Digital ethnography, resistance art and communication media in Iran

Iranian visual materials relating to the presidential election crisis have the potential to become the sites of analysis and debate for fields as diverse as history, visual history, memory and post-memory, or trauma studies. References to memory are now omnipresent in scholarly discourse and in a wider public debate: ”social memory’, “collective remembrance”, “national memory”, “public memory”, “counter memory”, “popular history making” and “lived history” jostle for attention.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Making Ordinary: Recuperating the Everyday in Post-2005 Beirut Novels

I argue that young Lebanese novelists like Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman mobilize the ordinary as a way to 'write out' of the literary legacy of war and trauma writing that have characterized Lebanese fiction, without denying or suppressing Lebanon's violent past. I go on to argue that this discursive move of ‘making ordinary’ allows these writers to focus on pressing contemporary issues, such as a rising sense of economic and urban precarity in Beirut. In doing so, I bring the literary into conversation with the sociopolitical and the urban. I also make the case that this ‘descent into the ordinary’ compels us, as readers, towards a more nuanced understanding of such interventions by Lebanese youth into the multiple temporalities and shifting landscapes of Lebanon’s postwar period

Tiny jubilations: using photography in fiction

Zoë Strachan offers here an examination of the haunting power of photography as a creative stimulus. She discusses the use of photographs in Janice Galloway’s two autobiographies This is Not About Me (2008) and All Made Up (2011), as well as her own use of photographic inspiration for her currently untitled new novel, an extract from which closes the special issue

Suji Kwock Kim's “Generation” and the Ethics of Diasporic Postmemory

Regarding her highly acclaimed first book of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country, second-generation Korean American poet Suji Kwock Kim has stated that she considers the representation of the traumatic experiences of the Korean War as “the responsibility that one has, in terms of using the imagination as a means of compassion, and understanding things one couldn't have experienced.” If Notes from the Divided Country is a work created from a sense of ethical responsibility, we could perhaps also see it more specifically as a project of ethical memory and ask, along with ethnic studies scholar Jodi Kim, “What does it mean to want to represent or ‘remember’ a war that has been ‘forgotten’ and erased in the U.S. popular imaginary, but has been transgenerationally seared into the memories of Koreans and Korean Americans, and experienced anew every day in a still-divided Korea?” Notes from the Divided Country in many ways grapples with this very question and can be seen as an effort to remember the “Forgotten War” through vivid, chilling, moving poems that depict the enduring trauma of wartime violence from the perspective of diasporic postmemory. Taking Hirsch's work on Holocaust photos as a point of departure, this article reads in the poem “Generation” the poetics of postmemory and the ethics of memory from the perspective of diasporic subjectivity

Visible

I will never know what it means to be invisible. I will never know how it is to be able to kiss carelessly in the park, to just go for it. What it means to stroll in the streets and not have to deal with the fact that somebody might try and touch my hair as they walk by. How it is not to have to constantly self-soothe in monologues after a day of being asked multiple times whether one understands German. To dissolve in the crowd is not an option for me. I belong to several minority groups at once; to conceal this would entail more dangers for me than to name my positionalities

Georges Didi-Huberman, Écorces, and Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death – as Lager essays? Imagination and remembrance of the title formulations in relation to the formulation “anus mundi”

The article is an attempt at interpretation of two essays, which may be called „Lager” essays. These are Écorces written by G. Didi-Huberman and Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death written by O.D. Kulka, their books are deeply related as the negation or at least as the questioning of the title of autobiographical book Anus mundi written by W. Kielar. Both authors do not describe Nazi concentration camp as „the anus of the world”. Their imagination is a post-imagination, their memory is a post-memory. In her paper Kuczyńska-Koschany considers the condition of the essay as quasi-genre after the Holocaust, after the genocide and in reference to the experience of a Lager

Memory, Identity and Migrant Generations: Articulating Italianità in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Northern England through the Case of Kingston upon Hull

Owing to its geographical location and the collapse of its fishing and shipping industries, the UK city of Kingston upon Hull post-WWII rapidly acquired a reputation as a declining outpost of the British nation with no real links to the rest of the world. Yet, historically, Hull has always been a multicultural city that welcomed different migrant communities. Links with Italy, for instance, date back to the 1500s, as the recent ‘Italian Connections’ exhibition, held in one of the local museums, has shown. This exhibition was then also the opportunity to rediscover and reaffirm the existence of an Italian community in the city. This article presents a selection of stories from members of this community, which emerged during and immediately after the exhibition, as a means of exploring the nature of Hull’s historic Italian community and to analyse the extent to which an ‘Anglo-Italian’ identity emerges in this case. It focuses in particular on two case studies: the Coletta and Bottery families. Hirsh’s notion of post-memory and Bedingfield’s idea of trans-memory are used to investigate how members of these families view their Italian background and construct their identities, how memories are transmitted and “translated” across generations, which external factors impacted on their identity construction, and which image of Italy emerges from their recollections. Being able to discuss their family history matters to this group of people: they see this opportunity both as a mechanism by which to reaffirm their personal histories and heritage and as a way to uncover a hidden aspect of Hull’s past which can impact positively on the city’s future

It is not yet resolved. Post-memories of the Third Reich

This essay offers a reflection on the concepts of identity and personal narrative, a line of argument that is closely interlaced with a subject’s capacity to self-representation. As self-representation is necessarily composed upon remembrance processes, the question of memory as a collective phenomenon that directly influences identitary mechanisms becomes an emergent topic. Bearing this objective in mind, I shall point at the different types of memory and will argue that not only experienced memories play a key role in this process; intermediated, received narratives from the past, memories transmitted either symbolically or by elder members of the group or, what has been meanwhile termed “postmemory”, also influence the development of an individual’s identitary map. I shall link these issues to the generations of individuals that were born in the aftermath of Germany’s National-Socialist dictatorship, particularly by focusing on the literary representations and personal perspectives of contemporary German and Austrian writers, whose texts represent the concepts of trauma, identity and (post)memory in central Europe’s historical, political and social context

A Non-blocking Buddy System for Scalable Memory Allocation on Multi-core Machines

Common implementations of core memory allocation components handle concurrent allocation/release requests by synchronizing threads via spin-locks. This approach is not prone to scale with large thread counts, a problem that has been addressed in the literature by introducing layered allocation services or replicating the core allocators - the bottom most ones within the layered architecture. Both these solutions tend to reduce the pressure of actual concurrent accesses to each individual core allocator. In this article we explore an alternative approach to scalability of memory allocation/release, which can be still combined with those literature proposals. We present a fully non-blocking buddy-system, that allows threads to proceed in parallel, and commit their allocations/releases unless a conflict is materialized while handling its metadata. Beyond improving scalability and performance it is resilient to performance degradation in face of concurrent accesses independently of the current level of fragmentation of the handled memory blocks