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Out of Place: Fetal References in Japanese Mythology and Cultural Memory

Jane Marie Law

in Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture

This chapter explores three references to fetal imagery in Japanese mythology and cultural memory where the fetal reference clearly works as symbol. Though historically dispersed, these three ... More

This chapter explores three references to fetal imagery in Japanese mythology and cultural memory where the fetal reference clearly works as symbol. Though historically dispersed, these three examples provide a map for locating a certain kind of fetal imagination: the fetus that is unusual, out of place, or somehow violated. This chapter demonstrates how these examples offer a typology of sorts for imagination of the fetus. The fetus that garners attention is the fetus that does not turn out right, somehow does not follow the norms of reproduction, or explodes an essential counter-memory dominating collective memory of the past.Less

Selling Chineseness and Marketing Chinese New Year: Corporate Sponsorship, Television Broadcasts, and Counter Memory

Chiou-Ling Yeh

in Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown

With the rise of the Pacific Rim economy, the restructuring of global economies, the image of wealthy immigrants, and the prevailing model minority narrative, Chinese Americans became “dream ... More

With the rise of the Pacific Rim economy, the restructuring of global economies, the image of wealthy immigrants, and the prevailing model minority narrative, Chinese Americans became “dream customers” for multinational corporations. They were also perceived as cultural brokers to expedite trade across the Pacific. Major corporations began to sponsor the festival in 1987, while television stations started annual broadcasts of the parade in 1988. This chapter explores how commercialism and the mass media entered the terrain of ethnic-identity formation. By evoking exoticism and the model minority image in the English-language parade broadcasts, parade organizers successfully attracted corporate sponsorship and incorporated the Chinese New Year Festival into contemporary multicultural America. However, the counter-memory presented in the Chinese-language television broadcasts of the parade rebuffed the idea of a unified Chinese American ethnicity, instead revealing a heterogeneous community divided by geographic and linguistic barriers.Less

Contesting Public Memory

Douglas A. Boyd and W. Fitzhugh Brundage

in Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community

This chapter looks at how dominant and subordinated memories interact in an oral history project and examines the dynamic between public and historical memory through multiple community symbols such ... More

This chapter looks at how dominant and subordinated memories interact in an oral history project and examines the dynamic between public and historical memory through multiple community symbols such as schools, churches as well as a variety of symbolic events such as flooding. Additionally, it examines the role of an activist interviewer in shaping the resulting narrative that emerges from the interview.Less

Conclusion: Is This Who We Want to Be?

Jeanne Morefield

in Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection

The Conclusion begins by examining the narrative of “who we are” as it appears in the security speeches of President Barack Obama. It then reflects upon the kinds of critical discourses that, in the ... More

The Conclusion begins by examining the narrative of “who we are” as it appears in the security speeches of President Barack Obama. It then reflects upon the kinds of critical discourses that, in the early twentieth century, this narrative approach successfully marginalized, by focusing on the radical democratic theory of G. D. H. Cole and the critical nationalism of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. These thinkers, the chapter argues, theorized a more self-reflective, anti-imperial form of politics that was ultimately drowned out in Britain and America by the deflective rhetoric of liberal imperialism. The chapter looks briefly at the kinds of alternative political visions being similarly obscured today and concludes by using Edward Said’s notion of “counter-memory” to imagine what a politics of reflection might look like.Less

La mujer sin cabeza: haunting and community

Deborah Martin

in The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Chapter 3 deals with La mujer sin cabeza,which appears to allude to the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-82 and to the disappeared. The chapter proposes that this film can be understood as a form of ... More

Chapter 3 deals with La mujer sin cabeza,which appears to allude to the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-82 and to the disappeared. The chapter proposes that this film can be understood as a form of counter-memory, that both avoids neat expositions of the past, whilst looking at its repetitions in the present. Drawing on Derrida, the chapter shows how the presence of spectres in La mujer sin cabeza recalls the victims of both the dictatorship and of contemporary neo-liberalism. It argues that spectres consistently puncture the comfortable bourgeois world of the film through silent gazes of resistance and knowledge, gazes which constitute a demand for justice. As the chapter goes on to argue, these gazes – repressed,emanating from the film’s visual periphery – are aligned in its meaning system with challenges to the bourgeois family associated with the adolescent girl and her transgressive, cross-class, same-sex desire. Through these images, the film gestures to a different kind of community to come, to the possibility of a world beyond the stifling and exclusionary world of the family, and hints at queer and non-normative forms of kinship and collectivitywhich transgress previously established social hierarchies of class and ethnicity.Less

Transforming Memory into Literary Narratives about the Past

Eve-Marie Becker

in The Birth of Christian History: Memory and Time from Mark to Luke-Acts

This chapter reflects on the early Christian shape of literary religious memory. The earliest Christian memorial culture does not stand alone. In order to develop, especially by literary means, it ... More

This chapter reflects on the early Christian shape of literary religious memory. The earliest Christian memorial culture does not stand alone. In order to develop, especially by literary means, it reiterates basic patterns that already circulate in its surrounding world. While maintaining continuity with both the Hebrew and Septuagint versions, the influence of Roman memorial culture is decisive in terms of how Christian groups organize their memoria. Moreover, early Christian authors tend to maintain the concepts of memory which are constitutive for Israel's history with God. In the New Testament writings, the concept of memory—which predates history-writing—is affiliated with a variety of contexts: ritual practices, the memorization of Jesus's teaching, and certain events and experiences.Less

Ghosts of the Past: Myth and the Winter of Discontent

Tara Martin López

in The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory, and History

The chapter explores how the Winter of Discontent has been mythologized and indelibly set in popular memory. The author argues that Conservative Party and New Labour politics have been especially ... More

The chapter explores how the Winter of Discontent has been mythologized and indelibly set in popular memory. The author argues that Conservative Party and New Labour politics have been especially crucial in shaping the myth and memory of the Winter of Discontent, which was crystalized through media representation of this important series of events. The author incorporates historian Paul Cohen’s definition of myth to provide the basis upon which the author will not only analyse the political influences upon this myth, but also how it has become so profoundly embedded in British popular memory. The chapter introduces how historian George Lipsitz’s idea of “counter-memory” and feminist historian Ava Baron’s more fluid definition of gender provide essential conceptual frameworks to understand how the experiences of striking activists, especially female activists, challenge the hegemonic myth of this series of events that occurred in 1978-1979. Furthermore, Colin Hay’s analysis of the role the media plays in perpetuating what he refers to as a collective mythology of the Winter of Discontent offers another lens through which the author examines the connection between the media and myth of the Winter of Discontent.Less

Spectral Spaces of Counter-Memory

Athena Athanasiou

in Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black

How does the political action of reclaiming a public space for remembering others and otherwise work to transfigure the polis and the ways in which it comes to organize its remembrance? The ... More

How does the political action of reclaiming a public space for remembering others and otherwise work to transfigure the polis and the ways in which it comes to organize its remembrance? The counter-memory of Women in Black is enacted through deheroicized standing at Belgrade’s Republic Square, under the national hero’s sleepless gaze. This chapter engages with the ways in which theWomen in Black political actors carve an expansive cartography of critical memory in the polis through performative idioms of body-archive that decenter national memory as a haunted space of political death. This account bears on the modes of embodiment, knowledge, as well as affective intensity that is rendered possible by the work of haunting the polis’s “organized remembrance”, in Hannah Arendt’s terms. Focusing on the agonistic eventness of appearing (out of place), the chapter offers a reflection on what kind of polis would emerge from performing the spectral potentiality of disconcerted memory: an occurrence of memory that persistently complicates the ways in which people “come together”.Less

Introduction: Structures of Feeling and the Reformation of Emotions

Steven Mullaney

in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare

The introduction clarifies the use of “social emotions” and discusses the concept in relation to debates over the nature and historicity of emotions in the social sciences and the humanities. It ... More

The introduction clarifies the use of “social emotions” and discusses the concept in relation to debates over the nature and historicity of emotions in the social sciences and the humanities. It argues that a phenomenology of historical emotions—social emotions felt, expressed, and understood by others as well as oneself—cannot be derived from humoral medicine or other etiological and physiological theories of the period. Social emotions participate in “structures of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s phrase. They are a form of embodied social “thought,” in Michelle Rosaldo’s sense, an affective and cognitive apprehension that “I am involved.” With the help of Williams, Rosaldo, Peter Marshall, Sara Ahmed, Patrick Collinson, and a number of other historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars, I argue that the Reformation in England did not succeed in severing affective ties to the past but did manage to loosen and unravel them, with significant consequences for individual and collective senses of identity. Like the emptiness at the foundations of St. Paul’s after 1549, gaps had opened up in the affective landscape of the period. The introduction closes with brief readings of plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare and an overview of the chapters to comeLess

Introduction

Akiko Takenaka

in Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan's Unending Postwar

The introduction proposes the framework of study, namely, to examine Yasukuni Shrine through its three components, Yasukuni the belief, Yasukuni the site, and Yasukuni the issue. It also outlines the ... More

The introduction proposes the framework of study, namely, to examine Yasukuni Shrine through its three components, Yasukuni the belief, Yasukuni the site, and Yasukuni the issue. It also outlines the key concepts that are woven throughout the main text: the relationship between memory and spatial practice, the discourse of victimhood, and the idea of postwar responsibility. The introduction also presents an overview of the book chapters.Less

Irish Republican Memory as Counter-Memory

Kevin Hearty

in Critical Engagement: Irish Republicanism, Memory Politics and Policing

This chapter critically examines the inter-communal contestation over policing memory. It contextualises this dimension to memory contestation in contemporary Northern Ireland by drawing on ... More

This chapter critically examines the inter-communal contestation over policing memory. It contextualises this dimension to memory contestation in contemporary Northern Ireland by drawing on theoretical literature on the use of memory in deeply divided societies and on memory politics in transitioning societies. In doing so it establishes how the collective memory of violence, suffering and victimhood can become ‘war by other means’ in post-conflict societies trying to ‘deal with the past’. This chapter uses the Irish republican policing narrative to critique Unionist, state and RUC narratives of policing that have little resonance with the lived on the ground reality in republican communities, thus developing a fuller understanding of the counter-memory function that Irish republican policing memory performs in current debates on the policing legacy in the North of Ireland.Less

Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter-memory

in Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies

This chapter has three objectives: First, it seeks to forge an unholy alliance between the cannibal and the ghost, and to explore their interworkings in the context of revisionist Caribbean history. ... More

This chapter has three objectives: First, it seeks to forge an unholy alliance between the cannibal and the ghost, and to explore their interworkings in the context of revisionist Caribbean history. Second, it examines the cannibal and the ghost as textual mediators, employed by Caribbean writers to re-imagine their European literary ancestry. Finally, it charts the attempt through the shape-shifting cannibal/ghost alliance to transform the orthodox, largely negative perception of Caribbean history, setting up a counter-memory to the hegemonic European record. The cannibal, being an alibi for historical race oppression, must be confronted and overcome in order to fulfill the great utopian vision where ‘self’ and ‘other’ converge until there is no ‘self’, no ‘other’, only people working together in the creation of a liberated future.Less

Introduction: The Collective Memories of the Persian War

David C. Yates

in States of Memory: The Polis, Panhellenism, and the Persian War

The Introduction situates the thesis within current scholarship and explores its broader implications, particularly with regard to Herodotus, panhellenism, and the influence of Philip and Alexander ... More

The Introduction situates the thesis within current scholarship and explores its broader implications, particularly with regard to Herodotus, panhellenism, and the influence of Philip and Alexander the Great on the later Persian-War tradition. Yates also provides a brief introduction to memory theory through a review of five key concepts: the definition of collective memory, the relationship between power and memory, the nature of memorial communities, memory as narrative, and the transmission of memory over time. This review is not exhaustive, however, and is intended merely as a primer for concepts that appear throughout the book. The Introduction then turns to a discussion of the methodological challenges of applying memory theory to the ancient world and ends with an outline of the chapters.Less

Pre-Forgetting: Before 1798

Guy Beiner

in Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster

Paradoxical as it may seem, memory can pre-date history, and even more surprisingly, forgetting can precede remembering. Historical events are perceived through the ‘prememory’ of reference to ... More

Paradoxical as it may seem, memory can pre-date history, and even more surprisingly, forgetting can precede remembering. Historical events are perceived through the ‘prememory’ of reference to memories of previous events. Moreover, concerns of being forgotten, though often unnoticed, can be raised in advance of the unravelling of historical events and their remembrance. The subtle dynamics of this ‘pre-forgetting’, which are embedded into the very earliest stage of memory formation, are demonstrated through an examination of the case of the republican protomartyr William Orr. Remembrance of his trial and execution, in advance of the 1798 rebellion, offered a template for subsequent remembrance of the United Irishmen. Periodic calls to ‘Remember Orr’ were perforated with anxieties of forgetting that sustained forgetful remembrance.Less

Amnesty and Amnesia: The Aftermath of 1798

Guy Beiner

in Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster

Policies of pacification through amnesty imply the promise of forgetting and forgiving. However, the attempt to decree collective amnesia from above is subject to contestation. The brutal suppression ... More

Policies of pacification through amnesty imply the promise of forgetting and forgiving. However, the attempt to decree collective amnesia from above is subject to contestation. The brutal suppression of the 1798 rebellion in Ulster, enforced through counter-revolutionary measures of state terror, and the limitations placed on the attempt to introduce amnesty for the rebels left a residue of bitter memories, which could not be openly discussed in public. Those who benefitted from pardons and converted to loyalism had an incentive to disremember the rebellion. In addition, transportation, exile, and mass emigration of former rebels removed many recollections from social memory. On the other hand, radicals were determined not to forget and cultivated clandestine narratives of counter-memory, which encouraged the development of a tensely ambiguous culture of social forgetting.Less

Reclaiming Nostalgia

Michalinos Zembylas

in Emotion and Traumatic Conflict: Reclaiming Healing in Education

This chapter attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in ... More

This chapter attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in productive ways. Central to the chapter’s argument is that nostalgia has multiple meanings, some of which promote nationalist agendas while others offer opportunities for transformation. One way to begin the process of reclaiming nostalgia in education is to shift the discourse from restorative nostalgia to reflective nostalgia. The constructs of counter-memory and aporetic mourning provide useful theoretical lenses through which reflective nostalgia can promote productive ways of addressing national memory and historical trauma.Less