Inherited memories : performing the archive

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-220).This thesis explores the way in which words, memories, and images of District Six are mediated and performed in an attempt to memorialised a destroyed urban landscape. It expands the borders of 'performance' to include oral (re)constructions of place by ex-residents, which in turn opens a space for a reflective analysis in which Marianne Hirsch’s psychodynamic theory of ‘postmemory’ is explored through the phrase ‘Children of District Six’. It traces the role and influence of ex-residents in shaping the politics and poetics of the District Six Museum and argues that orality and performance are singularly sympathetic in evoking and remembering the aesthetic, cultural, and political realms of District Six. It then shifts towards an analysis of two creative projects; Magnet Theater's Onnest’bo and the Museum’s Re-Imagining Carnival in which the themes of place, home, loss, exile, resistance, advocacy and restitution rotate around experiences of forced removals in general and District Six in particular. A thematic cord is created between these performance pieces and oral testimonies and their combined mediation of the many archives of District Six. Through an engagement with the performative odysseys and attendant archives of Re-Imagining Carnival and Onnest’bo the thesis examine metaphysical enactments of material loss, engages with tactics of re-construction of place and experience through memory, connects the psychic worlds of memory and performance and suggests an ideological flow between oral history, witnessing, and theatre. It is an exploration underpinned by the question of the role of performance in memorialising national narratives and the potential of creative mobilisations of memory in enacting psychic restitution. Both Onnest’bo and Re-Imagining Carnival are linked to the District Six Museum, and as such the Museum, its methodologies, ethics, ethos, and work with tangible and intangible heritage serve as an essential ideological foundation from which these creative visions emerge

‘The violent destruction of solid things’: Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime short stories

Elizabeth Bowen’s introduction to the American edition of The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1944) explores the feeling of ‘lucid abnormality’felt by many during the Second World War; in this collection of short stories, Bowen offers a portrayal of London life when ‘[t]he violent destruction of solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. This paper focuses on three specific stories from the collection; these stories – ‘The Inherited Clock’ (where time is literally stopped), ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Happy Autumn Fields’ – demonstrate Bowen’s own fascination with temporal discombobulations, depicting in the latter two stories the ‘destruction of solid things’ where time is no longer fixed and where ghosts from the past displace time in order to appear in the present.  Drawing on these stories, this paper discusses Benson’s use of temporal disturbances in her wartime Gothic stories to explore the fears of many in London who did not know ‘who the dead were’ and for whom ‘the destruction of solid things’ leads to a ‘rising tide of hallucination' for those struggling to live in a world torn apart by war

“Antigone’s Stance amongst Slovenia’s Undead.”

Memorialization in the form of the architectural statue can suggest that our stance towards the past is concrete while memorials in the form of repeated social activity represent reconciliation with the past as a continual process. Enacted memorials suggest that reconciliation with the past is not itself a thing of the past. Each generation must grapple with its inherited memories, guilt, and grief and self-consciously take its own stance towards that which came before it. This article considers Dominik Smole’s post World War II rewrite of Antigona as an enacted memorial within the context of socialist Yugoslavia. The practice of restaging Antigona in Slovenia may be seen as the practice of meta-memorialization, which routinely returns to the past while openly weighing the dangers of awakening the unburied dead against the dangers of letting the unaddressed conflicts of the past sleep

Setting the Record Straight: Cuban- Jewish Responses to the Holocaust (1938-1948)

This lecture by Dr. Rosa Perlmuter, professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discusses the complicated public, private and inherited memories of the Holocaust and its reception by the Jews of Cuba. Event held on Sunday, November 20,2016 at 2 PM at Jewish Museum of Florida- FIUhttps://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cri_events/1321/thumbnail.jp

From politics to nostalgia: the transformation of war memories in France during the 1960-1970s

This article discusses changes in collective memory of World War Two in France during the 1960s—1970s on the basis of a contextualized discussion of three films, all of which adopt, it is argued, a self-conscious politics of memory. The films are taken as examples of a particular relationship to World War Two that was historically possible in a given political context. As in most of the literature, ‘the 1968 years’ are taken as a moment of change, but it is argued here that they constituted the end rather than the start of a series of political challenges to collective memory of World War Two. During the 1970s representations of World War Two in cinema as well as public discourse more generally were increasingly historicized and disconnected from contemporary society, and thus de-politicized

Dancing with the dead generations after the Holocaust: a fictional blogged phenomenology and pedagogy of embodied post-Holocaust inherited memories via a/r/tography

This project is a self-reflexive philosophical thought experiment on Holocaust memory, imagery and pedagogy. I ask if the artist-researcher-teacher-I who is neither a survivor nor a daughter of a survivor, can present an image of the Holocaust that carries memories forward via inherited or vicarious memories gained through multiple means of gathering and storing memory information. I engage open-ended arts-based inquiry through writing and art, published Second Generation narratives, and post-Holocaust artists' theological, philosophical and artistic considerations of memory as I promote an art of memory and transformational pedagogy. I question which memory theories, theologies, and philosophies must inform an artist-researcher-teacher in order to intersect and interpret personal lived experience with that of eye-witnesses or other inheritors of Holocaust memories. My inquiry is located within larger issues of Holocaust studies: memory, art, narrative and curriculum research. I theorize Post-Holocaust imagination through self-reflexive arts-based research situated in a fluid, contingent fictional blog of a Second Generation teacher/artist wrestling with her inherited memories. Concepts of A/r/tography, an embodied art, research and teaching practice, are engaged as tools to inquire into sites and disciplines of post-Holocaust art making that interconnect to beget layers of additional or new understandings or unfold those hidden due to cultural, political or religious constructs or metanarratives. My inquiry does not end with a "final solution," but asks additional questions related to keeping alive Holocaust memory through arts and pedagogical theories and praxes that acknowledge present reality (dystopic) rather than hope for future perfection (utopic)

What to Conserve? Heritage, Memory, and Management of Meanings

This Paper explores and criticizes different theories and perceptions concerning ‘cultural heritage’ to explore the definitions of ‘heritage’ throughout history, and questions how the conflicts in considering and identifying ‘heritage’ might have affected the approaches to its conservation. In such process, the paper investigates the relation between ‘place’ and ‘memory’ and how place has been always the medium through which history was written, resulting in two inseparable faces, tangible and the intangible, forming the two-faced coin of ‘cultural heritage’. This research assists understanding the complex construct of heritage places; stressing the growing awareness of intangible heritage’s importance, which represents a remarkable turn in heritage conservation realm in the twenty-first century, and emphasizing the notion of heritage as a coefficient of society, which is understood through experience, learnt through performance, and represented through ‘activities’ formed in the present maintaining and developing the identity of place and preserving its spirit, rather than a past oriented vision that tends to ‘pickle’ images from the past in a picturesque manner that is only tourism-oriented

The Quale of Time

Time is one of the greatest subjects of interest to the disciplines of both Science and Philosophy, being seen to have a greater importance in the workings of reality than other entities. In this paper, a phenomenological analysis of time based on the general workings of the emergent structure of consciousness will be done, and time will be shown to be no different than any other qualia. It will be shown that, like any other qualia, time is an emergent level of consciousness, manifesting all the properties of emergence: inheritance of qualities from the previous levels, top-down influence in levels received from the higher levels and top-down influence in levels impressed on the lower levels

Hirsch, Sebald, and the Uses and Limits of Postmemory

Marianne Hirsch’s influential concept of postmemory articulates the ethical significance of representing trauma in art and literature. Postmemory, for Hirsch, “describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right”. Through appeal to philosophical work on memory, the ethics of remembering, and Peter Goldie’s discussion of empathy, I explore the virtues and limitations of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and the risks involved in empathic engagement in the past of another. This analysis informs my rejection of Hirsch’s attempt to place German author W.G. Sebald in league with the postmemory generation

Optimized Bacteria are Environmental Prediction Engines

Experimentalists have observed phenotypic variability in isogenic bacteria populations. We explore the hypothesis that in fluctuating environments this variability is tuned to maximize a bacterium's expected log growth rate, potentially aided by epigenetic markers that store information about past environments. We show that, in a complex, memoryful environment, the maximal expected log growth rate is linear in the instantaneous predictive information---the mutual information between a bacterium's epigenetic markers and future environmental states. Hence, under resource constraints, optimal epigenetic markers are causal states---the minimal sufficient statistics for prediction. This is the minimal amount of information about the past needed to predict the future as well as possible. We suggest new theoretical investigations into and new experiments on bacteria phenotypic bet-hedging in fluctuating complex environments.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/obepe.ht