Memory Studies

Discourses of Remembering: the Construction of Recollections in “Travels in West Africa”

by Karen Bennett

In Literature and Memory, Ansgar Nünning, Marion Gymnich, Roy Sommer (Eds.), Tübingen: Narr Francke Verlag, 2006. 281-291

Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, first published in 1887, is a book constructed out of memories. It was... more Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, first published in 1887, is a book constructed out of memories. It was published following the author’s return from two amazing lone voyages to the Congo and Camaroon, and although is vaguely categorised today as ‘Travel Writing’, it was not originally conceived as a coherent unified whole. Instead, it was patched together from a series of different texts, some of which were possibly written in situ (notebook jottings), others during moments of reflection in Africa (diary entries and letters), and yet others upon the author’s return to England (extracts from the lectures that she gave to institutions as diverse as the Cheltenham Ladies College, Manchester Chamber of Commerce and the Royal Geographical Society). Consequently, the final product bears traces of many different narrative voices. This paper examines the ways in which distance (temporal, geographical and social) conditions Kingsley’s memories of Africa. It looks at how those memories are construed in the various discourses according to the degree of elaboration demanded by the conventions governing each one, and focuses on the way in which the construction of identity (of the Self and Other) is affected by the implied presence of particular narratees.

Collective memory and the politics of urban space: an introduction

by Derek Alderman

Rose-Redwood, Reuben, Derek H. Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu. 2008. “Collective Memory and the Politics of Urban Space.” GeoJournal 73(3): 161-164. Introduction to special issue (guest edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, and Maoz Azaryahu).

Trauma and Memory: The Impact of Apartheid-Era Forced Removals on Coloured Identity in Cape Town

by Henry Trotter

in Mohamed Adhikari (Ed.), Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2009), pp. 49-78

Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse... more Communities often cohere around memories of historical suffering: yet coloured South Africans, a people whose diverse ancestry experienced enslavement, dispossession, genocidal extermination, and apartheid degradation, for the most part, they do not invest in remote historical traumas. Most coloured Capetonians instead focus upon a painful experience within living memory: the forced eviction of 150,000 coloured people from their homes and communities in the Cape Peninsula between 1957 and 1985 under the Group Areas Act. It is this experience that gives coloured identity vital resonance, especially amongst working class people, many of whom have yet to overcome the losses of that trauma.

Based on over one hundred life history interviews with coloured and African forced removees, this article examines the impact of Group Areas evictions on contemporary coloured identity. It suggests that, in the wake of mass social trauma, coloured removees coped with their pain by reminiscing with each other about the "good old days" in the destroyed communities. Their removal to racially defined townships ensured that they mainly shared their memories with other coloured people, and much less with African or Indian removees.

Apartheid social engineering to a large extent thus determined the spatial limits within which coloured memories circulated, creating a reflexive, mutually reinforcing pattern of narrative traffic. Over the past four decades, the constant circulation of these nostalgic stories has developed a "narrative community" amongst coloured people in the townships. This experience of popular sharing and support in the context of loss today gives coloured identity in Cape Town a dimension that would be lacking if it were only mobilized for political or economic purposes.

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by Sabire Arık

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

by Hilton Kelly

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by Sabire Arık

Encoding activity and face recognition

by Guy Tiberghien

Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica, Intellectual History Review, 20 (2010), 227-252

by Matthew Daniel Eddy

Author: Matthew Daniel Eddy

Recent studies on commonplacing have shown that it flourished as an important information management tool and, in some... more Recent studies on commonplacing have shown that it flourished as an important information management tool and, in some cases, it functioned as a method (methodus) that facilitated the ordering of natural history systems. In what follows in this essay, I wish to extend this point by examining the role played by heads in the work of Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné). I address two core questions. First, what were the economies of attention that guided his commonplacing techniques? Second, what type of impact did his note-taking skills have upon the way that he spatially arranged information in texts? Whereas intellectual historians sometimes tend to focus on the role that he played as the unique originator of modern botanical and zoological classification systems, I approach his work merely as one example in a long tradition of commonplacing and graphic design that originated in the Renaissance, but which had become an indispensable organisational tool used to create knowledge systems in the leading research centres of Enlightenment Europe.

Crises de la mémoire

by Yan Hamel

Comte-rendu critique de Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press, 2006, 286 p.

Mescaline facilitates retention of passive avoidance in rats

by Jeffrey Kahn, M.D.

Jeffrey P Kahn, David A Gorelick, Wagner H Bridger
Physiological Psychology (later Psychobiology) 06/1974; 2(2):120-122.

Tested the hypothesis that hallucinogens produce memory disturbance. Of 81 male hooded rats, half were given 1 trial... more Tested the hypothesis that hallucinogens produce memory disturbance. Of 81 male hooded rats, half were given 1 trial of step-through passive avoidance, then immediately injected with saline or mescaline (160 mmol/kg intraperitoneally) and tested for retention 48 hrs later. Controls were given identical treatments, except that they did not receive footshock during the training trial. Groups receiving footshock showed learning and retention, with the mescaline group showing better retention than the saline group. The no-footshock groups showed no learning, with the mescaline group not differing from the saline. In a separate experiment, rats were given 1 trial of step-through passive avoidance, then injected with saline or mescaline 72 hrs later and tested for retention 48 hrs after injection. The mescaline and saline groups did not differ, indicating that mescaline did not have a 48-hr proactive effect on performance in this task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Dynastic Identity and Remembrance of Ducal Brittany in a Fifteenth-Century Carmelite Missal (Princeton University Library, Garrett MS 40)

by Diane Booton

Princeton University Library Chronicle (2011): 37-67.

Anxiety over family succession and dynastic continuity emerge as a political undercurrent in a uniquely illustrated... more Anxiety over family succession and dynastic continuity emerge as a political undercurrent in a uniquely illustrated memorial to the Montfort rulers of the late-medieval duchy of Brittany in a fifteenth-century missal made for the Carmelite order in Nantes, and now held at the Princeton University Library. Written and illuminated chiefly during the reign of François I (1442–50), at a time when the Montfort’s dynastic concerns were uncertain, the missal negotiates the visual recreation of the family’s legitimacy and legacy to promote collective identity and memory in a more public sphere.

The manuscript’s elaborate illumination shows each generation en famille, kneeling in adoration before the statue of the Virgin and Child in the convent’s chapel; the pictorial program dovetails not only with the Passion of Christ, but also with historicizing scenes of the convent’s construction under ducal patronage and of the captivity of certain family members by rivals. The family sequence of miniatures is interrupted, however, by images and emblems of other Breton nobles and foreign merchants, thereby complicating our understanding of the missal’s commission. Whose heritage is being remembered and for what purpose? How does a missal as a physical object participate in this historical theater to define and convey meaning?

This article explores the role of the Carmelites in shaping and promoting the fama and memoria—the reputation and memory—of the Montfort dukes as virtuous princes. Illustrated rituals in sacred space and the placement of familial emblems in the missal were symbolic commemorations of the deceased by the living, who had a potent and solemn role in assuring the deceased’s salvation, filtered through the agency of the Carmelite order.

Diagrams increase the recall of non-depicted text when understanding is also increased

by Michael Serra

Towards a cognitive pragmatics of collective remembering

by Lucas Bietti

to be published in Pragmatics & Cognition 20 (1)

This article aims to provide a cognitive and discourse based theory to collective memory research. Despite the fact... more This article aims to provide a cognitive and discourse based theory to collective memory research. Despite the fact that a large proportion of studies in collective memory research in social, cognitive, and discourse psychology are based on investigations of (interactional) cognitive and discourse processes, neither linguistics nor cognitive and social psychologists have proposed an integrative, interdisciplinary and discursive-based theory to memory research. I argue that processes of remembering are always embodied and action oriented reconstructions of the past, which are highly dynamic and malleable by means of communication and context. This new approach aims to provide the grounds for a new ecologically valid theory on memory studies which accounts for the mutual interdependencies between communication, cognition, meaning, and interaction, as guiding collective remembering processes in the real-world activities.

Re-examining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H., Paul Kingsbury, and Owen Dwyer. (forthcoming, 2013) “Re-examining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement.” Professional Geographer.

The impact of familial risk for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder on cognitive control during episodic memory retrieval.

by Sophia Frangou

Christodoulou T, Messinis L, Papathanasopoulos P, Frangou S

Psychiatry Research 2012. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2011.12.028

BACKGROUND: Episodic memory impairment is a robust correlate of familial risk for schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar... more BACKGROUND: Episodic memory impairment is a robust correlate of familial risk for schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD); still much is unknown about the processes that underlie this deficit and how they may be implicated in BD and SZ. We examined the possibility that (a) episodic memory impairment may arise from abnormalities in the cognitive control of interference between task-relevant and task-irrelevant memories during retrieval; inability to suppress task-irrelevant representations could give rise to intrusions of inappropriate memories and increased rate of forgetting, (b) cognitive control deficits during retrieval may be differentially affected by familial predisposition to SZ or BD.

METHODS: We examined episodic memory in relatives of patients with SZ (SZ-R) (n=15) or BD (BD-R) (n=17) compared to healthy controls (n=23) using the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) and the Doors and People Test (DPT). All relatives were free of any psychiatric morbidity and were matched to controls on age, sex, educational achievement and general intellectual ability.

RESULTS: During the CVLT, both relatives' groups made significantly more perseverative recall errors than controls. However, intrusion errors were significantly increased in SZ-R only. SZ-R also showed increased rate of forgetting in the DPT while BD-R were comparable to controls.

CONCLUSIONS: Familial predisposition to SZ, compared to that of BD, was associated with significantly greater impairment in cognitive control processes during episodic memory retrieval with some evidence of specificity for SZ in connection with mechanisms relating to increased forgetting.

Landscape, Allegory, and Historical Trauma in Postwar Japanese Cinema: Recapitulating Existential Horror in Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the Dunes (1964)

by Akshaya Kumar

Published in Asian Cinema Journal

This paper tries to reconfigure trauma theory with the help of two outstanding films, Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the... more This paper tries to reconfigure trauma theory with the help of two outstanding films, Onibaba (1964) and Woman in the Dunes (1964), both curiously released in the same year. The paper configures trauma as a prolonged state of exception, not necessarily linked to the historical event, indeed more connected to an uninterrupted memory of catastrophic events, which itself is history (Benjamin). How effective is the allegorical representation as opposed to the modernist or realist forms to represent this history? How does the fairytale aesthetic and ethic, role of morality and sexuality, socialization and transgression, come together to construct the allegorical form? We shall try to read the tension between trauma and representation in proportion to the slippage between the allegorical and the real, the love of life-force within the allegory as opposed to the fear of living within the traumatic real. How these slippages construct the cinematic image in the two films, yet spill over it in order to make their various meanings, needs a complex analysis that this paper attempts to accomplish.

La bifurcación del tiempo en una historia hecha pedazos Vladimir Roslik y Basilio Lubkov. Los héroes y el tiempo de la muerte.

by L. Nicolás Guigou

La bifurcación del tiempo en una historia hecha pedazos.
Vladimir Roslik y Basilio Lubkov. Los héroes y el tiempo de la muerte.

En: Anuario de Antropología Social. Montevideo: DAS-NORDAN, 2009.ISSN : 1510-384

La bifurcación del tiempo en una historia hecha pedazos.
Vladimir Roslik y Basilio Lubkov. Los héroes y el tiempo... more La bifurcación del tiempo en una historia hecha pedazos.
Vladimir Roslik y Basilio Lubkov. Los héroes y el tiempo de la muerte.

L. Nicolás Guigou
Indagamos la bifurcación del tiempo – y la construcción de la
temporalidad- en un espacio etnográfico específico: la Colonia
rusa de San Javier (Dpto. de Río Negro, Uruguay). En este
espacio etnográfico, habitado por el Terror como experiencia
social, profundizamos en los trayectos de dos figuras – dos
héroes-para-la-muerte- cristalizados en Vladimir Roslik (último
muerto bajo torturas por la dictadura militar uruguaya) y en el
fundador de la citada Colonia, Basilio Lubkov, asesinado en la
URSS durante el genocidio estalinista.

Palabras clave: San Javier/Terror/Lubkov/Roslik/

Remembering and forgetting the Great War in New York City

by Ross Wilson

First World War Studies Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012, p.87-106

This article examines the history of the Great War in New York City and the means by which it has been remembered and... more This article examines the history of the Great War in New York City and the means by which it has been remembered and forgotten through the presence and absence of war memorials. New York City played a unique role in the history of the Great War, contributing to the war effort even before the declaration of war by the United States in 1917. The wartime experiences in the city were accompanied by political and racial tensions as fears of foreign influences undermining the city and the wider nation were ever-present. In a city which had witnessed large-scale immigration over the preceding century, fears of unrest or unpatriotic and un-American behaviour preoccupied both the city and the federal government. Nevertheless, the wartime contribution of the city's foreign-born residents was substantial as large numbers registered for military service. As a means of reaffirming the principles of patriotism and an ‘American’ identity for the city, after the Armistice the official bodies and veterans groups worked to develop a singular expression or ‘spirit’ for the local war memorials. As the schemes for a central war memorial for the city floundered, the local memorials served as a means for residents to adopt and adapt this hegemonic expression of ‘American’ identity and form specific memories of the war for each community.

María de Molina y la educación de Alfonso XI: las semblanzas de reyes del ms. 7415 de la Biblioteca Nacional

by Rosa María Rodríguez Porto

History and Memory: Czechs in the Danube Gorge (Istorie şi memorie în comunităţile cehilor din Clisura Dunării), Sînziana Preda,Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai Cluj-Napoca, Institutul de istorie orală, Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut, 2010.

by Aleksandra Djurić-Milovanović

Book review in Balcanica XLII (2012), 236-238