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Ana Mendieta: Chiseling (in) Cuba

Iraida H. López

in Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora

Devoted to the legacy of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), chapter 3 explores the impact of the Cuban-American artist in Cuba, at the time of her visits in the early 1980s and thereafter. Research conducted ... More

Devoted to the legacy of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), chapter 3 explores the impact of the Cuban-American artist in Cuba, at the time of her visits in the early 1980s and thereafter. Research conducted on the island reveals an erasure at the institutional level due to the negligence with which her work has been treated. However, Mendieta’s case demonstrates that memory can be preserved at the margins of institutions, in lieux de mémoire or sites of memory (Pierre Nora) such as the Jaruco caves where the remains of Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures are found and have become a magnet for young artists. This following helped preserve the collective memory of Mendieta in Cuba.Less

Introduction

Susanne C. Knittel

in The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

The introduction provides the historical and methodological framework for the book. It begins with a discussion of the power of certain memories to trouble received notions about the past and its ... More

The introduction provides the historical and methodological framework for the book. It begins with a discussion of the power of certain memories to trouble received notions about the past and its relationship to the present. This is what I call the “historical uncanny.” The introduction then traces the history of eugenic thinking in Germany and Italy and sketches the post-war memory culture in these two countries. On the basis of Pierre Nora's work on sites of memory, the introduction elaborates an expanded definition of “site,” which builds on Michael Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory and on Karen Barad's method of diffractive reading. In this way, the coexistence of two seemingly incompatible or contradictory phenomena is not seen as a problem in need of resolution but rather as a site of productive tension that reveals underlying structures of meaning that may not be readily assimilable to preexisting frameworks of knowledge.Less

Constructing Famine Spaces in Ireland

Emily Mark-Fitzgerald

in Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument

This chapter reviews the range of monuments erected by small community groups throughout the Republic; selected cases of local Famine commemorations are mapped against registers of space, presence ... More

This chapter reviews the range of monuments erected by small community groups throughout the Republic; selected cases of local Famine commemorations are mapped against registers of space, presence and performance. ‘Space’ considers the rationale and consequence of siting memorials in cemeteries, workhouses and other spaces marked by social stigmatisation. ‘Presence’ addresses the omnipresence of the Famine body and how community groups have dealt with issues of absence and figuration at memorial sites. ‘Performance’ explores the performative nature of community commemoration – the rescuing of abandoned spaces and the vigilance to sustain them against time and decay, the ceremony and rituals which attend their narration, and the pragmatic processes of monument construction. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of recent works by Irish contemporary artists working in installation and time-based media who deconstruct Famine ‘icons’ like the workhouse, cemetery and cottage, offering the possibility of imagining alternative spaces of Famine memory.Less

The Memory of Abraham in Late Persian/Early Hellenistic Yehud/Judah *

Ehud Ben Zvi

in Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods: Social Memory and Imagination

This essay show how the memory of Abraham served as a central site of memory that encapsulated and evoked a large number of central issues and images in the discourse of the community and how the ... More

This essay show how the memory of Abraham served as a central site of memory that encapsulated and evoked a large number of central issues and images in the discourse of the community and how the latter related to the actual historical circumstances, in late Yehud, in which it lived. The essay uses approaches informed by studies in social memory to discuss, inter alia, the triad ‘Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ as a site of memory, memories of Abraham associated with and encapsulating matters such as the possession of the land (and lack thereof), exile and return, divine choice, obedience, divine test, torah as well as constructions of past, present and future relations between Israel and the other nations in the land. The essay deals also with general social and mnemonic tendencies affecting the ways in which Abraham was remembered in the community. By studying how and why Abraham was remembered by the Jerusalem-centered community of the late Achaemenid/early Hellenistic period in Yehud/Judah, the study contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of ancient Israel.Less

Sites of Memory of the 1980 Military Coup in Turkey

Derya Firat

in Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting

The 1980 military coup is a milestone in Turkish history. While more than thirty years have passed since the event, a review of contemporary debates on the subject reveals an urgent need to confront ... More

The 1980 military coup is a milestone in Turkish history. While more than thirty years have passed since the event, a review of contemporary debates on the subject reveals an urgent need to confront the memories associated with Turkey's unspoken past. In order to meet this need, this chapter discusses the physical sites of memory that emerged with the military coup. It focuses on three sites associated with urban public protest: the street, Istanbul's Taksim Square, and Diyarbakır Prison. While the first operates at the scale of the whole Turkish society, the second concerns the Turkish Left, and the third is a site of memory for the Kurdish people. In approaching these three spaces, Fırat ventures into different topographies of memory, exploring in particular how Pierre Nora's 'sites of memory' and Maurice Halbwachs’ “collective memory” articulate with the Turkish case.Less

The Pursuit of Memory

Claudine Raynaud

in Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning

Using a psychoanalytic framework and an artful deployment of Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” Claudine Raynaud draws on memory as “the return of the repressed” in Beloved. She argues that the ... More

Using a psychoanalytic framework and an artful deployment of Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” Claudine Raynaud draws on memory as “the return of the repressed” in Beloved. She argues that the staging of the workings of memory is akin to phantasm and that Morrison’s “rememory” can be read as a “the narrative of a fable”—or “fabulation”—that figures the return of the repressed Whether bumping into to a rememory that belongs to someone else, or the haunting of a house by a phantasm that re-presents the traumatic (or catatonic) memory of the infanticide, Raynaud links the “geological metaphor” (of literary archeology) of a spatially-oriented “myth of memory” to “the metaphoric process at work in Black American literature.” In a third movement that concentrates on the color of memory, she shows how repression is described as a mise en abyme of remembering: Sethe cannot remember the workings of memory. (140 words)Less

Exploring the Memory of Moses ‘The Prophet’ in Late Persian/Early Hellenistic Yehud/Judah

Ehud Ben Zvi

in Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods: Social Memory and Imagination

This essay deals Moses “The Prophet” as a central site of memory in the Jerusalem-centered community of the late Achaemenid/early Hellenistic period in Yehud/Judah and as such, it contributes to a ... More

This essay deals Moses “The Prophet” as a central site of memory in the Jerusalem-centered community of the late Achaemenid/early Hellenistic period in Yehud/Judah and as such, it contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of ancient Israel. The essay uses approaches informed by studies in social memory and focuses first on the relation between this core site of memory and the Exodus node of memories and then on the multiple concepts, images and inner group negotiations that became embodied in and communicated by it. It addresses, inter alia, how remembering Moses the Prophet shaped and reflected on matters of continuity and discontinuity involving topics such as Moses and later Mosaic prophets, periodizations of ‘national’ history, the nature and genre of prophetic and historical books, and leadership. The essay pays attention to the ways in which remembering Moses the Prophet served to construct integrative fuzziness and vice versa within the community. By studying how and why Moses was remembered in Yehud/Judah at this time, the study contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of ancient Israel.Less

Sasanian Memory and the Persian Monumental and Ritual Legacy

Matthew P. Canepa

in Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE-642 CE

Chapter 12 explores the techniques by which the early Sasanian dynasty shaped Pars’ patrimony of glorious Achaemenid ruins and foregrounded its ancient artistic heritage and traditions of ritual. The ... More

Chapter 12 explores the techniques by which the early Sasanian dynasty shaped Pars’ patrimony of glorious Achaemenid ruins and foregrounded its ancient artistic heritage and traditions of ritual. The built and natural environment of Pars, including Achaemenid ruins and new sites, created a vital experience of the Sasanians’ new vision of the past and their place in it.Less

Imagining Sites of Memory in the Post—Civil War South: The National Cemetery in Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper”

Martin T. Buinicki

in Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894

This chapter examines Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “Rodman the Keeper” (1877). It considers Northern sentiment about national cemeteries for the Union dead, and investigates the ways in which ... More

This chapter examines Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “Rodman the Keeper” (1877). It considers Northern sentiment about national cemeteries for the Union dead, and investigates the ways in which Pierre Nora’s “sites of memory” were fashioned once historical events began to fade.Less

Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James’s Paris

J. Michelle Coghlan

in Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter moves from sights of Paris as a revolutionary underground to sites of Paris in ruin, from unexpected forms of imperial adventure or subterranean possibility to uncanny forms of affective ... More

This chapter moves from sights of Paris as a revolutionary underground to sites of Paris in ruin, from unexpected forms of imperial adventure or subterranean possibility to uncanny forms of affective possession. While The American Scene has been the privileged site to examine Henry James’s fascination with—and affective responses to—lost landmarks and newly minted ruins, I excavate the sights of and detours around the post-Commune ruins of Paris in his writings and contemporary periodical culture. Situating James’s attention to charred landscape and vanished tourist sights alongside their ongoing returns in U.S. print and visual culture, I suggest, crucially reconfigures James’s transformative and uncannily embodied “historic sense” even as it recovers the post-Commune ruinscape that came to function as an unexpectedly charged site of transnational memory in U.S. literary, visual and performance culture. Less

Isaiah, a Memorable Prophet: Why was Isaiah so Memorable in the Late Persian/Early Hellenistic Periods? Some Observations

Ehud Ben Zvi

in Remembering Biblical Figures in the Late Persian and Early Hellenistic Periods: Social Memory and Imagination

This essay deals with Isaiah as a site of memory for and within the Jerusalem-centered community of the late Achaemenid/early Hellenistic period. It addresses how as a site of memory, Isaiah embodied ... More

This essay deals with Isaiah as a site of memory for and within the Jerusalem-centered community of the late Achaemenid/early Hellenistic period. It addresses how as a site of memory, Isaiah embodied and communicated a condensed core narrative about ancient Israel. It discusses, inter alia, the use of central contrastive pairs, temporal gaps and the like as structural mnemonic devices and their implications for the mnemonic landscape of the community. It deals with how this site of memory embodied and communicated fuzziness and why. Finally, although random or accidental developments that can only be approached from the perspective of chaos theory might explain why some prophetic figures began to become more central than others (e.g., Isaiah vs. Micah), this essay shows how approaches focusing on social memory may help us recognise features that explain some of the ways in which the memory of a central prophet such as Isaiah was shaped and why such a shape brought to Isaiah a strong mindshare in the community in Yehud/Judah at the time. By doing so, this study contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of ancient Israel.Less

Conclusion

Susanne C. Knittel

in The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

The conclusion brings together the disparate problems and themes addressed in the book, emphasizing in particular the importance of education in fostering a critical attitude toward history, which, ... More

The conclusion brings together the disparate problems and themes addressed in the book, emphasizing in particular the importance of education in fostering a critical attitude toward history, which, in turn, could be described as the positive side of the historical uncanny. From a methodological standpoint, the conclusion re-emphasizes the importance of combining a careful, context-specific approach to diverse local “sites” of memory with a more macrological and transnational perspective. Each of the two sites examined in this book has a specific set of historical and representational problems associated with it and at the micro-level, they may not appear to have much in common. Yet, by placing them in the larger framework of the international eugenics movement it becomes possible not only to identify points of intersection between them but also between them and other “sites,” namely, the Holocaust, colonialism, and Communism—i.e. the three most foundational memory complexes of Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Less

Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Mae G. Henderson

in Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual ... More

Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.Less

Ancient History, American Time: Charles Chesnutt and the Sites of Memory

John Levi Barnard

in Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture

This chapter considers the ways Charles Chesnutt and other writers at the turn of the twentieth century critically responded to the project of postbellum national reconciliation, which involved not ... More

This chapter considers the ways Charles Chesnutt and other writers at the turn of the twentieth century critically responded to the project of postbellum national reconciliation, which involved not only a recommitment to national expansion and the increasingly global projection of American power, but also the proliferation of monumental structures and historical celebrations that enabled and justified that imperial agenda. The chapter focuses on Charles Chesnutt’s early work in relation to this resurgent imperial culture of the postbellum United States. While monumental constructions and public rituals commemorating national history aimed to reassert the Jeffersonian notion of the “empire for liberty,” Chesnutt’s early fiction—in alignment with the writings of contemporaries like T. Thomas Fortune and Pauline Hopkins—reads these cultural rituals and artifacts as evidence of the persistence of the “empire of slavery” by another name.Less

Embodiments and Disembodiments of the Nation, the People, and the State: Disputing Bolívar’s Body, and the Uses of Bolivarianism in Contemporary Venezuelan Politics

Luis Duno-Gottberg

in Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon

Human remains constitute the ultimate and most contentious “site of memory.” The bone fragments of Columbus or Cuauthémoc, the leg of Santa Ana, the embalmed body of Evita, the mutilated bodies of ... More

Human remains constitute the ultimate and most contentious “site of memory.” The bone fragments of Columbus or Cuauthémoc, the leg of Santa Ana, the embalmed body of Evita, the mutilated bodies of Juan Perón and Che Guevara, are well known examples of the lively role that dead bodies (or body parts) have played in the staging of the past. In this essay, Duno-Gottberg reflects on Bolivarianism in contemporary Venezuela through a recent controversy regarding the remains of Simón Bolívar. He contends that beyond the populist instrumentalization of those “heroic bones,” the source of conflict might relate more closely to the ways in which the body of Simón Bolívar condenses a particular conception of the state and a certain notion of sovereignty, all within the contentious political arena of contemporary Venezuela. This polemic is also placed within a discursive tradition that dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century.Less

Sweet Memory: Archaeological Evidence of Jesus in Jerusalem

Jodi Magness

in Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity

This chapter, written from an archaeological perspective, considers details about Jesus in Jerusalem which are provided by the author of the Fourth Gospel but are not in the Synoptic accounts. ... More

This chapter, written from an archaeological perspective, considers details about Jesus in Jerusalem which are provided by the author of the Fourth Gospel but are not in the Synoptic accounts. Although these details might correlate with sites or artefacts known from archaeology, this does not prove they were associated with the historical Jesus or derive from traditions that go back to the time of Jesus. Generally, it is impossible to distinguish between historical details that were theologized by John and invented details that John inserted to serve theological purposes. What stands out is that John often provides a specific place for such episodes, a procedure that enhances memory, as expressed by the term lieux de mémoire, even if that term is often used metaphorically rather than limited to topography.Less

Introduction: The Place de la Bastille

in The Place de la Bastille: The story of a quartier

This book investigates the history and cultural geography of the Place de la Bastille, one of the most important lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’) in Paris, France, which was named after the ... More

This book investigates the history and cultural geography of the Place de la Bastille, one of the most important lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’) in Paris, France, which was named after the eponymous fortress and prison destroyed on July 14, 1789, an event that triggered the French Revolution. Due to its symbolic resonance and sheer size, the Left has made the Bastille quartier an important rallying point. This Parisian square, also known as the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, evolved from bastion of working-class militancy to a fashionable bourgeois-bohemian area, highlighted by the opening of the opera house two centuries after the French Revolution. It has been the site of numerous rallies and demonstrations over the years, from the election of François Mitterrand as French president in 1981 to the introduction of a new employment law that would have made it easier to dismiss workers younger than twenty-six.Less

Introduction

Nora Goldschmidt and Barbara Graziosi

in Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern ... More

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.Less