la creación de una ficción histórica verosímil en el campo de una semiblogonovela.

Reconstructing Somerset Place: Slavery, memory and historical consciousness

by Alisa Harrison

Generating meaning across generations – The role of historians in the codification of history in Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia

by Meike Wulf

M.Wulf & P. Grönholm, “Generating meaning across generations – The role of historians in the codification of history in Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia”, in Special Issue on Collective memory and pluralism in the Baltic States, Journal of Baltic Studies, 41 (3), 2010, pp. 351-382.

The main focus of this paper is on processes of official history making in post-Soviet Estonia. Special attention is... more The main focus of this paper is on processes of official history making in post-Soviet Estonia. Special attention is thus given to the historians, as memory agents, i.e. their self-understanding and their changing role as codifiers and mediators of social memories, and shapers of a post-Soviet Estonian identity. Overall many historians took on an active political role in the restoration of a sovereign Estonian state; the question though is: why and when did they assume a more active role in supporting the independence movement and subsequent nation building processes? Based on their post-1991 biographic accounts, various modes of talking about their past experiences, such as glorification, denial, self-justification, apologetics, distancing, resignation and destiny, are singled out, as these reveal strategies of coping with loss and of generating new meaning. The key analytical tool herein are generational group identities among post-Soviet Estonian historians, which by and large, this is the argument, inform their personal and professional outlook.

Introduction to JBS 50.4 (October 2011)

by Brian Cowan

Co-authored with Elizabeth Elbourne

1.  William Perkins, “Atheisme,” and the Crises of England’s Long Reformation (pp. 790-812)  more

1.  William Perkins, “Atheisme,” and the Crises of England’s Long Reformation (pp. 790-812) 
Leif Dixon

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661199

2.  Evil Counsel: The Propositions to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliament and the Critique of Caroline Government in the Late 1620s (pp. 813-839) 
Noah Millstone

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661000

3.  The Citizens of Morley College (pp. 840-862) 
Andrea Geddes Poole

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661021

4.  Remembering the 1605 Gunpowder Plot in Ireland, 1605–1920 (pp. 863-891) 
James McConnel

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661200

5.  1688 and 1888: Victorian Society and the Bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution (pp. 892-916) 
Edmund Rogers

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661209

6.  Voices and Silences of Memory: Civilian Internees of the Japanese in British Asia during the Second World War (pp. 917-940) 
Felicia Yap

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661602

7.  Narrative and the Start of the Northern Irish Troubles: Ireland’s Revolutionary Tradition in Comparative Perspective (pp. 941-964) 
Simon Prince

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661184

Difference in memory

by Mahua Sarkar

Constructions of Childhood In Apartheid's Last Decades.

by Monica Eileen Patterson

Dissertation for Ph.D. in Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, 2009.

My dissertation examines constructions of childhood at a time and place in which black children‘s lives were defined... more My dissertation examines constructions of childhood at a time and place in which black children‘s lives were defined by tremendous instability. On the one hand, these children are often remembered as the most vulnerable and defenseless of apartheid‘s victims. Yet, the history of the struggle for freedom in South Africa reveals that young people were also potent political actors, dangerous and willing to take on a whole government, armed with placards, songs, stones, military training, guns, and other weaponry. They were critical targets of state violence, but also powerful political players and themselves agents of violence.

Semantically, socially, intellectually, "childhood" is in its essence constructed in its meanings and usages. The political, cultural, and social work of childhood lies in these conventions. Suffering and violence vex and complicate the constructions of childhood in South Africa, where violence and childhood were structurally and practically linked through the apartheid system.  Following the Soweto Uprising of 1976, images of children as victims of state-sponsored violence saturated South Africa and the world. 

Within the context of the late apartheid period, the complex relationship between childhood and violence fuels new opportunities for additional reflection and debate by reopening questions about agency, responsibility, culpability, and consciousness for reconsideration and revision. It is impossible to settle on one definition of childhood in South Africa, where the child-youth continuum is one that has been especially open to manipulation by various kinds of actors, including children and youth themselves.

In exploring these issues I examine the Soweto Uprising of 1976, the Bantu Education System, the languages of Afrikaans and the pidgin known as Fanagalo, the United Nations International Year of the Child in 1979 and its counter version, South Africa‘s National "Year of Health," the historical shifts in the iconography and representative range of images of children in South African political posters from the 1980s, and South Africa‘s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Special Hearings on Children and Youth and The Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the Mandela United Football Club.

Re-curating Testimony: Toward a New Pedagogy for Learning from the Past

by Monica Eileen Patterson

Co-authored with Erica Lehrer

The last few decades have seen an upsurge among anthropologists (and others) of critical attention to memory in its... more The last few decades have seen an upsurge among anthropologists (and others) of critical attention to memory in its various manifestations. Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation of museums, memorials and media-based interventions seeking to represent and remember past atrocity. Experimenting at the intersection of these trends, we have developed a “curatorial pedagogy” that engages students in both critical thinking and creative production around the question of what it means for public audiences to “learn from the past” in the face of ongoing global violence.

The Sense of the Past: History and Historical Criticism.

by Gert Buelens

Co-authored with Celia Aijmer, pre-peer-review version. Published in Peter Rawlings, Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007
192-211.

En el ultimo azul by Carme Riera: Memory's future and the history of the Spanish Jews

by Reyes Coll-Tellechea

in Models of Medieval Literature Minority Views in Spanish Medieval literature and Their Modern Reflections. Juan de la Cuesta Press, 307-320, 2002

The Paradox of Historical Fiction: Finding Truth in the Absence of Fact

by Loree Westron

Presented at the Playful Paradox conference at the University of Bedfordshire, June 2009

History.  What is ‘history’?  Is it simply a ‘record of past events’ as my Collins Concise Dictionary... more History.  What is ‘history’?  Is it simply a ‘record of past events’ as my Collins Concise Dictionary suggests?  What about past events which aren’t recorded?  Are they still part of history?  And whose record counts?  Does mine?  Does yours?  Which one is the most accurate, and more importantly, whose account is right?  As I embark on research for my novel, Legacy, strands of which are historically based, I have begun to ask the questions which all writers of historical fiction must ask. 

Destruction matérielle et constructions mémorielles dans le discours épigraphique des cités de l'Occident méditerranéen sous le Haut-Empire

by Bertrand Goffaux