Niq Mhlongo's Paradise in Gaza (2020) uses images related to soil to emphasize the novel's concern with the transmission of indigenous knowledge and the relationship between a sense of humanity and ...land ownership. Mhlongo's novel not only explores the quotidian and practical relationship between its characters and the land they occupy and cultivate, but also suggests a transcendental and spiritual relationship between them. With reference to work by Maurice Halbwachs, James E. Young, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, I argue that Mhlongo's inscription of soil reflects an authorial concern with the entanglements amongst collected memories, just memories, the transmission of culture, land ownership and human dignity. I present a close reading of key passages from the novel using Sarah Nuttall's notion of entanglement to demonstrate these relationships. Ultimately, I argue that Paradise in Gaza is not only an exploration of African life in a historical setting, but that it also presents an argument for the need for some form of land restitution in contemporary South Africa while recognizing the complexities inherent in any such process.
The article results from the creation and implementation of a 1-year online Memory Studies Certificate Program at UCLouvain (Belgium). It describes the program designed by a team of researchers with ...different disciplinary backgrounds (i.e. sociology, political science, psychology, philosophy) and with different pedagogical styles. After this description, the article highlights key lessons informed by data from lecturers’ internal discussions and a survey involving the pioneer student cohort enrolled during the 2021–2022 academic year. This experience shows the importance of teaching as a way of contributing to field of Memory studies. As a counterpoint to the relentless publish-or-perish ethos, which often favors expedited dissemination of fragmented knowledge, creating a study program necessitates deep understanding and cohesive dialogue.
Welcoming the turn toward including normative conceptions of the human into the remit of economics, this paper compares philosophical frameworks that guide principles such as dignity and justice as ...one source of theological ethics. Recent political crises show the importance of analyzing the public sphere with which Christian ethics in its various approaches interacts. The place given to religions in Rawls’s and Habermas’s concepts of “public reason” is compared with Ricoeur’s understanding of religions as cofounding traditions. They can contribute to a necessary exchange of memories, also of conflict and conquest, inspired by the undelivered hopes of their own founding memories, precluding triumphalism and fostering “intellectual solidarity” (Hollenbach).
This article explores the meanings and significances of memories of settler histories in transatlantic relations. Looking specifically at the medium of monuments, it asks what functions they have ...played, and continue to play, in relations between the United States and certain European countries. The first section of the article offers an anatomy of transatlantic monuments, outlining its key characteristics through a discussion of some prominent examples that range from Christopher Columbus to Leif Eriksson and the Plymouth Colony. In the second section, this typology is further explored through an in-depth analysis of the 1938 monument of the New Sweden colony (1638–1655) designed by Swedish sculptor Carl Milles. The third section deals with memory and ethics, focusing on the analytical consequences and contemporary ramifications of applying a transatlantic perspective on monuments of settler histories. The article argues that a framing of memories of European settlement in America as transatlantic encourages us to rethink its meanings and functions, but also to reappraise questions of responsibility. As monuments of settlement appear to be politically relevant in Euro-American relations, we need to address consequential questions of inclusion, authority, accountability, and agency, that are central to an ethics of memory in transnational settings.
In Negative Dialektik, Theodor W. Adorno claimed that after the Second World War a new categorical imperative was imposed on mankind: namely, to prevent Auschwitz – or something similar – from ...happening again. Today – 60 years after the United Nations Genocide Convention came into effect – it is difficult to remain optimistic about the preventive character of Adorno’s “Never Again!” imperative. In spite of its existence, the second half of the 20th Century was filled with ethnic violence andgenocide. This article undertakes a philosophical analysis of the “Never Again!” refrain and questions whether this new imperative is as preventive as we assume. The analysis looks at how Serbian nationalism used (and misused) history and expressions as “Never again!”. This example shows us that the impulse of moral abhorrence in “Never again!” does not necessarily lead to preventing atrocity, but can be an incitement to initiate new ones.
During the past two decades, memory culture surrounding the Second World War has developed from a narrow focus on “when we were at war” to the current broader focus on complex and universal issues ...such as human rights, reconciliation, justice, and atonement. This development has given the war and Holocaust museums a dynamic position within the current political culture of Europe. But what do we actually remember when we insist on keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust, genocide, and political mass violence: The lives which were lost during these atrocities? Or the violence that created the losses? In this essay, the author presents a series of reflections on memory culture around the Holocaust and other mass atrocities that has developed in Europe since the fall of communism.
The ethics of memory, for Avishai Margalit and Paul Ricoeur, means, respectively, remembering the past so as to foster more caring relationships and seeking the truth of the past and building a ...better future. In post-apartheid South Africa, a variety of memory practices bring to public attention reminders of apartheid, a past that must be remembered so that it will strengthen relationships amongst once-divided citizens and so that iniquities will not be repeated. In general, these diverse efforts - official, publicly funded initiatives and individual endeavours to preserve personal memory - seek to shape collective memory in ways that invoke the horrors of the past. Native Nostalgia (2009), by Jacob Dlamini, both conforms to this trend and challenges it. It follows convention by contending that apartheid was without virtue; it defies the norm by insisting that the life that Dlamini lived in Katlehong is worth remembering with nostalgia - reflective nostalgia - because it was an ordered world in which ethically laudable principles governed social interactions, principles and practices, all of which are rare in post-apartheid South Africa.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract
This article examines subjunctive approaches to history and memory as a novel aesthetic and ethical mode of Holocaust (post-)memory in two prominent examples of contemporary German-Jewish ...fiction. I argue that Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) and Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017) develop subjunctive modes of Holocaust (post-)memory as a response to a crisis of witnessing in the post-survivor era. Faced with the dying out of the survivor generation and the increasing institutionalization and hypermediation of Holocaust memories, these two authors invoke the subjunctive to self-reflexively account for their historical positionality and critique monolithic memory discourses (Petrowskaja), while also aiming to (re-)invest a stagnant culture of Holocaust memory with political urgency and futurity (Menasse). Subjunctivity thus emerges as a central yet underexamined mode of contemporary German-Jewish writing which has the potential to transform wider cultures of Holocaust (post-)memory, by moving ‘beyond the traumatic’ (Rigney 2018) in the direction of futurity.
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. ...Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven themes – autobiography, agency, forgetting, ethics, affect, space and institutional practices – are discussed. Each theme draws out a particular facet of the relationship between the content and contexts of vital memories and demonstrates that while vital memories frame problematic experiences, they remain essential for those who express them.
In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. ...While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic "politics of regret", the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed "postnational" approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a "European ethics of memory"). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational "essence", most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.
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