Memory Studies

Woodstock is a grey, windy suburb, squashed between the freeway and the docks in Cape Town, South Africa. Woodstock once had a beach. Physically, the beach is long gone, but it remains in the rain as the smell of salt, the smell of fish and, relentlessly, as sand, swept up again and again, always returning. This article engages the lingering presence of Woodstock Beach in the concrete that now covers it and explores how the memory of the beach orients us towards questions of ruination and process, of how our cities could have been otherwise, and how we can imagine them anew. It also explores the ways in which the material quality of the beach – in this case, as covered in concrete – reveals memories, metaphors and guiding analytical frameworks which in turn point us to pre-existing forms of resistance. This exploration of Woodstock Beach and its ongoing relevance is guided by the analytical attunements of ‘texture as method’. Texture as method engages memories, objects, texts and political processes to explore the emergent and processual qualities of place, and the entanglement between what is absent and what remains.

This article draws on interviews with people from striking families who remember the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike as children. It considers how proximity to the strike is often understood as participation in picket lines and in other forms of activism most commonly used to represent the strike in the media, film and television. However, the accounts reveal that, in contrast to the solidity of these images, memories of the strike’s children are characterised by a sense of knowing and not knowing. Family stories and family secrets, located in the home, are vital to the management and negotiation of the strike and these omissions and absences continue to characterise the memories of the strike in adult retellings. This article considers the context of family stories and the importance of family secrets in adult memories of childhood experiences of the strike, suggesting that looking at absences, silences, secrets and the known and unknown can reveal the many ways in which the strike was experienced and is narrated and remembered.

CHamoru people, the Indigenous peoples of the Mariana Islands, have long been voyagers. In contemporary times, their voyages across the United States and beyond have become a source of discussion by scholars, artists, and activists. This essay illustrates how poetry of the CHamoru diaspora illuminates our interconnectedness to one another across geographical distance: relationality, in other words, not remoteness. I focus on the works of two diasporic CHamoru writers, Lehua Taitano and Clarissa Mendiola, who utilize similar imagery rooted in CHamoru voyaging epistemologies. Instead of foregrounding the geographical barriers between Guam and the continental United States, Mendiola’s and Taitano’s imagery enacts a decolonial poetics that illustrates the interconnectedness of CHamoru communities in the Pacific and beyond.

This article focuses on analysing memory reconfiguration within creative digital forms of activism, heightened by interconnecting two major wars and traumas in the Palestinian context, namely the Nakba (meaning ‘catastrophe’) in 1948 and the Gaza War in 2023. From time and space perspectives, the Nakba is considered a ‘finished’ war where over 70% of the Palestinian population was displaced and Israel was established. For many Palestinians, however, the Nakba is ongoing and never stopped. The deterioration of Palestinians’ humanitarian rights and living conditions over the years preceding the genocidal Gaza War are symptomatic of a crisis that began back in 1948. This article examines the parallels being made on social media platforms between the ongoing Gaza War and the 1948 Nakba, by analysing a selection of videos and photo assemblages on social media platforms, particularly on Facebook. The proliferation of 1948 archival materials on social media during the Gaza War confirms Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s notion of ‘the archival multitude’, in which the agency of online users and activists is transformative, creating ‘the living archive’. The article thus explores the agency of the social media user as multidimensional, being both archivist and activist.

This article explores the use of counter-reenactment by Black community heritage organisations in the Deep South. By counter-reenactment, we refer to the creation and dissemination of a Black living history that challenges the white master-narrative of the regional past. In Sadiya Hartman’s (p. 85) terms, counter-reenactments ‘redress’ the suffering of historical Black bodies by ‘counterinvesting in the [contemporary] body as a site of possibility’. These performances are commonly staged at sites of historic violence where tangible Black heritage has been erased. Using Miss Lou Heritage Group & Tours from Natchez, Mississippi, as a case study, we suggest that counter-reenactments rematerialise African American history in a memorial landscape where Black experience is structurally invisibilised, enacting a form of ‘mnemonic restitution’ that resists the depleting effects of everyday racism, past and present.

The duty to remember and its promises are increasingly challenged. Following the “activist turn” in memory studies, this article analyzes how memory activists internally discuss the idea of the duty to remember. Since 2010, Afrodescendant memory activists play a pivotal role in raising public awareness about colonialism and its legacies in contemporary Belgian society. First, I show how a group of decolonial memory activists has embraced the duty to remember in their counter-memory campaigns and political lobbying. Second, I analyze the resistance of some activists to the framing of their decolonial demands in these terms. I demonstrate that how memory activists view the duty to remember is not only related to what they believe but is also shaped by processes of (self-)presentation in relation to outsiders, state actors, and each other. Here, socio-economic backgrounds, gender, but also personalities play a key role.

This article examines the Augmented Reality app MemoryBytes, which documents and presents the history and lived experience of the 500-year-old Anglo-Indian community in India, as a site for studying cultural preservation and intergenerational identity-iterations through an intersection of memory studies and digital humanities. Using Johny Miranda’s novella Requiem for the Living (2004) as entry point, this article seeks to trace the diachronic movement of this community and study its slow social changes through historical trajectories, inherited practices, and kinship networks. Such an entry point is necessitated due to the absences and silences in historiography, which arguably may be redressed only through an examination of the community’s experiences of integration and alienation through an entanglement of private and public markers of memory. We argue that the Anglo-Indian situation in postcolonial India facilitates an experiential as well as a strategic projection of changing identities and memories, which entail an enquiry into the politics and processes of producing and preserving hyphenated historical narratives. From its selected historical and textual readings, the article will move on to examine how the memories of this changing Anglo-Indian community may be mapped via postdigital networks through a study of MemoryBytes, an Augmented Reality-based application developed at the Centre for Memory Studies, IIT Madras in 2022, which captures and calibrates the 500-year-old histories and lived experiences of the Anglo-Indians in India, illustrating the iterations of such hyphenated and hybrid identities through a memory-ecology of interactive information and images. We aim to foreground how the fluidity, connectivity, and mobility of the postdigital ecology offer inclusive, interactive, and interaffective frameworks for engaging with complex identities by breaking the binaries of public and private spheres through a digital reconstruction of cultural markers, cuisines, public events, and family documents. Through this entanglement, we hope to highlight how the postdigital productions and preservations of postcolonial identities illustrate slow changes in alienated communities through historical, material, and affective processes.

In this article, we propose a model of community memory work, inspired by Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory and based on a research-intervention experience we carried out with teenagers in marginal areas of suburban Buenos Aires in 2022–2023. We claim that memorial community work can resignify spaces by recreating dedicated memory sites and including new spaces in a multilayered narrative of memory and future that, in essence, puts multidirectionality into action. We will start by analyzing the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical underpinnings of “Intimate Cartographies in Community,” a research-intervention project we carried out in high schools in marginal areas of suburban Buenos Aires during the years 2022–2023 (https://edjam.network/project/intimate-cartographies-in-community/) and then offer an analysis of the results.

The article treats two forms of memory activism in the visual arts of the global South: on one hand, gallery and museum art by artists such as Kuitca from Argentina, Salcedo from Colombia, Kentridge from South Africa, Guzmán from Chile, Malani and Sundaram from India, and on the other hand, a series of short-term political-aesthetic interventions in public space such as El Siluetazo of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, María José Contreras performances in Santiago, and many of the recent interventions aiming at decolonizing the art world. The essay reevaluates the traditional distinction between aesthetic autonomy and artistic projects in the realm of political movements. It shows how this distinction has collapsed in contemporary memory art and how both trends participate in what Doris Salcedo has called acts of memory. Both kinds are needed and can work politically and socially in tandem.

This article presents two reflections about memory from my long years of engagement as an oral historian. I argue that within cultures of orality, where wisdom traditions abound, memory is often ‘a site of learning’ distinct from forms of colonial knowledge, including the idea of history itself. My second reflection is that cultures of orality also nurture a form of fugitive memory that can conceal itself from public attention for extended duration of time. Drawing on the works of Amritlal Nagar and Mahasweta Devi, two postcolonial writers, I look at how memory of the 1857 ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ was forced to conceal itself in British India until it could be articulated safely. These insights from cultures of orality enable us to articulate two inter-related dimensions of memory and their relationship with community in a postcolonial context.