Memory on Trial

Anders Høg Hansen, Oscar Hemer, Thomas Tufte (Eds.) Memory on Trial

MEMORY ON TRIAL Media, Citizenship and Social Justice

edited by Anders Høg Hansen Oscar Hemer Thomas Tufte

LIT Photooncover:Tank Man. Photo by Jeff Widener

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliograﬁe; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-643-90531-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© LIT VERLAGGmbH&Co.KGWien, Zweigniederlassung Zürich 2015 Klosbachstr. 107 CH-8032 Zürich Tel. +41 (0) 44-251 75 05 Fax +41 (0) 44-251 75 06 E-Mail: [email protected] http://www.lit-verlag.ch Distribution: In the UK: Global Book Marketing, e-mail: [email protected] In North America: International Specialized Book Services, e-mail: [email protected] In Germany: LIT Verlag Fresnostr. 2, D-48159 Münster Tel. +49 (0) 2 51-620 32 22, Fax +49 (0) 2 51-922 60 99, E-mail: [email protected] In Austria: Medienlogistik Pichler-ÖBZ, e-mail: [email protected] e-books are available at www.litwebshop.de CONTENTS

I Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice 3 Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE II The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Remembrance 13 Kendall R. PHILLIPS III The role of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ in sustainable development: Asking different questions in communication for development 25 Jo TACCHI IV Structural Amnesia in the 21st century 35 Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN V Global Injustice Memories 45 Thomas OLESEN VI Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance 57 Thomas TUFTE VII Countermemories, Counterpublics 73 Tamar K ATRIEL VIII Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre 85 S. Elizabeth BIRD IX Documentary Film, Collective Memory and the Public Sphere 99 Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON X Memoryscapes: Experiments in Oral History and Place-Based Media 111 Toby BUTLER XI Bengaluru Boogie 127 Oscar HEMER XII Memory, Mandela and the Politics of Death 145 Sarah NUTTALL

–i– XIII Space Oddities. Music and the Making of Living Archives 157 Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON Notes on Authors 175 Keywords and Names Index 179

–ii– I

MEMORY ON TRIAL.MEDIA,CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE

“The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge”, the Canadian-American painter Phillip Guston said back in 1965. He could not imagine “art without a trial”1. An impetus to this book – and its preceding festival with the same title, Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice – was to approach the memory sharing of groups, communities and societies as inevitable struggles over interpretation of, and authority over, particular stories. Coming to terms with the past in memory work, alone or with others, is always unsteady ground with its on-going search for truths and understanding – apropos Guston’s prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. But the trial also points forward: the activation of memory will always relay imaginations of futures we want to shape and inhabit. Here memory is elaborated upon, rstly, beyond its common- sensical understanding as a noun and container for storage of the xed that individuals or collectives may occasionally attempt to retrieve or re-excite (see e.g. Hoskins et al. 2008). Memory is also, secondly, approached beyond the individual work of relating to past experience either by intended recall or habitual forms, including those where memory sets off in the mind unexpectedly – a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea triggering childhood memories? What is at stake in this anthology is the making public of memory, what has been brought into the open, and where the sum – of public memory – becomes more than the individual parts. Memory needs social frames and contexts, otherwise it would icker like dreams in the theatre of consciousness, Schutz notes (in Hoskins et al. 2009: 11).

1 “The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance: it is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable”- Philip Guston, 1965 (quoted in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition, opened 4 July 2014).

–3– Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE

In this elaboration of memory evolving through social frames, there is an emphasis of memory as a painstaking but also resourceful and future-posing activity that makes it the very processor of social changes. It becomes an inevitable activity of the present with which groups, and the media footprints of societal memory they make, try to dene the past. Memory work also becomes work of catalysis necessary to try to take some kind of hold of the future. Temporary movements of the street, internet blogs, NGOs and governments, major archives, monument builders and History school curricula are domains or groups of people constantly engaged in activities of retrospection, imagination and reinterpretation, trying to give authority to and mediating particular stories. With this book we have tried to engage scholars and intellectuals that do not necessarily place themselves at the centre of memory studies within the humanities or social sciences, but who all share an interest in how citizens can actualize a public and how citizens and groups struggle with their pasts and presents – and other group’s understandings – in their work for futures they dream of, or envision. This leads into an engagement with the notion of social justice, which in turn implies trial and revision of ideas and procedures of how to share the world. But to share also takes some kind of common ground and distributed power. Memory is here understood as living, not just by providing access to the container or archive of societal memory, but the very contestation and use of memory as developing rather than dormant material – with help from Aleida Assmann (2010) this may be named working memory, as opposed to storage memory. Living memory implies events of activation where citizens create meaning of the present and near past by exploring or challenging understandings of societal development. The media, and their increasing ubiquity, both produce and conceal tensions between living memory and established history. They also continuously imprint on our memory and vice versa. The imprints are continuously written over, partly or fully, with new representations. But silenced or overwritten memories can also make their sudden return. This anthology engages with a range of cases that bring views and voices back in public, demanding justice, recognition, sometimes literally triggering new trials. Some of the bringing back of voices and views is done strategically, in the context of communication for development and social change interventions where NGOs, community-based organizations, governments or UN agencies pursue not just voice and views, but also very material demands for social justice and social change. A lot of the campaigns and strategies within communication for development and social change are driven by the impetus of meeting immediate needs, responding to urgent demands and promoting development as a process of constructing a better future with health, education and sustainable solutions to the various needs. However, no sustainable development process or strong sense of ownership, commitment and engagement can be articulated if it is not contextual-

–4– Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice ized and takes its point of departure in the histories and trajectories of the issues and people at stake. While the Western notion of development, and particularly that of the mod- ernization paradigm, has been severely criticized for its uniform, linear and economic growth orientation, the debates of post-development, post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism and other notions of development follow other criteria. They speak for example about development as ‘happiness’ and ‘the good life’ (de Souza Silva 2011) thus opening up for other histories, trajectories and narratives to be considered about development. In communicating about development in these contexts, living memory is an approach and a resource this book wishes to promote. Some memory work can be seen in communication for development interventions in the stories that are told, the genres that are chosen to convey these stories and in the media formats and channels applied. However, this book calls for a stronger in- corporation of living memory into the work of communication for development practitioners. Working with the public sphere is a strategic site for communicators for development. The public sphere may here be viewed as a memory of publics (see e.g. Phillips 2004), where issues are brought into the open, but maybe in fragmented publics, in plural, and taking globalization into account. Places and platforms are nevertheless where citizens come together and act and authorize certain memories. Acts of sharing, but also of including, excluding, and persuading, are inevitable in the struggle with/for public memory, which may remind us of Hannah Arendt’s notion of action, emphasizing the collective nature of a citizenry, disclosing and expressing itself with others (Arendt 1958: 182-200). It may be difcult to make a difference as a lone activist, whereas changing the world is easier to imagine for a group. We may nevertheless think of resistance that – while inevitably triggered by social circumstances – takes the form of a highly individualised action. When this introduction was drafted it was the 25th anniversary of the ‘Tank Man’ protest at Tiananmen Square. The most well-known and depicted documentation of the event is one photograph capturing a lone protester standing in front of four driving tanks (the column was much longer) brought to a halt. It was 5 June 1989, the day after the Chinese government had removed a larger group of demonstrators by force from the square. The photo is an example of how an incident may be framed by media and then distributed. It has become a well-known and globalized ‘ashbulb’ memory (Brown and Kulik, 1977 in Hoskins et al. 2009: 12), a glimpse of an incident many people remember. A media memory of a magnitude implying that those that are old enough recall where they were, or what they were doing, when they heard about it or saw it on TV. What is not captured in the photo is further drama and story development: the man crawls up on top of the rst halted tank, has a conversation with a driver, then leaves, but when the column begins to move again, ‘Tank man’ returns and makes

–5– Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE them stop again. Soon he is pulled away by two guards. Who he was and what happened to him, we don’t know. Here, media do not just function as tools or channels for the distribution. When engaging with possible change, practices of communication become important means of articulating and scrutinizing change, revisiting our pasts and mapping out futures. The conict between ofcial history, or the hegemonic narrative of History books (History with a capital ‘H’) and its alternative, revisionist or silenced voices, has long been of concern in the humanities – and with the advent of new social media practices in the 21st century, the fragmentation of a public may, on a positive note, open for a proliferation of voices and more peer-to-peer and group-to-group exchanges, also across distance, although not replacing more traditional one-to- many mass communication. The potentiality of citizen engagement around social justice is of importance in societal debates concerning what, how and for whom we remember, not least in transitional processes of attempted healing and reconciliation after incidents of massacres or mass-violence. Such traumatic events are most often concealed, and witnesses silenced or ignored, either to preserve im- punity for the perpetrators, or for the sake of “moving on.” Yet telling the story in all its horric detail may be a prerequisite for true reconciliation. Whether for- mally, through truth commissions and memorials, or informally, through grassroots initiatives or artistic interventions, memories of collective trauma need to be constructed and maintained, in order for a society to acknowledge and possibly come to terms with appalling and shameful parts of its history. The notion of “transitional justice” is usually associated with formal judicial processes that bring punishment and redress. But sanctioning memory, honouring the dead, and allowing the suppressed stories to be told can arguably also be dened as a form of justice, regardless of legal procedures, as demonstrated by the proliferation of truth commissions in the last decades, although the real impact of these extra-legal commissions with regard to (national) reconciliation is a highly disputed matter.2 Today’s discourse on memory within the humanities and social sciences emerged in the 1980s, with the Holocaust as its fundamental reference, and reached momentum in the late ’90s, when rst-hand experience of the Nazi death camps was beginning to disappear. Our knowledge of the Shoah has long been conned to what James E. Young (2000) calls history’s after-images. Dis- cussing the after-image of the Shoah in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, Young’s colleague Marianne Hirsch (1997) coined the concept postmemory for

2 Cf. for example the legal prosecution of the Argentinean military Junta leaders and the still ongoing trials against perpetrators of ‘’the dirty war” in the 1970s to the amnesty process of the South African TRC (Hemer, 2012). For a thorough discussion of traumatic memory and transitional justice, see Bird and Ottanelli (2015).

–6– Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice this intermediate state between (personal) ‘memory’ and (public) ‘history’. Post- memory, as Hirsch denes it, applies specically to the second generation; those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, and whose own stories are overshadowed or even eradicated by the traumatic experiences of the parent-generation. The postmemory concept has since appeared in many other contexts of contested traumatic experiences, for example in Argentina with regard to the children of the disappeared (see e g. Beatriz Sarlo’s intriguing comparison of the “post- memories” of the generation of the guerrillas and those of their children, in Sarlo 2005), and lately in Spain, where the third and fourth generations of the victims of the terror during and after the Civil War (1936-39) are coming forth, demanding recognition and justice for their murdered grand and grand grandparents. Spain, often presented as the model for a successful transition from dictatorship to democracy, is also an example of the perils of closing the book on the contested past without either a judicial process or a truth commission (see e. g. Martin-Ortega and Alija-Fernández in Bird and Ottanelli 2015). An even more striking example of the lingering consequences of silenced trauma is the partition of British India in 1947, which displaced some twelve million people and caused the death of up to one million in gruesome communal violence. No ofcial memorial has ever been raised over the victims of the Partition. There are many examples of different ways to deal with the societal impact of violent conict, whether ethnic, religious (communal, sectarian) or political (“national liberation”, revolution), and whether imposed by the state (“combating terrorism”) or by insurgent groups or paramilitary organizations. The rationale for suppressing or discouraging performances of traumatic memory may be, as in the two disparate cases of Spain and India, that these performances have the potential to iname latent conicts and instigate new outbursts of violence. However, as Eva Hoffman argues, suppressing the “long afterlife of loss” may also deprive the next generation of the ability not only to validate the suffering of the past, but to use that memory constructively in the future (Hoffman 2010: 414). Literature and art have likewise played an important role for the public memory and processing of the perpetrated violence and its consequences. The ctional accounts are supplementary to testimonies and documentary accounts, especially when testimonies are absent, but they may also sometimes question and even stand in opposition to the testimonials, defying both the ofcial history and the alternative counter-history, as demonstrated in the Argentinean discussion of the Malv- inas/Falklands War (Hemer in Bird and Ottanelli 2015). This tension between c- tion and truth attains crucial importance when it comes to historical events where few or none of the rst-hand witnesses are still alive, as in the cases of the Spanish Civil War and the Indian Partition (as well as the Holocaust). The understanding

–7– Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE and imagination of these events is largely shaped and conveyed through ctional mediations. Implicitly or explicitly, the common denominator for these theoretical and empirical explorations is to demonstrate how ‘living memory’ work can be crucial for citizens to move forward as plural collectives (or counter collectives) and create or revitalize publics that engage in social justice debates and change processes.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The anthology is divided into two parts. Part I presents the scene of the inquiry with primarily theoretical discussions exploring approaches to memory, media and communication studies. Part II directs orientation towards actual empirical and locational cases, bringing in practices of art, movements and ethnographic reections with the aim of providing elaborations on how memory work ignites public debate and re-actualises particular pasts or issues/memories of concern for particular groups. Kendall R. Phillips (chapter 2) explores contests over our recollections and interpretations of the past and the considerable anxiety they provoke. His chapter suggests that the struggle over how to remember the past can be productively understood as a rhetorical process. The relationship between memory and the art of rhetoric is pursued through the historical connection between these concepts in ancient western philosophy. Focusing on this relationship suggests attending to the processes by which the past is debated as an indicator of democratic culture. Jo Tacchi (chapter 3) examines how voice, stillness and nostalgia may play a progressive role in debates around development. Her contribution addresses the role of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ in a contemporary concern for sustainability in international development. Communication for development and social change increasingly thinks about sustainable development and the importance of grounding our understandings of development processes within local contexts. While closer consideration of complex local contexts adds to understandings of processes of social change, ideas about culture and tradition can be considered backward looking and contrary to the forward-looking, progress-oriented goals of development itself. Tacchi challenges that culture and tradition are backward looking and focuses on ideas of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ as evoked through close study of media practices. She considers how notions of voice and listening might be understood as moments of stillness in a fast moving and mobile world, and how experiences of nostalgia can be considered as located in the present, and part of aspirations for the future.

–8– Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice

While Tacchi turns her focus towards new ways of viewing nostalgia and stillness, Thomas Hylland Eriksen (chapter 4) turns his attention to a structural amnesia as a distinct feature of global modernity. The term, coined to describe how tribal genealogies in Africa tended to vanish into the mists of oblivion after the fth or sixth generation, applies to present-day society’s concealing of its imma- nent “double bind”, that is the dual impossibility of continued economic growth and its reversal (“degrowth”). If the past is no longer convincingly connected to the present, because imagined futures do not shed a particularly attering light on the past to which we have been committed for generations, then the only credible response consists in reinventing the past to make it suitable for a meaningful present and future. Hence, Eriksen suggests that we replace the “standard modern script” with an ecological multispecies history, and a history of human justice and happiness rather than progress and development. Thomas Olesen (chapter 5) addresses the possible global character of collective memory, and in particular global injustice memories. The last couple of decades have witnessed a virtual boom in academic works on collective memory. This body of work has made great strides in our understanding of the social and political character of memories. The literature remains limited, however, when it comes to the global character of some collective memories. Olesen suggests a number of empirical cases that can potentially be addressed from a global memory perspective. He also offers a range of suggestions for crucial analytical themes and discusses the relationship between global memories and global society. The focus of the chapter is on global injustice memories, i.e. memories based on events that entail perceived injustice towards individuals or collectives. Thomas Tufte (chapter 6) builds on Kendall R. Phillips’ notion of public memory as a rhetorical strategy and elaborates on an argument on how memory work can add a new dimension to both the research and practice of communication for development and social change. What is often overlooked is how memory constitutes a hidden resource in communicating for social change. In this chapter, Tufte proposes a three-pronged diachronic dimension to research in and practice of communication for development and social change. Recognizing public memory as both a rhetorical and political strategy and being attentive to the challenges of translating the past into a meaningful present altogether constitute stepping stones, both in planning communication for social change strategies and in understanding their dynamics and potential. This diachronic dimension, Tufte argues, can furthermore prove a useful pathway to deepen our understanding of what really happened with the ‘eruption’ of social movements in recent years. Tamar Katriel begins Part II (chapter 7) with a study on the Israeli veteran’s organization Breaking the Silence and their counter-discourse to a culture of silence surrounding the reality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Tamar discusses how this silence has been punctuated by voices of public dissent.

–9– Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE

One such counter-discourse is generated, circulated and archived by Breaking the Silence. Amassing soldiers’ testimonies of their experiences as upholders of the regime in the Palestinian territories, the organization’s memory activism seeks to trigger open discussion of the country’s military policies and their moral implications. Capitalizing on their authentic knowledge of the occupation regime, which is rooted in their embodied presence and participation in its day-to-day life, the soldier-witnesses circulate personal accounts of what they did, saw and felt during their military service in the Palestinian territories. They ground their project in a speech culture that highlights the value of deant truth-telling, and use personal experience stories in attempting to constitute counterpublics that would support the kind of open public debate they envision. The testimonial project of Break- ing the Silence demonstrates the possibilities and entanglements of ‘memory activism’ as a form of civic engagement within the wider eld of anti-occupation protest in Israeli contentious politics – and beyond. S. Elizabeth Bird’s case study (chapter 8) also addresses attempts to counter silenced or minimally reported stories. She focuses on an incident in the early months of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967, when the civilian population of Asaba was decimated in an unprovoked attack by Nigerian federal troops. The massacres went largely unreported in the press and subsequently received minimal attention in civil war histories. The people of Asaba have remembered, and are now attempting to re-inscribe their story into the ofcial collective memory of Nigeria. Bird’s recollection touches on the role of “old media” in suppressing the story, before moving to a discussion of the collaborative process of “reclaiming” the narrative and working to inscribe the lost history into the collective memory of the country, providing a form of overdue justice. Such public re-inscription is inevitably contested, but no more so than in a country still embroiled in ethnic and religious conict. Bird discusses the potential of new media to provide sites in which such “memory work” may take place. From Israel-Palestine over Africa to Latin America: Alfonso Gumucio Dagron (chapter 9) focuses on memory in relation to documentary lm and movies. How does a movie remember? If a lm aims to share or disclose the past, how do images activate the viewer’s memory? What do we remember when we see a lm? How do we create social relationships with the past through images? Being a lmmaker, a communication for development practitioner, and a researcher himself, Gumucio takes us on a tour de force through documentary lm history, exploring how the documentary lm debate has revolved around reality, truth and memory. Filmmaking implies choices and decisions that are creative as well as political and ideological. This also counts in the ways documentary lm works with memory. Focusing on Latin American documentary lm, Gumucio Dagron ends his essay by making a particular call for the urgency to use lm to preserve the memory of people and cultures, a call for the need to

–10– Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice also make an effort to preserve lm archives per se, and nally he calls for political will to strengthen collective processes of documentary lm production at the community level. In Chapter 10 Toby Butler unveils his journey of developing an oral history practice to create walking trails, or ‘memoryscapes’, that incorporate oral history recordings into our experience of the landscape. Along the way he explains why he spent weeks in a rowing boat on the River Thames, intensely following otsam for fteen miles, and how that experience opened up for the creative potential of using oral history in place-based media. Chapter 11 continues in the experimental mode as an attempt of approaching the present past by means of what Oscar Hemer tentatively calls “ethnographic ction”. The city of Bangalore (Bengaluru) is portrayed in a form of meta- reportage that juxtaposes impressions of three journeys to the “IT metropolis”, in 2003 and 2013. Hemer’s literary recollection is interspersed with photographs by Bangalore-based artist Ayisha Abraham. Sarah Nuttall (chapter 12) considers the questions posed by the rubric of ‘memory on trial’ by reecting on the slow death of Nelson Mandela. She considers not only Mandela’s own attitudes to death and dying as well as his confrontation with his own possible death as early as 1964, but also how he dealt with the deaths of others in the context of his twenty-seven years in prison. Mandela’s actual death and the attempts by his family to extract money out of the event raised discussions on the relationship between death, memory and money. Nuttall argues that the task now is to interpret the meaning of his life in relation to other global gures such as Gandhi and King, an area where surprisingly little scholarship has been done. With the nal chapter (13), Anders Høg Hansen and Erling Björgvinsson take us back to one of the cities where early versions of these chapters were presented in 2013: the city of Malmö, Sweden. The chapter explores a recent attempt to archive and make publicly visible on the Internet, a productive historical era of popular folk-song writing in the city of Malmö. While introducing a local cultural association’s now over 500 song lyrics archive (Project Malmö Folk Song), the chapter concentrates on an analysis of a selection of songs from the archive and their portrayal of one of the oldest public parks in the world, Folkets Park (People’s Park) in Malmö. It questions how the park is represented as a place for different forms of public memory and citizen activity, socially and politically. The chapter also engages with the project’s various means of preserving and revitalizing a musical heritage as a ‘living archive’. This volume is the outcome of the third Ørecomm Festival, a four-day academic and artistic event in Malmö, Roskilde and Copenhagen in September 2013, with the title Memory on Trial. Media, Citizenship and Social Justice. The yearly Ørecomm Festival was initiated in 2011 by researchers active in the Ørecomm

–11– Anders Høg HANSEN, Oscar HEMER, Thomas TUFTE

Center for Communication and Global Change, a bi-national collaboration between Roskilde University in Denmark and Malmö University in Sweden. We are happy that most of the keynote speakers at the Memory on Trial conference have developed their work into chapters for this anthology.

REFERENCES

Assman, A. (2010). ‘Canon and Archive’ in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Erll and Nünning (eds). Berlin: De Gruyter. Bird, S. E., and F. Ottanelli (eds.)(2015). The Performance of Memory as Transitional Justice. Mortsel, Belgium and Cambridge, U.K: Intersentia. De Souza, S. (2011). Hacia el ‘Día Después del Desarrollo’. Descolonizar la comu- nicación y la educación para construir comunidades felices con modos de vida sostenibles. Asunción: Editorial Arandurã. Hemer, O. (2012). Fiction and Truth in Transition. Writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina. Münster: LIT Verlag. Hemer, O. (2015). Memories of Violence: Literature and transitional justice in Argentina, in Bird and Ottanelli Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: photography, narrative and postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Hoffman, E. (2010). “The Long Afterlife of Loss”, in Radstone, S., and B. Schwarz (eds.). Memory: histories, theories, debates. 1st ed. New York: Fordham University Press. Hoskins, A., Hansen, J. G. and A. Reading (eds.) (2009). Save As. . . Digital Memories. London: Palgrave. Martin-Ortega, O., and R. A. Alija-Fernandez (in press). “Where is my Grandfather? Im- punity and Memory in Spain”, in Bird and Ottanelli. Phillips, K. (ed.) (2004). Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Sarlo, B. (2005). Tiempo pasado: cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo: una discusión. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Young, J. (2000). At Memory’s Edge: after-images of the Holocaust in contemporary art and architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

–12– II

THE ABSENCE OF MEMORY:RHETORIC AND THE QUESTION OF PUBLIC REMEMBRANCE

Kendall R. PHILLIPS

The importance of our collective understanding of our past is rarely more evident than when that understanding is challenged. Controversies over public memory provoke anxiety because they lay bare both the importance of our collective narratives of our shared past and the underlying fragility of these narratives. Such contests arise around issues ranging from questions of geopolitical borders and past atrocities to seemingly more trivial issues such as the aesthetic choices for monuments. At the time of this writing, there are profound political questions over, for instance, whether Crimea belongs in Russia or the Ukraine. While this crisis is driven by a variety of broad geopolitical tensions, it is also a question of which nation can lay a historical claim to the peninsula and its people.1 Other disputes arise over issues seemingly less provocative than a military invasion. An August 15, 2013 visit by senior Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine for Japanese war dead on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, for instance, provoked strong condemnations from both the Chinese and South Ko- rean governments who saw the ceremony as “an intrinsic attempt to deny and beautify that history of invasion by the Japanese militarists.” At about the same time, in the United States, the recently completed Martin Luther King, Jr. monument was resurfaced to remove an inaccurate quotation from the Civil Rights Leader. National Park Service superintendent Bob Vogel acknowledged the controversy and the $800,000 cost of the x by noting, “It’s certainly a hassle, but that’s the story of every memorial. I can’t think of one that hasn’t elicited contro-

1 As Patrick Jones writes for the BBC: “Russian bonds to the peninsula stretch back more than two centuries, over a timeline punctuated by bloody sieges of Sevastopol. One remark you constantly hear is that Crimea is historically ‘steeped in Russian blood’.” Patrick Jones, “Ukraine Crisis: A Guide to Russia’s Vision of Crimea,” BBC News. (24 March 2014). {urlhttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26695808.

–13– Kendall R. PHILLIPS versy.”2 While these are only a small sampling from the wider range of disputes over public memory, they suggest the potentially profound consequences from our contests over the past. In this chapter, I want to suggest that the various and ongoing contests over the past can be productively framed by thinking about the rhetoric of public memory. While in much of the contemporary world the term ‘rhetoric’ is understood to mean ‘mere talk’ and ‘fancy words instead of action,’ I want here to recover the term’s rich and productive origins in the ancient Greek and Roman traditions. In these traditions, rhetoric can be dened as the art of public persuasion – the practice of public speaking and debate – and in this way it is the rst and most essential art of citizenship. In Athens, for instance, the study of rhetoric was a crucial element to a democratic society instructing young citizens in the arts of advocacy, argumentation and the delicate practice of reasoning in public. Indeed, one of the spheres of public life most concerned with the art of rhetoric was the judicial realm, which as Aristotle notes, is a species of rhetoric essentially concerned with the past; did a certain act happen and what were the circumstances of its occurrence. The rhetorical question of judicial discourse, however, entailed not only the occurrence and circumstances of past acts but, essentially, questions of whether these acts should be deemed just or unjust. Thus, inquiries into the relationship between public memory and social justice seem likely to entail questions of rhetoric. Taking a step further, as I have argued elsewhere, the very notion of public memory can be understood as deeply rhetorical (Phillips 2004). Acts of public remembrance are ultimately persuasive acts – encouraging us to engage the past in particular ways, to accept particular narratives about ourselves, and these collectively accepted memories themselves become the bases upon which we deliberate about our future. Thus, public memory can be conceived in at least two ways: rst, as those collectively shared memories that serve to constitute us as a public and, second, as the means and mediums through which we publicize these narratives and images of our past. Both aspects work together in a dynamic and often disjointed way such that the memories of diverse publics come into conict and competition in disputes and controversies over whose version of the past will serve as the foundation for deliberations about our collective future. Given this initial sense of the relationship between rhetoric and remembrance, it should come as no surprise that the two concepts share a long connection in western intellectual thought. In seeking to frame the disputes over public remembrance in terms of rhetoric, I want here to trace one of these connections in the

2 Anotnio Slodkowski, “Japanese visits to shrine on war anniversary anger China.” Reuters.(15 August 2013); Meredith Somers. “Truncated King quote removed from memorial.” Washington Times (1 August 2013).

–14– The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Remembrance hopes of suggesting a rhetorical perspective on the dynamic processes by which public memories are constituted, contested and transformed.

ABSENCE IN MEMORY AND RHETORIC

As my title suggests, I begin this exploration of the intersection between rhetoric and memory with the notion of absence. Both rhetoric and memory can be understood as constituted in part by their engagement with absence – with things that are not or are no longer present. For rhetoric, this seems clear. We do not seriously debate issues that are already resolved or a question with a clear and obvious answer. Rather, real world political debates concern issues that are uncertain and questions without clear answers. In this way, rhetoric is understood as an art of the contingent and the pursuit of judgment about matters that cannot be treated with certainty. Or, thought of another way, rhetoric is as an art of crafting judgments within a space of absence – the absence of certainty. Memory too can be thought of as emerging within the space of absence. Put simply, we do not remember that which is in front of us. You are not remembering reading these words though if I do my job effectively I hope you will recall this chapter in the future. Memory is fundamentally the peculiar experience of the presence of things absent. Paul Ricoeur has argued that this is the crucial dis- tinctness of the experience of memory, the “aporia of the presence of absence” (Ricoeur 2004: 10). Aporia becomes the crucial notion – the irresolvable tension or contradiction at the heart of a concept or experience; for memory, it is the irresolvable contradiction of that which is absent being presented. This aporia is also the source of much of our anxiety about those memories we understand to constitute our collective identities. The cultural admonition “Never Forget” is implied in every monument, memorial site, and commemorative holiday. It is the animating force for our archives, our history books, and our popular narratives. But there is a gentle irony in the admonition “never forget”: namely, that we base this command upon the premise that a particular event or person is so important that they must not be forgotten. Lingering in this premise, however, is the animating anxiety that in spite of the asserted importance of the object to be remembered it may, in fact, not be remembered. Or, to push the point a bit more, might be remembered differently. Ricoeur considered this “The fundamental vulnerability of memory, which results from the relation between the absence of the thing remembered and its presence in the mode of representation” (Ibid.: 58). The slippery relationship between the absence of the thing to be remembered and the modes through which it is presented constitutes the basis of our collective struggles with the past and in a

–15– Kendall R. PHILLIPS way these struggles can be understood as a battle between divergent presentations of the past: whose memory of borders, atrocities, obligations, vendettas, etc. shall become the basis upon which we seek justice and attempt to forge a future. Whose memories of the past will call us to pride or shame, to revolution or reconciliation, to praise or blame? The potential consequences of memory’s vulnerability led Plato to have deep skepticism about it.3 In one of the most striking and inuential metaphors for memory, Plato likens it to the imprint left in wax. In the Theaetetus, Plato writes: Now I want to suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another, and of purer wax in one case, dirtier in another . . . . We may look upon it, then, as a gift of Memory, the mother of the muses. We have impressions upon this of everything we wish to remember among the things we have seen or heard or thought of ourselves. Whatever is impressed upon the wax we remember and know so long as the image remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know (Plato 1992: 191d-e). In this brief passage we already begin to sense some of the sources of Plato’s anxiety about memory. First, each of us is given a different capacity for memory – softer or harder, cleaner or dirtier wax within which the impression is left. Second, there is the ever present danger that that which is impressed upon us either does not leave a strong enough impression or that this impression is obliterated by other impressions. At rst glance, the main concern here seems to be that of forgetting – either because of our own diminished capacity or because of the circumstances of a weak or obliterated impression. A broader look at the Theaetetus, however, reveals a slightly different concern – not forgetting but remembering differently. Plato’s discussion of memory is motivated not by his concern for the lack of remembrance but by a concern for our ability to render false judgments. The source of misremembering, for Plato, lies in the aporia of the absence that memory appears to present. For Plato this fundamental absence – the empty space left by the impression – renders memory a dangerous source for knowledge and for judgment. Interestingly, Plato – at least in his early dialogue The Gorgias – rejects rhetoric for almost exactly the same reason. In his repudiation of the early teachers of rhetoric – the Sophists – Plato rejects rhetoric for creating the “appearance” of truth and virtue instead of producing real truth and virtue. For Plato, the beliefs created by the arts of persuasion are false images of the kinds of truth created through rigorous philosophical dialectic. Plato feared rhetoric’s capacity to create

3 What follows is a rehearsal of an argument I have made earlier in: (2010). “The Failure of Memory: Reections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance.” Western Journal of Communica- tion, 74, 208-223.

–16– The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Remembrance collective opinion just as he feared memory’s capacity for creating false memories – both are illusions that lead us away from more fundamental truths (Plato 1994). Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, shared his teacher’s anxieties about both rhetoric and memory and provided a similar approach to both. For rhetoric, Aristotle urged a more systematic and rigorous approach to public persuasion and insisted – in the rst passage of his work On Rhetoric – that the study of rhetoric be connected to dialectic and recognized as a means of amplifying philosophical truths to the masses. Crucial to Aristotle’s “rehabilitation” of the art of rhetoric was its alignment with a more rigorous, systematic and dialectically-based means of persuasion. Rhetoric’s potential to create false beliefs, in Aristotle’s eyes, could be limited by its strict adherence to a rigorous disciplining of belief and sub- servience to philosophically derived notions of truth and ethics. Aristotle’s approach to rhetoric would be highly inuential on later students of rhetoric including Cicero and Quintilian (Aristotle 1991). We nd a similar approach in Aristotle’s discussion of memory. In his treatise, “On Memory and Recollection,” he carefully distinguishes memory from recollection. For Aristotle, memory is understood as the largely unbidden appearance of images of the past – the way a particular smell, for instance, might elicit memories of one’s childhood. Recollection, on the other hand, is the intentional and deliberate recall of information or ideas. For Aristotle, undisciplined memory, as with Plato, is an unreliable and in ways unruly process by which the past emerges within the space of absence created by earlier impressions. In contrast to unruly memory and as a means of disciplining it, Aristotle suggests recollection as a more systematic approach by which memories are intentionally solicited through a process of self-discipline. Indeed, he argues, “As a rule, those people remember well who are slow-witted, while on the other hand those excel in powers of recall who are clever and quick at learning” (Aristotle 1973: 449b). Memory, thus, is a capacity more connected to the slow-witted – those who are taken over by the undisciplined return of the past; where recollection, as a disciplined recall of the past, is more associated with the intelligent and capable. Just as with rhetoric, Aristotle’s orientation towards memory would also prove remarkably inuential to later students of the concept. As Frances Yates has shown in her monumental work The Art of Memory, disciplines of recollection were a principle component of western thought continuing into the Middle Ages and for much of this period, it is worth noting the art of memory was deeply embedded within the art of rhetoric. The unknown author of the highly inuential Roman work Rhetorica ad Herenium would call memory, “the treasure-house of inventions, the custodian of all the parts of rhetoric” and so memory, or memoria, would be preserved as one of the essential canons for the study of rhetoric (Yates 1966). But the Greco-Roman relationship between the art of memory and the art

–17– Kendall R. PHILLIPS of rhetoric would not last, and in some important ways the dissolution of their union would have profound effects on our contemporary orientation to both public persuasion and public memory. By the Middle Ages, memory would no longer be considered part of rhetoric and when the French educational reformer Peter Ramus began reassigning the expansive aspects of rhetoric, memory would be relegated to a process of repetition and rhetoric itself would be relegated primarily to issues of tropes and style.4 Both the art of memory and the art of rhetoric would be largely removed from active involvement in public life and disputation. Rhetoric’s place in the education of the citizen supplanted by studies of philosophy, ethics and politics; memory replaced by ofcial histories. In both cases, we can see the fruits of Aristotle’s early efforts at disciplining the dangerous uncertainty of both public disputation and public memory. The unruly practices of public dissension and controversy become reconstituted as more formalized processes of debate – the dynamic discussions of the Greek agora replaced rst by the rationalized space of the coffee houses and salons – here I’m gesturing towards Habermas’s notion of the public sphere and specically his early rejection of rhetoric as “strategic communication” – then by the social scientic aggregation of individual opinions into public opinion research that now seems to guide most democratic governments (Habermas 1990). The scientic rationalization of democracies seeks to remove the contingencies of uncertainty – erasing the space of absence between the present and the future.5 The discipline of History, at least in its most traditional form, can be understood as performing a similar function. As Pierre Nora has noted, “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects opposed.” In Nora’s conception, memory is “in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways to appropriation and manipulation.” In contrast, history is a “reconstruction” and “representation of the past” and, “being an intellectual, nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical discourse” (Nora 1996: 3). In both cases – the rationalization of popular judgment and of public recollection – we nd the aporia of absence erased. The contingency that lies as the aporia at the heart of rhetorical practice is replaced by the careful sciences of public opinion and, in ways, of economics, marketing and public relations. The uncertainty that lies at the heart of memory is replaced by the careful recording of history and the ofcial crafting of archives, monuments and museums. What I have hoped to recover in this brief stroll through the ancient histories of

4 Yates notes, “Naturally, the omission of memory from rhetoric means that the articial memory is discarded, and repetition or learning by heart becomes the only art of memory advised” (Ibid: 228). 5 For a fuller discussion of the contrast between rhetorical and scientic views of opinion see, Hauser 1999.

–18– The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Remembrance both rhetoric and memory is their fundamental interconnection in western thought. While the two concepts would be both separated and diminished in later eras, the anxiety attached to each would remain. Even in the current era there is an anxiety – rooted in early Greek thought – about memory’s capacity to present visions of an uncertain past and rhetoric’s capacity to articulate persuasive visions of an uncertain future. It seems to me that this anxiety is rooted in the fundamental aporia of absence in both memory and rhetoric. And the response to anxieties surrounding both the presentation of the past and the articulations of the future has been to apply a scientic rationalization to both in an effort to ll the space of absence with mechanisms of discipline that seek to establish order and certainty.

MEMORY AND RHETORIC IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE TENSE

What would it look like to engage the aporia of absence that lies at the heart of memory and rhetoric? What kinds of questions would we need to ask and where might these questions lead us? In a way the rst problem we face is how to frame these question in the rst place. How can we talk about memory – Should we say that a memory is or should we say that a memory was? In this simple grammatical conundrum we are struck precisely with the aporia Ricoeur mentioned – the problem of the presenting of absence. If memory is present, then it is and should be addressed in the present tense. If memory is something that was here but is now absent, then it was and, as such, should be addressed in the past tense. Yet, neither tense seems quite right. This may seem a mere inconvenience of the limits of grammar, especially the grammar of the English language, but there is a more fundamental issue at stake in seeking to choose an orientation towards memory – either in the present or past tense. Either choice is another means of eliding the aporia of absence – If the past “was” then “is” is absent and we need not be concerned with its presence in the present; or if it is, then we need not concern ourselves with its absence in the past. What is needed, then, is a new orientation – a different grammatical tense by which we can engage memory through the aproia of absence rather than around it. Charles Scott suggests a different grammatical frame for engaging memory precisely through its aporia: the subjunctive. The basic denition of subjunctive is a grammatical tense of verbs expressing what is possible or imagined. In a more theoretical mode, Scott contends, “the subjunctive is a mood of noncomple- tion contrary to fact. It names a dimension of occurrences outside the range of declarative statements. Subjunctive phrasing indicates or betokens indeterminate contingency, possibility and mood” (Scott 2004). Following this argument, we are

–19– Kendall R. PHILLIPS led not to say memory is or was but, rather, that memory might or could. And if we are to enter into the realm of the contingent – the subjunctive mood of “might” “could” or “would” – then we have also entered into the realm of rhetoric as an art of forging and contesting judgments about contingent matters. We can have robust debates, disputes and controversies over the “might have” and the “could have” – precisely the kinds of rowdy discussions that provoked anxiety in both Plato and Aristotle. And, just as importantly, a contingent matter need not – indeed cannot – be settled or resolved into perpetuity. Decisions made can be unmade, verdicts overturned, opinions changed. The contingent and subjunctive nature of public memory can be observed in any number of memorial projects. As an example, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is now widely regarded as a sacred American site; a place of reection and healing. It was, however, not always so universally embraced. As Marita Sturken recounts, “When it was rst unveiled, the design was condemned by certain veterans and others as a highly political statement about the shame of an unvictorious war. The memorial was termed the ‘black gash of shame and sorrow,’ a ‘degrading ditch’, a ‘tombstone’, ‘a slap in the face’, and a ‘wailing wall for draft dodgers and New Lefters of the future”’ (Sturken 1997: 51). Indeed, the US Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, only allowed Lin’s design to go forward with the promise of a nearby compensatory memorial, which took the form of Frederick Hart’s gural sculpture “The Three Soldiers” (Kammen 2006). From the standpoint of the present, in which the Wall is widely embraced, the controversies at its unveiling might seem reactionary. However, it is worth noting that the controversies around the memorial’s design also constituted sites in which broader public arguments about the Vietnam War, and indeed the nature of war in American culture, could be engaged. Read in this way, one might specu- late that the controversies around the memorial’s design constituted an important democratic moment and, counter to popular opinion, that the memorial’s now sacred status is not so much a step forward as a step backward. Harry Haines, for instance, critiques the apparent consensus created by the embrace of the Wall’s aesthetic and argues, “Where disagreement existed, a consensus is manufactured which attempts to integrate the Vietnam veteran with other veterans and to nor- malize the Vietnam War in terms of other wars” (Haines 1986). Writing in 1986, Haines’ perspective is prescient. America’s notable reluctance to engage in overt military operations in the years immediately following the difculties of Viet- nam began to erode and between the early 1990s and the present, America has developed a markedly different vision of the Vietnam War, its soldiers, and its orientation to military action. I seek here not to condemn, nor praise, Lin’s design nor to lay at its doorstep the last twenty years of American foreign policy. Rather, I note the complex nature of the way ofcial memories seek to resolve the question of the past, to establish

–20– The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Remembrance certainty and clarity of both fact and feeling. At times, as with Lin’s memorial, these efforts prove remarkably successful. Yet, as I’ve suggested, the nature of both memory and rhetoric suggest that these effort to establish certainty will be met with contingency as both our arguments and our recollections struggle against the fundamental absence of indeterminacy and contingency that lies at their heart. From an analytic point of view, I believe this recommends great attention be paid not to the ways contests over the past are resolved but the dynamic nature of the contests themselves. At a practical level, embracing the aporia of absence that connects memory and rhetoric suggests a radically indeterminate and contingent approach to the past and for this reason may appear to be a dangerous embrace. Should we, a critic might object, embrace the Holocaust revisionist or a genocide denier? Should we open up the box and embrace every presented memorial image as if they were all equal and abandon any sense of the facts of the past? The answer, of course, to these pointed objections is ‘no’ and the means by which I hope to move beyond these concerns both returns us to the core art of rhetoric and, I hope, begins to suggest some practical implications for my theoretical/historical exploration. It is worth noting that rhetoric entails the crucial dimension of an audience. Rhetoric cannot be understood as discourse or appeals in a vacuum but is understood as requiring that the words, images or object be presented to others. This presentation is meant to lead towards judgment and it is in the engagement with judgment that we nd the crucial means by which we evade the concerns over excessive relativism. Public judgment is not a simple or easy process. It entails extended periods of argumentation, shifts in opinion and ongoing struggles to gain a public voice in the dispute. While we often focus on the nal judgments arising from public controversies, it is crucial to note that the actual enactment of democratic principles comes not in the nal decision but in the open, contentious and uncertain processes by which public judgments are formed. Following this, our public controversies then are not only matters of establishing judgments but are crucial enactments of our capacity to collectively form judgments; though, always with the implicit knowledge that the judgments we reach, no matter how apparently certain, can also be drawn back into controversy and contingency. Public memory is clearly a site of this kind of struggle. Returning to Nora we recall that memory was not understood as a repository in which every individual’s personalized recollection holds equal sway but rather a tumultuous contest in which various memories take hold. At times, the contest seems to be settled – our memory becomes treated as history and the past seems to become determined. At other times, sacred and certain memories are pulled down by social strife and critique, history is challenged and rewritten, and the debate is resumed. When public memory is understood as an ongoing rhetorical struggle over the past, we also recognize more clearly the important place of both the ofcial

–21– Kendall R. PHILLIPS and the provocateur; the curator of ofcial history’s clash with the protestor who seeks to reframe some sacred historical object. Neither is more noble or ignoble but together their clashes and controversies help to foster and stir the collective debate over the place of a given accepted history. The importance of all these forms of memory-work – those that claim to be denitive and those that embrace their indeterminacy – is to provoke the ongoing public uncertainty over its past. The controversies and contests around our past seem to me precisely the kind of ethic necessary for a democratic engagement with the past. Not an acceptance of any and all versions of the past, but an acceptance that no version will be perpetually accepted. In this way, even the admonition “Never Forget” must be suspended. There may, as my colleague Brad Vivian contends, times when even forgetting is an appropriate orientation towards the past. These intentional moments of forgetting take many forms – restitution, reconciliation, the redrawing of borders and boundaries. As Vivian notes, “public forgetting is desirable when it reects open and voluntary procedures of judgment and detestable when it contributes to deny- ing opportunities for communal judgment” (Vivian 2010: 177). The same can be said of public remembering – desirable when the product of collective and ongoing public judgment, detestable when used to foreclose those processes. Processes of remembrance and calls for forgetting are almost always contentious and the controversies provoked about our past are rarely pleasant. When we return to the question of which memories to present and how to represent them we call the very foundations of our collectivity into question. From my vantage point, these crucial, although at times painful, questions should not be turned over exclusively to the rigid disciplines of either the political pundit or the archivist. The norms, values and narratives embodied in our past demand continuous critical examination and on-going difcult reection. Such processes of controversy and contestation, the struggles between different publics and their diverse presentations of the past are crucial to the ongoing process of forging and reforging our collective capacity for judgment. Seen from the vantage point of the aporia of absence, we should neither expect the question of the past to be resolved nor want the deliberations to conclude.

REFERENCES

Aristotle (1973). “Memory and recollection” in Ross, G.R.T. (trans.) Aristotle: De sensu and de memoria. New York: Arno Press. Aristotle (1991). On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse, Kennedy, G. A.,(trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Habermas, J. (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Lenhardt, C. & S. W. Nicholsen (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

–22– The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Remembrance

Haines, H. W. (1986). “What Kind of War?’: An Analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memo- rial”. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 3, 1-20. Hariman, R. (1986). “Status, Marginality and Rhetorical Theory”. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 72(1): 38-45. Hauser, G. (1999). Vernacular Voices: On Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press: Kammen, M. (2006). Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture. New York: Random House Nora, P. (1996). Realms of Memory: Conicts and Divisions. Kritzman, L. D. (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press Phillips, K. R. (2004). Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press Phillips, K. R. (2010). “The Failure of Memory: Reections on Rhetoric and Public Re- membrance”. Western Journal of Communication, 74(2), 208-223. Plato (1992). Theaetetus. (Levett, M. J. Rev., Burnyet M. F.,(trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Plato (1994). Gorgias. Watereld, R. (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press Ricouer, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting. Blamey, K and D. Pellauer (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press Scott, C. E. (2004). “The Appearance of Public Memory”, in Phillips, K. (ed.). Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press Sturken, M. (1997). Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Vivian, B. (2010). Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again.Uni- versity Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Yates, F. (1966). The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

–23–

III

THE ROLE OF ‘STILLNESS’ AND ‘NOSTALGIA’ IN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT:ASKING DIFFERENT QUESTIONS IN COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

Jo TACCHI

Within development, there is a concern for the future, with economists rather than social scientists or humanities scholars capturing the agenda. This is because the tendency has been to understand culture as a matter of the past, tradition or custom, something to be challenged and changed in a development that has an orientation to the future (Appadurai 2004). Economics is seen as ‘the science of the future, and when human beings are seen as having a future, the keywords such as wants, needs, expectations, calculations, have become hardwired into the discourse of economics’ (ibid.: 60). Notions of a developed future contribute to a public memory – in Scott’s (2008) sense as mutable and transitory – connected to ideals of progress. My contention is that this misses a great deal, and that communication scholars have much to contribute to understanding humanity in all its richness and complexity in order to inuence development agendas. The association of cultural actors with the past, and economic actors with the future serves to oppose culture to development. Appadurai argues that the future and people’s aspirations are in fact cultural capacities. Within a development context, culture can be seen as a capacity worth strengthening, linked to aspirations of the future (plans, hopes and goals), and rooted in the past (habit, custom, tradition) (Ap- padurai 2004). Development models the past and the future by framing it within certain paradigms and a logic of linear progress. Development is a central organizing concept of our time, framing our thinking about much of the world, an interpre- tive grid providing meaning for a range of observations (Ferguson 1990). Buskens (2010:19) suggests that while development is well aware of the need to acknowledge and strengthen the agency of the beneciaries of development, it is the

–25– Jo TACCHI agency of other parties that dene its discourses and practices. Donors, practitioners, researchers, and scholars inuence theoretical, methodological, and normative concepts, ‘[a]lthough their agency may be less visible, and denitely under less scrutiny, their frames of mind impact directly the way meaning is made of . . . experiences, dreams, and perspectives in the context of human development, poverty, and ICTs’. The ways we make sense of what we research ‘impact the reality that we study because of the ways that power and knowledge construction interact and intersect’ (Buskens 2010:20). We must therefore recognize and challenge our theoretical, methodological and normative positions and acknowledge and take account of their impact on those we research. The questions and topics of development tend to be restrictive. They are overly determined by the framework of economic development and growth that dominates ideas of and approaches to development. As media and communications scholars, we have something more to bring to the debates. How might we step back and think about other ways of framing development, and pay attention to things that apparently do not relate very much at all to development per se – for example, broader cultural and gendered contexts, memories and changing sensibilities? In development research, what happens if we ask different questions? Rather than ask about the economic benets of the take-up of media and communication technologies, with implicit assumptions about what constitutes ‘correct’ usage of these technologies, can we perhaps focus on how people ‘think and feel’ through them? Can we, through this kind of understanding, better appreciate how to positively inuence lives that have a past as well as aspirations for the future? Here I will explore notions of past, present and future in relation to communications research and development, and suggest that a diachronic notion of stillness might help us reect on what are and might be considered suitable topics for development research. The three sections in this chapter indicate some ways in which this might be done. First, I will discuss the concept of stillness as it emerged from research on the consumption of radio in the UK, and as I’d like to explore it in communication for development studies in South Asia. I argue that this concept helps us to take a diachronic approach to communication and development. Stillness represents contemplation rather than lack of movement, emphasizes non-contemporaneous aspects of everyday life, and draws upon unrecognized and unmarked events and aspects of life that are not always registered ofcially. Secondly, I discuss the concept of voice in relation to communication and development and consider how we might think of it as a moment of stillness that represents a basic component of citizenship. Finally, I discuss the concept of listening, and how this can signal the moment of recognition in communication and development, demonstrating a role of media and communication in enriching social justice. To contemplate,

–26– Stillness speak out, be heard, and to listen are internal and external states that speak to the present, the past and the future. My argument here has been built from combining studies with different objectives, disciplinary settings, and research questions. One set of research I draw upon briey below is about radio consumption in Bristol, a city in the South West of England. From there I take the concept of stillness and see how it ts with other studies about communication for development, set in a range of locations in South Asia. In the work on radio in the UK, I focused on how the affordances of radio allow listeners to establish affective rhythm in their everyday lives and how moments of stillness contribute to this. In the communication for development work in Asia I focused in a range of ways on how media, communication and ICTs can help people move out of poverty. These are the kinds of focus areas in each case that seem perfectly appropriate within their different disciplinary and theoretical frameworks. This chapter is an effort to explore the usefulness of disrupting and blurring those frameworks.

STILLNESS

In the 1990s I carried out an ethnographic study on the role of radio in domestic lives. I was interested in understanding what radio sound contributed to people’s lives, why they often talked about radio as a friend or companion. I found radio to be central to domestic soundscapes and the senses of being in the world these engendered. In addition to nding that radio sound has particular characteristics or affordances that make it suitable for the affective management of the everyday, my ethnographic work showed that radio sound was appealing partly because it allowed for moments of what I sometimes called ‘social silence’ (Tacchi 2003; 2002), or ‘stillness’ (Tacchi 2012). In the Bristol study social silence did not refer to a lack of sound, but to spaces or zones that allowed a form of stillness, or a stilling of the senses (Seremetakis 1994) – for example a woman who talked about blasting the radio at high volume to banish tensions or disturbing thoughts, or the woman for whom a certain song reminded her of her childhood and her long dead father, as she pictured him shaving at the kitchen sink while he listened to the morning radio show. Another woman talked of the way reggae music stations connected her to a culture that she was never fully part of, but always longed to belong to. The concept of stillness refers to a range of ways that people connect with different aspects of their lives, to momentarily disengage from the social ow and order, in order to – inevitably – reengage.

–27– The role of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ in sustainable development

This is a different way of thinking about connection to the one usually referred to in new media work. It is not the connectivity implied by new media as the ‘always on’ phenomena. Connectivity in that sense considers being connected and having access as the part of new and social media that deserves attention, especially in development studies. The ip side would be the use of media to disconnect. Stillness can be thought of as both a kind of connection and disengage- ment, and in the cases discussed here, through the mechanism of media. While it emerged as important for me through the research in Bristol, it might apply just as well, in this sense, to some of the women I met in later work in India. Monica is 21 and lives in a slum in Delhi. Her parents run a general store, which does good trade. They also own three slum dwellings that they rent out, and so are comparatively well off in the area. Her mother is the head of the household, and monitors Monica closely. She is especially concerned about Monica because she is beautiful, educated, and attracts a lot of male attention. Monica found a job in an export house on the outskirts of Delhi and commuted an hour each way. She loved her job, and the experience and exposure that it brought, especially considering her lack of independence as a young woman from the slum, and in this period of time before her parents arranged her marriage. It gave her access to a different experience of life. Monica left the job after just a few months because her mother had made it too difcult for her. According to Monica her mother would call her mobile every half hour to nd out what she was doing, and if she did not answer she would call the ofce number. It became unbearable for Monica one day, when her mother turned up in person at her work because she had not answered the mobile. Now that Monica is no longer employed and spends all of her time at home, her mobile phone connection with the outside world both allows her mother to stay constantly connected, and stops Monica from ‘going mad’. This is because she spends hours online. She uses Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and Skype. Monica knows that her mother would prohibit the use of the phone if she knew what she did with it, including irtations with ‘friends’ she has never met in person, but for her it provides a way of managing the severe restrictions placed upon her, and imagining a different life. While ofine her social life is highly monitored and she has little to keep her engaged, online she is free to roam wherever she wants, and contemplate a different future. She is in this way able to sequentially connect and disconnect, to exist on different planes. Exploring the concept of stillness further, to try and understand its implications for ideas of the past and the future, we might think of the wider context of ‘ofcial cultures and memories’ (Seremetakis 1994:13). Seremetakis sees everyday life as having been ‘colonized’ as a ‘repository of passivity’ by political powers and ofcial denitions, and a site of forgetfulness and inattention. She regards it as the site where there are harboured ‘elusive depths, obscure corners,

–28– Vo i c e transient corridors’ that evade political observation and control (ibid.). It is within this devalued space that stillness can be generated, as a ‘resting point’, ‘against the ow of the present’ (ibid.:12). Seremetakis (1994:13) states: There are substances, spaces and times that can trigger stillness. I think of the old Greek who halted from his daily activities in the heat of the mid-day to slowly sip his coffee, each sip followed by a sigh of release. This was a ‘resting point’, a moment of contemplation, the moment he began to re-taste the day. Intro- duced by aroma and taste, this was a moment of stillness . . . a moment of meta- commentary in which the entire scenography of present and past social landscapes are arrayed before his consciousness . . . . There is a perceptual compression of space and time that is encapsulated in the small coffee cup, from which he takes a sip every other minute, and while feeling the sediments on his tongue, he makes his passage through this diversity. Such experiences emphasise the non-contemporaneous aspects of everyday life, drawing on unrecognised and unmarked events and aspects of life. Against the ow of the present, in the ofine world, Monica uses her mobile to connect with virtual friends. According to Seremetakis, such moments ‘are expressions of non-synchronicity which become material encounters with cultural absence and possibility’ (ibid.), where the imperceptible may become perceptible in a marked way. Such moments can provide opportunities to create alternative understandings and rationales, and give depth to the experience of everyday life, which is otherwise given little attention. For Monica, the online space gives her a chance to express herself, and provides plenty of listeners. But we might ask how her experience of digital media relates to notions of voice and listening as imagined in development.

VOICE

Voice is about the agency to represent oneself and the right to express an opinion, and is widely considered to be a basic aspect of citizenship. Couldry (2010) ex- pands on this to think about voice as both a process and a value. As a process it is giving an account of one’s life and its conditions, as a value it is the act of valuing those frameworks for organizing human life and resources that themselves value voice (as a process). If voice is valued in development, it suggests not simply acknowledging processes for voice. It also necessitates a form of listening, as will be discussed below. Voice is inextricably linked to ideas of dialogic approaches to communication for development and to participatory development. In the latter in particular, voice is often understood with specic reference to process, so that giving people the opportunity to have a voice is often paid more attention than

–29– The role of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ in sustainable development thinking about the broader frameworks for recognition, for the valuing of voice. Thinking about communication and development broadly this difference can be explained by contrasting ideas of allowing people a space to express opinions and share experiences with ensuring voices are heard in the places and spaces where they might inuence decision makers. Opportunity for voice might also be considered as a moment of stillness – an opportunity for contemplation and reection. In itself this is of value, both as an internal act of contemplation and then of expression, and as a process to think about and formulate communication on the things that matter. We can explore this through the project Finding a Voice. Finding a Voice was made up of a research network of 15 pre-existing local media and ICT initiatives in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. This included community radio stations, video projects, computer and resource centres and community libraries. All were equipped with computers and Internet. The goal of Finding a Voice was to increase understanding of how ICT can be effective and empowering in local contexts at a time when many development agencies were investing in ICT4D initiatives and keenly interested in understanding the development potential of new technologies. We experimented with ways to get more involvement from local people in the creation of content used within the media and ICT initiatives, to communicate a range of voices within and beyond marginalized communities. In Finding a Voice, voice referred to ideas around self-expression, inclusion and participation in social, political and economic processes, and ‘voice poverty’ was understood as the inability of people to inuence the decisions that affect their lives, and the right to participate in that decision-making (Lister 2004). Ac- cording to Appadurai (2004:63) one of the poor’s ‘gravest lacks’ is ‘the lack of resources with which to give “voice”’. So voice in this understanding is about being able to express themselves in order to inuence political debates so that their own welfare is given due attention. Finding a Voice worked with members of the local media initiatives to develop capacity in digital content creation. Content creation techniques and formats were explored through a series of workshops where the techniques and processes were adapted according to local strategies and conditions. One format that was taken up, adapted and applied in a variety of ways across the sites, was digital storytelling. Digital stories are 3-5 minute multimedia creations using digital images and voiceovers, narrated in the rst person (Hartley and McWilliam 2009). It was found to be an interesting way to encourage participation and engage the voices of people who otherwise have no access to the media, to express concerns about various social or personal issues (Tacchi 2009). What was interesting about this particular format was the community workshop method used to produce the digital stories. A 3-5 day workshop involved story circles and script development, which in effect meant creating, considering,

–30– Listening developing, critiquing, reecting and recreating stories. This was done individu- ally and in groups, and included a lot of whole group discussion and feedback sessions. The stories were honed through individual work, and wider group in- puts. This in itself created a space for contemplation and reection on aspects of life that were of concern to the participants. The workshop took them out of the daily ow of events and pressures, to temporarily give them a chance to reect upon and come up with the story that they wanted to tell. It was discussed and (hopefully) improved with critique from their peers. Finding a Voice indicated some interesting and promising opportunities for developing mechanisms or a form of stillness to allow for the generation of considered voice. However, we need to think carefully about how to encourage active ‘listening’. If these storytellers were only talking to their peers, and not to the decision making powers that could positively effect the issues their stories raised, how could this be considered any different to Monica’s experience of self expression? What she does can be seen to give her a voice within a certain space, yet it is hard to see how it has a positive inuence or impact in the spheres of decision making which effect her. This brings us on to the idea of listening.

LISTENING

In development there is an emphasis on the delivery of information from development agencies and ‘experts’ to poor populations. The focus of development mon- itoring and evaluation is often on whether those poor populations are listening effectively, and whether their lives and behaviours have changed as a result. This is to place the emphasis of listening on poor people, based on the assumption that knowledge resides with the ‘experts’. Ideas around voice challenge this and have contributed to broadening ideas about poverty (Narayan et al. 2000) and new ways of engaging with people and their experiences through dialogue (Chambers 1997). Such approaches introduce alternate ways of positioning the speaker-listener relationship. Bickford’s writing on politics, conict and citizenship (1996) points to how political theory has consistently focused on the politics of speaking, paying very little attention to listening. The politics of recognition (Honneth 1995) centres on the esteem, value and attention given to social and cultural difference as questions of justice, and on attention and response as questions of communicative justice. We need to more effectively listen across difference and inequality (Dreher 2009). We learned through Finding a Voice that helping people nd ways to create content and express themselves through digital media is not enough, we cannot assume that decision makers who are important to the issue are listening. The

–31– The role of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ in sustainable development institutions that excluded communities might usefully try to communicate with are often structurally unsuited for listening. They too need to nd a space of stillness in which to contemplate and reect on the diverse aspects of the lives of those their decisions impact, and how their decisions are made. As Quarry & Ramirez (2009) put it, they need to become listeners rather than tellers. Such a stilling of the discourses and normative frames, allowing other perspectives and experiences to penetrate might lead to development being far more effective. Who gets to speak, and how their voices are listened to is crucial here. The problem of listening is highlighted through the Listening Project (2009). They talked to development workers and communities across a range of countries globally and found a consistent story of systems of international assistance biasing the ways agencies and aid workers listen and do not listen, what and who they listen to, where and when they listen. This can be seen as requiring the acknowledgement that Buskens (2010) calls for, of their own agency in dening such spaces and the knowledge that is produced and circulated and which in turn creates models of development. Being prepared to accept and respect alternative knowledge and knowledge practices requires a stillness on the part of those with the power, as it may contradict dominant knowledge practices and beliefs in challenging ways.

CONCLUSION

The mainstream narrative around the growing penetration of mobile phones in developing countries tends very much to focus on their role in economic growth (Osorio and Postill 2010). Donner (2009) recognizes the blurring of lives and livelihoods through mobile phone use in developing countries, and calls for more attention to be paid to the way mobiles are used and valued for self-expression, agency, and social connection as well as to livelihood and economic activities. Yet economic growth and economics as the pathway to developed futures remains the dominant framework for understanding mobile phones and new technologies in development contexts. Studies of the role of mobile phones and social networking in the West is far more likely to be framed in social and cultural terms. It is rarely accompanied by discussion of GDP and economic growth, but more likely by discussions of communication, social and cultural changes and the everyday lives in which they are experienced (Katz and Aakhus 2002; Ling 2004; Ito et al. 2005). It is in such studies that concepts arise that might have something to add to understanding of communication and development. There is after all a contemporary concern for sustainability in international development programmes. Communication for development and social change increasingly thinks about sustainability and the importance of grounding our un-

–32– Conclusion derstandings of development processes within local complex contexts. Commu- nity participation and ownership in planning, decision-making, evaluation and implementation of C4D are crucial for sustainability (Quarry & Ramirez 2009). While closer consideration of complex local contexts adds to understandings of processes of social change, within development discourses ideas about culture and tradition can be considered backward looking and contrary to the forward- looking, progress oriented goals of development itself. My argument here is that everyday life and media and communication practices as aspects of culture in the everyday can offer insights that are useful to understanding ongoing processes of social change. Notions such as ‘stillness’ as contemplative moments or resistance, might help us to appreciate where and how development programmes might think in more nuanced ways about sustainability. If we understand stillness as encompassing moments of taking stock, contemplation and reection and consider that these things are important when thinking about voice and listening, then this in turn becomes of interest to development. Ofcially recorded aspects of life, public memory and development itself are just a part of what is of interest here. They are shaped by the agencies that dene them. We might come at these things differently by applying concepts from cultural and communications research that use a different frame and ask different questions.

REFERENCES

Appadurai, A. (2004). “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition”, in Rao, V. and M. Walton (eds.). Culture and Public Action. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press: 59-84. Bickford, S. (1996). The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conict, and Citizenship. New York: Cornell University Press. Bissell, D. and G. Fuller (2010). “Stillness Unbound”, in Bissell, D. and G. Fuller (eds.). Stillness in a Mobile World. London: Routledge: 1-17. Buskens, I. (2010). “Agency and Reexivity in ICT4D Research: Questioning Women’s Options, Poverty, and Human Development”. Information Technologies & Interna- tional Development, Volume 6, Special Edition: 19-24. Chambers, R. (1997). Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Couldry, N. (2010). Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism. London: Sage. Donner, J. (2009). “Blurring Livelihoods and Lives: The Social Uses of Mobile Phones and Socioeconomic Development”. Innovations 4(1): 91-101. Dreher, T (2009). “Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice” . . . Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies Vo l 2 3 ( 4 ) .

–33– The role of ‘stillness’ and ‘nostalgia’ in sustainable development

Ferguson, J. (1990). The anti-politics machine: “Development”, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Hartley, J. and K. McWilliam (eds.) (2009). Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ito, M., Okabe, D. and M. Matsuda (eds.) (2005). Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Katz, J.E. and M.A. Aakhus (eds.) (2002). Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ling, R. (2004). The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society. San Fran- cisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Lister, R. (2004). Poverty. Cambridge: Polity Press. The Listening Project (2009). LP Factsheet and Timeline. Retrieved January 9, 2010, from http://www.cdainc.com/cdawww/pdf/other/lp_factsheet_20091105_Pdf.pdf. Narayan, D., Chambers, R., Kaul Shah, M and P. Petesch (2000). “Crying out for change”. Voices of the Poor series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Osorio, F. and J. Postill (2010). “Mobile rewards: a critical review of the Mobiles for De- velopment (M4D) literature”. Paper presented at EASA 2010: Crisis and imagination, Maynooth, Ireland (24-27 August 2010). Quarry, W. and R. Ramirez (2009). Communication for Another Development: Listening Before Telling. London: Zed Books. Scott, C.E. (2008). “The Appearance of Public Memory”, in Phillips, K.R. (ed.). Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press: 147-156.. Seremetakis, C.N. (ed.) (1994). The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. London: University of Chicago Press. Tacchi, J. (2012). “Radio in the (i)Home: changing experiences of domestic audio technologies in Britain” in Bessier, L and D. Fisher (eds.). Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. New York: New York University Press. Tacchi, J. (2009). “Finding a Voice: Digital Storytelling as Participatory Development”, in Hartley and McWilliam: 167-175. Tacchi, J. (2003). “Nostalgia and Radio Sound”, in Bull, M. and L. Back (eds.). The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Tacchi, J. (2002). “Radio Texture: Between Self and Others”, in Askew, K. and R. Wilk (eds.). The Anthropology of Media: A Reader. London. Blackwell: 241-257.

–34– IV

STRUCTURAL AMNESIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY1

Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN

I take my cue from two books by Paul Connerton, the Cambridge sociologist and cultural historian. The rst is the inuential How Societies Remember (1989), a widely read and much admired book about social memory. Notice the title. A contemporary Durkheimian, Connerton argues that the entities that remember are not individuals, but collectives: Societies perform acts of remembering, in different ways. The second book, far less known, was published twenty years later, and is entitled How Modernity Forgets (2009). It is about the obliteration of the past in modern societies where the frenzied commitment to accelerated change renders the calm gaze into the rear mirror all but impossible. In Malmö, for example, this relentless change can certainly be observed, not least in the harbour area, but in all justice, it should also be pointed out that there exists a very conscious attempt to strike a balance between remembering where one is coming from and empha- sising where you are going, or rather where you are right now. Cranes and factory buildings remain intact as memorials to the recent, but suddenly distant past. In Connerton’s view, there is a sense in which modernity, owing to its positive evaluation of change, deliberately or unwittingly forgets its past. I do not entirely agree with this sweeping judgment, and perhaps a useful contrast can be drawn between the modern and the postmodern in this respect. Perhaps we reached the postmodern at the very moment when we lost the hegemonic narrative about where we are coming from, and began to recuperate it in ways that were immediately controversial, contested and bifurcating like so many gardens of forking paths. Modernity had some very clear narratives about its origins, the stages of history that had led, in a logical and rational way, to the present. Presently, it is as if we have lost the plot; there is a real shortage of compelling stories connect- ing various pasts to the present and, not least, constructing the hinge to a desired and realistic future. This loss of historical memory is problematic, arguably more

1 The chapter is based on the rst half of the lecture ‘How Globalization Forgets’, given at the Ørecomm Festival 2013. I would like to thank Oscar Hemer and the organizers for the invitation.

–35– Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN so than what is commonly assumed. Let me therefore begin with a very famous and oft-quoted passage in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Winston Smith – who, in the best lm based on the book is portrayed by John Hurt with an almost uncanny resemblance to Orwell himself – resists the brainwashing of the party and its Newspeak, and tries very hard to remain an autonomous individual capable of thinking for himself. At a pivotal point in the novel, Winston is given to believe that he has found an ally. This man, O’Brien, presents himself as another dissenter and freethinker resentful of the thought control and authoritarianism of Ingsoc and Big Brother. O’Brien offers Winston an illegal, seditious book by the opposition leader Goldstein; they strike up a conversation, and a toast is proposed. As most of you would know, O’Brien will later reveal himself as a member of the inner circle of the party, capable of creating huge problems for Winston. But for now, under more convivial circumstances, the issue that immediately presents itself is that of the toast. O’Brien suggests that they should drink to the future, an obvious proposal as the two men appear to share a dream of a better society. Win- ston Smith then suggests that they drink to the past instead. For, as he says, he who controls the past controls the future. Through this statement, Winston identi- es one of several reasons why it can be a terric idea to have some notion about the past as a process credibly leading to the present. It is not necessarily about nostalgia or about recreating the past, but about knowing your place in a story about la longue durée, an interconnected stream of events, with changes and continuities, which is coming from somewhere and is going somewhere in a reasonably meaningful and intelligible way. In some societies, mind you, it isn’t going somewhere. Sometimes the present is, in an important sense, about recreating a past, notably in traditional societies. But modernity is, if anything, committed to change. If you are committed to living in a modern society, you have to reconcile yourself with change. Not any change, but some kinds of change. And certainly technological change. We did, in a not too distant past, have some good stories about where we were coming from and where we were going. Narratives of progress and development. At a certain time in our recent history – when I say recent, I refer to the last two or three hundred years – stories of human progress began, in a serious way, to replace the religious narratives about the human condition, making them obsolete or less relevant than before. Consider Darwinism, the most enduring of all the great Vic- torian theories about development and change. In the rst edition of The Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin did not use the term evolution, nor did he talk about progress. He spoke about transmutation, how species changed, but without a specic direction. He even revealed himself as a closet cultural relativist, or – better – a closet species relativist. He reected on the highest capacities of various species, concluding that humans ranked intelligence highest. But, he added, were you to ask a bee (perhaps undertaking multi-species eldwork, as some anthro-

–36– Structural Amnesia in the 21st century pologists aspire to these days), doing eldwork on the world-view of the bee as it were, it would in all likelihood not have placed cognitive intelligence in high esteem, but would rather have referred to some other capacity, such as the ability to nd your way back to the hive after a long day of nectar collecting. In later editions of the book, which was to be published in six revised versions, Darwin did speak of evolution and progress. He had been inuenced by social philoso- phers like Herbert Spencer, the creator of the slogan ‘the survival of the ttest’, and others who reinterpreted his theory as a linear narrative of development and progress placing humanity on top and, by analogy, British civilization at the apex of cultural evolution. This was the nineteenth century, and let us not forget that there was a time when there was a struggle between different, sometimes starkly opposed stories about where we were coming from. I could have spoken about other evolutionist stories in the Victorian age, but there was, for a while, an open conict between Darwinism and certain forms of Christianity (which, perversely, is still operating in some places, especially in the USA). Other varieties of Christianity were quite happy to reconcile their beliefs with Darwinism, accepting that these were different domains; and that it is even possible to read the story of the Bible as a metaphoric one. On the whole, and not just because of Darwinism but also because of technological and scientic advances, religious narratives were, in our part of the world, eclipsed by stories of progress and development. But the theory of evolution tted really snugly with the general Zeitgeist. When The Origin of Species rst came out, Karl Marx was exhilarated. He read it avidly and dashed off a letter to Engels, who was in Manchester, running his factory, where Marx announced that this was the natural science story that he and Engels needed to complement their historical materialism, since it posited struggle and change as fundamental forces of nature. Marx was somewhat critical of some of Darwin’s own interpretations, claiming that Darwin had been unwittingly brainwashed by the liberal free-trade ideology of the time, by using parts of the capitalist conceptual appara- tus in accounting for natural processes; but on the whole, he saluted the comple- mentarity between his theory and Darwin’s. What these theories had in common was, among other things, that they entailed a development, through struggle and violence, from something to something else that was bigger and better. By secular- ising human hope, this kind of theory, or ideology, relegated religious templates to the back burner, at least for those who lived or aspired to live on the sunny side. These stories of human progress became ever more dominant as the nineteenth century ipped into the twentieth, not least in a city like Malmö, one of the symbols of Scandinavian industrialism, which is associated not only with the industrial revolution, but also with the growth of secular individualism and of state bureaucracies, the latter of which has often been underestimated in many accounts of modernity, notwithstanding Max Weber’s early analyses. Whereas religion told

–37– Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN you that even if life was miserable, things would get much better when you died, industrialism and the modern state told you that salvation could be had this side of the grave, with the help of new factories, trade unions, consumerism and improved health services. In Sweden, this transition took place rather abruptly; the replacement of a religious narrative about the meaning of life with a secular vision of society happened around a century ago. Almost from one day to the next, references to God in Swedish public debate vanished, making this country the epitome of a modern mentality from the beginning of the last century. One aspect of modernity is that change can happen very fast and abruptly, as in this example. This does not mean that everything changes simultaneously. As Margaret Mead wrote more than half a century ago, in the somewhat clunky 1950s language of American cultural anthropology, different parts of a culture change at different speeds: you can have fast change in some domains and not in others. Today, it is evident that change has sped up in many realms. As a matter of fact, it is easy to draw a number of exponential growth curves that show that modernity entails the acceleration of change. Quite recently, I happened to hear a lecture by Kate Pickett, the co-author with Richard Wilkinson of The Spirit Level, an inuential book about inequality (Wilkinson and Pickett 2011). She spoke about the exponential growth in the USA of narcissistic personality disorders. Several decades ago, my cohort read and discussed a book by Christopher Lasch called The Cul- ture of Narcissism, published in 1980. Pickett didn’t mention that book, but argued that the growth of narcissism took off in the early 1980s, just after the publication of Lasch’s prescient book. Anyway, there are many growth curves of a similar kind, the most well-known being that of global population growth since the early nineteenth century; but there are others, ranging from the growth in international tourism to energy use and communication. My claim, thus, is simply that we have lost the plot as a result of accelerated change in a broad range of domains. The narrative of growth and development, still capable of convincing and persuading millions from the time of the great Victorian theories of Darwinism and Marxism until the nal decades of the last century, no longer works as a meaningful story about where we are coming from and where we are going. Change is now taking place too fast and entails too many unintended consequences to t into a simple linear story about the growth of human or global civilization. Progress even seems to be turning against us, appearing in the guise of anti-progress. Take population growth. About a century ago, we were slightly less than two billion; there are now slightly more than seven billion of us. There is still a lot of free space – I hear that even today, the entire population of the world would t into the northern Swedish municipality of Kiruna, admittedly with standing space only. But we are scattered across the continents, and we engage in a multitude of world-transforming activities, from logging and mining to space travel and industrial meat production. James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis,

–38– Structural Amnesia in the 21st century says in his book The Revenge of Gaia (2006) that a couple of hundred years ago, when there were no more than a billion of us, we could do ‘pretty much as we liked’, and the planet would still recover. This is no longer the case. The era of the Anthropocene, the beginning of which coincided with the start of large-scale extraction of fossil fuels, is a time of exponential growth in a number of domains, the most signicant arguably being those of population (sevenfold increase in two hundred years) and energy use (which has grown twenty-eight times in the same period). I think we should see other forms of exponential growth, from tourism to Internet use, in direct relation to these more fundamental processes. In such a world, new trafc rules are required. In a sense, there are only three kinds of traf- c: Free ow, synchronised ow and the trafc jam. The world of 1800 was one of free ow, whereas in the contemporary era, we nd ourselves in a situation of synchronised ow occasionally verging on the gridlock, where exibility is lost and all options have been exploited. That is, if we accept fossil fuels as the source of the wealth of nations and consumerism as the main recipe for the good life. Consider this. More than forty years ago, the inuential report Limits to Growth was published by the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972), a book which could be described as a neo-Malthusian treatise warning that unchecked population growth would spell environmental disaster. At that time, global warming was not yet on the agenda (in fact, many experts believed that we were heading towards a new ice age), and it should also be noted that since the mid-1970s, not only has global population nearly doubled, but global energy use has more than doubled. In other words, if prospects were grim in 1974, on the same criteria they are catastrophic forty years on. It is the nature of exponential growth curves to be unnoticeable at rst, un- dramatic in their second phase, and explosive in later stages. Since they double at regular intervals, early numbers are small – 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on. But by the time the numbers reach 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096, gures quickly become huge. And it is easy to see that growth, noticeable in many domains in the 1960s and 1970s, has been spectacular in a number of domains only since the turn of the century. In 2008, for the rst time in human history, more than half of humanity lived in urban areas. Researchers now speak of super-diversity (Vertovec 2007) as a new form of urbanism where mobility and transformations of the urban space are so accelerated that demographers nd it difcult to chart urban populations. Or take online connectivity. As late as 2006, it was estimated that a grand total of one per cent of Africans (bar South and North Africa) had access to the Internet. At the latest count – spring 2014 – the gure was estimated to be close to twenty per cent, a main reason being that millions of Africans now have smartphones. And, swiftly moving to a different domain, let me just mention that the number of international tourist arrivals has grown by a factor of ve since the mid-1970s,

–39– Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN reaching a billion for the rst time in 2012. The largest foreign spenders are now the Chinese, a nationality that was way down on the list only four years earlier. In this kind of world, it is hard to keep a tab on numbers and patterns, and the xation on the present, everything that is urgent, takes precedence over the long- term. The here and now wins over the there and then. And, as Winston Smith well knew, without a rm grasp on the past and an awareness of the hinge that connects it to the present, notions about the future are bound to be vague and indenite. Yet, there are deeper causes for the loss of the past. As mentioned, stories about progress and development replaced religious narratives about the human condition in the industrial age, which was also an age of imperialism and global integration. Today, the concept of progress has lost much of its lustre. Human nature has not improved – we are just as mean, selsh, brutal and short-sighted as we ever were. As pointed out by John Gray, one of the most powerful critics of Enlightenment illusions, 21st century debates about morality and politics are not very different from those in ancient Greece (Gray 2013). Poverty, inequality and oppression are not likely to be eradicated. The great utopian projects of the 20th century all failed in dismal and often tragic ways. Global economic crises, believed by economic pundits in the 1990s to have been done away with once and for all, have continued to recur, creating uncertainties and ambivalence almost everywhere. Modernity, moreover, did not do away with political irrationalism, religious fundamentalism and ethnic tensions, but seemed to have egged them on. Finally, it has become clear that the spoils of modernity, the benets of the modern life, can easily be lost. There is a book that might have been called ‘Memories of Modernity’, but which is instead entitled Expectations of Modernity. Written by the anthropologist James Ferguson (1999), it describes people in Zambia who have lost a modernity they once had. During the mining boom in the Copperbelt, African miners could lead relatively comfortable lives. One reminisces about the time when they could take their girl out on a Saturday, nicely dressed in shiny shoes and a white shirt, eat a T-bone steak and later listen to a jazz band. This would have been in the 1960s. Today, only memories are left of this life in towns that have become dusty backwaters with dilapidated buildings and half-legible signs indicating where bars and shops used to be. Modernity had been achieved, and was now lost. One context for Ferguson’s book was the earlier research carried out by social scientists, many of them anthropologists, working in the same area some decades earlier, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Seeing the development of mining and urbanism as an expression of irreversible change, these scholars described the growth of individualism and trade unionism as de facto replacements of the kinship and tribal afliations that had formerly been the backbone of social organisation. Fer- guson shows, with the benet of hindsight, that this development was far from

–40– Structural Amnesia in the 21st century irreversible, but temporary. In other words, there is no historical necessity, no unilinear direction to change. As a result of the onslaught of contradictory, counterintuitive and confusing facts, stories and rumours about the contemporary world, challenging any simple narrative about progress and unilinear development, there is today a huge demand for simple answers to complex questions. Two opposing, but symmetrical and typical responses, are religious fundamentalism and Neo-Darwinism. The latter is a scientic movement which seeks to establish the principles of natural selection as a ‘universal acid’ capable of reducing difcult problems to simple models of explanation. Not only is it opposed to religion of every kind, but faith in selsh- gene Darwinism also liberates you from the need to delve into difcult texts and complicated ideas; the entire catalogue of contemporary thought, from Adorno to Žižek, somehow becomes superuous. You’ve got your hammer, and the whole world is made to appear as if it consists of nails. Yet, the Achilles heel of Neo- Darwinism in our context is not its simplications, but the fact that it has nothing interesting to say about human history. Exactly the same objection can be made to religious fundamentalism, which emphasises the timeless and eternal at the expense of the ows, continuities and transformations of history. There is at the same time a great demand for obscurity; an unintelligible world, as it were, needs unintelligible theories. But neither obscurantism nor simplication, be it religious or secular, can help to solve the problem of the past, the amnesia of modernity that has accelerated along with the changes it brings to the world. The decisive blow to the idea of progress has nevertheless been delivered from within and can be witnessed, usually implicitly, in news media almost every day. It concerns the double bind between growth and sustainability, a fundamental dilemma of which hundreds of millions are aware, acutely or dimly. Develop- ment and progress have for two hundred years been inextricably linked to growth in energy use, and we have now reached a point where there is broad agreement among scientists and intellectuals – if not by politicians worldwide (I currently do research in Australia, where politicians like Tony Abbott may describe climate research as ‘mostly crap’) – that fossil fuel consumption has to end, or at least be reduced dramatically. A double bind is a dilemma of the Catch-22 kind (Bateson et al. 1956), where both options are unsatisfactory. It is also self-referentially inconsistent, in that the two alternatives not only contradict each other but also themselves. So let us look at the growth alternative rst. In order for humanity to increase its level of well being, this view maintains, economic growth has to continue. But, the objection goes, population growth along with growth in energy use will in fact undermine the very conditions for our existence by poisoning ecosystems and contributing to irreversible climate change which may, ultimately, make human life on the

–41– Thomas Hylland ERIKSEN planet unbearable. In other words, the better you succeed, the more dismally you fail. In order for this option to appear convincing, the ecological consequences of accelerated growth in population and energy use have to be bracketed and ignored. The sustainability option is also problematic. It argues that in order for life on the planet to be genuinely sustainable – capable of reproducing itself indenitely without undermining its own conditions – energy use has to be reduced dramatically, logging and mining must be curtailed, industrial production reduced and closely monitored with a view to minimising environmental damage, and (at least in some versions) population size stabilised or reduced. However, every version of this option presupposes a break with the planet’s business as usual which is not only cognitively difcult to imagine, but probably far more difcult to implement in practice than defenders of the sustainability perspective tend to think. It would require massive investments into alternative energy sources, and not only in countries like Germany and Sweden, but in China, India and Australia as well; and – an even more difcult task – ecological sustainability would require reduced, not increased consumption. While continued growth will entail digging our own graves (or, more accurately, those of our descendants), sustainability would necessitate a turnaround which somehow resembles a reversal of the arrow of time, since the dominant myth we live by is that of growth, made possible through massive extraction of fossil fuels. Degrowth sounds oddly contradictory, if not reactionary. Wedged between these opposing and equally impossible scenarios, an insis- tent presentism can offer a comfortable escape. Since the past can only provide a feeling that contemporary world civilization has painted itself into a corner, a gaze restricting itself to that which is immediate and short-term prevents serious reection about a frightening future. The term, ‘structural amnesia’, was coined by British anthropologists describing how tribal genealogies in Africa tended to vanish into the mists of oblivion after the fth or sixth generation. They saw this societal forgetfulness as being useful for the cohesion of present communities. In our era, structural amnesia exists in a different way and for different reasons, chiey in order to avoid the im- manent double bind of society to become apparent. Keep in mind that the concept of the double bind was initially developed in research on the causes and symptoms of schizophrenia, so there are sound reasons to keep it at bay. If my diagnosis is correct, that the past is no longer convincingly connected to the present chiey because imagined futures do not shed a particularly attering light on ourselves or the past to which we have been committed for generations, then the only credible response consists in reinventing the past to make it suitable for a meaningful present and future. The stories about the past, related to children and adults alike, must then be rethought and rephrased. Rather than depicting a linear development from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the plough and

–42– Structural Amnesia in the 21st century animal husbandry, and then on to industrial society, as a story about steady im- provements, stories about past and present must encompass the non-human world as well. The established stories of human development, entertaining as they may be, sound increasingly hollow as we approach the present age. In a more realistic kind of narrative, the missed opportunities and false notes would be just as preva- lent as the victories and advances made by science and technology. The past must be redrawn for the sake of the future. Incidentally, it is only thus that the past can be recovered, too. There is something liberating about this thought, almost akin to removing a heavy backpack from your tired shoulders. The standard modern script leading to the present was too contradictory, and it led to too many unintended and unfortunate consequences. It had become like the epicycles circling the geocentric universe of the pre-Copernicans, heavy, cumbersome and ultimately not credible. The alternative is an ecological history, a multispecies history, and a history of human justice and happiness rather than progress and development. Far from forgetting the past, what is needed is to reconstruct those pasts through a form of global psychoanalysis, tracing new paths through the past, which help make sense of the present and can point the compass needle in the right future direction faced with the mounting challenges of the present century.

REFERENCES

Bateson, G., Jackson, D., Haley,J. and J. Weakland (1956). “Toward a theory of schizophrenia”. Behavioral Science, 1: 251-264. Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, P. (2009). How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, J. (1999). Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gray, J. (2013). The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. London: Allen Lane. Lasch, C. (1980). The Culture of Narcissism. London: Abacus. Lovelock, J. (2006). The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity. London: Allen Lane. Meadows, D., Dennis H., Meadows, L., Randers, J. and W. W. Behrens III (1972). The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg. Vertovec, S. (2007). “Super-diversity and its Implications”. Ethnic and Racial Studies,30 (6): 1024-54. Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2011). The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes So- cieties Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

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GLOBAL INJUSTICE MEMORIES

Thomas OLESEN

INTRODUCTION

The last couple of decades have witnessed a virtual boom in academic works on collective memory (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011). This body of work has made great strides in our understanding of the social and political character of memories. The literature remains limited, however, when it comes to the global character of some collective memories. Important work has been done on the Holocaust as a global memory (Alexander 2004; Levy and Sznaider 2002), but the research agenda remains underdeveloped. A search in perhaps the leading journal on globalization and sociology, International Political Sociology,pro- duces only two articles with the term “memory” in its title (McDonald 2010; Ole- sen 2013). Turning to another key journal bridging globalization research and sociology, Global Society, the results are equally limited with only one article dealing specically with the concept of global memory (Aksu 2009). Looking instead to books there is now a sound body of works with an IR or global prole (Assmann and Conrad 2010; Bell 2006a; Edkins 2003; Langenbacher and Shain 2010; Müller 2002; Olick 2007; Phillips and Reyes 2011; Zehfuss 2007). Yet, most of these works (but see, especially, the collections by Assmann and Con- rad 2010 and Phillips and Reyes 2011 for notable exceptions) are characterized by a predominant focus on Europe and the United States. In them, for example, one only nds scattered references to what are arguably two of the major traumas and injustices of the recent past: South African Apartheid and the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The goal of this chapter is threefold; (a) to suggest a number of “new” empirical cases that can potentially be addressed from a global memory perspective; (b) to offer a range of suggestions for crucial analytical themes; (c) and to discuss the relationship between global memories and global society. The focus of the chapter is on what I call global injustice memories, i.e. memories based on events that entail perceived injustice towards individuals or collectives.

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The discussion is structured by the following themes: how injustice memories are cross-temporally preserved in various carriers; how injustice memories are created, shaped, and preserved through processes of analogical bridging;how injustice memories are often sites of contestation; how memories potentially involve amnesia and forgetting; and how memories reect, negatively or positively, on the remembering collective. The nal section builds on these themes to address a major sociological question: whether it makes sense to speak of a global society.

CARRIERS

By carriers I refer to the formats through which past events are made socially and politically available in the present. The discussion focuses on photographs as memory carriers, but also seeks to offer an overview of other types of carriers. Photographs of suffering are core elements of the memory structure of global society. Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of a group of naked children eeing from a na- palm bomb attack at the village of Trang Bang during the Vietnam War achieved political status in its own context of antiwar protests, but, importantly from a memory perspective, remains well-known more than forty years later (Hariman and Lucaites 2007). The same is true of the grueling photographs taken by US Army photographers after the massacre in 1968 in the village of My Lai (Schlegel 1995). South African Apartheid, a core global injustice memory, also has a strong visual dimension. For example, the Soweto uprising in 1976 is intimately tied to the photograph (taken by Sam Nzima) of Hector Pieterson, a 13-year-old schoolboy, being carried in the arms of a student and with his sister running beside them, after being fatally shot by police during protests. And perhaps the best-known global injustice memory, the Holocaust, has its own powerful visual vocabulary (Buettner 2012). Images and photographs are not in themselves memories, but they serve as powerful cognitive memory facilitators and preservers. As such, all of the photographs mentioned above are visual representations or symbols of a wider situation considered unjust: the Vietnam War, Apartheid, and the Holo- caust. The power of photography as a memory carrier is obviously not reducible to the global level of analysis. Yet photographs of human suffering have a potential for global resonance that resides in their universality. Photographs of dead or suffering individuals have a direct emotional appeal that is able to circumvent the national, religious, and political frames that we normally see the world through. Photographs do not become symbolic memory carriers automatically. The iconic photographs from the Vietnam War have acquired their status because they were used strategically by social movements, in this case, antiwar protestors, to support their claims. This happened in an indirect collaboration with the media for whom

–46– Global Injustice Memories photographs of human drama have considerable newsworthiness. Photographs as memory carriers may potentially morph into other formats and memory carriers. As shown by Hariman and Lucaites (2007), Nick Ut’s photograph from Trang Bang has become an element in countless artistic representations and critiques of the Vietnam War. And the photograph of Hector Pieterson was a direct motivation for the creation in 2002 of the Hector Pieterson Museum, located in the Soweto area of Johannesburg (I return to the museum in the section on forgetting). These last points also indicate that photographs are not the only type of memory carrier. For example, cultural productions play a crucial role. One of the central injustice memories of the modern period, antebellum American slavery, is deeply rooted in and preserved through popular culture (Eyerman 2004) and globally diffused through books and lms such as Alex Haley’s Roots and, lately, the Academy Award winning lm 12 Years a Slave. Similarly there is a long list of lms and books that treat the 1994 Rwanda Genocide (Olesen 2012). Additionally, key events such as the Holocaust and Apartheid have UN designated remembrance days, while public monuments and places in major cities serve as commemorative spaces (Booth 2006:104; Nora 1996). Consider, for example, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Freedom Park in the same city where artists decorate pieces of the Berlin Wall to commemorate global injustice events; see, for example, Olesen 2013). Institutional arrangements offer a different format for injustice memory preservation. The criminal court for the Rwanda Genocide is still working and serves as an institutional and legal framework for remembering Rwanda (Olesen 2012). Finally, it is worth mentioning how new media platforms are becoming a kind of global memory archives. This is particularly the case with YouTube. For example, Neda Agha Soltan, a young woman shot and killed during demonstrations in Iran in 2009 is the object of numerous commemorative videos paying tribute to her death and locating it within a critique of the injustice of the Iranian regime (Olesen 2014).

ANALOGICAL BRIDGING

In his analysis of the Holocaust as a cultural trauma and memory, Jeffrey Alexan- der (2004: 247) argues that an event’s integration into political culture and collective memory is evidenced by its employment in analogical bridging.Froman injustice memory perspective, analogical bridging occurs when a current event is “compared” with a past event (whose injustice is undisputed) to emphasize the injustice of the current event and to strengthen the legitimacy of claims related to that event. This type of political activity has a bearing on the current event and, what is most interesting from a memory perspective, on the past event as well.

–47– Thomas OLESEN

When the past event is invoked in the present it is kept socially and politically alive, as it were. Alexander thus shows how, for example, the Holocaust was frequently invoked during the Balkan Wars in order to put these events into historical perspective. More recently, advocacy for political-military intervention in Darfur often drew on the 1994 Rwanda genocide as a moral-political reference point: “not another Rwanda” (Olesen 2012). Similarly, the term Apartheid is frequently used in relation to Israel’s presence and policies in Gaza and the West Bank. In the United States, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 keeps resurfacing in contemporary debates about the United States’ international military engagement. When US Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including women and children, on November 19, 2005, the case quickly drew comparisons to My Lai. At a global level of analysis analogical bridging thus involves both spatial and temporal displacement: spatial displacement in the sense that memories are employed in other geographical contexts than the original one (as when Apartheid is applied to conditions in Palestine) and temporal displacement in the sense that they are employed in new historical settings. The concept of analogical bridging furthermore demonstrates how injustice memories of the past in fact involve three political temporalities: “Though memory is concerned with past events, it is especially concerned with those aspects of the past that remain unnished business” (Poole 2008:160). The past is pro- jected into the politics of the present: “It is the project of memory to understand the past as a source of present responsibilities” (ibid; see also Eyerman 2004:63 and Booth 2006:118). Past events and situations of injustice are, consequently, open social wounds that come to represent “a tear in the social fabric” (Eyerman 2004:61): so even if injustices have been halted through military intervention (as in the case of the Holocaust or Kosovo in the late 1990s) or political pressure (as in the case of Apartheid in the 1980s; see below), the injustices already committed cannot be undone; they linger on into the present and future with moral and political questions: What should we have done? Could we have done more? And how do we halt present and prevent future injustices? Injustice memories in other words have a central moral-political dimension. They become yardsticks to measure and understand the present and to build social and political initiatives ad- dressing future potential injustice. For example, the remembering of the Rwanda Genocide in the rst decade after the event gravitated around early warning initiatives intended to identify signs of genocidal processes. The Rwanda memory is an injustice memory in two senses: rst, the atrocities committed in 1994 constitute a massive injustice in their own right; second, reecting what was said about the soul searching following the event, claims of guilt and injustice was also directed towards, especially, major Western states and international organizations (the UN in particular) who were accused of not intervening sufciently when it became clear that large scale violence was occurring or about to occur (Olesen 2012).

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CONTESTATION

Remembering past injustice is a decidedly political act. Recalling the discussion of the three temporalities above it is so because the past has implications for the present and the future. This also indicates that injustice memories are often contested. Looking back at the My Lai example given above, the comparison between Haditha and My Lai was seen by some as a gross exaggeration. Those arguing against the analogy focused on the facts: many more people (between 300 and 500) were killed at My Lai than at Haditha; the My Lai massacre took place over several hours whereas the one in Haditha occurred within a few minutes; My Lai was the scene of systematic abuse (rape, torture) of villagers, while none such incidents took place in Haditha. Those making the analogy were less concerned with factual similarities. They rather saw Haditha as just another example of the morally unacceptable consequences of US military engagement (the killing of innocent civilians). Of particular interest for a discussion of global injustice memories is the sometimes conictive relationship between national and global memory cultures. The Srebrenica massacre on thousands of Bosnian Muslims by the Serb-Bosnian army under Ratko Mladic has become a core injustice memory at a global (and especially European) level, but remains controversial and contested in Serbia (Miller 2006). A large number of Serbs either challenge the facts surrounding the event or consider it to be wholly or partly legitimate. These debates and divisions surfaced when a video showing executions by Serbian paramilitary forces was revealed in 2005 and when the Serbian parliament issued a declaration condemning the massacre in 2010. Those challenging the memory also view it as an attempt by global society to demonize Serbia and relieve other collectives of their guilt and part in the conict. The controversy has gravitated considerably around Ratko Mladic who commanded the Bosnian-Serb army. While Mladic has become a kind of negative global icon he is viewed as a hero in some quarters in Serbia. In fact it might be argued that the perceived villanization of Serbia has fuelled the formation of national counter-narratives and counter-symbols. We encounter related dynamics around the Nanking massacre, 1937-8, and the Armenian genocide, 1915-8. These events have in recent years been elevated to the status of major global injustice memories, but remain contested in the perpetrating countries, Japan and Turkey. What this discussion demonstrates at a more general level is how injustice memories are never xed. For example, the Armenia genocide was dormant for most of a century before it was given new prominence in the global public sphere as part of a wider movement in the 1990s towards processes of reconciliation. As the centennial for the start of the genocide approaches the event is receiving increasing attention and several commemorative events are being planned for 2015. These initiatives have already drawn criticism from Turkey and we are likely to

–49– Thomas OLESEN witness signicant new political meaning work around the Armenia genocide in the years to come. In another recent example of memory contestation in international politics, France decided to pull out of the 20th anniversary commemorations for the Rwanda Genocide in April 2014 as an interview emerged in which Rwan- dan president Paul Kagame accused France of not only having not done enough to intervene during events in 1994, but of having played a direct role in the preparations for the genocide. Injustice memory processes are also affected when new facts emerge. As already mentioned the revelation in 2005 of new video material documenting executions during the Balkan Wars sparked new debates in and outside of Serbia. For those wishing to raise the prominence of the injustice memory this documentation provided welcome material for the strengthening of such claims and initiatives.

FORGETTING

As discussed above, injustice memories involve collective reections on what society should and should not be. Yet remembering past injustice also, at least potentially, involves forgetting or amnesia. It was pointed out earlier how the memory processes related to the Rwanda genocide has concerned the lack of attention and intervention on the part of those non-Rwandan actors and audiences witnessing the genocide. The process remembering thus placed a large share of guilt on actors, especially key states and institutions, outside of Rwanda. This guilt, however, only concerned the specic events of 1994. What was, in other words, forgotten or un-remembered in the aftermath of the genocide was the fact that the sharp ethnic separation between Hutus and Tutsis, which fuelled the genocide, was to a large extent a remnant of the colonial system set up by Germany and Belgium in the 19th and 20th centuries (Melvern 2000). While this line of interpretation was surely available and voiced by numerous observers the mainstream memory process gravitated around the genocide in a narrower fashion. The Srebrenica massacre in 1995 during the Balkan Wars holds a related story of amnesia. The massacre had a clear perpetrator in the form of the Bosnian-Serb army under Ratko Mladic. Yet the event and its establishment as a major global and European injustice memory has, as discussed above, resulted in a portrait of Serbia and Serbians as inherently villainous. While such an attribution of guilt is certainly rooted in observable facts it does, however, risk creating a one-sided remembering of a conict in which atrocities were committed not only by the Serbs and in which not all Serbs endorsed nationalist policies. The Srebrenica example illustrates the potential forgetting or un-remembering that occurs when injustices are remembered via certain events or certain iconic g-

–50– Global Injustice Memories ures. As suggested earlier, Apartheid is a core global injustice memory, which for many is closely associated with Nelson Mandela. Mandela has become a global political icon who represents values such as democracy, human rights, peace, and reconciliation (Olesen 2014). The fact that Apartheid is centrally remembered through the gure of Nelson Mandela has important memory implications. First, because of Mandela’s association with the ANC there is a tendency to forget the efforts of other organizations such as, most notably, the Black Conscious- ness Movement and the Inkatha Freedom Party in the struggle against Apartheid. Second, condensing the anti-Apartheid struggle in the gure of Mandela tends to cloud the fact that the dissolution of Apartheid came via the suffering and sacrice of thousands of individuals whose fates and achievements do not have nearly the same status as that of Mandela. These observations, however, are valid mainly at a global level. At the local and national level we are thus likely to encounter local and national memory cultures that place greater emphasis on other collective and individual actors. What these observations indicate is how memory processes at the global level often contain elements of reduction and simplication. Even global injustice memories are always based in events that are ultimately local and national. As also discussed in the section on contestation the analysis of global injustice memories should therefore pay keen attention to the meaning negotiation that occurs between these spatial levels.

SELF-CELEBRATION

It has been emphasized throughout the chapter how remembering injustice is a social exercise in dening who “we” are (and not are) as a collective. This means that remembering essentially has two “directions”: on the one hand, it reects on those who have suffered some kind of injustice; on the other, however, it also points strongly to the remembering collective. For example, in his analysis of Abra- ham Lincoln in collective American memory Schwartz (1990) shows how Lin- coln memories have signicantly changed over time and in ways clearly shaped by audience expectations and political-cultural context. In explaining the increasing popularity of Lincoln in the early 20th century he notes (p. 101): “Lincoln was not elevated at this time because the people had discovered new facts about him, but because they had discovered new facts about themselves, and regarded him as the perfect vehicle for giving these tangible expression”. Following this line of thinking memory processes often contain an element of self-celebration. This is especially marked when the remembering collective considers itself to have a positive role in the alleviation of suffering. Apartheid as a global injustice memory is a case in point. When Nelson Mandela died it

–51– Thomas OLESEN became a moment to remember the extraordinary story and accomplishment of the man, but it also became an occasion to remember how the release of Mandela and the collapse of Apartheid was, at least partly, the result of the concerted effort of global society acting in more or less unison around its condemnation of Apartheid (Thörn 2006). This element of self-celebration was evident already in relation to the activities surrounding Mandela and Apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1990 a globally televised show was held at Wembley Stadium to celebrate the release of Mandela. The show came only two years after another major event in the same place celebrating Mandela’s 70th birthday (he was still in prison at this time). Consider for example the opening remarks by American actor Denzel Washington (Washington’s presence reected his role as Stephen Biko in Richard Attenborough’s 1987 movie about Apartheid, Cry Freedom): “Two years ago we were here to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday, we put our collective hearts and minds together to pray that he would be free, and today he is free” (huge roar from the crowd). In sum we might thus say that the Apartheid injustice memory is also a justice memory in the sense that a fundamental wrong was corrected and that the efforts of global society and global social movements had been instrumental in this outcome. In this way it is also in many ways an opposite of the memories of, for example, Rwanda and Srebrenica discussed earlier. Rather than being occasions of self-celebration, these memories invite a kind self-agellation gravitating around the lack of action.

INJUSTICE MEMORIES AND GLOBAL SOCIETY

In this nal section I address the overall theme laid out in the introduction: the relationship between injustice memories and global society. In 1990, Anthony D. Smith (1990:118) formulated a powerful and still relevant counter-narrative to the ascending globalization paradigm. Smith did not deny the acceleration of globalizing dynamics in the elds of technology and economy, but was adamant that these developments would not be paralleled by a global culture (see also Smith 1995 for a later version of the argument): To believe that “‘culture follows structure’, that the techno-economic sphere will provide the conditions and therefore the impetus and content of a global culture, is. . . to over- look the vital role of common historical experiences and memories in shaping identity and culture” (Smith 1990:180). To Smith, “a global culture is essentially memoryless. . . There are no ‘world memories’ that can be used to unite humanity: the most global experiences to date – colonialism and the World Wars – can only serve to remind us of our cleavages” (pp. 179-180: my italics). While Smith’s

–52– Global Injustice Memories account remains a healthy antidote to heady hyper-globalist assertions about the erasure of nations and cultures in the era of globalization it has the unfortunate effect of closing off important lines of sociological inquiry into global memories. In a well-known challenge to Smith, Levy and Sznaider (2002:89) thus hold Smith’s argument that nations are the only containers of culture to be “a breathtakingly un- historical assertion”. National culture and identity, they contend, are themselves historical constructs or inventions (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983); imagined communities (Anderson 1983) based on a forging (often in vehement opposition to local/regional identities) of new national identities and memories. There is no reason, Levy and Sznaider conclude, that similar processes could not evolve at the global level. While global culture and memories may not have the “thickness” and deep history of national cultures this is insufcient to deny their relevance as emergent or potential phenomena. Levy and Sznaider offer the Holocaust experience as illustration. While they are cautious to remind us that the Holocaust memory does not mean the same to everyone everywhere, that its meaning is l- tered, so to speak, through local and national specicities (p. 92), they do assert that it has gradually attained the status of “a global collective memory” (p. 93). The Holocaust example is important because it challenges Smith’s view that the World Wars only serve as memories of human division. While the wars certainly convey this meaning they cannot be reduced to it. World War II, and in particular the Holocaust, led to a whole range of normative and institutional (e.g. the 1948 creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) changes aimed at preventing human suffering as a result of war and political persecution (Shaw 2000:122). This injustice memory, as shown in the preceding discussions about the Balkan Wars, thus continues to shape contemporary political debates by offering yardsticks for what we consider to be moral and immoral behaviour (Alexander 2004: 249). The other injustice memories discussed in the chapter serve essentially the same role. They are part of the present and the potential future as moral-political reference points. As shown by Durkheim (1912/2001) in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life society and collectivity are constituted through shared symbols and memories. If the argument is accepted that we have shared global injustice memories these serve as powerful evidence of a global society. Global injustice memories are thus intimately connected to an implicit or explicit global “we” with moral responsibilities that extend beyond national boundaries and identities. Of course, this argument should not be taken to imply any kind of global meaning homogeneity. To state that a memory is global, in other words, is not tantamount to saying that it is equally known and distributed all over the globe. In reality many of them are anchored more powerfully in some regions than in others. Considering the cases of Apartheid and Rwanda, for example, these memories have special signicance in the African region. Rwanda because it directly affected several other

–53– Thomas OLESEN states as a result of huge ows of refugees; and Apartheid because the colonial experience in which it was grounded is widely shared across the region. Simi- larly, Salvador Allende, who died in the violent takeover by Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, has signicant status as an injustice memory in South Ameri- can history and collective memory as well as in Europe and the United States in which numerous actors engaged in solidarity activities with Chile (states in this part of world also welcomed and received a strong ow of refugees). His status is undoubtedly less pronounced in, say, Africa and Asia. Similarly, the discussions have also shown that global injustice memories are sometimes contested at the national level and over-layered with processes of forgetting andself-celebration. In other words: global injustice memories exist, but they exist in and are shaped by an uneven global space traversed by conicts and power inequalities.

REFERENCES

Aksu, E. (2009). “Global Collective Memory: Conceptual Difculties of an Appealing Idea”,.Global Society 23(3): 317-332. Alexander, J. C. (2004b). “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holo- caust’ from War Crime to Trauma Drama”, in Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N . . . J., and P. Sztompka (eds.). Cultural Trauma and Collective Iden- tity. Berkeley: University of California Press: 196-263. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origins and Speed of Nationalism. London: Verso. Assmann, A. and S. Conrad (eds.)(2010). Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Bell, D. (ed.) (2006). Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reections on the Relationship between Past and Present. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan . Booth, W. J. (2006). Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Buettner, A. (2012). Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe: The Cultural Politics of Seeing. Farnham: Ashgate . Durkheim, É. (2001 [1912]). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eyerman, R. (2004). “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity”, in Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka: 60-111,.. Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. L. (2007). No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hobsbawn, E. and T. Ranger (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. .

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Langenbacher, Eric and Shan, Yossi (eds.) (2010). Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations. Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press. Levy, D. and N. Sznaider (2002). “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory”, European Journal of Social Theory 5 (1): 87-106. McDonald, M. (2010). “Lest We Forget’: The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention”, International Political Sociology 4(3): 287-302. Melvern, L. R. (2000). A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide. London: Zed Books. Miller, P. B. (2006). “Contested memories: the Bosnian genocide in Serb and Muslim minds”, Journal of Genocide Research 8(3): 311-324. Müller, J.-W. (ed.) (2002). Memory and Power in Post-War Europe. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. Nora, P. (ed.) (1996). Realms of Memory, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. Olesen, T. (2012). “Global Injustice Memories: The 1994 Rwanda Genocide”, Interna- tional Political Sociology 6(4): 373-389. Olesen, T. (2014). “Global Political Icons: The Making of Nelson Mandela”, unpublished paper, Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University. Olick, J. K. (2007). The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Respon- sibility. New York: Routledge. Olick, J. K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. and D. Levy (2011). “Introduction”, pp. 3-62 in Olick, J. K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V, and D. Levy (eds.). The Collective Memory Reader.Ox- ford: Oxford University Press: 60-111. Phillips. K.R. and G. M. Reyes (eds.) (2011). Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remem- brance in a Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Schlegel, A. (1995). “My Lai: ‘We Lie, They Die’ Or, A Small History of an ‘Atrocious’ Photograph”. Third Text 9(31): 47-66. Schwartz, B. (1990). “The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln”, in Middleton, D. and D. Edwards (eds.). Collective Remembering. London: Sage: 81-107. Shaw, M. (2000). Theory of the Global State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. D. (1990). “Towards a Global Culture”, Theory, Culture and Society 7: 171-191. Smith, A. D. (1995). Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge, MA: Black- well . Thörn, H. (2006). Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society.Bas- ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zehfuss, M. (2007). Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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MEMORIES OF AGENCY,PARTICIPATION AND RESISTANCE. TOWARDS A DIACHRONIC DIMENSION IN COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Thomas TUFTE

When social movements today mobilize and organize citizens in struggles for social justice, and when non-governmental organizations campaign to raise awareness on particular causes, they are constructing and implementing communication strategies for social change. More or less strategically, they plan how to achieve their goal, how to pursue their mission. Central in this endeavor is to communicate with large groups in society. However, what is often overlooked, in the strategizing of communication plan- ners as well as in the analysis by scholars, is how memory works and constitutes a hidden resource in communicating for social change. In this chapter, I propose a three-pronged diachronic dimension to be further strengthened in research and practice of communication for development and social change. Recognizing public memory as both a rhetorical and political strategy, and being attentive to the challenges of translating the past into a meaningful present altogether constitute stepping stones, both in planning communication for social change strategies and in understanding their dynamics and potential. This diachronic dimension can furthermore prove a useful pathway to deepen our understanding of what really happened with the ‘eruption’ of social movements in recent years.

–57– Thomas TUFTE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THEIR TRAJECTORIES OF MOBILIZATION

The many recent social uprisings, most recently in Brazil and Turkey, but also in Spain, Greece, Chile, Egypt, Tunisia and many other places, have been characterized and celebrated in the public sphere as uprisings growing out of immediate experiences of exclusion. A lot of these uprisings took even initiated commentators by surprise, with politicians, analysts and the general public seeking the deeper reasoning behind these massive mobilizations. With the risk of simplifying, I argue that the public discourse and memory already constructed around these recent uprisings have emphasized short-term and supercial explanations as to what happened, with analysts and journalists focusing their stories on the uprisings being reactions to the economic crises. However, if we look back into history, major changes in the development of society have most often been long struggles for justice, emerging from groups of people that have mobilized, organized and advocated their cases – communicating their causes and, sometimes, achieving their objectives. The women’s movement in the late 19th century and early 20th century is one example of this. The civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s is another. Many of the social movements ghting military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and especially the 1980s are other examples. These movements took time, often many decades, and were successful at claiming a voice and a space for their protagonists. They were successful in articulating civic and collective action – and they were successful in enhancing citizens’ claims for a role in the development of their society. Persistence and a long trajectory in pursuit of a social or political cause was what led to social and political change. The social movements we have witnessed more recently most often show similar trajectories: be it the movements of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, the Autonomous Movement or the Indignados. These are names and slogans given to processes of social mobilization and collective action that have at least one common denominator: the call for a more inclusive development process in which the unemployed, the youth, women, the poor, the marginalized, or simply the citizen on a low income, demand to be seen and heard. These historical claims have become visible in current times of economic crisis, but they carry the legacy of exclusion with them, and often times also histories and memories of agency, participation and resistance. A world famous example, a symbol of resistance, but also a piece of memory work is the appearance and use of the mask of Guy Fawkes in the recent social uprisings, including, for example, in the uprisings in Turkey and Brazil in June 2013, in the anti-government demonstrations in Argentina later the same year, but

–58– Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance also many other mobilizations (i.e. Thailand, Syria, New York, Spain, etc.). In the photo below we see a visual representation of the face of Guy Fawkes, but maybe we are also seeing the Gunpowder Plot, a story of resistance against the British government in 1605? This mask has come to carry the memory of a past resistance movement and of individual agency, and has in recent years been remembered and now catapulted into new spheres and struggles, as a piece of memory work.

Guy Fawkes mask, 2011. Photo by Justin Ling

–59– Thomas TUFTE

COMMUNICATION FOR CONNECTIVE ACTION

The role of the new digital media in these contemporary social movements is man- ifold; circulating information, opening spaces for social critique and facilitating new forms of social mobilization, often times in close synergy with the traditional media. In this respect, 2011 was a seminal year, which gave rise to many social movements of continuing importance, movements which did make often creative and intense use of the new digital media in their orchestration and mobilization of people (Gerbaudo 2012). While the crucial role of the media and communication in processes of social change has become ever more evident, this growing recognition is ironically not connected to the eld of communication for development and social change as it has unfolded in UN agencies and in large government programs or international NGOs in past decades. Most governments and development agencies have developed vertical spaces for participation, in which target audiences, through strategic communicative interventions, are ‘invited’ to participate, to gain knowledge, to deliberate, debate and change behaviour. This is seen in the way communication for social change has come to be institutionalized in contemporary government programs as USAID and DFID, and even in large NGOs, especially many of the US-based NGOs, as well as in transnational development agencies, for example in many UN agencies. However, these communication for social change practices have little or nothing in common with the new generation of social movements. The differences between an institutionalized communication for development practice and the ways social movements mobilize and communicate for social justice and social change are in part explained by their different approaches to participation. Governments and development agencies largely understand participation as social processes closely tied to program and project cycles and the underlying logics that inform their organizational inertia (Tufte and Mefalopulos 2009). Citizen-led participatory processes, such as those seen during the many social mobilizations since 2011, are a difcult match with the logics of most system-driven processes. While being very in favor of and at some level engaged in opening up space for popular participation and citizen-driven processes, governments and large development organizations seem hardly able to connect with what is happening in the horizontal spaces of deliberation created by contemporary social movements. Substantial social mobilizations occurring outside formal institutional and political arenas are generating previously unseen processes of deliberation, social and political critique, collective action and social change. However, they are doing this without clear organizational structures, no xed membership, no explicit communication strategy on paper and, in many ways, as a movement ‘in ux’ that is difcult to clearly identify, monitor and evaluate (Kavada 2011). Many contemporary

–60– Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance social movements t with the ‘segmented, polycentric, integrated networks’, or simply the SPIN-type of groups dened by Gerlach and Hines (1970). Alain Touraine (1981), Alberto Melucci (1996), Lance Bennett (2003), Anas- tasia Kavada (2011, 2012) and many others have since taken this work much further. They have theorized collective action in social movements, and scholars are also increasingly theorizing the communication ows inherent in these processes. Recently, Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg have developed a typology for what they call ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). Based on case studies in the US, Germany and the UK, they identify three ideal types of action involving media in contemporary contentious politics. These are:

¯ Organizationally brokered collective action; coalitions of heavily brokered relations among organizations seeking a common collection action framing.

¯ Organizationally enabled connective action; loosely tied networks of organizations sponsoring multiple actions and causes around a general set of issues in which followers are invited to personalize their engagement (more or less) on their own terms.

¯ Crowd-enabled connective action: dense, ne-grained networks of individuals in which digital media platforms are the most visible and integrative organizational mechanisms (Ibid.: 13).

COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE AT A CROSSROADS

The dominant discourses used within communication for development and social change today have primarily grown out of organizations that produce institutionalized communication in the form of ‘campaigns’ and similar invited communicative practices. These connect mostly to the organizationally brokered collective action in Bennett and Segerberg’s typology of action. In contrast to these spaces of communicative practice, the social movements use media and communication technologies as a practice embedded in the spaces they create outside of formal systems of governance and social organization – spaces they claim, demand and occupy. They cut across Bennett and Segerberg’s typology, containing elements of all three – the ways this happens is very case specic. However, most relevant for the topic of this chapter is the intriguing gap between invited system-driven spaces for communication and participation and the bottom-up, informal and non-institutionalized spaces that ought to provoke the established systems and organizations to rethink their strategies of communication for social change.

–61– Thomas TUFTE

This gap illustrates very different views upon how agents of change may engage citizens in processes of social change. These different perspectives have always been there but not always clearly carved out. The differences are demonstrated clearly in the communication for social change practices coming out of the Latin American social movements of the past ve decades (Gumucio-Dagron and Tufte 2006), a history and experience of resistance that sharply contrasts the historical legacy of government controlled initiatives. Communication for development in Latin America has historically been closely associated with the ‘development projects’ of the military dictatorships as well as with democratically elected governments’ initiatives to create invited spaces of communication. The many decades of bottom-up communication of the social movements have been articulated in resistance to the latter, developing not only a vocabulary and a discourse but also a political project and thus a set of objectives very different from those of the system driven initiatives. However, similar communication approaches, with bottom-up notions of agency, participation and civic engagement, are being rearticulated today. It is seen in the many social movements that swept across the globe, but it is also seen in the global proliferation of civil society organizations in the past 15-20 years. Many civil society driven initiatives seem to assume that constructing opportunities for participation in the public sphere will enhance citizenship and produce a more inclusive development process. However, a lack of consensus both amongst the civil society practitioners, and amongst the scholars as to the denition of citizenship results in different takes on what participatory forms of media use and communicative practice entail, and what they should aim to achieve. The debate is locked in what the Brazilian political scientist Evelina Dagnino has called a ‘perverse conuence’ of two different political projects: ‘The perverse nature of the conuence between the participatory and the neoliberal projects lies in the fact that both not only require a vibrant and proactive civil society, but also share core notions, such as citizenship, participation and civil society, albeit used with very different meanings’ (2011: 419). Many NGOs and social movements are struggling to position themselves with regard to this paradox. It is a struggle that results in competing and even conicting political discourses emerging in the currents of social movements that on the surface seem to be assembled around common causes. The recent mobilizations in Brazil in 2013 and 2014 were a clear example of this paradox. On the one hand, we can thus recognize the perverse conuence of discourses that Dagnino points at. On the other, we can identify a large global resurgence of practices of bottom-up communication for social change that is stirring up our thinking around agency, participation and resistance in a highly productive and provocative manner. We, the critical researchers, are, as it were, experiencing a ‘wake-up call’ that is forcing us to critically re-examine current schools of thought

–62– Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance and produce new insights regarding how we can conceptualize and theorize about the use of media and communication to articulate behavioural change, social justice and political transformation. It is in this reexive moment and in this crossroads of discourses around the discipline of communication for development and social change that an opportunity has emerged to rethink or simply introduce what has for long been ignored. I am speaking of introducing some reection around memory and memory work into the eld of communication for development and social change: memories of agency, of participation and of resistance.

MEMORY WORK:AHIDDEN RESOURCE IN COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE?

The aim of introducing memory into the rethinking of the eld of communication for social change is twofold. Firstly, it is to critically assess the communicative practice of social movements and civil society. This will be done by analysing their way of conducting memory work. Secondly, the aim is to explore how memory work possibly can serve as an analytical perspective, a way to broaden and strengthen a theory of communication for social change, where history, experience and trajectory can come together in the concept of ‘memory work’. The question which therefore drives the next section is the following: to which degree have current social movements and civil society initiatives drawn on the memories of past movements of resistance, as a resource in their struggles, as a source of inspiration? How is memory de facto articulated in today’s social movements and today’s civil society organizations’ work for social justice and human rights? My hypothesis is that memory work remains a used but largely untheorized and hidden resource in a lot of communication strategies for change. By theorizing how memory work can be conceived, and by de facto shedding more light on the histories, trajectories and experiences that are remembered and used from the past, communication strategists will be able to work more proactively and consciously in strategizing for change. Furthermore, communication researchers and analysts will be able to perform much better and deeper analyses of where social change comes from and how and why change processes are articulated. If we take a look at the mainstream communication practice of a lot of social movements and communication strategies, they are very often focused on having a clear strategy that can be efcient, can promote visibility and can articulate public resonance. This is seen in so many communication interventions and in the

–63– Thomas TUFTE strategic thinking behind them. It is seen in their conceptualization and implementation. And it is also the predominant focus when mainstream interventions are evaluated. However, there are so many unrevealed social dynamics which communication for social change strategies contribute to enhance, but which our current analytical frameworks simply are not tuned in to detect, analyze or understand. By enhancing a focus on memory – on the resources that our societies carry with them from the past and use in the present to project a better future – a whole array of real-time and analytical opportunities open up. A focus on memory and memory work can open up for a much deeper ‘dialogue with society’, for example by making visible and telling the stories that have shaped both the collective moral, the political values and the meanings citizens attribute to them. Therefore, by bringing the eld of memory, as a resource and as a value, into the strategic work of communication for social change, we, as critical researchers, and also as action-researchers, can position ourselves within a more dialectical way of understanding the relationship between social movements and civil society on one hand, and social change processes on the other.

THE DIACHRONIC DIMENSION:THREE PERSPECTIVES ON MEMORY WORK

In the following I introduce three analytical perspectives on memory and memory work that can open up for an improved understanding of how communication and memory interrelate. I am here drawing on the conceptual contributions from three scholars that all were speakers at the Ørecomm Festival 2013, two of whom are also contributing to this book. The American rhetorician and researcher into public memory, Kendall R. Phillips interestingly claims that ‘memories don’t die – they may only just lie around in subaltern publics’ (Phillips 2013). As such, he argues, they remain resources that potentially can reemerge from their ‘lying around’ in subaltern publics. They can possibly, through the mass self-representation that new social media provide opportunities for, obtain prominence, spark debates or serve as key narratives in struggles for human rights or social justice. This is the work that social movements can stage. However, it is important to state that besides the work of the social movements, we often times nd civil society organizations that work ongoing with similar issues on the ground. There are many recent examples of civil society driven media platforms (Kavada 2012; Tufte 2013 & 2014; Wilder- muth 2013 & 2014). It can actually often be difcult to draw the line between what

–64– Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance is a social movement and what is an NGO. But they can both draw on memory as a resource in their communication work. The three perspectives on memory that I nd helpful for us in strengthening what I call ‘the diachronic dimension’ of communication for social change theory all circle around memory work as a resource for social movements and civil society. They do at times overlap but indeed also complement each other.

PERSPECTIVE 1: PUBLIC MEMORY AS RHETORICAL STRATEGY The rst of these perspectives draws on Phillips’ notion of public memory as rhetorical strategies (Phillips 2013 and in this volume). He suggests two ways of working with public memory from a rhetorical perspective. One way is to view public memory as collectively shared memories that help constitute communities, collectivities or nations. To enhance such collectively shared memories, the media have indeed played a fundamental role. Some stories are told and shared in the public domain, while others may lie around in subaltern publics, as Phillips argues. The point to be aware about here is that the public sphere or public spheres remain a dominant arena for these collectively shared memories. The other rhetorical strategy whereby we can approach public memory is through the means by which we publicize these memories. This emphasizes the tools and channels used to communicate the shared memories to a broader audience. In both cases, the construction of public memory remains a contested eld where struggle and negotiation take place, and some stories and histories come to dominate the public sphere while other stories are silenced. This speaks to my second perspective on memory. The fact of the matter is that in addition to thinking about memory as a rhetorical strategy, we cannot ignore that memory is highly political

PERSPECTIVE 2: MEMORY IS POLITICAL The Danish political scientist Thomas Olesen speaks to this political dimension. He argues that memory struggles never close. It is a similar but maybe slightly more combatant approach as compared to Phillips’ emphasis on memories that never die but lie around. Olesen is more proactive, deliberative and critical. He introduces what he calls ‘injustice memories’, dening these as cross-temporal carriers of collective meanings. Injustice memories, he argues, are symbols based on events or situations that have acquired meanings that point beyond their spatio- temporal roots (Olesen, 2013 and in this volume). Consequently, meaning infusion is political. It enters social movements and some memories of injustice climb the hierarchy of visibility and recognition to become almost sanctied stories or meta- narratives of injustice memories. In this manner, the injustice memories become

–65– Thomas TUFTE more or less socially accepted yardsticks for the assessment of right and wrong. Injustice memories exist in the real world, in relations, as norms and values. As such, they are intangible – you can’t go out and grasp them or point at them. They become elements of a political culture. However, there are a number of tangible expressions of this political culture, of these accepted yardsticks for the assessment of what is right and wrong. Olesen provides three very tangible sites where they appear in very material forms: The rst site is in photographs, or rather visual representations. This can be in the form of sculptures, photos, grafti, coffee cups or posters – all of these forms coming together under the concept of iconicity. A second tangible expression appears in art and popular culture, both the professional and the amateur. A lot of this we see appearing on digital sites as YouTube as forms of popular political art. Thirdly, injustice memories appear in places, that is, in the naming of public spaces like street or squares. For example in Paris, there is already a public square named after the young man who put re to himself in Tunis in late 2010 and who died in early 2011. The square is called ‘Place Mohamed Bouazizi’ and the text on the plaque tells the years he was born and died, 1984-2011, and it states: En homage au peuple tunisien et a sa revolution de janvier 2011: in honour of the Tunisian people and their revolution of January 2011. In a more global perspective, Olesen brings up two examples of injustice memories which can be seen as belonging to several collectives, but where those who constitute the actual collective vary: a) the Rwanda genocide in 1994 is a global injustice memory, although also, and maybe primarily a national injustice memory. The Rwandans will never forget that genocide, whereas we seem largely to have forgotten it globally: b) the reverse case is Apartheid in South Africa. It’s a global injustice memory, but also national. It is a reversed example compared to Rwanda because it shows what can be achieved when the global community acts together, contrary to what the global community did in Rwanda, where they left the Rwandans to kill each other in horrendous numbers (Olesen 2013 and in this volume). All these stated examples provide elements of contestation. They all have one thing in common: it is that memory struggles very seldom close. They remain open and constant arenas of erce competition and negotiation. Sometimes the empirical foundation is challenged, sometimes victims are discredited, and sometimes the custodians of memory act immorally. The key question here is: What is remembered and what is not? It’s a highly political question, carrying elements of collective moral and political values across time. What is remembered and what is not orients our sense of who we are and who we wish to be.

–66– Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance

PERSPECTIVE 3: THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSLATION IN MEMORY WORK

The third perspective on memory that I suggest draws on the work of the post- colonial theorist Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, now living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his address to the Ørecomm Festival, Mbembe reected critically upon the afterwardness of Apartheid in South Africa, asking the question of how South Africa can remember without ending up in violent revenge, in imprisonment in the past. What discourses of South African development can be narrated whereby new modalities of relationality can be imagined and carried forward? The main challenge here is that of translating memory into a discourse that is workable and feasible for the present and future, and which avoids sparking new conict. As such, Mbembe’s contribution to our analytical perspectives is that of drawing our attention to the discursive challenge, and furthermore, the challenge of translation, i.e. how to translate memory into manageable discourses. It is Mbembe’s concern about methods of discursive translation in memory work that can open up the door for the strategic thinking that change agents wish to apply in communicating for social change. These change agents can be governments, NGOs or even social movements. It is about what discourse to use. Let me provide an example here that emerges from the South African civil society. In South Africa a well-known NGO called Soul City has drawn on a common experience and traumatic memory from the Apartheid years to enhance an act of agency and resistance to oppression. Soul City worked with the memory of how resistance was articulated in the townships when the police came to persecute and arrest youth, particularly young men, who had stood up and exercised resistance against the racist regime. The way people acted against the repression at the time was by banging pots and pans, an act that was as visible and noisy as an active but non-violent protest against the regime. Soul City worked with this memory of agency and resistance from the times of the Apartheid regime, but put it into a contemporary context where the theme was domestic violence. Soul City put together a whole campaign trying to draw attention to the massive problem of violence against women in the South African society in the aftermath of Apartheid. Central in the campaign and specically in the TV-series component of the campaign is that a woman, named Matlakhala, is being beaten up by her husband. It is a situation of repression and abuse that has been going on for long in this story. And once again, Matlakhala is trying to escape. But this time, the private and lonely experience of abuse is pushed into the public sphere: she simply runs out of her private sphere, the house, and out into the street, where the husband’s abuse of her becomes enacted in a public sphere where neighbours see her. In response to this act of oppression, the neighbours act as they did against the po-

–67– Thomas TUFTE lice brutality that they experienced in the 1970s and 1980s when the police came into the townships looking for young people who were opposing the regime. The neighbours back then in Apartheid times, as well as now, grabbed their pots in the houses and took to the streets banging the pots. This narrative is Soul City’s way of using storytelling, in the format of entertainment-education, as a communication strategy for social change. Entertainment-education is a very widespread and popular strategy used in many NGOs and civil society initiatives throughout the world. What is special here is rst of all, how the telling of stories is used to make private experiences of domestic violence an issue of public concern. This strategy is very much in sync with the political potential of storytelling that for example Hannah Arendt spoke about. To recall Arendt with her views on storytelling:

“Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead to an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to t them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling. (Arendt 1958: 50)”

The case of Soul City’s pot-banging is an example of the deliberate choice that the NGO Soul City makes to work with a social practice from the times of the Apartheid regime of which many adult South Africans have a controversial but probably vivid memory: it is the practice of banging pots to show discontent and to protest against a superior power. Packaging this within the telling of a story of domestic violence, and inserting the actual pot-banging as a response to such abuse, worked very well with the South African audience. That it drew on a memory of agency and resistance that even transcends the history of South Africa and is known as a global symbol of resistance, is most likely not a memory that is articulate and present for the South African audience. Soul City’s communication for social change campaign is embedded in the collective memory of South Africa and the struggle against apartheid, and was in this capacity brought in as a strategic way of working with memory, recirculat- ing the meaning of the specic act of deance. It becomes Soul City’s strategy to translate memory of agency, participation and resistance into manageable discourses that t today’s challenges. At the end of the day, the campaign was very successful, managing to inuence social change at many levels in South Africa (Tufte 2005).

–68– Memories of Agency, Participation and Resistance TOWARDS A HOLISTIC FRAMEWORK IN COMMUNICATION FOR DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Recognizing the strategic, the political and the discursive dimension of memory work brings us a step forward in developing a holistic framework in communication for development and social change. Together, these three perspectives upon memory work, that of the strategic considerations and choices, the political option, and the actual discursive construction of memory, constitute elements of a diachronic dimension I would suggest to add to the different models of communication for civic engagement that we know of. Complementing Bennett and Segerberg’s typology, mentioned earlier, Mirca Madianou provides a useful perspective for the exploration of civic engagement. Madianou (2012: 5) articulates a ‘tripartite model of engagement’, arguing that the Habermasian ideal of public speech as a signicant form of engagement and as an action in its own right must be connected to concerns about awareness and understanding of the campaign and communication intervention in which one is engaged. By reecting critically on how humanitarian appeals – in campaigning for a cause via social networking sites – often simplify proposals for action, she argues that opportunities for speech and action need to be connected with increased awareness and understanding of the issues at stake, to avoid running the risk of ‘clicktivism’ and pursue more articulate forms of civic engagement. This combined approach to civic engagement, integrating speech, action and understanding, resonates with the model of ‘concientization’ developed by Paulo Freire in the 1970s. Freire’s core argument in promoting dialogic communication was to avoid action without reection, as this would become mere ‘activism’, and he would also avoid reection without activism, as this would remain ‘verbalism’ (Freire 1996 [1970]). Conclusively, what I would like to suggest is to view ‘memory work’ as an additional dimension to the model of civic engagement. Memory work – rhetorical, political and translational as it were – is inherent in the diachronic dimension that complements the synchronicity of Madianou’s three aspects of civic engagement: those of speech, action and understanding. The works of Jesus Martín-Barbero and Jorge Gonzalez on trajectories and formations of publics and most recently Jorge Gonzalez’s work on cyberculture can been seen as providing a strong social scientic foundation in which to embed the diachronic dimension and the focus on memory that I am suggesting for the eld of communication for development and social change (Gonzalez 2012). It remains beyond the scope of this chapter, but is a highly recommendable starting point for further elaboration of this dimension. By incorporating the rhetorical, the political and the ‘translation’ challenge of memory work we can hopefully develop a clearly diachronic dimension to how

–69– Thomas TUFTE we conceive of civic engagement and communicate for development and social change.

REFERENCES

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bennett, L. (2003). “Communication Global Activism: Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics”. Information, Communication & Society 6: 143-168. Bennett, L. and A. Segerberg (2013). The Logic of Connective Action. Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. New York: University of Cambridge Press. Dagnino, E. (2011). “Citizenship: a perverse conuence”, in: Cornwall A. (ed.). The Par- ticipation Reader. London: Zed Books: 418-427. Freire, P. (1996 [1970]). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Books. Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto Press. Gerlach, L.P, and V. H. Hine (1970). People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Trans- formation. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Gonzalez, J. (2012). Entre Cultura(s) e Cibercultur@(s) incursões e outras rotas não lineares. São Bernardo do Campo: UMESP. Gumucio-Dagron, A. and T. Tufte (eds.) (2006). Communication for social change. An- thology: Historical and contemporary readings. South Orange, NJ: Communication for Social Change Consortium. Jackson, M. (2002). The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjec- tivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Kavada, A. (2011). Digital Communication Technologies and Collective Action: Towards a Conceptual Framework. Paper presented at the ‘Political Communication’ Section of the IAMCR 2011 General Conference, Istanbul, 13–17 July 2011. Kavada, A. (2012). “Engagement, bonding, and identity across multiple platforms: Avaaz on Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace”. Mediekultur 52; 28-48. Madianou, M. (2012). “Humanitarian campaigns in social media”. Journalism Studies, DOI:10.1080/1461670X.2012.718558..

Mbembe, A. (2013). Africa in Theory. Oral Presentation at the Third Ørecomm Festival, 15 September 2013: http://bambuser.com/v/3918562# t=122s. Melucci, A. (1996).Challenging codes. Collective action in the information age.New York: Cambridge University Press. Olesen, T. (2013). Social Movements and Injustice Memories. Oral Presentation at the Third Ørecomm Festival, 13 September 2013: http://bambuser.com/v/3910307#t= 720s. Olesen, T (2014). ‘Global Injustice Memories’, in Hansen, A. H, Hemer, O. and T. Tufte (eds). Memory on Trial. Media, Citizen and Social Justice. Münster: LIT Verlag..

Phillips, K. (2013). Oral Presentation at the Third Ørecomm Festival, 13 September 2013: http://bambuser.com/v/3910307# t=720s.

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Phillips, K (2014). “The Absence of Memory: Rhetoric and the Question of Public Re- membrance”, in Hansen, Hemer and Tufte. Touraine, A. (1981) The Voice and the Eye. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tufte, T. (2005). “Entertainment-education in development communication: Between marketing behaviours and empowering people”, in Hemer, O. and T. Tufte (eds.). Media and Glocal Change: Rethinking Communication for Development. Göteborg and Buenos Aires: Nordicom and CLACSO: 159-174. Tufte, T. (2013). “Towards a Renaissance in Communication for Social Change. Reden- ing the Discipline and Practice in the Post ‘Arab Spring’ Era”, in Tufte, T. et al. (eds.). Speaking Up and Talking Back: Media, Empowerment and Civic Engagement among East and Southern African Youth. Yearbook 2013 of The International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media. Gothenburg: NORDICOM, UNESCO and University of Gothenburg: 19-36. Tufte, T. (2014). “Civil society sphericules: Emerging communication platforms for civic engagement in Tanzania”.Ethnography, Special Issue on Civic Mediations. Tufte, T. and P. Mefalopulos (2009). Participatory Communication. A Practical Guide. Washington: World Bank. World Bank Working Paper No. 170. Wildermuth, N. (2013). “Information and communication technology-facilitated e- citizenship, e-democracy and digital empowerment in Kenya: The opportunities and constraints of community-based initiatives”, in Tufte T et al.: 55-80. Wildermuth, N. (2014). “Communication for transparency and social accountability: The affordances of ICT”, in Wilkins K., Tufte T. and R. Obregon (eds.). Handbook of De- velopment Communication and Social Change. Malden: Blackwell-Wiley: 370-392.

–71–

VII

COUNTERMEMORIES,COUNTERPUBLICS

Tamar K ATRIEL

INTRODUCTION

Grassroots interventions that are located at the nexus of social activism and memory work challenge widespread understandings of both past and present by inserting alternative discourses into the public sphere. These discourses, in turn, give rise to what Warner (2005:67) has called counterpublics. In Warner’s conceptualization, publics are spaces of discourse “organized by nothing other than discourse itself,” whereas counterpublics are “formed by conict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment” (ibid.: 63). Importantly, this conict is not just a matter of ideas or policy questions but pertains “to the speech genres and modes of address that constitute the public” (ibid.: 119). The question Warner poses is therefore intriguing for students of the dynamics of public communication: “How, by what rhetoric, might one bring a public into being when extant modes of address and intelligibility seem themselves to be a problem?” (ibid.: 130). This chapter addresses this question through an ethnographic study of a loosely and horizontally organized activist group of Israeli veterans called Break- ing the Silence, a so-called ‘witnessing organization’ (Frosh 2006), whose goal is to resist the ofcial policy of military control over the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967.1Breaking the Silence activists do so by constructing a testimonial edice of soldiers’ witness accounts about the on-the-ground reality of the occupation regime.2

1 There is mandatory military service in Israel (3 years for men and 2 years for women); furthermore, upon their discharge many veteran soldiers become part of the “reserve corps” and may be called into service for about one month per year well into their 30s, depending on their military role, and do not really leave their military experience behind. In what follows, I use the terms soldier and veteran interchangeably. 2 A preliminary note about the use of the term “occupation” is in order here. Lexical choice in naming and framing the story of Israel’s military control of the Palestinian territories inevitably

–73– Tamar K ATRIEL

Breaking the Silence witnessing project follows a strategy globally associated with the oppositional practices of human rights organizations. It involves eliciting and archiving testimonies of harassment and human rights abuses perpetrated by soldiers as part of their routine daily rounds, thereby concretizing and eshing out the nature and meaning of the occupation in the day-to-day reality of both occupier and occupied. The particular intervention of this organization, whose anti-occupation message is shared by a range of other activist groups operating at the margins of Israeli contentious politics, involves giving voice to the distinctive perspective of the soldiers who had served in the Palestinian territories during the Al Aqsa Intifada in the early 2000s. These soldiers have direct knowledge of the workings of the occupation, and they enjoy the narrative authority of authentic witnesses as well as the social prestige of combatants in Israeli society. Rather than simply replicating well-rehearsed ideological and political dissident positions, these soldier-witnesses draw on their autobiographical memories to counter the hegemonic discourses emanating from the military authorities and circulated by the mainstream media. In and through their testimonial project, the soldiers mobilize their personal stories so as to mount a moral critique of the occupation regime, highlighting the intrusive and coercive nature of their policing assignments in the heart of civilian-populated areas. In what follows, I address some of the efforts made by Breaking the Silence soldier-witnesses to translate their military experiences into a civilian idiom that would allow them to step out of their military role and offer a critical, retrospective glance at their military experience. I do so by attending to two rhetorical moves that punctuate many of the soldiers’ testimonies – the rationales they offer for assuming the witness role; and their renderings of traumatic moments of ‘moral shock’ (Jasper 1997) that are associated with emotionally charged and morally troubling encounters they experienced during their military rounds. These two modes of self-narration mark complementary paths in the soldiers’ attempts to make sense of their military experience for themselves and for their imagined audiences.

BREAKING THE SILENCE AS A WITNESSING ORGANIZATION Breaking the Silence began its anti-occupation activism in the spring of 2004, when a group of Israeli veterans, who had spent portions of their military service

invokes a political stance. Indeed, the term occupation draws a linguistic line between the state of Israel in its 1948 borders and the military control over Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Notably, this distinction is rejected by both Palestinian and Israeli hard-liners. The former claim entitlement to all of the territories which were inhabited by Palestinians in pre-1948 years, to all of Falastin. The latter claim the same territory as the divinely ordained biblical land of Israel, designating the West Bank as Judea and Samaria.

–74– Countermemories, Counterpublics in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, decided to share their experiences with the public-at-large. With the curatorship of a well-known photojournalist and artist, Miki Kratzman, they mounted a photography exhibition of pictures taken by soldiers during their military rounds in the Palestinian city of Hebron. Held in a college in the outskirts of Tel Aviv, the exhibition sparked considerable public interest, drawing in many soldiers and their families, among others. The organizers offered guided tours along the exhibition walls and engaged visitors in animated discussions, turning the exhibition space into a vibrant site of unprecedented open exchange. The images circulated within the exhibition, the events associated with it, including a raid by the military police and the brief detention of some of the organizers, the resentment expressed by some and the admiration by others – all contributed to the public debate that the exhibition generated. Following this initial success, a core group of activists decided to organize under the name of Breaking the Silence, launching the sustained testimonial campaign on which my study focuses. While attuned to the plight of the Palestinian population, which has been documented by a range of both Palestinian, Israeli and international NGOs, the group’s stated goal was to bear witness to the moral price Israeli soldiers are paying for their participation in the occupation regime and its social implications for Israeli society at large. The group’s mission statements indicate the collective self-understanding of its members as morally driven silence-breakers who insist on naming the elephant in the room. In one of them they explain their shared motivations:

We got out of the army recently. Hebron was the hardest and most confusing place that we served in. Up until now we have all dealt with the shocking things we saw there. Our photo album, a souvenir from our service in Hebron, has remained sealed on a shelf in a room. But as time passed since our discharge, we discovered that those memories were common to all of us who served together. . . We saw our friends and ourselves slowly changing. Caught in impossible situations. . . We decided to speak out. We decided to tell. . . The group has taken upon itself to reveal to the Israeli public the daily routine of life in the territories, a routine which gets no coverage in the media. . . The main goal of Breaking the Silence is to expose the true reality in the territories and as a consequence to promote a public debate on the moral price paid by Israeli society as a whole due to the reality in which young soldiers are facing a civilian population everyday and controlling it (Breaking the Silence, The Hebron Booklet, 2004).

Over the past decade, Breaking the Silence activists have used informal snowball recruiting methods in creating an archive of soldiers’ testimonies about the occupation regime, amassing some 900 videotaped interviews in which young men and women recount what they did, saw and felt during their military service. Tran- scribed segments of these interviews were edited into testimonial booklets and

–75– Tamar K ATRIEL posted on their well-maintained website.3 This archival effort is supplemented by activities designed to create spaces and occasions for the circulation of this testimonial edice. The exhibition mentioned earlier traveled to various locations around the country and abroad, providing a platform for live testimonial events and panel discussions and talks to various groups. These were supplemented by alternative guided tours to the Palestinian city of Hebron, a play and documentary lms based on soldiers’ testimonies, and occasional op-eds in the popular press. Around a dozen active core members of Breaking the Silence are active at any given time, serving as organizers, strategizers, interviewers, speakers and tour guides. The group also enjoys some wider, more uid circles of supporters who help to promote the circulation of the soldiers’ testimonies and the public activities associated with them. These activities are mainly sponsored by private organizations, civil society agencies, but also by some European governments, whose support has generated public controversy over what the organization’s opponents consider to be foreign interventions. A closer look at the way the soldiers’ witnessing voice has been constructed through their archival and dissemination efforts will serve to clarify the unsettling role played by these soldiers’ countermemories in Israeli cultural conversation. The efcacy of the soldiers’ dissident voice hinges on their ability to both imagine and constitute a counterpublic willing to join them in questioning the hegemonic version of political reality.

THE TESTIMONIAL EDIFICE OF BREAKING THE SILENCE The collective voice of Breaking the Silence arises from the synergy of the individual voices of soldier-witnesses. It is a voice that arises from a carefully or- chestrated balance between the rst person singular and plural, the “I” and the “we.” Thus, alongside the group’s collective mission statements, as exemplied above, the group’s website carries a range of video clips with personal statements by individual soldiers who expound on their personal motivations for breaking the silence. These personal accounts echo but also amplify and esh out the group’s collective statements, underscoring the enormous distance they experience between their home world and the world of the occupation, their sense of self and the uniformed self they encounter during their military rounds. Thus, in explaining his decision to testify for Breaking the Silence, Zohar, an educator, describes how his deeply felt sense of self-alienation compelled him to speak:

In the rst years after I sobered up, I’d talk about it all the time. I think it was a cathartic process for me. . . because you’re a different person in the Territories and when you come home you hug your wife or speak to your daughter, or work with children, I’m a teacher. You’re a different person and you can’t mix the two. You can’t be a psychopath and a

3 See http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/ (English version, last accessed 17.3.2014).

–76– Countermemories, Counterpublics lover or educator in the same body. . . I repressed it into darkness under pressure. You refuse to see reality and then it surfaces and time after time you’re reminded. . . 4

Similarly, Inbar, a former woman-soldier, explains her decision to speak out by underscoring the inner tension she experienced upon her release from the army and her desire to trigger a public debate about the soldiers’ experiences:

I decided to talk because I felt I had to. I left the army with a huge sense of unease, I had this time bomb ticking inside me and if I didn’t do something about it, it would eat me. So at rst I spoke, I said what went on. It snowballed from there. It bothered me on a personal level, I saw and experienced too many things I don’t think I was supposed to go through. It was important for me to speak out on another level, because it’s the best starting point there is. The public self-examination that the State of Israel must conduct with itself. First people must look into the mirror and start from there. I believe it’s a moment of sincerity that can generate good things even though people don’t think that way when they rst hear these stories.5

The textual organization of BTS testimonies similarly foregrounds the resonance between personal and collective voices; at the same time, it also brings out their disjuncture. While individual interviews construct a linear chronology of the soldier-witnesses’ military career, their textual presentation follows a thematic organization. The linearity and narrativity of individual witness accounts is dis- rupted by this editorial intervention as thematically linked anecdotes pile up, rein- forcing each other’s evidentiary force. Themed categories relate either to soldiers’ military assignments, such as house searches, checkpoints, or curfews, or to categories of human rights violations such as random arrests, unprovoked shooting, or looting. The thematically arranged segments can be read or viewed in any order, either following different witnesses’ accounts on a particular theme, or, in the video segments, collating different segments of one particular testimony to build up a sense of the testifying soldier’s cumulative experience. This fragmen- tary arrangement of testimonial segments marks a rejection of narrative knowledge. Piling up anecdotes, factual reports, descriptive details – all removed from their original witnessing texts – this testimonial edice manifests the aesthetics of excess, whereby textual fragments are amassed and held together by the power of repetition, aggregation and accumulation. This aesthetic, as discussed by Peter Brooks (1976: 67), is characteristic of the melodramatic mode as a “language of presence and immediacy.” As we shall see, it is a language of traumatic experience that carries no narrative closure, whose use leaves the soldiers’ predicament open-ended and bereft of a sense of closure.

4 Zohar, video interview, segment Why I Break the Silence, 4.5.2011, at http://www. breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos/25947?sg=0 5 Inbar, video interview, segment Why I Break the Silence, at http://www.breakingthesilence.org. il/testimonies/videos/75763?sg=1

–77– Tamar K ATRIEL

Nowhere does the tormented and unresolved confusion of the soldier- witnesses come so clearly to light as in those segments in which they attempt to articulate their sense of moral shock and the trappings of power in which they nd themselves entangled. At times, they express their shock at the unlimited power routinely placed in their young soldiers’ hands, as in the following segment:

Like, it’s crazy! I’m just a kid. I was born yesterday. I derive my power from my uniform and my machine gun, it’s what gives me the right to decide everything. And I do what I’m told to. That’s the power I have and I use it. . . I don’t care if I’m 18 or 17 or 21. I’m a soldier. I’ve got a gun and I’m from the IDF. I’ve got orders and they’d better follow them. . . Why? Good question. A very good question. I really don’t know. . . just because. Because it’s shit. That’s what it is (Breaking the Silence, 2004: 15).

At times, this sense of shock is tinged with a sense of shame as they admit to their own infatuation with the sense of power they experience during their military rounds, as in the following testimonial segment:

I was ashamed of myself the day I realized that I simply enjoy the feeling of power. I don’t believe in it: I think it is not the way to do anything to anyone, surely not to someone who has done nothing to you, but you can’t help but enjoy it. People do what you tell them. You know it’s because you carry a weapon. . . You start playing with them, like a computer game. . . You barely move, you make them obey the tip of your nger. It’s a mighty feeling. . . Suddenly I notice that I get addicted to controlling people (Ibid.: 10).

At other times, the witnessing soldiers’ sense of shock is conveyed through the use of narrative fragments that articulate a new sense of their positioning vis-à-vis the Palestinian ‘other’ under their control. A notable category of such narrative fragments involves accounts of incidents of harassment and humiliation in which the soldiers imaginatively placed themselves in the Palestinians’ position, report- ing an experience captured by Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) notion of “empathic unsettlement,” which he coined in an attempt to capture the kind of inner rup- ture experienced by a witness who encounters the predicament of the victimized ‘other’ through an empathic act of the imagination. One such witness recalls an exchange he witnessed with a Palestinian man whose home was occupied and used by Israeli troops:

. . . this man was not obsequious, and he spoke the truth: that his life was a living hell, and that he wanted us to get out already. . . I don’t agree with the man’s opinions, but he told the soldier that he had entered his home just like that, and was humiliating him, undermining his dignity. And I looked at the man and said to myself: wait a minute, here is this man in his own home, and it made me think of my own family home, surrounded by a garden and greenery, a kind of fortress surrounded by a hedge of lantana and hibiscus, and I thought what if someone were to burst into the house like that, entering through an upstairs window, and force my parents and my younger brother into one of the rooms and start interrogating us, questioning us. . . These are not people of a different kind. The men

–78– Countermemories, Counterpublics even physically look like my grandfather. . . That person could be your own father, for whom you have the greatest respect. . . (Ibid.: 21)

Through accounts of such unsettling moments of self-recognition, in which they recognized the de-humanizing lure of limitless power as well as their shared humanity with the Palestinian other, the Israeli soldier-witnesses add their distinctive voice to a long-standing legacy of soldiers’ witnessing, which gives both historical and cultural depth to their testimonial project.

THE CULTURAL LEGACY OF SOLDIERS’WITNESSING The cultural legacy of modern soldiers’ “war witnessing,” as described by military historian Yuval Harari (2008), was marked by a shift from a war culture centered on a code of honor – as glimpsed in early Renaissance soldiers’ writings – to a modern view of war as a transformative experience of self Bildung. Following WWI, the view of war as transformative became associated with harsh experiences of shock and trauma. Soldiers came to see themselves as victims of war, not as its potential heroes. Their disaffection with the romantic promise of “the beautiful war” gave rise to the authority of “esh-witnessing” as a rhetorical mode. The sense of horror and futility that animated early instances of the esh- witnessing genre, notably in the testimonial writings of WWI veterans,eventually evolved into a full-edged antiwar rhetoric that became part of a broader transnational movement, including such antiwar organizations as War Resisters Interna- tional (established in 1921). A notable later example of antiwar activism in which veterans’ voices predominated was the Winter Soldier Investigation of the Viet- nam War era. This marathon meeting of orally delivered public testimonies by Vietnam War veterans, which was held in Detroit in early 1971, became a leg- endary moment in the cultural legacy of the globalized antiwar movement. As we were told by a founding member of BTS, who gave us a DVD with an edited selection of testimonial segments from this American event, the Winter Soldier investigation was the most immediate model after which the testimonial project of BTS was designed (even though Breaking the Silence opted for an ongoing, gradual project of archive-building rather than a one-time, high prole marathon event). Thus, Breaking the Silence testimonies have creatively appropriated earlier versions of “esh-witnessing.” While viewing themselves as victims of the military and political systems, like their predecessors, their disaffection lies not in their self-positioning as victims (rather than potential heroes) but in their recognition of the questionable morality of their endeavors. These testimonials can therefore be said to constitute a distinctive category of esh-witnessing, one that blends the voices of perpetrator and victim, one marked by a depleted sense of agency and

–79– Tamar K ATRIEL a deeply fractured sense of self. Breaking the Silence activists explicitly regard their move as an act of civil courage no less signicant than the military defense of their country. For their speaking out to resonate with – or construct – a potential counterpublic, the soldier-witnesses must tap into available cultural resources that can provide a warrant for the performance of oppositional speech. These are readily available in Israeli speech culture.6

BREAKING THE SILENCE TESTIMONIES AS OPPOSITIONAL DISCOURSE

In both telling their personal stories and formulating their public appeals, the soldier-witnesses invoke valorized cultural symbols and meanings, such as commitment to the common good and adherence to truth-telling, which have been central to both Israeli culture and to the Western critical tradition. In Israeli culture, truth-telling has been associated with the ethos of straight talk, natively known as dugri speech. In talking straight, a dugri speaker signals adherence to his or her inner sense of truth and makes claim to a sense of agency in such a way as to support his or her oppositional stance. In my earlier work, I have discussed the cultural-historical roots of Israeli dugri speech as a central anchor for the identity of the Sabra, the native-born New Jew of Zionist ideology (Katriel 1986). I have since realized that dugri speech bears many similarities to the classical Greek notion of parrhe’sia (“fearless speech”), the modality of truth-telling that Foucault (2001, 2012) considered integral to the evolution of the critical attitude in the West. Given the impact of Western modernism on the evolution of modern Israeli culture, the discussion of Greek parrhe’sia is pertinent to the understanding of the cultural roots of Israeli oppositional talk, including the Breaking the Silence speech-centered campaign. Like the dugri speaker, the parrhesiast has the courage to engage in speech that may jeopardize his or her relationship with others. Speaking in his own name,

. . . he says things as clearly and directly as possible, without any disguise or embellish- ment, so that his words may be immediately given their prescriptive value. The parrhesiast leaves nothing to interpretation. . . he leaves the person he addresses with the tough task of having the courage to accept his truth, to recognize it, and to make it a principle of conduct (Foucault 2012: 16).

Thus, in their attempt to constitute a counterpublic willing to recognize their truth- telling and embrace its implications, Breaking the Silence draw their credence not only from the soldier-witnesses personal authority but also from a speech culture

6 For a detailed consideration of speaking out as a speech activity viewed within an Ethnography of Speaking perspective, see Katriel & Shavit 2013.

–80– Countermemories, Counterpublics that demands truth-telling and supports the possibility and value of straight talk or fearless speech.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Given the foregoing account of Breaking the Silence testimonial project, what can we learn about attempts to challenge hegemonic discourses and mainstream constructions of reality? How have the organization’s efforts to offer alternative platforms and insert oppositional discourses into the Israeli public sphere been received? To what extent have they been able to consolidate a counterpublic that would be willing to address the issues they raise in the kind of public debate they envisioned? Indeed, as noted, the public responses to the emergence of Breaking the Si- lence were mixed from the very start, with criticisms mounted against from both the political right and left. Notably, however, their decade-long activities have never been seriously curtailed.7 In some quarters, among right-wing and establishment critics, this witnessing organization has been angrily accused of contributing to the growing international de-legitimization of the Israeli state by questioning the morality of its military and the ethics of its occupation policies. In these acri- monious assaults, the accuracy of the soldier-witnesses’ reports are often thrown into doubt even though no specic evidence of fabrication has yet been provided. The organization members counter these criticisms by challenging received notions of patriotism and portraying their dissent as a socially committed act of civil courage. They also repeatedly publicized their use of strict journalistic methods of cross-checking information for each testimonial segment they make accessible to the public, countering charges of fabrication. In a complementary vein, a group of West Bank Jewish settlers has recently pressed charges against several women-soldiers whose testimonies appear on the Breaking the Silence website, demanding that they be held accountable for the self-incriminating violations of human rights on which they report. In this context, raising the issue of personal accountability marks an attempt to shift responsibility for violations of human rights from the military system to the individuals that inhabit it. This is a rejection of the witnessing soldiers’ claim that the kinds of misconduct the army labels “irregularities” are actually regular features of the occupation regime, a construction the settlers consider to be an attempt to shirk personal responsibility for one’s deeds. This critique gives another twist to the

7 That said, a law that right-wing parties are currently trying to pass in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, proposes to penalize organizations that are sponsored by foreign governments. This law is clearly directed to Human Rights oriented organizations, and Breaking the Silence is frequently cited as one of them by the law’s proponents.

–81– Tamar K ATRIEL soldiers’ ever-troubling problematic of agency as they navigate their way within the military system of control. Interestingly, even though Breaking the Silence have been largely applauded within the political left as helping to preserve Israel’s most cherished humanistic values, some of the more radical members of the left have raised their own criticism concerning the issue of personal responsibility. In particular, critics questioned the Breaking the Silence decision to refrain from taking a collective stand on conscientious objection, depicting this witnessing project as one more version of the Israeli “shooting and crying” syndrome, an attitude criticized for its equiv- ocation over military action and its use of personal confession as a self-focused, ineffective conscience-cleansing tool.8 The self-focused orientation of Breaking the Silence testimonies was also critiqued for sidelining the plight of the Palestini- ans, who are the primary victims of the occupation regime. Breaking the Silence, on their own part, have anticipated and responded to such criticisms by aligning their project with the unique value of soldiers’ esh-witnessing, by insisting on the systemic rather than individual nature of the collective soldierly predicament to which their personal accounts give voice, and by reafrming their commitment to public debate even if it remains restricted to small-scale counterpublics in the foreseeable future. Clearly, by inscribing dissenting soldiers’ countermemories in the Israeli public sphere, and thus focusing their efforts on the production of counterpublics constituted through conict with the cultural environment in which they are embedded, as described by Warner, Breaking the Silence have been walking a thin line. Thus, Breaking the Silence has been largely rejected and marginalized by mainstream Israeli society, the main target of their efforts; it has been demonized by right-wing circles and military ofcials; and it has been dismissed by critics who consider their project inadequate to the urgent demands posed by the decades-long occupation – yet the organization continues in its tracks and has become a recognized presence in Israeli public discourse, with a mission and voice of its own. While the occupation is still in place, Breaking the Silence have contributed to the fact that fewer Israelis can claim ignorance of its nature or are reluctant to name it as such. And as one of the soldier-activists has noted, the existence of their archive ascertains that the history of the second Intifada, when written, will include the dissident soldiers’ oppositional view on the immorality of the occupation and help inscribe the countermemory it entails. In his monumental study of the art of moral protest, Jasper (1997: 136-7) claims that activists, like artists, recongure the eld of discourse rather than directly change the social reality they reject since protest involves:

. . . not necessarily doing the right thing but saying what the right thing is. This kind of

8 See Katriel 2004 for further discussion of this issue.

–82– Countermemories, Counterpublics moral testimony is itself an important practice. One probes one’s own psyche and orders one’s beliefs and feelings; one articulates the most important ones. . . One offers new language for describing the world, and for acting in it.

By pointing to the many things that they believe have gone wrong, Breaking the Silence activists insist on saying what the right thing is. An idiom of moral commitment pervades the soldiers’ testimonial efforts as it does the discourse of many other groups working towards social justice around the globe. Through cultivat- ing the possibility of inscribing countermemories and constituting counterpublics, Breaking the Silence activists also question the polarity between words anddeeds, which is replicated in Jasper’s distinction between ‘doing the right thing’ and ‘saying what the right thing is.’ For them, struggling to say what they believe the right (and wrong) things are is a human right and civil duty whose implementation must defy institutionalized social silences. To reiterate Warner’s (2005: 130) formulation, this is the rhetorical idiom the dissenting soldiers employ in search of redress, reclaiming their language of agency and civil standing in a context in which “extant modes of address and intelligibility seem themselves to be a problem.”

REFERENCES

Brooks, P. (1976). The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless Speech, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2012). The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lec- tures at the College de France 1983-1984. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmil- lan. Frosh, P. (2006). “Telling presences: Witnessing, mass media, and the imagined lives of strangers”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (4): 265-284. Harari, Y. (2008).The Ultimate Experience: Battleeld Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Jasper, J. (1997). The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Katriel, T. (1986). Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture.NewYork: Cambridge University Press. Katriel, T. (2004). Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Katriel, T. and N. Shavit (2013). “Speaking Out: Testimonial Rhetoric in Israeli Soldiers’ Dissent”. Versus: Quaderni di Studi Semiotici 116: 81-105.. LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Uni- versity Press. Warner, M. (2005). Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.

–83–

VIII

REBUILDING MEMORY IN AN AGE OF NEW MEDIA:THE CASE OF THE ASABA MASSACRE1

S. Elizabeth BIRD

INTRODUCTION

The 1967-70 Nigerian Civil War, fought over the secession of Biafra, was the rst major conict to saturate the living rooms of Europe and the United States with graphic journalistic images of suffering; as Bartrop (2002) writes, “For most members of my generation or older, the very name Biafra instantly conjures up images of babies with big staring eyes and bloated bodies, little stick-like limbs and a helplessness preceding death which only starvation can bring” (Ibid.: 526). Celebrated photojournalists, such as Don McCullin in Britain (Campbell, 2003) and Gilles Caron in France (2008), brought especially searing images, and as Wa- ters (2004) notes, Catholic priests were highly effective in enlisting Western journalists to tell the story of the mass starvation that eventually brought Biafra to surrender in January 1970. Although the war had begun in 1967, Biafra began to rise to international prominence only around April 1968, after the Nigerian Fed- eral government imposed a blockade, creating the mass starvation that killed at least one million Biafrans. Before that, the war had been raging largely out of international sight for months. It is this phase of the war that I address here – specically a massacre of civilians that played out largely unrecorded in 1967. I focus on how media played into both the silencing of memory of this atrocity, and later the reclaiming of memory; in doing so, I explore the potential of the virtual environment as a site for new “places of memory.”

1 Part of this chapter draws on material included in Bird and Ottanelli 2015

–85– S. Elizabeth BIRD

THE ASABA MASSACRE IN CONTEXT

In October 1967, a few months into the Nigerian Civil War, Federal troops laid waste the Nigerian river town of Asaba, and in the course of a few days, system- atically massacred at least 1,000 civilians. To understand what happened here, a brief background is in order. The war had broken out following the declaration of the sovereign state of Biafra – formerly the country’s Eastern Region. The region was predominantly of Igbo ethnicity, and its governor, Col. Emeka Ojukwu, was responding to massacres of Igbo in the North and West, which had followed a coup and countercoup of 1966. These “pogroms,” as the Igbo called them, had prompted thousands to return to their ancestral homes in the East or Midwest regions, and fear of genocide was rampant. Ojukwu declared secession in May 1967, and the Nigerian military government, under Col. Yakubu Gowon, responded with what began as a “police action” to keep the country united – soon developing into all-out war. In early August, Ojukwu’s forces crossed the Niger and invaded Nige- ria’s small Midwest Region, which was outside the boundaries of Biafra. Meeting little resistance, the Biafrans spread west, overrunning Benin City, but were later pushed back eastwards. They crossed the bridge over the Niger, which separated the town of Asaba (in Nigeria), from the city of Onitsha (in Biafra), blowing up the bridge at the Onitsha end. Unable to use the damaged bridge to pursue the Biafran army, the Federal troops made several abortive attempts to cross the river in boats, resulting in high casualties from Biafran bombardment. Meanwhile, troops, under the command of Col. Murtala Muhammed, ran riot in Asaba, looting, demanding money and killing boys and men accused of Biafran sympathies. The approximately 20,000 townspeople were caught unawares; although ethnically Igbo, Asabans considered themselves distinct from the Igbo-dominated Biafra, and the town (along with the multi-ethnic Midwest Region) ofcially favored the government’s ideal of “One Nigeria.” After a few days of violence, on October 7 town leaders summoned hundreds of men, women and children to sing and dance in a parade that would show support for the Government. As the crowd moved through a major junction, troops separated women and small children from men and teenage boys, taking the males to an open square at the village of Ogbe-Osowa, where they found themselves surrounded by soldiers with machine guns and automatic weapons. An order was given to open re, and within the next hour or two, up to 700 people were mowed down (see Bird and Ottanelli 2011). The total number of civilian deaths in October is likely over a thousand. Although the worst killings stopped after October 7, the occupation continued, and acts of violence, mass rapes and “forcible marriages” of local women to soldiers continued. These combined with the physical destruc-

–86– Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre tion of the town meant that by mid-October many Asabans had ed the area and did not return until the end of the war in 1970. The long-term impacts were profound. Many people became homeless refugees in their own community, and after losing scores of members, extended families went into progressive economic decline, a process we examine more fully elsewhere (Bird and Ottanelli in press). The events in Asaba, involving the killing of Nigerian (not Biafran) civilians, sent shockwaves East, helping conrm Biafran fears that this was a war of genocide against the Igbo, and likely prolonging the war.

THE BURDEN OF MEMORY

The Civil War has left a bitter legacy throughout the country; many today argue that the violence and ethnic hatred endemic in contemporary Nigeria are partly at- tributable to the unresolved legacy of the war, and the unwillingness of the country to come to terms with it (Osaghae 2002; Ukiwo 2009). At the war’s end, Gowon famously declared that there would be “No Victors, No Vanquished,” with no reprisals, and since then there has been little ofcial appetite for revisiting past trauma. In spite of the lingering (although fading) visibility of Biafra in international memory, the war is largely absent from any ofcial expressions of national history and identity. In spite of the war being perhaps the “most signicant episode in Nigeria’s national history” (Odoemene 2012: 169) it has a marginal place in the school curriculum (Simola 2000). For Asaba and the Midwest, the legacy has been particularly bitter, given that their people died while voicing support for a united Nigeria, a point that also helps explain why the Federal government made a special effort to suppress the memory. Kendall R. Philips, writing with Mitchell Reyes, argues that “the very notion of a national identity can be said to have been largely constituted through practices of public remembrance that serve to forge a common origin as well as a sense of collective identity” (2011: 6). In Nigeria, a lack of a coherent sense of nationhood is a problem that has bedeviled the country since its birth – the nation’s unful- lled promise is a constant theme in popular and scholarly writing. Like so many African nations, Nigeria is a product of colonialism – an entity stitched together by Britain from many once-autonomous territories, dominated by three major ethnic groups, the Hausa/Fulani in the North, the Yoruba in the West, and the Igbo in the East. It gained independence in 1960, amid high expectations of becoming the “giant of Africa,” yet spiraled quickly into political chaos and then civil war. Ofcial neglect does not mean that people have forgotten, and recently there has been rising interest in exploring the legacy of the war, spurred by such literary

–87– S. Elizabeth BIRD successes as Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006),

as well as Chinua Achebe’s war memoir, There was a Country (2012) published just before he died, in which he asked, “Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, over 40 years after its end?” This revisiting has clear potential to open old wounds and even propel the country into disintegration, such as the increasingly visible Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), which seeks to restore Biafra. In some quarters, Achebe’s memoir, which was read and reviewed widely in Nigeria, was seen as a pro-Igbo provocation. Indeed, Ngwu, Ekwe, and Chukwuma (2013), using surveys and focus groups to explore the impact of the book on public opinion, concluded that many non-Igbos believed that his accusatory tone had served to increase ethnic hostility. Nevertheless, experience from other contexts, such as South Africa and Rwanda, suggests that coming to terms with the country’s troubled history, in a spirit of reconciliation, could strengthen Nigeria for the future. Within this spirit, my colleague, historian Fraser Ottanelli, and I have been working for four years with the people of Asaba to reclaim the lost history, and attempt some kind of intervention in that collective memory, with the role of media as one key consideration. (See Bird and Ottanelli forthcoming, for a fuller consideration of the memorial process).

OLD MEDIA,NEW MEDIA, AND THE PROCESS OF MEMORY

In an age of “old media” the massacres at Asaba were very effectively contained. As Barbie Zelizer writes, in the modern world, “[t]he story of [the] past will remain in part a story of what the media have chosen to remember, a story of how the media’s memories have in turn become [our] own” (2008: 214). Here, Zelizer emphasizes the ability of journalists to make active decisions about what to cover, in common with Zandberg (2010), who notes, “Journalists choose which stories or facts have importance. They select facts, construct them into cultural- interpretative frames, and thus give them meaning” (Ibid.:7). Journalists’ role in memory construction essentially involves two steps – the choice to cover events in the rst place, and then the choice to validate (and create) memories through commemorative journalism (Kitch 2008). In the case of Asaba, however, the media at the time had little choice about what to report, given that in the early months of the war, the Nigerian government maintained tight control of the press, both national and international, as I detail elsewhere (Bird 2011a). While the Nigeria press was not actively censored, highly

–88– Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre restrictive laws effectively prevented local journalists from contradicting ofcial positions (Ekwelie 1979), and very few international journalists ventured into the war zone, generally relying on ofcial Nigerian sources and hearsay accounts. The British press, especially inuential in Nigeria, provided very little coverage of the war in 1967; among the very few dispatches on the Midwest action were stories led by London Times correspondent, Bill Norris. When interviewed in 2011, Norris said that most reporters “stayed in Lagos and took briengs from the British Consulate [who] lied through their teeth throughout.”2 Norris himself passed through Asaba in October, and reported on the massive destruction and de- sertion of the town, although he was not aware of the systematic killing only a few days earlier. The only mention of mass killing in Asaba appeared in the London Observer, almost four months later, when, based on second-hand accounts, Africa correspondent Colin Legum (1968) conrmed that Federal troops took part in the killing. However his story claimed that a hostile Biafra sympathizer attacked troops by surprise as they watched the welcome dance, leading to retaliation, an account that bears no relationship to the many eyewitness testimonies. It shows, however, the power of media accounts to establish “the story.” While the Asaba massacre is absent from most later war histories, a few brief mentions reproduce Legum’s account (e.g. De Jorre 1968; O’Connell 1993), and the story resurfaces in contemporary online discussions, as I note below. Thus the ofcial memory of Asaba is sketchy at best, although the people of Asaba have kept the memories of the atrocity alive for over four decades. There is now a strong desire in Asaba to create a full accounting of the massacres, to memorialize the dead, and to receive formal acknowledgement of their loss. Since 2009, we have been working with our Community Advisory Board in Asaba to achieve these goals, providing, we hope, a form of transitional justice through active memory work. As Irwin-Zarecka notes, “to secure a presence for the past demands work – ‘memory work’ – which addresses “the ‘infrastructure’ of collective memory, all the different spaces, objects, ‘texts,’ that make an engagement with the past possible” (2007: 13). Kitch (2008: 317), while arguing for the importance of journalism in building collective memory, especially in establishing a “rst draft” for that memory, also emphasizes that “journalism is not only a discourse in itself, but also an agent in many other ‘orders of discourse’.” Indeed, “we might understand journalism as a memory network that also functions as a hub for other memory networks.” It is within that context that our work has developed. It has been important to establish the role of media in containing the memory, while moving toward an engagement with both media and other “orders of discourse” in an attempt to help “recalibrate” the national memory. The intent is not to iname, but to work in the

2 Phone interview with Bill Norris, 14 December 2011

–89– S. Elizabeth BIRD spirit of Hoffman (2010), who argues that the “long afterlife of loss” may afford the next generation the ability not only to validate the suffering of the past, but to use that memory constructively in the future. She argues that “it is necessary to incorporate loss into a vision of life” (Ibid.: 414). With these points in mind, our work has moved through several steps. First, with assistance from Asaba leaders from both Nigeria and the diaspora, we began interviewing survivors, witnesses, and descendants in late 2009. To date, we have interviewed 77 people who witnessed or survived the massacre, or whose families have been impacted directly. Our academic goal is to reconstruct an event that was effectively denied for decades, contributing to the growing scholarship on the Civil War by showing the pivotal and distinctive role that the Asaba events actually had in the progress of the war, as apart from the experience of Biafra itself (see Bird and Ottanelli 2011; Bird and Ottanelli in press). At the same time, we are actively aiding the community by developing public ways to tell the story both locally and internationally through the creation of a museum exhibit in Asaba, a website, and a short video, providing what we hope may function as an intertextual infrastructure for the development of memory. Our academic and public work are thus intertwined; we post academic pieces on the website and make them available for discussion on online forums, and we join these discussions ourselves. Through these new media mechanisms, we hope to facilitate memory work not just in Asaba, but elsewhere. The work is complex. Asaba’s sense of betrayal is exacerbated, not only because of the decades of suppression, but because those held responsible have become national heroes. Murtala Muhammed, the commander of the Second Di- vision, which perpetrated the massacres, is sometimes referred to locally and in the Igbo diaspora as “the butcher of Asaba.” Yet in 1975 he became President of Nigeria, having toppled Gowon in a coup. He is still widely revered; the country’s main airport in Lagos is named in his honor, and he appears on Nigerian currency. He died in an attempted coup in 1976, along with his associate Ibrahim Taiwo, who several witnesses identied as the man who ordered the soldiers to open re on October 7. For the people of Asaba, the unresolved burden of memory has become a po- tent symbol of festering injustice that continues to fuel ethnic tensions to this day. All this makes the process of memorialization fraught with potential dangers, and we are very aware that revisiting history is likely to trigger the ethnic hostility that is always just below the surface in Nigeria. In Asaba, even the beginning of formal recognition of the massacres was a long time coming, and the story lived on primarily in what Assman (1995) calls “communicative memory,” maintained by those who experienced events and their immediate descendants. Early attempts at annual commemorations were forbidden by central government. Nevertheless, narratives continued to be shared, and by around the turn of the 21st century, or-

–90– Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre ganized efforts toward memorialization were beginning, energized by an informal apology by Gen Gowon to the people of Asaba.

INTERTEXTUAL MEMORY WORK

In our work, it is clear that varieties of memory work are needed, although all intersect. Local efforts, in which we are not directly involved, include the erection of a cenotaph, listing the names of the dead, and funded through private donations, which is now nearing completion. While including some problematic elements (see Bird and Ottanelli forthcoming), essentially, this is a representation of local collective memory, for a local audience that already feels it knows the story. However, our work has contributed to broader local efforts to bring the story to a newer generation and have it noticed beyond those immediately affected. Since we began our work, Asaba leaders have initiated an annual remembrance day on October 7; the 2011 event included an address by Dr. Louis Odogwu (a member of our Advisory Board), who noted that those killed “paid the supreme price with their innocent blood, that Nigeria our dear country becomes an indissoluble entity” (emphasis added). This claim, that Asabans, unlike Biafrans, died not in opposition to Nigeria, but for a united Nigeria, is a key message that our collaborators wish to emphasize, and it was one that we stressed when interviewed by local media. It also guided us as we developed the materials for a museum-style exhibit presented at the next Asaba Day in 2012. This exhibit, created in the form of eleven large panels printed on heavy-duty vinyl fabric, told the story of what happened in Asaba in words and images, with heavy reliance on witness testimony. Every feature of the exhibit was shared with our advisory board before nal production, and was also vetted by the Asagba of Asaba, the traditional ruler; the nal version remains on public display in his palace. Our hope, and that of the Advisory Board, is that the exhibit constitutes a form of public memory work that will reach not only those in Asaba, but also those in the region more generally, beginning in a small way the process of recalibrating national memory, while maintaining a conciliatory and inclusive message. However, our community partners agree that they also have a more ambi- tious goal, which is to intervene in the construction of national collective memory, largely through utilization of media. It is here that our contributions as outsiders are helpful, since the hope is that our work is more likely to be accepted as unbiased. One step, for example, was to rewrite the Wikipedia entry on the massacre, drawing from our published work, and referencing that work exten- sively. Essentially we agree with Pentzold (2009), who argues that online me-

–91– S. Elizabeth BIRD dia may constitute the “memory places” (Nora 1989), in which active memory work is done: “Wikipedia is not only a platform to constitute and store knowledge, but a place where memory – understood as a particular discursive construction – is shaped” (p. 264). Since the initial rewrite, the entry has been edited

several times by others, who have created new links and honed a few points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asaba_ massacre). Our broader forays into social media began when we posted a link to our published article on the massacres on www.nairaland.com, a popular Nigerian diaspora discussion board, and the sensitivity of our work became apparent. After one member posted a note of appreciation, a second member, “Dudu Negro,” posted the following:

. . . go to page 4 of this amateur research product and read some of the reasons why the war happened. Ibos said because dem sabi English language pass Hausa and dem sabi business so Nigerians hate dem . . . The biggest problem we have as a people is the ability to tell ourselves the truth and act on it. Bunch of goats!! (Original spelling retained).

“Monkeyleg” responded:

I fnd no blame in the writers article, and I for one will accept the account if what happened as truth.It is a real shame that up to this very date 40yrs post the civil war, anti Igbo senti- ments still exists . . . So where have we grown as nation, how do we represent difference from the past? No wonder we are still making the same mistakes we made 50yrs ago.For those familes who suffered this brutal wicked incident, maybe at last thier stories will be told and heard.

“Dudu Negro” responded with, “Can an Ibo ever open his mouth and present true perspective of events without exaggerating it falsely to score points?” After that, the discussion turned into several pages of ethnic name-calling; the massacre itself was forgotten. We have faced similar reaction in other forums, demonstrating that our “unbiased outsider” stance is by no means universally accepted. We are mindful of the problematic issues raised when Africans’ history is reconstructed by outsiders. In his negative reaction to our article, internet commenter “Dudu Negro” wrote that “White people dont understand this culture or the root of our issues but come here and speak to a people who sell them lies and they publish that as work of historical record;” this response did not surprise us.3 Nevertheless, we have continued to try to harness the potential of new media to spark the kind of intertextual memory work that is needed. Early in the process, we had developed the website4 and had been pleased to see it accessed from around the world. As part of the 2012 Asaba memorial day, we had shown a short

3 This exchange happened at: http://www.nairaland.com/882413/asaba-massacre-1967-newest- article, Feb. 29, 2012. Last accessed March 28, 2014. 4 www.asabamemorial.org

–92– Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre

(21-minute) video we made, using our interviews and available historical photos and documents. In August of this year, we decided to post the video through Vimeo, with a link to the website, and were quite startled when the video received over 4,000 hits over the next few days. Someone then posted it on YouTube; to date it has been viewed almost 9,000 times. We have also tracked its many repostings on Nigerian and diaspora sites, while the new trafc on our website shot up. While not exactly viral by global standards, this strategy brought visibility that conventional scholarly outlets could not. As Drinot (2011) notes, sites like YouTube “constitute sources through which to examine the interplay between the history (in the sense of historiography; i.e. history produced by professional historians) and the collective, and, in turn, transnational or global, memories of a particular historical wound” (p. 371).

The author interviewing Chief Esananjo Awolo, who lost two brothers and many other relatives during the Federal occupation of Asaba. Photo by Fraser Otanelli

As the video made its way across the Nigerian virtual landscape, it was received well by Igbo groups, and with scorn by some others. Achebe’s memoir sparked wide discussion in the online world, as Nigerians revisited the Civil War with renewed vigor. The Asaba massacre (which Achebe mentions briey in his book) often comes up in one way or another in such discussions, and our work is receiving some notice. In one recent long thread on Nairaland, in which partici-

–93– S. Elizabeth BIRD pants were hotly debating whether the Igbos should make a case to the Interna- tional Criminal Court for reparations for civilian deaths in the war, the massacre was mentioned, and someone posted our video. In spite of the direct descriptions of the event given by survivors, doubt was still expressed: madam_oringo: So the ibos want to quickly rush to ICC . . . The biafra case was a war, war is not a soccer game. People will die, men will fall and that was what happened to ibos . . . and the asaba massacre was brought about by the indiscretion of an itinerant ibo man who thought it is bravery to attack the commander of an army while his army is on top and in charge. What do you expect his soldiers to do? Sing you a lullaby? . . . the action of a stup.id ibo man caused 700 ibos to be lined up against the wall and shot!5

We see here how the long-established narrative, originating in “old media” in 1968, resurfaces as “proof” of Igbo responsibility for the massacre. Others respond with exasperation: “watch the fu**ing video!” writes one contributor. Online media are notoriously problematic, because of the permission they give people to vent, often under the cover of anonymity. In an earlier study of online newspaper comments sections (Bird 2011b), I have argued that such forums need to be viewed with caution, and not treated as surrogates for audience activity more generally. At the same time, I also argue that not all online forums are the same, and that the virtual environment should not be dismissed as a potential site of reasoned discussion. Our experience with the Asaba project supports this position, as we have seen in the more thoughtful way our work has been received in some venues. The Nigeria Nostalgia project, for example, is a Facebook site devoted to memories of Nigeria, especially through photos. Membership is about 30,000 worldwide, with many (possibly most) in the diaspora, especially the U.K. and U.S. This forum, which includes a special sub-group on the Civil War, has strict rules of language and behavior, and the slightest signs of ethnic hostility are quickly silenced. The individual who posted our video wrote:

After watching this . . . I begin to wonder: Can some wounds ever heal? How do we, as a nation, go about re-uniting the broken “elements” that hold us together?

Some typical comments in the discussion that followed:

Apart from my parents talking about the Asaba massacres, I did not learn anything about it in school . . . We need to present all these atrocities in the light and let it be in a mainstream discussion. Without doing so we will continue in circle and it may actually destroy us as a people Thanks for the documentary. Captain Matthias6is also the reason why we must tell this story. There is always a remnant of hope among the carnage

5 http://www.nairaland.com/search?q=asaba+massacre&search=Search. 6 During our interviews, many people spoke of Nigerian soldiers who resisted the violence being perpetrated. Several specically mentioned a Captain Matthias, who was instrumental in

–94– Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre

Thanks for posting this. Every Nigerian should watch this so we never ever go thru anything like this again Thank you for sharing. A little bit of Nigeria’s history for sober reections7

We tracked repostings as much as we could, nding the video on many different blogs, such as Jaguda.com, where the blogger noted:

This documentary gave me the chills, and I’m sure it will too. For those that know already it serves as a painful reminder of our tainted past, and for those that don’t it’s an eye opener.The best thing we can do as Nigerians is educate ourselves on our past and learn from it so we don’t repeat the same mistakes our fore fathers did.8

We have now found ourselves invited into the discussion, and the work of recalibrating memory has taken on an additional, collaborative dimension that we are documenting as part of our ongoing exploration of memory.

CONCLUSION:MEMORY WORK IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA

Moving forward, we hope to build productively on the work already achieved. One strategy, which we had not initially planned, is being explored by members of our Advisory Board who believe that our videotaped interviews can constitute credible evidence from which a legal claim for reparations can be developed – not for individuals, but for the community. Reparations could enable the rebuilding of structures that still remain derelict, or could provide the health and educational services that people desperately need. While we cannot launch such an initiative, we continue to provide support where we can, and to make our data available to our partners. At the time of writing, we are exploring ways to present our work in mainstream Nigerian print media, supporting efforts to assemble such a legal case. A collaboration between outsiders and insiders offers one way to try to rein- scribe uncomfortable histories into a nation’s sanctioned memory, perhaps ultimately helping to address a lingering legacy of injustice and contributing to

stopping violence, sometimes protecting whole families from harm. We and our collaborators believe that telling stories of such “upstander” behavior is an important aspect of using the reclamation of the history in positive, rather than destructive ways. 7 These comments are taken from a long thread that followed the release of the video in August 2013: https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/nigeriannostalgiaproject/permalink/ 609018385805614/ 8 http://www.jaguda.com/2013/08/14/video-chilling-documentary-of-a-war-time-massacre-the- legacy-of-the-asaba-massacres/

–95– S. Elizabeth BIRD meaningful reconciliation. One important lesson connects to Phillips and Reyes’ argument that what they call the “memoryscape” is “a complex landscape upon which memories and memory practices move, come into contact, are contested by, and contest other forms of remembrance. . . . [and] are unsettled by the dynamic movements of globalization and . . . new practices of remembrance” (2011: 13-14). Similarly, Pentzold (2009) notes that the Web should not be seen as a static “record”; it “cannot be understood as one consistent medium like television or radio but rather as an underlying basis that fosters different applications, tools and forms of communicative interaction . . . The Web presents not only an archive of lexicalized material but also a plethora of potential dialogue partners. In their discursive interactions, texts can become an active element in forms of networked, global remembrance” (p. 262). In an era of “old media,” the Asaba massacres were effectively contained and memories silenced, and the full story remained primarily local. The intertextual, online mediascape is a very different place of memory. As Drinot (2011) notes, “Digital artefacts such as YouTube . . . offer historians another tool, along with oral history or the analysis of visual sources, to access and analyse collective memories. They enable historians to examine collective memories in an inherently transnational or indeed supranational context; i.e. in the de-territorialized world of the internet” (p. 372). Thus in today’s mediascape, the memory of Asaba can escape local boundaries, as the diaspora comes together with the local to create new opportunities for memory work to reclaim silenced histories and perhaps bring long overdue justice.

REFERENCES

Assmann, J. (1995). “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”. New German Critique, 65: 125-133. Bartrop, P. (2002). “The Relationship Between War and Genocide in the Twentieth Cen- tury: A Consideration”. Journal of Genocide Research,4 (4): 519-532. Bird, S. E. (2011a). “Reclaiming Asaba: old media, new media, and the construction of memory”, in Neiger, M., Meyers, O. and E. Zandberg (eds.), On media memory: collective memory in a new media age. London: Palgrave MacMillan: 88-103. Bird, S. E. (2011b). “Seeking the audience for news: Response, news talk, and everyday practices”, in Nightingale, V. (ed.). Handbook of audience studies. New York: Black- well: 489-508. Bird, S.E. and F. Ottanelli (2015). “Breaking four decades of silence: The challenges of reconstructing collective memory in post-civil war Nigeria”, in Bird, S. E. and F. Ottanelli (eds). The performance of memory as transitional justice. Mortsel, Belgium and Cambridge, U.K: Intersentia.

–96– Rebuilding Memory in an Age of New Media: The Case of the Asaba Massacre

Bird, S.E. and F. Ottanelli (in press). “The Asaba Massacre and the Nigerian Civil War: Reclaiming Hidden History”, Journal of Genocide Research, 16 (2-3). Bird, S.E. and F.Ottanelli (2011). “The History and Legacy of the Asaba, Nigeria, Mas- sacres”. African Studies Review, 54 (3): 1-26. Campbell, D. (2003). “Cultural Governance And Pictorial Resistance: Reections on the Imaging of War”. Review of International Studies 29: 57-73. Cookman, C. (2008). “Gilles Caron’s Coverage of the Crisis in Biafra”. Visual Communi- cation Quarterly 15(4): 226-242. De St Jorre, J. (1968). The Brothers war: Biafra and Nigeria.Boston: Houghton Mifin. Drinot, P. (2011). “Website of Memory: The War of the Pacic (1879-84) in the Global Age of YouTube”, Memory Studies 4 (4): 370-385. Ekwelie, S. A. (1979). “The Nigeria Press under Military Rule”, International Communi- cation Gazette, 25: 219-232 . Irwin-Zarecka, I. (1994). Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. Rutgers, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Legum, C. (1968).”How 700 Ibos were killed by mistake”, The Observer, 21 January 1968: 21 . Ngwu, C. C., Ekwe, O., and O. Chukwuma (2013). “Achebe’s There Was A Country in the Court of Public Opinion: 43 Years after the Nigerian Civil War”, Developing Country Studies 3 (3): 141-150. Hoffman, E. (2010). “The long afterlife of loss”, in Radstone, S. and B. Schwarz (eds). Memory: Histories, theories, debates. Fordham: Fordham University Press: 406-415. Kitch, C. (2008). “Placing Journalism Inside Memory and Memory Studies”. Memory Studies 1(3): 311–320. Nora, P. (1989). “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”. Representations 26: 7-24. O’Connell, J. (1993). “The ending of the Nigerian Civil War: Victory, defeat, and the changing of coalitions’, in Licklider, R. (ed.). Stopping the killing: how civil wars end. New York: New York University Press: 189-203 . Odoemene, A. (2012). “Remember to forget: The Nigeria-Biafra War, history, and the politics of memory”,’ in Korieh, C. K. (ed.). The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the politics of memory. Amherst, MA: Cambria Press: 163-186. Osaghae, E. E. (2002). “Regulating Conicts in Nigeria”. Peace Review, 14: 2: 217-224. Pentzold, C. (2009). “Fixing the Floating Gap: The Online Encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a Global Memory Place”. Memory Studies 2(2): 255-272. Phillips, K. R. and G. M. Reyes (2011). “Surveying global memoryscapes: The shifting terrain of public memory studies”, in Phillips, K. and G. M. Reyes (eds). Global memoryscapes: Contesting remembrance in a transnational age. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press: 1-26. Simola, R. (2000). “Time and Identity: The Legacy of Biafra to the Igbo in Diaspora”, Nordic Journal of African Studies 9(1): 98-117. Ukiwo, U. (2009). “Violence, Identity Mobilization and the Reimagining of Biafra”. Africa Development’, 34: 1: 9-30. Waters, K. (2004). “Inuencing the Message: The Role of Catholic Missionaries in Media Coverage of the Nigerian Civil War”. The Catholic Historical Review, 90 (4): 697- 718.

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Zandberg, E. (2010). “The Right to Tell the (Right) Story: Journalism, Authority and Memory”. Media Culture Society 32 (1): 5-24. Zelizer, B. (2008). “Why Memory’s Work on Journalism does not Reect Journalism’s Work on Memory”. Memory Studies, 1(1): 79-87.

–98– IX

DOCUMENTARY FILM,COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON

La memoria del corazón elimina los malos recuerdos y magnica los buenos. — Gabriel García Márquez1

FRAGMENTS OF A PERSONAL MEMORY

During my time as a lm student at the IDHEC in Paris in the early 1970s, more than the technical and artistic learning led by notorious editors or directors of photography such as Néstor Almendros or directors from the nouvelle vague,I remember how much I learned on ideology in lm through critics and scholars of lm language that helped me to reect on cinema with a depth that went beyond the thickness of lm or the lights and shadows on the screen. The lm analysis sessions with Jean Douchet were not to be missed. Sitting around a moviola (no video in those days), we went on reviewing shot by shot Dziga Vertov’s documentaries or ctions by Murnau. We learned much about composition and editing by examining the lms of great masters through a mag- nifying glass. Nevertheless, although IDHEC provided much I would have not been able to develop a critical view on cinema without the academic and social environment I lived during those same years at the University of Vincennes, where some prominent leftist European thinkers had been exiled after the student revolt of May 1968,

1 The heart’s remembrance obliterates the the bad memories and magnies the good ones.

–99– Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON among them Nikos Poulantzas, Michel Lowy and Maria Antonietta Macciocchi. At the Vincennes Film Department, I was fortunate to be part of the dialogue and the debates unceremoniously promoted by the teams of Cahiers du Cinema and Cinéthique, two leading specialized lm journals, both very radical at the time. Cahiers du Cinema was so radical that during a long period of time it refused to publish photographs of lms, considering it to be a bourgeois practice. Somehow, Latin American lmmakers and lm critics contributed to redress that situation through their reections, which brought lm art and social or political objectives. Such was the content, for example, of an article I wrote for Cahiers du Cinema on The Principal Enemy by Jorge Sanjinés, where I under- lined the lmmaker’s idea that political cinema should also be beautiful. At Vin- cennes University, the courses imparted by Jean Narboni or Serge Daney (both from Cahiers) and other colleagues from Cinéthique were not along the “classical” masterly French university courses, but mainly political discussions on the emergent cinemas of the world and the ideology of production. This was what I needed to supplement my training at IDHEC, but Paris offered even more at that time. While working at night to survive as a student, I had time to attend weekly lectures on cinema and history that Marco Ferro taught at the École pratique des hautes études, in Odeon, where we analyzed periods of contemporary history through iconic lms. I particularly remember the lms produced during the Nazi period, which we minced down to bare the ideology that supported it. Last but not least, I had the opportunity to participate in the workshop on cinema direct orcinema verité imparted by Jean Rouch at the University of Nanterre, west of Paris, on the very opposite side to the University of Vincennes although very close in their ideology. I had the privilege of being part of a small group animated by Rouch and his assistants, the brothers Vincent and Severin Blanchet, who taught us the techniques of handheld camera with the rst prototypes of the Aaton 16 mm camera that engineer Jean Pierre Beauviala brought from time to time, to test them with us. Finally, I need to mention my colleague and friend, Guy Hennebelle, lm critic, founder and director of CinemAction journal which still exists, although Guy died in July 2003 after spending more than 30 years of his life in a wheelchair following polio that he got by swimming in the pool at the Hotel Independance in Bukina Faso, during the Festival of Ouagadougou. Guy could no longer see many lms (at that time there was no DVD let alone internet), but he went on to study national cinemas, and together, we researched and published the rst book on Latin American cinema as a whole (what I mean but can’t translate well is that this was the rst book ever that included the history and development of all national cinemas of Latin America), a historical perspective. We gathered extraordinary partners in each country for this project such as Octavio Getino in Argentina,

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Palo Antonio Paranaguá in Brazil, Hernando Salcedo Silva in Colombia, Emilio Garcia Riera in Mexico, Isaac León Frías in Peru, among others. The Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza wrote the preface, and French critics, Louis Marcorelles and Edouard Bailby, contributed with a foreword. Rene Predal, another important lm researcher, was associated with our effort as well. With over 530 pages, the book served, among other things, to reveal that there was a cinematic story even in countries where it was commonly believed that there had not been any lm production. How not to remember with deep affection and pride all those mentors of my training as a lmmaker. And I mention these very personal stories of my training as a lmmaker, historian and lm critic for a reason: because any consideration I might be able to do now about documentary lm as historical memory – which I have developed in my books and my work as a lmmaker – would not be possible if I had not beneted from those intensive journeys where I started reecting on cinema not only as a sum of lms, but as historical processes and memory processes. I faced two options when I nished my lm studies in France: stay in Europe or return to Latin America. I chose to return and that meant somehow to unlearn some things and learn new ones in the daily work with indigenous communities and mining workers with whom I made my rst documentary lms.

FROM REALITY TO TRUTH

Several authors have theorized about the documentary lm and have attempted to establish rankings and trends, but lms by themselves, increasingly abundant, seem to refute classication attempts and labels. These tentative classications established the differences between the “ex- positive” historical documentary lms whose main exponents would be Flaherty and Grierson, the “observation” documentary as practiced by Fred Wiseman and Richard Leacock, the “reexive” documentary promoted by Dziga Vertov or Chris Marker and the “interactive” documentary of Jean Rouch, among other labels sometimes overlapping with those attributed to the lmmakers themselves: the “cinema eye” of Vertov, the “cinema verité” of Rouch, the poetic documentary of Chris Marker, or the “direct cinema” of Albert and David Maysles. For many years the debate over documentary lm has revolved around reality and truth. What is real and what is truthful? If reality is the visible, where lies truth? For we all know, from the moment that we intervene reality with a camera, we are changing it, and so much for the often unsuccessful attempts to pretend

– 101 – Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON the camera is not there, as if it were an omnipresent eye that records everything without intervening in reality. Robert Flaherty, one of the pioneers of documentary lm, said in 1922: “The documentary is just the creative treatment of reality.” And Paul Rotha, who theorized about the documentary lms of his time, wrote in 1935: “No lm can be completely true, since there is no such thing as truth while changing developments in society continue to contradict each other.” He added: “documentary is true insofar as it represents only a point of view.” Among his many reections on lm, I retain this assertion by Dziga Vertov: “I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world whose features only I can see.” If the rst part of the sentence seems to defend the idea of neutral documentary lmmaking, a product of a mechanical eye, the second reafrms the unique perspective of the lmmaker: what only he can see. That is, each perspective on reality is unique and different. In the same direction goes María Luisa Ortega’s assertion that contemporary documentary is primarily a rst-person documentary. Here is a typical scene of a documentary conceived and scripted in advance: shot of a person knocking a door, shot of the person who opens the door to let the person in. . . and in the next shot the camera is already inside the house, and shows the person who enters and the closing door. Techniques from ction lms are constantly used in documentary lm and the common viewer does not even notice the trick when a scene ows like a well-written sentence. Documentaries are often assembled as ction lms. On the one hand, we have feature lms, such as The Bicycle Thief (1948) by Vittorio de Sica, showing the reality with uncompromising documentary force, and on the other, documentaries where reality is manipulated, scanted and mis- appropriated through particularly morbid scenes such as Mondo cane (1962) by Gualtiero Jacopetti. Which lm is closest to reality? In Bolivian ction lms by Jorge Sanjinés, Ukamau (1965) and The Courage of the People (1968), reality is treated in such way that documentary truth becomes more important than the artistic artices common to ction lms. In lms like these, non-professional actors portray the main characters and scenes are lmed with long and uninterrupted sequences shot with a handheld camera, so that the truth interpreted by the eyes of the lmmaker emerges from the lmed reality. The opposite occurs with the Venezuelan documentary lms by Joaquín Cortés, whose quest for perfection makes him repeat and re-enact scenes and to build the soundtrack in studio, to add strength to his truth. In a recent book (Cortés 2012), the lmmaker describes that for a scene of his documentary, The Tamer (1978), he used several different but similar horses and trainers so that the edited scene suggested it was lmed from different angles in order to keep rhythm. In the same lm and in Women of Gold (2012), he preferred to fabricate the soundtrack

– 102 – Documentary Film, Collective Memory and the Public Sphere in a studio, believing that the direct sound was not sufciently expressive of the truththathewantedtoreveal. As documentary lmmakers, we know well that even in direct cinema or cinema verité, there is no neutral regard that “transfers” reality as it is. Throughout the production process, we make choices, and the decisions we make are creative, political and ideological. From choosing the theme and writing the script to the nal editing of image and sound, through the position of the camera, framing and choosing angles and shots, using or not articial lighting, all this is part of a process of construction of truth, not simply asexual reproduction of reality. Joaquín Cortés, supra, prefers to speak of a “cinema of discovery” rather than just documentary lm. Cinema of discovery would be one in which the lmmaker, accomplice of reality and along with the characters he meets, checks with them the truth through a lter of ethics and human solidarity. At the end, it is the lmmaker’s truth that prevails. According to Cortés there are two opposing attitudes in documentary lmmaking, “he who makes a lm on the truth already possessed and he who seeks the truth through the process of creating his work.” In other words, if there is any purity to “documentary of discovery” it is the ethical attitude of approaching reality with open and curious eyes, with a spirit of learning rather than the will to impose a vision. The ability to observe is therefore essential in the discovery documentary lm, a respectful observation of natural actors and the events that occur in reality, unprejudiced observation. As Albert Maysles said: “When you see somebody on the screen in a documentary, you’re really engaged with a person going through real life experiences. So for that period of time, as you watch the lm, you are, in effect, in the shoes of another individual. What a privilege to have that experience”2 The “discovery process” has an important component of improvisation that should not be underestimated, however, in every improvisation there is much previous work of preparation. Godard shot some of his long feature lms without a script (meaning without a script written and printed on paper), which does not mean he did not have a very clear script in his head. In the lms by John Cas- savetes, his actors worked very hard to make their performances look improvised, according to the testimony of Ben Gazzara. On the other hand, Robert Flaherty staged in his anthropological lms some scenes with the participation of actors selected among the aboriginal Inuit of Canada. After many years of discussions trying to draw a boundary between documentary lm and ction lm, there is a tacit agreement: both documentary and ction are interpretations of reality, and these interpretations are the truth of each director on the reality he is looking at. A characteristic of almost every documentary lmmaker has been the ability to reect on his work and the nature of “truth” and

2 http://www.thex.com/content/best-drug-addiction-documentaries90643?page=all

– 103 – Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON

“reality”. As much as a lmmaker may intend to appear neutral or distant, he or she intervenes over reality when shooting and, especially, when editing the lm. As Wolf Koenig says, each cut in editing “is a lie” but the lmmaker tells the lie “to narrate the truth”.3 This can be linked to what Bertolt Brecht said in 1938: “Reality changes, and to represent it the forms of representation must change.” Much of contemporary documentary lm reveals the insurgency of truth against falsehood and concealment. Despite the much-publicized free speech in the United States, the most critical issues are covered in a veil of silence, or disappear in the ood of news that saturates commercial media, although there have been rare cases of documentaries that reveal the truth in detail and with great force. An example of the latter are the independent documentary lms by Michael Moore, which are both works of research and provocative statements because the provocation allows them to penetrate the dark fabric of those political facts that, for ideological or economic reasons, are kept in the shadow. On the same wavelength we have ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) by Alex Gibney, which is not limited to unveiling the plot of widespread corruption in the giant energy company, but penetrates the psychology of the characters and their motivations. While the lm recapitulates that brokers, respectable banks, corporate executives and audit rms were equally involved in the monumental fraud, it also reveals a web of personal relationships, mutual cover-ups and psychological proles that, beyond the specic example of ENRON, describe the world of businesses where the only current value is money. To this same category belongs Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004) and Uncov- ered: The Truth About the Iraq War (2004) both directed by Robert Greenwald; The Corporation (2003) by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; The Shock Doc- trine (2009) by Matt Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom; Inside Job (2010) by Charles Ferguson and We Feed the World (2005) by Erwin Wagenhofer, to mention only some of those produced in the United States that address similar issues of capitalist politics and economy. In every region and country, there are numerous examples of the same trend of investigative journalism that through documentary lm reveals what the mainstream media hide. Every day I get by email a newsletter called India Unheard with links to short video documentaries about various social problems in India.4 This is a magnicent effort of a national movement of volunteers who use their digital cameras or smart phones to reveal the reality and take a stand against social injustice. This is an exciting venture enabled by new information and communication technologies.

3 “Every cut is a lie. It’s never that way. Those two shots were never next to each other in time that way. But you’re telling a lie in order to tell the truth.” 4 http://indiaunheard.videovolunteers.org/

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DOCUMENTARY: ALWAYS A PIONEER

The seeds of community cinema and audio-visual were planted by lmmakers with social sensitivity who invested in projects in which they acted as facilitators for the word and image of others. The role of facilitator is eminently an act of communication and marks the difference between the individual and the collective artistic expression. The distinction also applies to journalists and communicators. The rst make their own decisions about the product coming out of their hands (an article, a documentary, a radio program), while the latter facilitate participatory processes that may become more important than the mere visual products. Film activity developed by anthropologists, ethnologists or even engineers (as Jean Rouch) helped to break the glass that captured distant images of communities in various parts of the world. These cameras of these improvised, but no less important, lmmakers revealed not only the richness and plurality of native cultures, but did so in a way that communities appeared invested with dignity and moral authority, calling for the respect they deserved and that had been before denied to them. The name “documentary lm” appeared when the Scottish John Grierson mentioned in a text the documentary value of one of the iconic lms by Flaherty, Moana (1926). It was also Grierson who, in his article “Principles of Documentary Film” (1932), introduced his belief that lm cameras should go out of production studios, where they were trapped, to directly interact with reality. Grierson was interested in cinema as a means of communication for social change, and in that sense, he was a great pioneer, mainly through his ideas and work as a producer than as a lm director. In his manifesto, Grierson says that authentic scenes and actors “are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world”.5 For some theorists of documentary lm, such as Paul Rotha, there is a “method” that denes what is documentary and what is not (Rotha 2010). Rotha claims that purely descriptive everyday images (such as photographs of travel, nature lms, newsreels and educational lms), “do not quite meet the documentary requirements nor the creative dramatization of reality, neither the expression of social analysis that are the rst demand of the documentary method” (ibid). Rotha’s denition is quite exclusive and certainly belongs to his conception of the cinema d’auteur. If we followed those parameters, we would probably despise the documentary value that might exist in moving images of Kafka (if they were found) traveling to Berlin or walking the streets of Prague, simple everyday images.

5 “We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world. They give cinema a greater fund of material. They give it power over a million and one images. They give it power of interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the real world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studio mechanician recreate” (Barsam 1976)

– 105 – Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON

Rotha uses Flaherty to further the notion that the documentary is not only observation but interpretation, but his statement appears highly dependent on ction lm to the extent that he admits that documentary narrative also has rules, both in content and form, resulting in the manipulation of the original materials to dra- matize or emphasize its effect on the viewer. Rotha praises certain Flaherty traits, but while he denes documentary lm as “the most virile” of all types of lm, he also blames it for being sentimental and anchored in nostalgia for the past. It is indeed interesting to read Rotha’s alignment with socialist realism when he writes about Flaherty saying that “his view of reality is a sentimental reaction to the past, an escape into a world that is not signicant to contemporary life, positioning sentimentality over the most urgent claims of materialism.” Theorists like Rotha saw the documentary lm “as a method of philosophical reasoning” to serve the present, modernity, and not one to examine the history and look into the past. The new technology of cinema should be showing innovations in the industry and the production. However, Rotha distances himself from militant cinema: “Despite my insistence that documentary lmmakers should be politically and socially conscious in their approach to everyday experience, they should not claim the label of ‘political’. Their work is not a platform to harangue the crowds but a pulpit to take the masses out onto a broader consideration of human affairs” (ibid.). These theories about documentary lm seem to be locked into the modes of expression that promotes the genre rather than the historical and testimonial value of documentary materials. It is still an elitist vision reserved for lm creators. New technologies have updated the discussion on democratization of the audio-visual and its role in strengthening freedom of expression and exercising the right to communication and information, thus brewing a worldwide movement concerned about using it as an instrument for historical recovery, strengthening identity, promoting cultural activities, education and democratization. Since the rst portable 16mm cameras to Super 8 and video in its many formats up to digital cameras, technical innovations have allowed to democratize independent production and legitimize as lmmakers, many of whom had not had any opportunity before. Social intervention audio-visuals, labelled popular, alternative, educational or citizen, developed its own stories and modes of production and dissemination, seeking other venues and other broadcast channels to promote clandestine group projections or on large screens in public places, depending on the political environment. At the time, we had to defend the notion that low-cost formats, e.g. Super 8 or video, were not an underdeveloped expression of cinema – as professionals argued with contempt – but different instruments with new social features, with thematic and social antecedents that can be found in the history of lm within the region and also globally. Like other historical cycles, the emergence of independent lm meant a rup-

– 106 – Documentary Film, Collective Memory and the Public Sphere ture with the status quo, while claiming its origins in history and collective memory. We could trace the footprints of independent cinema and video that developed in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s in the history of other experiences of participatory documentary lm, which came out in search of reality, such as Medvedkin’s cine-train, and of course the strong emergence of the new Latin American cinema in the 1960s. Nothing happens outside of history and without history. The debt of the present with the past is always there. There is no doubt that the Teleanálisis experience in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship reminds us of those experiences that took place just a few years before in Argentina with Cine Liberacion and Cine de Base. In both examples, we nd underground production and dissemination in non-traditional circuits such as trade unions, cultural centres and churches. Militancy for democracy and the right to communicate appears throughout the history of the region. Within democratic environments, documentary lmmakers contributed towards popular education and communication activities, dissemination and training. Independent productions promoted debates within organized social groups: unions, professional associations, indigenous organizations, neighbourhood collectives, human rights groups, environmentalists, feminists, etc. The establishment of alternative video libraries, mobile exhibition units and the organization of independent shows and festivals were also encouraged. Independent documentary lm became part of the alternative communication movement that grew stronger during the 1980s and questioned traditional media for being in collusion with political and economic interests. Like other forms of alternative communication, such as community radio, it promoted community participation and, although often run by independent professionals, it promoted greater participation and inclusion of communities in lm production and content denition to reect other views from within organized groups. It also contributed to the communication between different communities through innovative formats such as the video-letters that Cuban Television Serrana promoted. An important marker of participatory documentary lm distinguishes the products from the processes. Cinema literature generally deals with movies, yet in documentary lm, not only products are important, but also the processes of organization, production and dissemination that aim to transform reality with an inclusive social perspective.

MEMORY, IDENTITY AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

One of the themes running through documentary lm from its origins is that of memory and identity. Recovery or consolidation of historical memory and cultural

– 107 – Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON identity are at the same time goals and means to strengthen society. The awareness of citizens about the importance of preserving the audio-visual memory gradually develops as the foundation of identity. The struggles for citizenship, for cultural, social and political demands and for an active participation in the public sphere, characterize the independent documentary lmmaking. Memory is a function of consciousness, therefore, activated from images that stimulate feelings either for the accession or for the rejection of what we see. Images themselves, however stark, beautiful, original and surprising they may be, are nothing without the regard of the viewer that processes them. Each spectator perceives differently the images of corpses from the Jewish Holocaust carried by Nazi bulldozers and trucks. Nobody is completely innocent when looking at those images because we all have to some extent prior knowledge of history, a sense of justice and, in the end, a perception of death. The reading of images can even be different, depending on how the shots and the soundtrack have been edited. Memory is a process that links us to imagining the past and, in the case of documentary lm, a double effect on the viewer occurs: the perception of present (the very act of looking at images on a screen) and the memory of past (evoking what is shown on the screen). Neither perception nor memories are innocent regards. The basic premise in the relationship between the viewer and the documentary image is a contract of consciousness in which the viewer has the assurance that he is looking at something that happened a few hours ago or a hundred years ago. However, the premise goes through an ethical course: the viewer honestly looks at images that the lmmaker honestly proposes. Nevertheless today there are many fake documentary lms called documentiras (“docu-lies” or “mockumentaries”); moreover digital technology allows the lmmaker to even fabricate or replace characters. These technical tricks are widely used in feature lms such as For- rest Gump (1994) where the character played by Tom Hanks appears shaking hands with President Kennedy. In Valentí Figueres’ The K Effect. Stalin’s Editor (2012) documentary, mockumentary and ction intertwine in a masterly manner to demonstrate that there are no boundaries. If we extend our reection on rst-hand testimonials as documentary proof of facts alluded, there would be no certainty either because each witness speaks from a personal perspective, his “I” (self) rearranged for the purposes of the interview. Therefore, another witness can describe the facts described by a witness very differently. Having been there at the time of an event does not mean that the immediate perception of what happened will be prolonged in an accurate memory of that rst perception. As the lmmaker chooses fragments of memory to construct his speech, the witness also selects what he or she wants to convey as a genuine memory. This shows how editing begins much earlier in the head of the witness, rather than in the head of the lm director. The viewer has no choice but

– 108 – Documentary Film, Collective Memory and the Public Sphere to believe the lmmaker, and therefore the witness. The covenant of trust between the witness and the lm director is extended to also cover the spectator. Authors such as Lior Zylberman (2012) query the direct correspondence between documentary lm and memory, that is, they question the automatic association between documentary and the mystication of the concept of past. Quoting a text of Henry Rousso from 2002, Zylberman believes that the term “memory” is fraught with ethical weight when referring to “the duty to remember” or the “magic virtues and an aura of human spirit absent from the accounts of the history” and states that “to set it as a value to be weighted, memory is on track to get the shape of a merchandise (and thus subsequent fetishization).” We may disagree with the criticisms of this author, but his questions are relevant, and those of us that work with the topic of memory in documentary lm should try to answer, or at least reect upon these questions: How does a movie remember? If the lm aims to share or disclose the past, how do images activate the viewer’s memory? This raises the question whether the image – still or moving – has memory qualities: what do we remember when we see a lm? How do we create social relationships with the past through images? What Zylberman says is that we cannot remember without prompting the mechanism of imagination, which is involved not only in the memories that are formed from every individual’s memory, but from the documentary images that recall that memory. Imagination assists memory, but not necessarily to strengthen it; it could also be used to re-invent it.

THREE WORDS: URGENCY, NEED AND WILL

I will conclude these notes with three words that seem essential at a time when we discuss the horizons of Latin American documentary lm. The rst has to do with the urgency that we have to lm that which runs the risk of being lost very soon. For example, characters whose death will end a capital of knowledge and memory that has not been documented. Every so often we hear about the disappearance of the “last speaker” of one of the 6,000 languages that we still have in the world. Ned Madrell died in 1974 on the Isle of Man, and she carried to her grave the ancient Manx language. When Tevk Escenc, a Turkish farmer, died in 1992, he took with him Ubykh, a language spoken in the North Caucasus. Laura Somersal died in 1990 and was the last speaker of the Wappo language. Another Native American language, Catawba, died with Carlos Westez, known as Red Thunder. On January 21, 2008 at 90 years of age, died Marie Smith Jones, the last speaker of Eyak in Alaska. Chilean Cristina Calderon, born in 1928, is the last speaker of Yagan; she doesn’t have

– 109 – Alfonso GUMUCIO-DAGRON anyone else to speak her language. A person dies, a language dies and a culture dies. Probably documentaries have been lmed about these people before their death, and it will preserve at least some of the culture they represented. Every documentary lmmaker should feel the urge to shoot what is meant to disappear very soon. The second word is need. The need to rescue, restore, copy and scan all audio- visual documents that are at risk of being lost because they are stored in poor conditions that threaten their conservation. These are not only ignored in forgotten attics, but in institutional archives that do not value what they have on their shelves. The third word is the will, the political will to promote the strengthening of collective processes of documentary production in communities that only need small support to record their culture and strengthen their identity, as has happened with the indigenous groups that are part of the Video nas Aldeias initiative, directed by Vincent Carelli in Brazil. To conclude, I will perhaps commit sacrilege by stating that the diffusion of their lms should not be the main concern of documentary lmmakers. I can understand the need they have to immediately impact society with their messages and their claim to earn a place in the lm industry at the same level as the ctional lmmakers, but diffusion of their lms should not condition the work of preserving the memory of people. Immediate impact is important, but long-term memory is even more important.

REFERENCES

Barsam, R. (ed.) (1976). Non-Fiction Film Theory and Criticism. New York: E.P Dutton. Cortés, J. (2012). El cine documental, ¿una Ficción? Centro Nacional Autónomo de Cin- ematografía. Caracas: CNAC. Gumucio Dagron, A. (2001). Making Waves:Stories of Participatory Communication for Social C hange. New York: Rockefeller Foundation. Rotha, P. (2010). “Algunos principios del documental”. Revista Cine Documental No. 2, Buenos Aires. Rotha, P. (1952). Documentary Film, third edition. London: Faber & Faber. Zylberman, L. (2012). “La imaginación como prótesis de memoria. Observaciones en

torno al cine documental latinoamericano” Revista Cine Documental No. 5, Buenos Aires.

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MEMORYSCAPES:EXPERIMENTS IN ORAL HISTORY AND PLACE-BASED MEDIA

Toby BUTLER

I am an oral history practitioner with a deep interest in conceptions of places and their pasts and how, like an OXO cube, memories can be used to ‘thicken’ them. This chapter is an account of my own journey of developing my oral history practice to create walking trails, or ‘memoryscapes’, that incorporate oral history recordings into our experience of the landscape. Along the way I’ll be explaining why I spent weeks in a rowing boat on the River Thames, intensely following otsam for fteen miles, and how that experience opened up for me the creative potential of using oral history in place-based media. The journey begins at the Museum of London, where I worked as an advisor on a sound art installation, Linked, by the artist Graeme Miller. This was a trail that opened in July 2003 and runs alongside the M11 link road in Hackney, the site of the biggest anti-road protest Britain had ever seen. The trail is made up of oral testimony from people who had lost their homes in the process of the motorway construction. These memories are continuously broadcast from 20 transmitters, mounted on lampposts in the streets alongside the new motorway. The broadcasts can still be heard with the aid of a small receiver which was originally available free of charge from local libraries and is now still available from Artsadmin in East London. The range of the transmitters varies according to the terrain, but can generally be heard within 50 metres of the lampposts. A map of the three-mile walking trail is handed out with the receivers and the route frequently gives dramatic views of the road and the surrounding landscape. The transmitters, which were custom made and cost £1,000 each, are built to last; the recordings are broadcast from particularly stable, non-volatile computer chip and the company that made them have even guaranteed them to work for 100 years. All they need to keep going is electricity from the lampposts. Twelve years later the receivers are still available so it seems entirely possible that Linked could run for decades – an unusual span of time for an exhibition, particularly for the art

– 111 – Toby BUTLER world, which is used to exhibitions running for weeks or months rather than years. The changing landscape of the surrounding area will also play a big, unchartable role in the future artwork, which spans several miles. Miller says that Linked has been designed with this in mind:

[in the future] people will come and have another look at it, people change generation, outlook, landscapes change, it will be interesting how audio hieroglyphs stand up to test of time. Fascinating to me. . . a bit like the satellite that goes out into space broadcasting James Brown.

This was my rst experience of a sound walk – a trail that you follow using some kind of audio equipment, back then it was usually a CD walkman, an MP3 player or a receiver of some sort. At certain points on the walk you listen to tracks at specic locations, a little like the museum audio guides that most people are familiar with, but used in the outside landscape. I later dubbed walks that involve oral history recordings ‘memoryscapes’ – landscape interpreted and imagined using the memories of others, and I became profoundly interested in what happened when these memories from the past touched the present (and the future). I arrived at the museum when this programme was in full swing and I was set to work advising on the interview-gathering process from residents and protestors and later evaluating Miller’s work (Butler 2005). I then decided to develop the idea of the audio walk conceptually, as an active and immersive way to understand and map the cultural landscape, and more practically as a potential medium for oral historians to use for presenting work to the public. I set out to construct two oral history trails or memoryscapes of my own near my home – which at the time was a houseboat moored off a small island in the River Thames in West London. One of the rst hurdles to constructing a trail is to decide on a method of choosing a route – through the landscape as well as the subject matter. After working on Linked I was heavily inuenced by Miller’s approach of using a route way – in his case a motorway – as a way of linking a series of ostensibly unrelated places; an idea that has also been adopted in literature. Authors have made many creative attempts to treat transport routes as destinations in themselves, worthy of comment and study. Thus the kaleidoscopic, even chaotic accumulation of impressions in Platt’s Leadville: A Biography of the A40 (2001) gives us many takes on reality; cumulatively we feel that we somehow ‘know’ the road by the time we reach the end of the book. Iain Sinclair’sLondon Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2003) and Patrick Wright’s The River; the Thames in our Time (1999) both use a route to organise reections. Using the conceit of a journey is a quickly un- derstandable way of organising narrative; it has an aesthetic of its own that can embrace the unusual and the unexpected in a creative way. Having lived on the Thames in a houseboat for ten years, I was acutely aware that the river in London was an entity in itself with a culture of its own, yet many

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Londoners seemed to spatially comprehend the river more as a border, an admin- istrative and cultural dividing line between north and south. Maps of conservation areas and local government boundaries often ended up in the middle of the river. I happened to live there, this led to absurdities – for example I voted and paid my local taxes to a local authority on the north side of the river, yet all my services, such as rubbish collection were provided by another authority on the south side of the river. A report by the London Rivers Association summed up this fractured approach to London’s river:

The opposites that structure the mindsets of the planning and built environment sectors, local/strategic, natural/urban, browneld/greeneld – and even water/land – seriously hand- icap our ability to think about urban water spaces and their relationship with the city and beyond. The zones, hierarchies (of policy, plans and strategies), sectoral boxes and check- lists that result from, and reinforce this approach effectively undermines the spatial con- gurations and naturalness of rivers which refuse to conform to the socially constructed lines on plans and in strategies (as many of the annually ooded towns and cities now contend) (Munt & Jaijee 2002: 75).

With this in mind, I wanted to nd a way of acknowledging the spatial and natural dimensions of the river by developing a more artistic and intuitive approach to structuring my eldwork. I developed a method of using the current of the river to nd my ‘sample’ of river interviewees and physically link their lives up. A oat was made out of driftwood and other river-carried material, using a design borrowed from hydrologists that use oats to track currents in rivers and oceans. I followed the oat for many days, tracking its route through London, and noting where it collided with the bank (or any other interesting thing). In this way I wanted to experience London from the river, feeling its ow and using a natural phenomenon as a memory path through the modern city. Many of these collision points became sound points on the walk, as more often than not a potential interviewee would become apparent – the oat would hit a boat or a property that was owned by someone, or a place where an individual was working or resting, and people were generally willing to be recorded. Usually this meant an in-depth interview at their home or place of work at a convenient time. The method presented some severe challenges. Moving at the pace of the river, often in a rowing boat, took a great deal of patience (in some stretches it moved at less than 1/10th of mile an hour, or even owed backwards with the tide). Some places the oat hit seemed so barren that it became a real challenge to nd a connection with human culture, but I found that if I waited long enough and looked hard enough a connection could often be made. An old outfall pipe of a disused waterworks led to an interview with a retired water engineer, for example. The ow of the river suggested quiet and noisy points. Turns in the river usually presented me with more collisions, different vistas and encounters with whole

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The drifting oat used to nd interviewees in West London families of other oating objects, each with its own unknowable source, story and trajectory. The landscape of the banks of the Thames in London also contains some of the most imposing architecture in Britain, as successive political and economic

– 114 – Memoryscapes: Experiments in Oral History and Place-Based Media powerhouses were built along the prestigious waterfront (palaces, bridges, par- liaments and corporate headquarters). Many of these buildings have such strong historical and visual centres of gravity on the riverscape that they are all but impossible to ignore. Yet the oat managed to do so. On long, straight stretches the oat would move fast, disregarding royal palaces, whole industries, entire local- ities. The ow gave me a strange, unfamiliar structure to my beachcombing of river-related memories. It forced me to consider talking to people that I would not have thought of ordinarily and it gave me a fresh set of memory places. This was the latest in a long line of practices that in some way challenge dominant cultural practices associated with national places of memory by providing an alternative. You may well be familiar with or involved in many such practices: neighbourhood tours, parish mappings, public art, gardening projects (Till 2003: 294-296). The result was a carefully constructed three-mile walk with 12 different sound points along the route, containing a total of an hour of memories from 14 different people. The sound tracks were also layered with binaural recordings of the river bank – recordings made with a stereo two-part microphone that is placed in each ear of the recorder, which picks up sound in the exactly the same way as the human head. When the binaural recording is listened to with headphones, the result is a startling ‘surround sound’ – if footsteps are recorded behind you, it will sound as if someone is behind you when you listen. This gives the walk an added temporal dimension, as the listener is hearing the past of the sound recording along the route (complete with rowers, ducks, swans and pushchairs) along with the past of the memories that they are hearing. The idea was to sensitise people to everyday sounds and remind the listener that their drift along the river would necessarily be different for each person that does it. Walking speed and pace play a very important part in the walk too. The number and crucially the location of the drifting sound points corresponded to the ow pattern of the river, so it is a very unusual trajectory. The whole design of the walk was meant to slow people down, to take more notice of what surrounds us and therefore make place more meaningful. I decided against continuous audio to allow people to reect, process and have their own adventure between sound points. Of course, the medium also allows the walker to skip or listen at their own pace, and some people enjoyed the walk in a very different way, for example by walking and listening non-stop. The overall effect has been described by one reviewer as being a little like a Zen koan; ‘a uid pattern of multiple agendas, effecting and being effected by the Thames and its social, political historical and economic sectors. Each location and narrator is accompanied by the river’s own music, its aural ebbs and ows, the creaking of wooden boat joints, the wash, a tugboat toot, bodying the world of a major urban riverway’ (Friedman 2006). The drifting oat method used to nd interviewees became unworkable in the

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Poster advertising the Drifting trail eastern part of London. The author Patrick Wright roughly divided up river culture into two sections – ‘upriver’ people who believe that the Thames starts in a eld in the Cotswolds and makes its way between tea rooms and thatched pubs down to London, and ‘downriver’ people who believe that the London Thames truly starts at the sea and works its way up the estuary. My downriver oat fought bravely on from the rst/last tidal lock at Teddington and got about as far as Kelmscott House, William Morris’s home in Hammersmith. From there the oat became impossible to follow; the river was too wide, tidal and strong owing for there to be enough points of impact with the bank. The oat either shot along the mid-ow of the river or was propelled backwards for hours as the tide came in. To see this strange effect, walk along the Thames in East London in March and watch the Christmas trees oating up and down, trapped in a strange, slow tidal dance after being tossed in two months earlier in the vain hope that the river would take them away. To have continued with my earlier method would have taken months. For the Dockers’ trail I used the same style of a river-culture based walk, using binaural recordings of the route, but this time I drew on a rare collection of 200 interviews with dock workers, now archived at the Museum in Docklands but recorded over 20 years ago when the London Docks were shut down. The route runs from picture-postcard Greenwich, starting at the remains of the

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Cutty Sark tea clipper, and runs along the quaysides of the Greenwich peninsula to end up at the extraordinary Millennium Motel, part greasy spoon cafe, part gypsy campsite, in the shadows of the Dome. The memories used to encompass dramatic events, such as when the Greenwich foot tunnel was used as shelter against the Zeppelin raids, but is mostly concerned with life in the dockside communities from childhood to working on the barges, cranes and warehouses near the river. The experience of standing in front of the ruins of an old crane, and hearing the pride in the voice of a crane driver who tells us he could pick up anything ‘from an elephant to a packet of pins’ gives a strange sensation of bringing the past present in a very direct way that no memorial or information board can touch – if you visit this website you can hear his words, the text below does not really do them justice:

Cargos, to give you some idea the variety could start in the morning from a packet of pins and you would handle everything from a pin to an elephant in the same days work. You see we were the outlet for the whole of the industries in this country. And whatever goods were manufactured came via the docks for export. Now the essence of uh efciency in the dock, we were all piece work. Now you could have uh a lovely team of good labourers, workmen, underneath you but if you hadn’t got a good crane driver then everybody suffered. So you had to be of some extreme capable to get jobs in the better gangs. I was the rst crane driver ever to land over eighteen hundred of butter in one day from one gang. I also landed ve hundred tons of our in one day, with the gang. Now these were extreme quantities. . . (Track 11, Dockers)1

Since making the trail, Lovell’s Wharf and the Millennium Motel have both been demolished to make way for apartment blocks. I hope that walkers are given the chance to make meaning of a confusing post industrial landscape; understand a little of the culture that was once there, and reect on the fact that the last remains of this industrial landscape are likely to disappear forever. The experience is not necessarily nostalgic; the present industry on the river and the existing (and changing) life along the route, both natural and human, temper the pull of the past to some extent; and a recent interview with the owner of the Millennium Motel at the end of the walk gives a positive view of the residential development of some now derelict areas. I hope the variety of voices and stories give a nuanced and complex impression of the area rather than a wholly nostalgic or developer-happy impression of nothing but views and progress. Again, do listen to the voice.

They had 20 caravans round here, the bar was open 24/7 and it was just full of characters. And the odd ght used to go off you know it was a great, very interesting place. . . But they’re building, they’re hopefully building over the road in April. So there’ll be house going, there’s thirty or forty thousand houses coming round here and we’re in the middle ofit... 1 http://www.memoryscape.org.uk/Dockers05.htm

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A crane at Lovell’s Wharf as it looked in in the 1950s (credit: Museum of London, Docklands)

It’ll be another Canary Wharf. In ten years’ time you’ll come and you won’t recognise it, it’ll be high rise and swanky stuff yeah. And I’m all for progress and this area’s uh a dump, its a mess, it’s mainly a mess because it is going to be regenerated, I mean no-one’s going to spend any money on something that is going to be regenerated. But no I’m all for it I think its great I think this will be, be good for the area, jobs, money etc, I think it will be great for the area. I’m sad because this what we have here is a unique bar cafe come whatever and there’s some stories to be told about what’s gone on here, and yeah it’d be sad to see that go, but that’s progress. I guess. (Philip Moore, Track 27, Dockers)2

One of the trickiest elements of designing the walks was deciding how much narration to include. The rst version of the walk did not have any narration, because I wanted to get as far away as possible from the authorial/tour guide style. People just had to use the maps and work out what to do. In the pilot study it was clear that some people liked it, but a lot of people were not sure what was going on. The whole drifting experiment got lost; people wanted to know who/why people were included and they wanted to feel that they were in the ‘right’ place. Artists like Graeme Miller celebrate the idea of getting a bit lost because that is when you start to have a bit of an adventure. It is the opposite of most people’s instinct, particularly of curators in museums who take great effort to make things as accessible as

2 http://www.memoryscape.org.uk/Dockers12.htm

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Lovell’s Wharf redevelopment (2013) (Credit: Steve Daniels) possible. Basically some people will have a great time, but a lot of people just do not get it or feel very insecure without being guided. I wanted the walk to appeal as widely as possible, and the whole point was to locate the memories, so in the end we put in the narration. I think it works particularly well on the drifting work, which was a highly personal piece – it gave me the chance to get that across and lay bare some of the mechanics of the drifting experiment. In some ways the process of using archive recordings for this walk was more difcult; there were some wonderful stories that were impossible to locate, not least because many people worked in different docks; brief catalogue summaries made hunting for relevant material very time consuming and the quality of the recording became more important than usual for listening outside in a noisy environment. This meant that some nice recordings had to be rejected purely on sound quality grounds. Never- theless, many voices that would have remained silent in the archives can now be heard at or near the places where the memories were born.

WALKING THE WALK

I made a particular effort to get my sound walks into the public domain, making sure that they were available on a website (memoryscape.org.uk), in local bookshops, museums, libraries and tourist information centres, and publicising

– 119 – Toby BUTLER the walks in the local press and on local radio. In ve months at least 3000 people looked at the website in a meaningful way, 600 downloaded a walk or bought the CDs and at least 350 people actually walked the two hour walks (as opposed to listening at home or online). These may not be enormous gures, but with no marketing budget and a small amount of promotional effort the circulation has grown far beyond the expected readership of many journals or local history books; and a year on at least 7000 people have encountered the memoryscapes in one way or another. I have conducted audience evaluation using questionnaires and interviews with nearly 150 adults. Almost everyone was very positive about the experience, which bodes well for future work that is aimed at a wide public audience. The evaluation process revealed some interesting benets to the memoryscape concept. Several people remarked that they felt empathy towards the people that they listened to despite the fact that they were from a different age, class or culture. This ‘normalisation’ effect seemed to come from a combination of factors including the content of the recordings, the style of speaking, and the fact that the listener could not see the interviewee. Listeners seemed to respond particularly well to the variety of voices used: most people seemed to enjoy hearing from ‘real’ people as opposed to a mono-vocal guide, and to prefer shorter tracks that used more than one interviewee. For me the most exciting nding was that the walks seemed to engender a feeling of identity with the landscape. Respondents reported that using a variety of senses, imagination, and references in the landscape, all helped to make the experience more meaningful and therefore memorable. Creating these connections, or links to place seem to have had led to a feeling of closeness, or rootedness for some people. One newcomer to London wrote “now I know a sense of a beginning attachment”. Another walker described the process beautifully as “deepening my attachment to the river. Like roots shooting off into the soil.” Several people talked about the experience adding a new reality, or a new dimension of reality to the existing landscape. Furthermore, anyone who visits the landscape again can use those links to remember something of the stories that they heard. Thus:

Memoryscape has made me consider the part the river has played in so many people’s lives. I think about this whenever I visit the river since listening to the recording ‘drifting’.

Perhaps this aspect of the experience could be of interest to those wishing to encourage feelings of belonging and identity in a particular community or location. On the other hand, the intimacy of some of the recordings combined with hearing them outside someone’s house or workplace made some people feel uncomfortable, particularly if the memories involved referred to recent circumstances. For example, one track featured a number of neighbours talking about a new house in the area – the footpath was located opposite the house that had enormous plate

– 120 – Memoryscapes: Experiments in Oral History and Place-Based Media glass windows and you could see inside. Hearing details of the house and people’s views of it seemed to become more powerful when stood outside the house itself, and there is a danger that using oral history in this way could verge on the voyeuristic. However, as the memoryscape process involved listening, understanding, consent and empathy I think it ran contrary to an act of voyeurism, which is based on the powerlessness of the subject – but I think it is worth pointing out as a potential concern with location based oral history. Another interesting issue that came up was how conversational recording can become quite a different beast when listened to in specic locations. For example, one couple had described to me how their idyllic riverside bungalow suffered from sewerage ooding, due to the sewers being over-run by the sheer number of properties built in the area. The interviewees objected to the inclusion of the sewerage story, because they felt that it might affect the price of their property if a potential buyer tried the walk. In the end the clip was kept in with the agreement that their names and the exact location of their house would not be mentioned, but this was an interesting example of how the new context for the recording can introduce a whole new set of ethical dilemmas.

MEMORYSCAPE TODAY

Location-based technology has become almost ubiquitous since these early experiments with oral history-based trail making took place. In many countries location aware tablet computers and smart phones with a GPS chip are more common than not and they are crowd-sourcing local, national and even worldwide grids of information. New location-based games and entertainments will be coming that make use of these location aware systems; mobile internet services are becoming cheaper and in some cities they will be free; and the sound walk, memoryscape or its multi-media equivalent will be rapidly evolving as different disciplines and sectors explore its potential. Some have been sponsored by companies interested in promoting brand awareness through new technology. Early examples included Adidas who sponsored sound walks of grafti walls in the Bronx in New York, and in Glasgow Tennent’s Lager commissioned a freely downloadable MP3 walking tour of Glas- gow’s music venues; more recently several local authorities and heritage organisations have commissioned similar ‘app’ based trails delivered by mobile phone. Computer manufacturers and software developers such as Hewlett Packard have long invested in research and development work for outdoor, mobile comput- ing which includes location-based computer games that can geographically locate players in real time. Content can be varied according to other real-world sensors,

– 121 – Toby BUTLER such as heart rate, direction and light using bio mapping techniques (Nold 2006). In Britain a BAFTA (our equivalent of the Oscars) was awarded to a BBC producer for creating a series of QR code triggered audio walks along coastal paths (linked to the Coast documentary series), and there are various web-based portals for local groups or organisations to podcast their own walks – territory already being rapidly dominated by Google Earth and Google Maps. The medium should certainly not be left solely for the market and large institutions to dominate. At best, this cultural, historical and geographical information system can be used to introduce multiple voices and conicting readings of the landscape (and those that move and live in it). It can also be an empowering and expressive use of technology for the gazed at (or listened to). Just as simple web- sites can be constructed by individuals or small groups, sound walks can be made with minimal training and gain easy exposure on the internet. A walk has none of the practical problems associated with exhibiting landscape-related conventional artwork or sculpture, because no exhibition space or planning permission is necessary. In the past this has proved to be a serious impediment to community-based initiatives that do not stem from local government or the arts establishment and the medium has the potential to be relatively inclusive. Both undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of East Lon- don have published a number of trail experiments.3 For example Rosa Vilbr uses archive recordings from an oral history project on housing to give a voice to an array of people who have struggled to be housed in Hackney (East London). In doing so the listener actually sits in the Hackney Council housing centre and listens to past experiences of those needing to be housed. The listener is hence brought face to face with the present reality of housing policy. In so doing the listener must contemplate how housing policy has worked from the citizen’s point of view in the present (and future) as well as the past. An even more multi-sensory trail is ‘The Brixton Munch’ by Laura Mitchison, which uses food as a ‘sensory portal’ to explore some of the complexity of place construction at Brixton Market in South London.4 Through tasting food, sound design and a combination of storytelling and memory listeners encouraged to consider more mobile, open and imaginative connections that we all use to devise our sense of place. I also think that trail making is a good way to make active connections across both time and space that can be useful in terms of community development. For example, I have been working on ‘Ports of Call’, a community project near the Olympics 2012 site in East London.5 Surprisingly the local area (Newham) does not have a local museum and the Royal Docks and its surrounding communities are almost completely devoid of any heritage interpretation in public areas. The

3 Many of them can be found at http://www.raphael-samuel.org.uk/history-trails 4 http://brixtonmunch.wix.com/brixtonmunch 5 http://portsofcall.org.uk

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Royal Docks, once the busiest in the world but now in a strange phase of derelic- tion and redevelopment, are in severe danger of being the victim of the splintered urbanism that characterised much of the development of the Isle of Dogs and Ca- nary Wharf. Premium sites such as the Excel conference centre and London City Airport develop excellent connections and facilities, but are in danger of becoming effectively gated communities, leaving poor, fractured communities physically or psychologically excluded from redeveloped places. The trails that we have been creating with local people encourage connections between the different parts of the docks and psychologically ‘ungate’ these premium sites by incorporating them as trail locations, and in turn encourage international visitors to venture beyond the taxi rank. Hopefully the process of creating and walking the trails will also provide opportunities for people to build identity and empathy with their surroundings – that feeling of ‘rootedness’, particularly for substantial proportions of the local population that are very new to the area (new dockside development residents; school children; newly arrived ethnic groups; students coming to the University of East London). We have worked with such groups on trail creation, through school or community-orientated workshops or in the case of the students as coursework, which is part of a history degree study programme. But involvement can also be in terms of the simple act of active listening of doing the trails. For example in Britannia Village, a new dockside community, we included Ports of Call trail booklets and CDs as part of a welcome pack that was given to new residents by the local community centre. In charting the area’s cultural, industrial, maritime and natural history before it is gone forever, we are also setting out to invent the traditions of a sustainable future that builds on rather than disregards local resources, both environmental and human. Our aim is to do this in an active, participatory way which gives local people new skills whilst at the same time giving some kind of context to the wider process of regeneration which for the rst time is bringing large numbers of middle class professionals to live and work around the docks. The project really does have the potential to give past and present residents a voice in one of the most rapidly developing urban areas in the world. Memoryscape can also help draw attention to forgotten or hidden aspects of place that should be remembered. The Bethnal Green Disaster Project is concerned with the remembrance of a terrible disaster in 1943 in which 173 London- ers were crushed to death (mostly women and children) on the steps of an underground shelter in the Second World War.6 Despite being the worst civilian disaster in modern British history, for decades this event was largely forgotten, due to a mixture of war censorship, witnesses being told to keep quiet and the sheer dif-

6 http://www.bgmemorial.org.uk

– 123 – Toby BUTLER

culty of discussing such an incredibly traumatic incident. Working closely with a charity, the Bethnal Green Memorial Trust which is fundraising to complete a major new memorial at the site, we have been talking to survivors and recording their memories of this terrible incident and its impact on generations of people. By sharing these once hidden memories – through exhibitions and an audio trail of the disaster site – uncomfortable stories about the civilian impact of war can be told, alongside more well-known tropes of how London coped with the Blitz. In so doing survivors of the disaster and their families have a focus for their grief and feel the event is getting the recognition that it deserves. For many historians sharing authority in this way is unsettling, but this kind of work can draw on oral history methodology, action research and community- based practice to use history in engaging and locally meaningful ways. In Theatres of Memory (1994), Raphael Samuel argues that in many respects we are all historians. We visit castles and museums, trace family history, collect things, buy stuff from junk shops, write blogs, share memories from our past and record and curate our lives (for example on Facebook). We are all engaged in one way or another in making sense of the past. That past might be our own past experience, that of our families, our ancestors and the places where we live or have come from. History is not only the preserve of the professional historian, but it is used for individual and collective purposes. It can be a shared project in which citizens can have an active role, not just as audience but as actors, debaters, directors and scriptwriters in the production of our understanding of the past. New technologies can allow us to create more multi-vocal senses of places and their pasts, and reect more deeply on what a muddled bundle of memories, ideas and trajectories places really are. Doing this kind of history should be like following otsam through an ancient city; alive, open and profoundly liberating.

REFERENCES

Butler, T. (2005). “Linked: a landmark in sound, a public walk of art”. Cultural Geogra- phies, 12(1): 77-88. Friedman, J. (2006). “Media Review: Drifting, from Memoryscape Audio Walks. Pro- duced by Toby Butler”. Oral History Review, 33(1): 107-109. Hulten, C. (2006). “Case study: Mölndals Museum”. Museum Practice (34):. 61-62. Miller, G. (2003). Linked: a landmark in sound, an invisible artwork, a walk [Sound installation]. Munt, I., and R. Jaijee (2002). “Postscript”, in River Calling: the need for urban water space strategies. London: London Rivers Association. Nold, C. (2006). Bio Mapping. Retrieved 24 March, 2006. Platt, E. (2001). Leadville: A Biography of the A40. London: Picador.

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Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (Vol- ume 1.) London: Verso. Sinclair, I. (2003). London Orbital. London: Penguin. Till, K. (2003). “Places of Memory”, in Agnew, K. M. J. and G. O’Tuathail (eds.). Com- panion to Political Geography. . . Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell: 289-301. Timothy, T. (2005). “Report on the Sept 9th forum event: A1 audio tour: brief description”. Arts for Islington Forum Monthly Bulletin, 3 October. Wright, P. (1999). The River: the Thames in our time. London: BBC Books.

– 125 –

BENGALURU BOOGIE

OUTLINES FOR AN ETHNOGRAPHIC FICTION

Oscar HEMER

with photos by Ayisha ABRAHAM

PRELUDE The “ethnographic ction” to follow is based on three journeys to Bangalore (Ben- galuru). The two last ones (both in 2013) were part of the second Memories of Modernity project, including artists, academics and master students at Malmö University and Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore. Its intention was to blend academic and artistic approaches by means of a series of “transdisciplinary interventions” in the city of Bangalore. A preceding Memories of Modernity project (2005-2007) had been carried out in Durban, South Africa, in collaboration with the University of KwaZulu-Natal. These experimental encounters are much more complicated than one may immediately imagine. Art and Academia are sovereign states, governed by their own rules and standards, and attempting to please the two of them, may well result in the expulsion from both. I don’t particularly fancy the term “ethnographic ction”, but for the moment I don’t have a better one to describe the kind of transdisciplinary interpolation I am trying to pursue. The idea of combining and possibly merging ‘ethnography’ and ‘ction’ emanates from another artistic research project, The Truth of Fiction (2007-2010), in which I interrogated ‘truth’ and ‘ction’ in the recent social transformation processes in South Africa and Argentina, using both ethnographic and literary methods. That interrogation from a writer’s perspective (which was one of the premises) brought me in the end, to my own surprise, to the crossroads of Literature and Anthropology. The resulting text turned out to be in the format of

– 127 – Oscar HEMER an academic dissertation, yet stretching the boundaries by incorporating elements of reportage, essay and memoir (Hemer 2011; 2012a). This was something that evolved in the process, in accordance with my ambition to nd one form that was somehow congenial with the subject matter. But it was nevertheless a compromise, where the literary in the end had to abide to the academic discipline and format. Therefore, it was a great relief to go back to writing ction. Last year I completed a major literary project, a novel trilogy,1 and the sudden freedom from inhibitions certainly sparked my imagination. I would not claim that these projects have run in parallel, but they have denitely informed each other, and in retrospect I can clearly see how they are really two different forms of interrogating a common thematic. Fiction writing to me is primarily interrogation, just like academic research. But what about the experimentation? Where do these practices meet – and possibly converge? Is it even desirable that they converge? These were crucial questions for my dissertation, and the somehow discouraging answer seemed to be: No, they are different practices and equally valuable only insofar as they remain separated. However, the Fiction and Truth project actually also had “literary” offspring; “Hillbrow Blues”, a text that was rst written and published in Swedish and later elaborated and published in English (Hemer 2012b). I was invited to contribute to a literary anthology and the editor’s insistence inspired me to write something I most likely would not have written without a sharp deadline. The rst version was conceived while I was working on the South African case study, more specically on a chapter about “writing the city” (Johannesburg). So, it was a way of approaching the same material from a slightly different angle. In a way, language was the main difference; Swedish being my literary language, English the academic one. The English version, which is more than a mere translation, was also written in response to a call (an anthology to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the yearly Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, in which I had participated in 2007). That was a greater challenge: It is the rst literary text I have written in English:

It goes fast. Pretoria Street is shorter than he remembered it; he’s looking for the hotel on the right side whose name he has repressed, no, simply forgotten, but he doesn’t see any signs at all, nor any traces of bookshops, cafés or lunch restaurants. Lots of people in the street, mostly young men, no suits or ties, a few older women, no commerce, shutters closed, the entire Carlton Hotel shut down like a ghost tower, the garage doors locked with chains, but no roadblocks or burning oil drums. . . “The Nigerians and the Zimbabweans have ruined the place,” says the taxi driver with a matter-of-fact distaste that reminds him of his rst taxi ride in Joburg fteen years ago, that time with a white driver venting his contempt over the black hordes that had invaded the formerly secluded city. He stayed in the hotel whose name he doesn’t remember, with a view to the street, noisy, without

1 The Argentina Trilogy: Cosmos & Aska (2000); Santiago (2007); Misiones (2014)

– 128 – Bengaluru Boogie air conditioning, cockroaches in the bathroom but otherwise neat and tidy. Apartheid was already history, like Communism in Eastern Europe, TV showed Hill Street Blues dubbed to seSotho (he believes), interspersed with commercials for Ohlsson’s lager, the beer for theNewSouthAfricainthemaking.[...]

Obviously, the above is not an academic text. Yet, in bits and pieces it is identical with corresponding parts of my dissertation, which also has the elements of essay, reportage and memoir. The difference is the component that would be dened as ctional; the stream of consciousness, the subjective distortion of reality. In the memory of the protagonist, the images of this taxi ride along Pretoria Street merge with other images into a slightly surreal cityscape. And, perhaps most importantly, there is the distancing device of the third person. That was something that I added in the English version – and I discovered that it really made a great difference. “He” is not “me”. I’m not exactly sure who he is, where he comes from, or where he is going. So, it is a ction. And it is ethnographic in the sense that it is conveying the experience of a real place, and an attempt at capturing the spirit of this place, if you like. It’s not one journey, but a condensation of many journeys, and with two registers in time, a now and a past, a before and an after; in this case, before and after the transition. When embarking on the second Memories of Modernity project I really did not know what my contribution would be. It was my second journey to Bangalore and it was very different from the rst one, ten years earlier. Then I had been a reporter, and being a reporter determines your experience in many ways. You process the impressions with the purpose of turning them into a comprehensive story. You look for a clue, an idea, which will give sense to the story, a revealing new understanding. And you are hyperactive, interviewing people, absorbing information like a sponge. On my second visit, by contrast, I deliberately refrained from doing anything a journalist would have done. Yet, it still nagged me that the reportage I wrote in 2003 was never published. So, on my return to Bangalore I got the idea to nally have it published, as a testimony of the emerging IT metropolis of the rst years of the new Millennium (a time that somehow seems very distant today) and to juxtapose this journalistic text to another, ctional one, based on my impressions ten years later. Bengaluru Boogie, as correspondent to the Hillbrow Blues, and possibly one in a series of similar ethnographic ctions.2 The breakneck feature of the new hybrid text is the protagonist’s change of sex, which came quite naturally at that very specic moment in India (January 2013). It is not necessarily a literal (physical) one, although a former “he” has obviously now become a “s/he”. Swedish has the new neutral pronoun “hen” (be-

2 In the end I decided to only use the unpublished reportage as a reference.

– 129 – Oscar HEMER tween the male “han” and the female “hon”). English does not, as yet, so “she” and “s/he” are only distinguished in writing, and so is my invented form “hir” to replace “his/her”. This creates an interesting difference in nuance between the Swedish and English versions (this time written in parallel), and it is by all means a disturbing difculty, which gives new meaning to the term third person. Ileave it to the reader to decide what it may entail.

The City

BENGALURU BOOGIE Ten years later s/he is another person. The altered perspective does not entirely have to do with the change of sex, but the manifestation could not have been timelier, with the daily gruesome new disclosures of ‘the Delhi case’. The gang rape of a twenty-three year old physiotherapist student and the demonstrations of protest all across the subcontinent have been breaking news ever since hir ar- rival two weeks ago. As a woman (hermaphrodite) s/he is being seen with other eyes, but s/he is also seeing other things than last time, because s/he is looking for other things. Jyothsna talks about the metropolis of the drowsy millennium as the “pre-broken Bangalore”. Then s/he, that is he, was only here for three or four days, at the end of a twelve-day condensed grand tour Bombay-Ahmedabad- Varanasi-Delhi-Bangalore-Delhi, whereof all-in-all at least two full days were spent at Delhi airport, which the coldest winter in forty years had wrapped in coal smog and fog. S/he hardly remembered anything about Bangalore, except the nice weather – “the air conditioned city”, an as worn-out cliché as India’s Silicon Valley – and not even the weather is persistent. Ten years ago, he was in the company of Madan, whom he had met a week earlier at the disastrous conference in Varanasi, where they had both felt out-of- place; an instant friendship of the kind he used to make on his travels, mutually benecial, as it were to turn out. Madan had recently published his Asia Pacic

– 130 – Bengaluru Boogie

Internet Handbook, the rst comprehensive overview of the ICT development in South and East Asia, including Australia, with the subtitle ‘’Episode IV: Emerging Powerhouses”. The Star Wars allusion indicated that he saved the prehistory for later, moving straight into the second round of the global Internet race, the one that had just started, about the mobile and the wireless; a round in which Asia had already taken the lead. The hardware producers Japan and South Korea were in the forefront, but the emerging powerhouses were of course China and India with their giant markets; they were the ones to generate the coming veritable explosion (the third stage of the digital revolution). The rst night in Bangalore, Madan had taken him to an outdoor concert with the violinist virtuosi Lakshminarayana Subramaniam and Jean-Luc Ponty and afterwards they went to a party at the house of Rajesh Reddy, the executive director of July Systems, who had just got back from San Francisco, his other home, to which he commuted once a month. A mix of old and new pop music streamed from the digital jukebox on the S-shaped bar, where bourbon and Drambuie were blended on the rocks in heavy glasses, the soft conversation moved from complaints over the increasingly hostile climate in the US to jokes about America’s lagging behind in the digital race, “they have only recently discovered SMS” (giggle). S/he could recall the scene because he had described it in his last reportage, that is s/he did not remember, but that was the way he had reconstructed it, with exactly those signicant details, the clichés of the IT metropolis, juxtaposed to the pilgrim town by the Ganges, whose murdering cold by contrast still evoked chills of discomfort. Death in Varanasi ... People froze to death by the hundreds, while the pilgrims continued to perform their morning rituals in the cold and highly polluted water and the gold-diggers poked for tooth llings and nose jewelry in the ashes of the funeral piles; he laid awake a whole night in a shivering t at the pension whose name s/he does not remember (why didn’t he ever memorize hotel names?) thinking about Death in Varanasi. He wrote his last reportage on commission, and received a decent honorarium, but it was never published. He waited for the next number of the journal, then the next and the next again, until it was too late to offer it to someone else. It was not his best reportage, but it still nags him that it never went to print. Ten years later, s/he is also reading what he wrote with other eyes; that which had been in the forefront, the very point about “India’s Catch 22”, that the competitive advan- tages over other developing economies would cease the moment it started to move up the global IT chain, blah blah, now appeared to be trivial, or even irrelevant, whereas the second register of the reportage, which was then in the background, points towards that which now preoccupies hir: the latent holocaust, group psy- chosis, the outbursts of unfathomable bestiality. Ten years ago the pogroms of Gujarat were fresh in the minds of victims and perpetrators, he had been taken to the cleansed residential areas in Ahmedabad, but without paying much attention to what he saw, without trying to induce the evil genius loci. There were no traces,

– 131 – Oscar HEMER no bloodstains, no stink of stale clotted horror (as the one that would nauseate him many years later in Rwanda, where the mouldering clothes of the murdered had been put in neat bundles in the pews), but it still astounded hir that he had not been more profoundly stricken by the moment. Obtunded, or simply absent- minded? On the verge of the second Iraqi war, anti-Islamic rhetoric permeated the public debate, security controls were as rigorous as in the US (or Israel, where he had never been), and although he may have intuitively grasped that in India the exception had been the rule ever since the disastrous partition in 1947, the mother of all pogroms, it was only many years later that he would realize the full extent of the hecatomb, no, it was still unfathomable, just like the gruesome popular festival in Rwanda, or the extermination of Europe’s Jews and Gypsies . . . Unfathomable, but not unintelligible, Arjun Appadurai dissects the logic of genocide with chilling exactitude in Fear of Small Numbers; the majority’s fear of the minority that stands in the way of the completion of wholeness, and which must be destroyed, because if proportions were inverted, tables turned, the former minority would do exactly the same. India has no memorials over the butchered; nobody wants to be reminded because everyone is compromised, more or less; even the untouchable.

Large-scale violence is not simply the product of antagonistic identities, the violence in itself is one of the ways in which the illusion of xed and charged identities is produced and maintained . . . The minority is the symptom, but the underlying problem is difference itself. Therefore, the purpose is the elimination of difference; that is the hallmark of today’s large-scale predatory narcissisms . . . Remember Philip Gourevitch’s statement about Rwanda: Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community-building.

One way

– 132 – Bengaluru Boogie

India overwhelms hir. “An assault on all the senses”, as the reactionary Naipaul so accurately has put it, s/he does not know where but has it from a reliable source. Ten years ago he had experienced the ambivalence, too, but now it is physical, a dyspnoea, a threatening nervous breakdown. The crowds, the sweat, the odours from exhaust pipes and sewers, the hands that furtively stroke hir body, the exposure in the auto-rickshaws that fearlessly crisscross in the constant rush-hour trafc, a wonder that it is at all possible to travel unhurt, just a few dents and scratches in the paint, like caresses, a word that connotes carcass . . . car-casses, car-kisses . . . Every transport a strenuous enterprise, Nandi Durga Road, where the pension is, an almost insurmountable barrier; once back at Droog House s/he is so exhausted that s/he stays in hir room the rest of the day. In the reportage he had likened Bangalore to a botanical garden traversed by motorways and regardless of whether it was an accurate metaphor or just another cliché, it is completely out of place now, ten years later, when the number of inhabitants, the human mass, has grown from sixty to a hundred lakhs, and the cars, motorbikes and auto rickshaws must have tripled or quadrupled; the few sorry trees left along the extinguished pavements look like the burnt trunks that miraculously survived a forest re. Out of place, yet predictable. Banal (like the contrast to Varanasi); The Botanical Gar- den, Lal Bagh, is Bangalore’s only attraction, according to The Lonely Planet (but he never visited it then); an extensive oasis, in the centre of which Gondwana raises its bald pate of gneiss, three, maybe four billion years old. Immemorial, without memory. Now s/he is in Bangalore to participate in a conference, Mediating Modernity in the 21stCentury, for which s/he hirself is one of the organizers. The city changed name in 2006, but s/he never heard anyone pronounce the revived Bengaluru. It is not laden with ideology like Bombay – Mumbai, where M still might signal Hindu nationalism, whereas B (as in Bom Bahía) connoted cosmopolitanism rather than colonialism, although Bengaluru does signal Kannada nationalism, while Banga- lore remains inseparably associated with the British Empire, the garden city of its retired servants. In fact, although s/he does not realize that yet, it is two cities that have lived side by side and only merged during the second part of the 20th century, the City and the Cantonment, which turned its back on the City . . . Cantonment, containment, the English enclave imported their house servants from Madras, not Mysore . . . The origin of coordinates is somewhere in Cubbon Park, but the bor- derline between the twin cities is nowadays an invisible seam, like the difference between Tamil and Kannada for the inexpert; the subcontinent’s forty languages and almost as many scripts is yet another warp in the composite fabric. Hardly any traces remain of the old Bengaluru, before the English conquest; a fragment of Tipu Sultan’s fort, embedded by the bus station and the market (the rickshaw driver had never heard of it); an air of the eternal market’s extravagance, the cones of spices in the warm register of the rainbow, the sea of guillotined owers, but

– 133 – Oscar HEMER the light of their petals does not banish the stink of putrid oil; the basic colour is russet to black. “Let it wither!” says Vasanthi, who is coordinating a Swedish-Indian collaboration project on Cultural Heritage. A metropolis that did not forget would soon be buried in its own memorials. But Bengaluru’s amnesia is exceptional! It is not denial, or suppression, but blindness, self-delusion, simulacrum. The symbol is Singapore. Hir only image of Singapore is the one that William Gibson engraved in reportage in Wired in the mid 90s: Disneyland with a Death Penalty. S/he witnesses the demonstrations against the sexual violence on TV, not in the streets of Bangalore, the cries for capital punishment for the arrested perpetrators, the youngest in particular, the one who committed the most ghastly violation, an iron rod in the vagina. The editor’s column in The Times of India, which is hung in a bag on the door handle to hir room every morning, makes a comparison of the last month’s two globally mediated tragedies: the gang rape in Delhi and the school massacre in Connecticut; Obama’s decisive and upright behaviour versus the gawky Manmohan Singh, but also the lack of protests against the weapon industry and easy access to rearms versus the wrath and indignation of the Indian middle class. But those who protest in the streets, says writer and activist Harsh Mander, are indifferent to the street children who get raped every night. Mander gives an open lecture on “Unequal India” in the location that a few days later will be the venue of the Mediating Modernity conference. He dees his middle class audience by comparing today’s India with the US American South in the 1960s. The elite school’s reluctance to accept quota-based admission of Dalit students is like the resistance against the Civil Rights movement and the desegregation of the schools in the South. The same confusion of privilege and merit; the horror of putting your children in the same school as the children of the servants, to nd out that the gardener’s or the housemaid’s kid is smarter than your own. The listeners unashamedly conrm Mander’s observations by their comments and questions. No anxiety of showing your colours here, as opposed to South Africa. (At a dinner in the home of one of the design teachers at Srishti, all housework is carried out by servants, and the hostess smiles and remarks that “this is the privilege of living in India”). But the challenging question is left hanging in the air, s/he is not sure what hir own answer would be: Are you prepared to understand – and forgive – the juvenile rapist in Delhi? The next evening, William Dalrymple gives a lecture at the National Gallery of Modern Art about the last Mughals; one and a half century, from 1707 to 1857, which the History books describe as a period of decay, that is, times characterized by miscegenation and cultural mélange. The white Mughals are predominantly Scots, transferred from the Empire’s Western outpost in North America, who fall in love with India to the extent that they take Indian wives and convert to Islam. As radical as ever Richard Burton, and in any case the negation of hir preconceptions

– 134 – Bengaluru Boogie about Brits in India. That is, hir conception of British colonialism is marked by the experience of Durban, and of Kenya. Now, all of a sudden, the concept Anglo- Indian, a term that encompasses all children of Indian mother and European father, attains a different meaning. Even the offspring of Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Germans are Anglo-Indians, just as all immigrants to Argentina travelling with Ottoman passports became turcos. When s/he asks how many they are, nobody seems to know the answer, not even an estimate. It is almost like asking for the number of Brahmins.

Border

In six months s/he will sit at hir late found favourite place, Indian Coffee House on Church Street, pale blue walls, wooden tables, laminate-clad wooden benches, waiters in white, classical Mysore garment (s/he believes), heavy belts and ornamented headgear, like loosely tied turbans; the cashier in round steel- rimmed glasses looks like a teacher, or intellectual. At the table in front of him, by the opening to the kitchen, a barefoot man puts his signature on the bills before the waiters take them to the cashier. The guests are all old or middle-aged men, alone or in company, immersed in soft conversation or reading the paper, one is playing with his mobile. The posters on the walls could have been the retro props of a hipster bar, but these have most certainly hung there since before Independence: a proud bearded man and a plate with roasted coffee beans, a ne type, a ne coffee, both are Indian.The coffee is exquisite, and so is the dosa, hir simple lunch. The third journey settles over the second, nuancing the picture . . . it will wonder hir that s/he gets so little out of the on-going sojourn, in spite of its three week duration, s/he will explain it partly with the isolation at Droog House (next time s/he is staying at Elanza Hotel on Richmond Road and the city is accessible in

– 135 – Oscar HEMER a completely different manner), partly with hir insufcient preparations, s/he is not well-enough-read . . . As a reporter he could be unprepared and still nd his way, by intuition and improvisation, but now there is no compelling force, unlike ten years ago s/he is not doing any interviews, none of that dialectic generated by the hyperactive reporter mode, a state of mind that requires solitude, he would never have been able to work in pairs, not even with a photographer, because every social concession would disturb his concentration . . . Now it is something else that s/he is after, uncertain what exactly, perhaps impossible or not even desirable, it remains obscure six months ahead, when s/he recapitulates this already distant now. Then, as now, s/he worries about the insensibility, it is no doubt a form of blunting, or habitual blindness and numbness, as devious as alcoholism; blasé is the wrong word, because s/he is still curious, radical also in a conventional political sense (more radical now than ten years ago) . . . Even though s/he sets hir mind on absorbing, registering, remembering all the signicant details, it is as if the impressions pass hir perception without a trace, the travels of recent years merge in hir memory, muddle, fade. Is there simply a limit as to how much you are able to remember? He used to assure himself that everything was there, somewhere, subliminally, below the surface, in the darkroom of consciousness, like undeveloped lm . . . But keen eyes and ears were never his distinctive characteristics, his foremost asset as a reporter was the reection, the surprise association, the ability to think in new directions, new even to himself . . . Boldness requires a certain innocence, an undaunted ignorance, too much preparation prevents audacity . . . The revisit six months from now will strengthen hir conviction that s/he is on to something important, both in terms of the form, the ethnographic ction, and the subject, the phantom of partition and the silence about the un- healed wound. But hinting is not enough, s/he has to go to the marrow . . . At the table next to hir, two Muslim men are sitting forehead to forehead in their white skullcaps, beside them, with his back to hir, a man in jeans and a t-shirt that says Shakespeare & Company Network of Writers, maybe a Westerner or Anglo-Indian . . . That would be another alternative, an ethnographic study of the Anglo-Indian minority, a comparative study of marginalized hybrid communities in racially and culturally segregated societies; Anglo-Indians, South Africa’s “coloureds”, the creolized Swedes of Misiones . . . Then three young women sit down at the table to his left, and behind them a man reading a Kannada newspaper (he assumes; it can just as well be Tamil, but not Hindu, because he recognises the South Indian characters, rounded in order not to destroy the bres of the palm leaf). It is a ne point from which to observe and reect, nobody pays hir any attention. Why are the middle classes so angry? Arjun Appadurai, escorted by his stun- ning Slovenian wife, is shorter and darker than s/he had imagined him. He is the keynote and draw of the conference, but that is not the reason for his visit to Bangalore, the conference has on the contrary been timed according to his sched-

– 136 – Bengaluru Boogie ule; he is invited by the Tata group’s National Institute of Advanced Studies, and he speaks to a full auditorium on the subject Corruption as Participation in Ne- oliberal India. Appadurai distinguishes the traditional vertical corruption, the one that consists of gifts and tips, from the modern, global one, which is horizontal and fraternal. India is a cash economy. Credit cards are scarce, half the population is unbanked (a peculiar word, s/he loses hirself for a moment in search of a Swedish translation) . . . The motif for economic liberalization of the ‘90s was more transparency, but the result turned out to be the opposite. Today half the economy is informal. There is of course a correlation here. The cash economy is, according to Appadurai, a more important explanation to contemporary India’s peculiarity than all the cultural factors put together. But, why this sudden fury? There are two things that make the upwards-striving middle classes take to the streets to demonstrate: Sexual violence and corruption. It is partly an anger turned inwards, frustration over dependency, over being so intrinsically involved in the corrupt transactions, horizontal and vertical. India is a beast that has wakened and started to move – not the wise elephant that venture capitalist Gurcharan Das envisioned ten years ago, in contrast to the East Asian tigers; the elephant who moves forward steadily and surely, pausing occasionally to reect on its past and enjoy the journey – but a brute whose face the world has barely begun to divine. The middle classes strive for the obscene opulence of the richest ten percent, while at the same time trampling on the likewise upwards-struggling dalits. The caste hierarchy is multiplex and unfathomable (incomprehensible to an outsider), with new alliances that allow a certain social mobility, corruption is the sphere of convergence . . . a charismatic interruption in the bureaucratic routine (did he really say that?) . . . Corruption as opposed to communalism? The violence against the Dalits, the casteless, is perpetrated by those second lowest on the ladder, the low-castes who are not favoured by reservation. Inciting communal violence is an efcient way of diverting the frustration of the poor and preventing the low-castes from rising against the high-castes. Muslims, the majority among minorities, Pak- istan’s alleged fth column, is the national scapegoat, but in Bengaluru the erup- tions of communal violence have also occurred along linguistic lines, Kannada against Tamil and Urdu. In the hotel room s/he zaps between the TV channels, all Fox News looka- likes. The Delhi case has had to stand aside for the breaking news about a killed frontier guard in Kashmir; beheaded, as far as s/he can decipher from the agitated commentators who stir up the hatred and demand retaliation. In one of the channels, the foreign minister tries hard to fend off the ery interviewer’s accusations of indulgence towards the archenemy. It has not occurred to hir until that moment that the resentment rests so immediately underneath the surface, s/he can sense the latent holocaust; the reversible pogroms that are only waiting for the signal to be unleashed; if he were to imagine the possibility of a nuclear war, it would be here.

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People are as easy to set re to as matches. S/he remembers those exact words from his reportage from Istanbul in 1998, during the Öcalan crisis, when people burned spaghetti in the streets prior to Galatasaray’s draw with Juventus in Cham- pion’s League. One of his Kurdish informants used the phrase to evoke the riots in Smyrna/Izmir, the population swap between Greece and Turkey, a minor scale parallel to India’s partition, when twelve million people were replaced across the new border and one million murdered. Is it possible to imagine anything worse than the ethnic (or religious) narcissism, the excuse and prerequisite for genocide? A deceptive simplication, perhaps, fundamentalism vs. cosmopolitanism . . . maybe cosmopolitanism from below is just illusory wishful thinking, like An- archism’s faith in human altruism, the fundament of libertarian socialism . . . But what else could one rely on? The terror balance of self-interest. Ten years earlier he had travelled in a ying saucer. Electronic City, the largest in the corridor of IT parks, IIIT-B, India’s cutting edge academy for IT engineers, an already faded hyper-modernity rising over the stalls and cartridges of the rudi- mentary subsistence economy, but on the interior a space station, manned by the rebels against the Empire. Open source against Microsoft’s monopoly (long before Facebook and Google). The Linux Spirit, like the electronic frontier of the early ‘90s, the California ideology, but with a social conscience. It was easy to imagine how old Everett Rogers on his tour around India’s tech parks had been taken in by these young enthusiastic engineers and entrepreneurs. India’s road to the future seemed as obvious as appropriate: the informatization strategy. That the last ve years had implied a greater change than fty years of independence, was the mantra that could be taken for an incantation. But “informatization” never became an accepted sequel to industrialization. And what happened to the expected exponential growth of internet tea shops, community centres and local radio stations, that would spread the blessings of the IT metropolis to the villages and light up the compact rural darkness? He did not see anything of village India then, and s/he hardly does now either, but s/he cannot avoid the slums, just a few blocks from Nandi Durga Road. “In Bangalore even the poor make an impression of prosperity”, was one of the statements in his reportage. That sentence is the only one s/he shamefully regrets. The transformation is simple. A long purple kurta over white cotton trousers, white cloth shoes, a shawl over head and shoulders, a little eye-shadow, and eye- liner under the eyes. But when s/he at last gets half a day on hir own, she puts away the shawl and the make-up, to stroll in the district Shivajinagar, ten minutes rickshaw ride from the hotel. Inspired by Appadurai’s notion of “cosmopolitanism from below”, s/he feels part of the millennial urbanity like a stranger among strangers, an unusual but not unknown element in the multitude. Here s/he wan- ders undisturbed, but there is nowhere to go; the mosques are forbidden, as are the hindu temples with their towers of smurf-like multi-coloured idols; and s/he would

– 138 – Bengaluru Boogie

Basement Theatre not step into the dark of any of the few bars even if someone invited hir. There is a smell of oil, of dismantled engines and gearboxes, the canal is a dry ditch, clogged with garbage, refuse (what’s the difference?), sewage, the sweet human smell, s/he comes to think of a book title, The Deodorized Skunk, an insigni- cant work from the late 1960s, a completely misplaced association, baroque, a defence against the galvanized reality around hir, like the lens of the mobile: he used to be a good photographer, or could have become, with his restored Leica M2 from 1962 which he bought in Stockholm in 1976 at the prize of 1200 kro- nor, at the time corresponding to three hundred Dollars and today equivalent of three thousand or more. He used to slosh about in the dark room at the School of Journalism, 25 ASA on Portriga Rapid, melancholy pictures from his monk-like existence in a summer house eighty kilometres north of Stockholm, in the years to come it would be slides from his travels in Africa and Latin America. The camera ceased to function in 1992 on the shore of Lake Tanganyika; he had shot a whole lm on villages that had been taken over by baboons, and on chimpanzees in Jane Goodall’s reserve, where one of the males had made a charge at his Ital- ian travel companion, but nothing had been exposed on the unwinded lm, and afterwards – now – it is as if that journey never took place, or was a dream. After the Leica he had a cheap Nikon that caught everybody’s attention every time the shutter opened and closed, then a couple of digital cameras that both broke down after less than a year, and ever since he made do with the mobile, but never got the feeling back for photography. The overow of instant images has blunted the gaze, or the will, s/he has never even held a video camera in hir hand, a limitation, no doubt, like the aversion against social media, s/he really hates Facebook, in-

– 139 – Oscar HEMER tensely and irrationally, an eccentric whim, maybe preposterous, but not a matter of snobbery; no nostalgic lamentation over worldly shallowness or demystica- tion, only light-hearted sadness at mediocrity . . . S/he has no pretentions to be more than an observer, a tourist, although that word is so circumscribed by contempt, both for vulgar charter tourism and as a metaphor for the new mobile elite, as opposed to those who are displaced by force, or who can’t move, tourists and vagabonds (or which was Bauman’s dichotomy?), The people s/he meets in the alleys of Shivajinagar, who hardly notice hir, or at least don’t turn their heads, are they even vagabonds, or for ever banished to this periphery? Swarming, stinking Shivajinagar, an Anti-Singapore in the heart of the IT metropolis, the remains of the vast semi-slum that the English called Blackpally, of which the most muddled parts were levelled to the ground after the plague to give space for Fraser Town. On the other side of the railway lies Cooke Town, where both Jyothsna and Ayisha live. The Globalization of Indifference. The new Pope, Francis, is to be credited for that expression, but it could just as well have been Harsh Mander’s; the very visible limit for the empathy of the middle class, in India as in Argentina and in the entire brave new world . . . Cubbon Park has been fenced in, to shut the masses out; in the middle class metropolis, plebeian democracy is a private nuisance. But no matter how one entrenches oneself behind fences and walls, the mass still permeates with its noise and its smells – like an entropy of diversity – if only as scenery outside the toned car windows on the way to the ofce or the private school. Hir own indifference is challenged daily, but not until s/he returns in six months will anyone reach behind hir shield. A beggar girl follows hir high pace a couple of blocks, s/he does not routinely whisk her away as s/he usually does, sometimes without even noticing, but s/he has no change, only 500 rupee bills. The girl senses hir indecision, and sees through hir dissemblance; to escape the humiliation s/he stops at the rst best street shop to buy eight different ayurvedic soaps. When s/he gets the change back s/he gives the girl 30 rupees – 60 cents! – and regrets it the moment the girl disappointedly slouches away. Why didn’t s/he give her fty, or a hundred, or ve hundred? S/he can’t scatter money about, that would serve no purpose, but why couldn’t s/he surprise the girl – and hirself? That elusive meeting with a dirty, snotty-nosed beggar girl, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, perhaps a cunning scrounger, will be hir only close encounter with anyone other than the reserved colleagues at Srishti – with the exception of rickshaw drivers, but then the relation is strictly regulated by the situation, a non-relation, a transaction, eventually even without negotiation, according to the meter, but the girl whose hopes s/he raises to immediately dash shall grieve hir the rest of the third journey. Six months from now the rapists are convicted, the rebellious spirit has van-

– 140 – Bengaluru Boogie ished and the media are already saturated by the upcoming election campaign, with Hindu fundamentalist and opposition leader Modi’s measures and statements as the serial story. S/he shall seriously doubt hir own usually reliable judgment when one of the colleagues at Srishti, whom s/he had instantly found very likable, comes out as a devoted Modi supporter. “If India as a whole were to be governed like Gujarat, it would be a completely different country.” She sounds like an echo of her husband, who at dinner the night before had explained China’s advantage over India by its racial homogeneity and strong central power. The suggestion that caste might have something to with it had been whisked away with a sigh resembling a snort. In the original Hinduism, caste was like a guild, something you acquired, not something you inherited. The distortion was, like every other ill, due to the Muslim invasion. In the beginning of time there were no minorities. Every- body was a Hindu. As a matter of fact, he had declared, India was more divided now than before Independence, because of the Reservation policy. “For how long are we as Brahmins going to pay for our forefathers alleged wrong-doings?” “In- stead of lifting the Dalits to a higher level, the standard is lowered for everyone.” The usual arguments about attening and vulgarization, the propertied classes’ defence of their hereditary privileges . . . S/he does not want to write her name, in case she is going to read it, although she would immediately recognize herself anyway, and she is moreover not at all ashamed of her opinion, on the contrary, but maybe s/he wants to retain hir rst impression, which s/he always used to trust. The wife had been silent during dinner, while the husband swaggered, s/he had not for a moment identied her with his unvarnished fascism, but then the day after, in the car to Srishti, she is not only an echo of her spouse, but even worse. The sweet little mouth, which s/he had associated with a little girl, becomes the jaws of a trooper. Modi, the butcher from Gujarat, prime-minister-to-be in the world’s largest democracy. If that happens, Jyothsna is going to emigrate. Maybe regardless of the outcome of the elections. She can’t stand being a woman in India, every time she goes abroad she can feel her entire body relax, becoming herself . . . S/he understands what Jyothsna means, although s/he can only imagine what it would be like to live here; s/he is white, twenty years older, and not a woman, too big, too manly, a butch or a tranny . . . everywhere else in the world s/he would be more vulnerable as a third gender, but not here, where the hermaphrodite is less offensive than the young woman who does not prove her subjugation by avoiding the men’s glances or stepping aside when they meet. The glances s/he receives may be defamatory, but not threatening, and most often simply indifferent; s/he is neither nor, invisible, harmless, neutral, like the untouchables who undisturbed plundered both Muslim and Hindu homes during the mutual massacres of the Par- tition; whereas the women, the vessels of religious chastity, were forced to commit suicide, or executed by their husbands and fathers, rather than ending in the arms of the enemy. The concept of honour killing attained henceforward a very con-

– 141 – Oscar HEMER crete meaning. Wells lled with dead women, the last ones to jump in survived if there was not water enough to drown them all. S/he nds hir way to Ayisha in Cooke Town with certain difculty. The rickshaw driver calls for instructions several times from hir Swedish mobile, the journey ends up being more expensive than a taxi ride, but taxi drivers are even worse at nding their way, Bengaluru is a labyrinth where all districts have the same street names – rst, second main street, second, third cross street – but at last s/he arrives and is welcomed in the stairwell by two waist-high dogs that would have scared hir stiff if s/he had met them in the street, and after that, in the evening sun on the balcony, to hir complete surprise, by Asu, Kevin’s wife, whom s/he hasn’t met in many years. S/he knew that Asu was coming to Bangalore, to participate in the same conference, but s/he had no idea that she and Ayisha were old friends; Ayisha had lived in Turkey for a year in the mid nineties. They tell hir a fantastic story; when Ayisha and Asu’s younger sister were hitchhiking in northern Anatolia, they were picked up by a man who took them to a deserted place up in the mountains. He could have been a rapist, a psychopath, a murderer, but all he wanted was to show them the view over the Black Sea. When they return to the valley below, an earthquake has ploughed through the landscape and buried the village where they had spent the night. The man who saved them is now Asu’s brother-in-law, although her sister divorced him a long time ago. They have a grown-up son in Istanbul. Ayisha’s short lms tell stories of people who live in the interstices, Anglo- Indian neighbours, the Nepalese garage guard, the Indian-Burmese dancer Ram Gopal; she calls them quasi-documentaries, but they are considered too arty for documentary lm festivals. The raw material are restored 8mm lms, vanished colours, a very special nostalgic nimbus, her parents’ rst journey abroad from the newly independent India gives a ashback to the family lm screenings of hir own childhood, the purring projector, the moment of awe, a very efcient way of tying the family together, the envied community, the sibling solidarity whose glossed over conicts s/he was luckily unaware of . . . The interstices, the pas- sages, fragments of stories, abstract, tangible; it strikes hir that these observations in the margin are the ones that narrate the history of Bangalore, a permanence in the transformation, as the comfort s/he feels in front of Ayisha’s computer, watching hir lms, one after the other, like an endless loop which s/he wishes will never stop, while Ayisha and Asu are talking in low voices and moving around the room, as if s/he weren’t there.

– 142 – Bengaluru Boogie

Astorm

REFERENCES:

Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Appadurai, A. (2013). The Future as Cultural Fact. London; New York: Verso. Butalia, U. (2000). The other side of silence: voices from the partition of India. London: C. Hurst. Dalrymple, W. (2002). White Mughals: love and betrayal in eighteenth-century India. London: HarperCollins. Das, G. (2002). The Elephant Paradigm. India wrestles with change. New Delhi: Penguin. Hemer, O. (2003). “Indiens Moment 22” (India’s Catch 22), unpublished reportage. Hemer, O.(2011). Writing transition: ction and truth in South Africa and Argentina. Diss. Oslo: University of Oslo, Dep. Of Social Anthroplogy. Hemer, O.(2012a). Fiction and Truth in Transition: writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Hemer, O. (2012b). ‘’Hillbrow Blues”, in Chapman, M. (ed.) Africa Inside Out. Stories, Tales and Testimonies. Scottville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947 (2002). K. Singh: TraintoPakistan; B. Sahni: Tamas;Manto:Stories. New Delhi: Penguin. Nair, J. (2005). The Promise of The Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century.New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pani, N., Radhakrishna, S. and K. G. Bhat (eds.)(2010). Bengaluru, Bangalore, Ben- galuru: Imaginations and their times. New Delhi: Sage. Rao, M. (ed.)(2002). The Asia Pacic Internet Handbook. Episode IV: Emerging Power- houses. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill. Rosenberg, D. (2002). Cloning Silicon Valley. The next generation high-tech hotspots. London: Reuters.

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Singhal, A . . . and E. M. Rogers (2001). India’s Communication Revolution. From bul- lock carts to cybermarts. New Delhi: Sage. von Tunzelmann, A. (2007). Indian Summer: The secret history of the end of an empire. London: Simon & Schuster.

– 144 – XII

MEMORY,MANDELA AND THE POLITICS OF DEATH

Sarah NUTTALL

The question of memory on trial is the question of how, if and when we remember: the question, that is, of negotiating the past, making memory, and hence the practice of forgetting. It is a question I want to take up in relation to what it means to remember Mandela and how we might commemorate both his life, and his recent death. I will suggest in what follows that an understanding of the politics of death (and of freedom), especially in black political life and philosophical writing, is central to the work of remembering, and the work we can do in the spirit of both the pre-mortem and post-mortem for a life. The question of memory, media, citizenship and change, which this volume establishes and examines, is, in part, a question about how we read – and for what: the question, that is, of how we read a life, its surfaces and underneath, its affective dimensions and its public invoca- tions. How do we read what was a ‘slow death’ – in relation to Mandela’s own thinking about death and dying? This essay was rst written when Mandela was still alive, in a state of ‘pre-mortem’, and part of my considerations then were how we were to ‘leave him alone’ (as his family wanted) and at the same time navigate a world death, a death of a world? What happened, too, to the sign of ‘Africa’ in the narrative of his (slow) death? The tension between provincializing Mandela and writing his life in relation to the lives of others such as Gandhi and King, is something I will examine too. Of interest, as well, is how we might widen our enquiry in terms of our political understanding of the institution of the trial in the broadest sense. Here we might think about Mandela as courtroom gure and the courtroom as a particular public space – and what is concealed in the invocation of the discourse of justice; as well as the performative nature of the large-scale political trial. I will take the trial literally, in the rst instance, in the discussion that follows, invoking the Rivonia Trial of 1964, when Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. Scholars of the political ‘show trial’ like Barbara Harlow (1993) and Awol Allo (2010) have

– 145 – Sarah NUTTALL shown these to be state-sanctioned exercises in adversarial struggle, social dramas with their own institutionally regulated rituals in which the versatility of language plays a crucial part. There is the transformative capacity of a trial – which is often foundational in terms of historical or transitional justice, and can even symbolically signal the end of a regime. The possibility of political martyrdom and Hannah Arendt’s view that it is the absence of the risk of acquittal that provides the classic show trial’s architecture. Speaking from the dock occurs in the radical interval just after conviction and immediately prior to being sentenced. Dialogue, dramatic soliloquy and legal utterance come together as a weapon. Mandela, as Falk points out so well, was a lawyer speaking against the law: the law, his argument was, was itself immoral, unjust and intolerable. The injustices sanctioned within the premises of the courtroom itself he compared to those practiced outside the courtroom in the country at large, against black people in South Africa. It was the law itself that had outlawed him. To put memory on trial, then, is to marshal all the metaphors of an actual trial space, and to recall the on-going signicance of the show trail in the twenty-rst century, as a hyper visible grammar of the memory-making project. Taking all of these arguments closely into account, my own contribution to the debate today is going to take off in a related, but different, set of directions. I have been working for some time now on a project I have called ‘Mandela’s Mortality’. Some of this work I have done with Achille Mbembe. The project has grown since then, has intersected increasingly with some of my more literary theoretical interests, and has been shaped and tested by Mandela’s subsequent death. In what follows, I will pursue a set of arguments which intersect with, wash over, return symbolically or by implication to, and take as broadly as possible, both the trial at the centre of Mandela’s political life, and the notion of a somewhat more personal trial that he has had to contend with during his long political struggle for freedom. I will move into more affective domains than those that usually enter into the literature of the law. The Rivonia trial was, amongst many other things, Mandela’s closest encounter with the prospect of his own death. Put on trial with his comrades in October 1964 for sabotage, the possibility of being sentenced to death was real. “The critical phase lasted a few hours only, and I was a worried and exhausted man as I went to bed the day I heard of the Rivonia swoop. But when I got up in the morning the worst was over and I had somehow mustered enough strength and courage even to rationalize that if there was nothing else I could do to further the cause we all so passionately cherished, even the dreadful outcome that threat- ened us might serve a useful purpose on wider issues”. (Long Walk To Freedom: 124) This belief, Mandela continues, served to “feed and replenish my slender resources of fortitude until the last day of the proceedings”. It was reinforced by the conviction that their cause was just and by the wide support they received from

– 146 – Memory, Mandela and the Politics of Death

“bodies and individuals from both sides of the Colour line”. But, he admits, “all the ourish of trumpets and the hosannas sung by us as well as our well-wishers in the course of the trial would have been valueless if courage had deserted us when the decisive moment struck” (Ibid.)1 “On our way home we stopped at the jail to talk to the accused. They were calm, living now in the shadow of death. The strain and tension was becoming almost unbearable, yet the only matter they wanted to discuss was how they should behave in court if the death sentence was passed”, writes Joel Joffe in his book The State vs Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa (2007: 246). Informed that the judge would ask him whether he had any reason to advance why the death sentence should not be passed, Mandela responded that he was “prepared to die for his beliefs, and knew that his death would be an inspiration to his people in their struggle”. There is “no easy walk to freedom. We have to pass through the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountain tops of our desires”, he concluded (Ibid.). This was quite different, he acknowledges, from being in his cell alone and trying to confront the fact that he was likely “to not live”. In a letter to Sefton Vutela (28 July 1969), he was more explicit about his will to live: “I must however, confess that for my own part the threat of death evoked no desire in me to play theroleofmartyr.IwasreadytodosoifIhadto.Buttheanxietytolivealways lingered. But familiarity does breed contempt even for the hideous hand of death” (Conversations with Myself: 123-124). During the course of his life, Mandela confronted and contemplated his own death. I would like to spend some time tracking and remarking upon his attitudes to death in the course of his life – both to the deaths of others and to his own death.

MANDELA ON DEATH

In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom but particularly in the recently published book Conversations With Myself (a selection of diary entries, excerpts from letters, private ‘to do’ lists and other textual snippets), Nelson Mandela reveals unexpected facets of himself.2 We are faced with a man acutely aware of his own

1 According to Mandela, on the morning before the judge delivered his sentence, he seemed nervous and they said to each other: “Well, it’s very clear, he’s going to pass the death sentence” (CWM: 124). They expected the death sentence and they had resigned themselves to it. Mandela calls it “a very serious experience” (Ibid.: 125), the feeling that somebody is going to turn to you and tell you now that “This is the end of your life”. 2 The section and the following section called ‘The Cell as a Shroud’ are drawn in part on a longer essay entitled ‘Mandela’s Mortality’.

– 147 – Sarah NUTTALL

Nelson Mandela, 2011. Photo by Tyrone Arthur vulnerability; at times at war with himself and with his passions; whose loyal- ties are divided between his family and “the family of the people” (LWF: 215); whose encounter with his own destiny, although irreversible, happens in stages, almost by accident. He emerges as a man who has suffered in his own body and in his psyche – a lengthy prison sentence, hard labour, tasteless meals, grim and tedious boredom, “the frightful frustrations of a life in which human beings move in complete circles”, landing today exactly at the point where they “started the day before” (CWM: 172). He has known pain and devastation – countless indigni- ties, severe and irrecoverable losses; dramatic separations and invisible wounds; grief, helplessness and mourning, the kinds of experiences that “eat too deeply into one’s being, into one’s soul” (Ibid.). Throughout his active life, Mandela consciously drew a veil over his wounds and misfortunes. He turned his pain into a private secret he was loath to exhibit in public. While he offered his outer self to the political sphere of men, he shared his inner self with privileged women friends3. “The truth”, he wrote to his daughter Zinzi Mandela in 1970, is that “my appearance had nothing to do whatsoever with the state of my feelings” (CWM: 189). In his later accounts of life underground, moments of separation foreground selfhood/personhood as a double. The inner self is released from the shackles of the outer self, and both are kept at a relative

3 “. . . With women I found I could let my hair down and confess to weaknesses and fears I would never reveal to another man” (LWF: 32). Most of his prison letters were addressed to women friends.

– 148 – Memory, Mandela and the Politics of Death distance from each other.4 For transguration or sublimation to occur, the inner world of the person must cease to mirror the outer world of the individual or the public gure. The release of the psyche and its disconnection from the soma allows for the sublimation of pain and the transguration of the self to take place while silence in the face of death becomes the privileged form of language and speech. The place where this process of transguration occurs most profoundly is, as I show below, the prison cell itself. One of the most dramatic moments in Mandela’s prison years was the death of his son Thembi, in July 1969 at 23, in a car accident. “The news was broken to me about 2.30 pm. Suddenly my heart seemed to have stopped beating and the warm blood that had freely own in my veins for the last 51 years froze into ice. For some time I could neither think nor talk and my strength appeared to be draining out. Eventually, I found my way back to my cell with a heavy load on my shoulders and the last place where a man stricken with sorrow should be. As usual my friends here were kind and helpful and they did what they could to keep me in good spirits” (173). “I do not have words to express the sorrow, or the loss I felt. It left a hole in my heart that can never be lled. I returned to my cell and lay on my bed. I do not know how long I stayed there, but I did not emerge for dinner. Some of the men looked in, but I said nothing. Finally, Walter [Sisulu] came to me and knelt beside my bed, and I handed him the telegram. He said nothing, but only held my hand. I do not know how long he remained with me. There is nothing that one man can say to another at such a time” (432). In later years, after his release, it is the deaths of Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu that Mandela is least able to handle in terms of defying the public expression of his pain. Walter Sisulu’s death, by contrast, left him “almost prostrate with grief” (345).5 What we observe in these descriptions is Mandela’s dramatic expression of emotion, the quasi-physiological and somatic effects of the tragedy upon him; and the nature of his response (withdrawal to his cell) in a context of extreme powerlessness in which he can strictly do nothing.

4 Mac Maharaj, Mandela’s fellow political prisoner on Robben Island, remarked: “As he has been living through prison, his anger and hatred of the system has been increasing, but the manifestations of that anger have become less visible” (CWM: 192). 5 When opponents and enemies of Mandela died, he took care not to rejoice in their death. About the death of Verwoerd, he said: “We would prefer that the community should convey its disap- proval of his policies without using methods like assassination. . . Verwoerd was one of the most insensitive of prime ministers in this country. . . who regarded Africans as animals, worse than animals in many cases. Nevertheless, one didn’t feel happy that he was assassinated” (CWM, 142-143).

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THE CELL AS A SHROUD

Mandela’s cell on Robben Island might not have presented the strict appearance of a grave. Measuring eight foot by eight foot (or three paces in length), its features were a mixture of a cofn and a catacomb. It was the actual instantiation of the harshness and grimness that surrounded him for decades. Whenever death struck, as we have seen, it is to his cell that he withdrew, or disappeared into. A physical space of connement and solitude, the cell became a shroud, a space of mourning and confrontation with oneself and with the memory of the dead. The practice of disappearing dated from the time he went underground. For years before his nal arrest for treason and sentencing, Mandela lived in a twilight world tipping this way and that between the worlds of living and dead, day and night, visible and invisible, presence and absence. He surfaced in the midst of an increasingly hazardous life, only to disappear again. Living underground, he has remarked, “requires a seismic psychological shift. . . Nothing is innocent. Every- thing is questioned. You cannot be yourself; you must fully inhabit whatever role you have assumed”. He continued that “in some ways, this was not much of an adaptation for a black man in South Africa. Under apartheid, a black man lived a shadowy life between legality and illegality, between openness and concealment. To be a black man in South Africa meant not to trust anything, which was not unlike living underground for one’s entire life” (LWF: 234). “I became a creature of the night. I would keep to my hideout during the day, and emerge to do my work when it became dark” (Ibid.: 255). “The key to being underground is being invisible”, he comments in his autobiography. “I like to see the coming of dawn, the change between day and night” (Ibid.: 149). The transition from life underground to life in a cell was marked by the degrading ritual of thawuza.6 Rituals of nakedness were complemented by isolation, usually associated with deprivation of meals, except rice water. Of his rst experience of isolation, Mandela remarks: “I found solitary connement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There was no end and no beginning: there is only one’s own mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything”(LWF: 401-2).7 Or: “I had nothing

6 According to Mandela, the practice of thawuza consisted in requiring of African prisoners to strip naked and display their “anus to inspection by an ofcial” in the presence of other prisoners, and the equally obscene practice of “a warder poking a nger into a prisoners’ rectum”. He denes it as a form of cruelty based on the “hatred, contempt and persecution of the Black man, especially the African, a hatred and contempt which forms the basic principle of the country’s laws”. See CWM:, 202. 7 “Watches and timepieces of any kind were barred on Robben Island, so we never knew precisely what time it was. We were dependent on bells and warders whistles and shouts. With each week resembling the one before, one must make an effort to recall what day and month it is. One of the rst things I did was to make a calendar on the wall of my cell. Losing a sense of time is an

– 150 – Memory, Mandela and the Politics of Death to read, nothing to write on or with, no one to talk to. The mind begins to turn in on itself, and one desperately wants something outside oneself on which to x one’s attention. . . After a time in solitary, I relished the company even of the in- sects in my cell and found myself on the verge of initiating conversations with a cockroach” (Ibid.: 321-2). But it was the regime of hard labour that nally put a ghostly stamp on Man- dela’s prison experience. For decades he worked at the quarry, with the heat and the sun’s rays reecting off the lime into his eyes. The glare hurt his eyes, which streamed while his face became xed in a permanent squint and the dust swirled all over him. “By the end of the day, our faces and bodies were caked with white dust. We looked like pale ghosts except where rivulets of sweat had washed away the lime. When we returned to our cells, we would scrub ourselves in the cold water, which never seemed to rinse away the dust completely” (Ibid.: 392). Signicantly during the Robben Island years are Mandela’s dreams, almost always ghostly narratives, usually about arriving at his house in Orlando and nding no one at home. These are preceded by an actual event involving Evelyn, his rst wife. After his arrest and imprisonment for two weeks in 1956, he records, he receives one visit from Evelyn. “But when I left on bail, I found that she had moved out and taken the children. I returned to an empty, silent house. She had even removed the curtains, and for some reason, I found this small detail shatter- ing” (Ibid.: 193). Mandela wrote to Winnie: “Sometimes I feel like one who is on the sidelines. . . who has missed life itself”. The prison cell in these accounts appears, then, as a space of isolation and loneliness, capable of jeopardizing Mandela’s personhood. But it is also a place of ascetic detachment and mourning. It operates as a shroud over his prisoner’s existence. Yet as we will see it also allows Mandela to perform a practice of regeneration. In prison he struggled the most in relation to how to let go of attachment; it is here that he felt the loss of beloved objects as losses of his own self. The objective wretched conditions of prison separated his ego from his body and the limits placed upon it and its movements, separating selfhood from the most brutal aspects of pain, the threat of complete objectication.8 He created a division in his self between psyche and soma in order to attain a certain state of detachment.9 An example of this removal is his sexual life, his celibacy, of which he speaks very little.10 He held onto the assurance that joy was possible when almost everything

easy way to lose one’s grip and even one’s sanity” (LWF: 365). 8 See here his remarks about the brutality of warders: in Conversations with Myself he writes, for example, ‘the average warder is a brutal man” (253). 9 Interestingly, after about 1980, he starts referring to himself in his diary as ‘Nelson Mandela’ instead of “me”. Sometimes he is copying out press clippings, but at other times, he refers to himself in the third person as a matter of course when noting political developments that invoke or name him. 10 When Richard Stengel, his collaborator on Long Walk To Freedom, asks him how he dealt with

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(except the right to be human and free) had been given up. In prison he encountered the reality of afiction and the void, but he was able to build a bridge back to the world left behind. This bridge was built with trusted others, especially, as we saw above, women. In his letters, he deliberately tried to remain in contact with a universe wider than his prison cell.

THE POLITICS OF DEATH

In thinking about Mandela’s slow death, we were thinking about an absence- presence, about a person who was there before us but who is/was no longer the same person who was fully alive. Thinking from that time and now into the present, one is thinking too about the politics of death in the history of black thought. Often invoked in this history is the wish to nd the capacity to die content. Martin Luther King wanted to die at home in his bed. He, like Mahatma Gandhi, was unable to do this: both men were assassinated. Both were deprived of what one might somewhat perversely call a happy death. For others who fought against colonialism, the connection between the politics of death and the politics of possibility has been a deep one: freedom has been so closely linked to death. We could consider in this context the meaning of Mandela’s longevity – his ‘refusal to die’ (or his ‘being kept alive’) – and what this offered us. In this history of anti- colonialism, being free at death has been imbued with political militancy – the need, that is, to establish with death a relation of sovereign equals. In the narrative of Mandela’s death, we have seen a long transguration of the self – political conversion, detachment as a force for freedom, attachment only to the essential, to life and freedom. We have seen, too, particularly at the moment of his trial for treason, his capacity to become one with history – to say, as a form of public gift, ‘it is not me, it is you’ (that I am ghting for). His refusal to separate one from the other, even in going slowly to his death, is imbued with signicance. His death, his life implies, depends not only on him but on the living, for its meaning. So it is that the question of Mandela’s death, and of the memory of Mandela in the context of his death, is a deeply meaningful question. Death, in the narrative of Mandela’s life, is something that is not given but must be achieved, a task to be taken up actively. But this, too, carries its own shadow, its own subterranean shadow-question: how

the idea that ‘you might never make love to a woman again; that your sexuality would just atrophy, he answers: “Oh well one gets used to that, and it’s not that [hard] to control yourself; I mean I was brought up in high schools, boarding schools, where you were without women for almost six months, and you exercised discipline of yourself. And then when I went to prison, I resigned myself to the fact that I had no opportunity for sexual expression and I could deal with that” (CWM: 175).

– 152 – Memory, Mandela and the Politics of Death far can I/we really go into death in control of our own freedom? Isn’t it still that deathiscomingtomeetus?

Mandea mourning for his great-granddaughter Zenani, 2010. Photo by Siphiwe Sibeko, AFP

FILTHY LUCRE/MEMORY AND MONEY

Since his release from prison in particular, various attempts have been made to turn Mandela into a commodity and to use his appeal as a source of revenue. The recent inscription of Mandela’s face on the national currency turns Mandela into a scal thing, a sign of the South African common. Thus he becomes the common property of all – imprinted on banknotes exchanged daily across the country. The idea behind this seems to be the conversion of a moral debt into a monetary asset. Notably, of course, one of Mandela’s biggest preoccupations was always his inability to properly take care of his immediate and wider family. He recognized his debt to his family, but he never formulated this debt in monetary terms.11 Many of the attempts to turn Mandela’s death and funeral into nancial gain were a de- ployment of two sets of symbolic capital: the Mandela lineage and the politics of chieftancy. To the already complex politics of lineage and inheritance is added

11 “One of my greatest regrets is to be unable to protect her. . . I never succeeded in providing for her and the children. . . Never shall I regret the decision I made in 61, but I wish one day my conscience would sit easy in my bosom” (CWM: 186).

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Mandela’s complex history of family-making: married three times and divorced twice, he has countless children and grandchildren, many of whom claim a part of his aura and inheritance.12 Mandela’s politics was long built on a particular relationship memory, to money and to regeneration. In the late 70s, the balance in Mandela’s account was R41-44 (about 3 Euros); in September 1984 it was R560. On one visit, Winnie Mandela brought him silk pyjamas. He refused to take them, saying: “this outt is not for this place”. He tells a story in Conversations with Myself about how he was offered $750,000 from Time magazine for his photograph, when he was in Victor Verster prison, months before his release. He was, he writes, deeply tempted to take the money, and how hard it was to resist: “You know, to be poor is a terrible thing. You are tempted by many things. You have to get rid of the habit of going to report to your fellows when you have been offered something”. (CWM: 261) Monetary claims by his family members have had the effect of attempting to provincialize Mandela as a gure, to conne him to the claims of family, and to a local South African story. What is important then, and where his memory is ‘placed on trial’, is to write anew Mandela’s story into the global history within which it so obviously belongs. In the last section here before the conclusion, I make some very brief remarks about Mandela and Gandhi, as a way of signalling the kind of work that now needs to be done.

MANDELA AND GANDHI

Mandela and Gandhi reveal similarities and differences that scholars have barely begun to unravel. Particularly instructive is to compare Mandela’s Conversations with Myself with Gandhi’s autobiography, My Experiments with Truth. I begin here with some initial observations. Whereas Gandhi’s book is imbued with notions of confession, repentance and original sin, Mandela’s thought does not become animated through a notion of sin. In the traditional African worlds that formed a part of his early experience and thought, moral wrong was not expressed in terms of sin but rather in the humanist language of an injury to one is an injury to all. Moral wrong, in this tradition, is the rupturing of social relations. Gandhi’s notion of sin and selfhood is drawn from a complex mix of Christian asceticism and Hindu traditions, relating to a notion of cleansing, and of emptying out the self.

12 Family interventions for nancial gain include attempts by his grandson, Mandla, to relocate the funeral to Mvezo, the area of which Mandla is chief, in order to attract infrastructure and tourism to the area, and the launching of a TV show called Being Mandela by two of his granddaughters. The show follows the lives of “two mothers as they carry on the family legacy while juggling motherhood in Johannesburg”.

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Both men share, however, a concern about neglect: neglect of others, especially those in their families, in the name of a liberatory politics. And while both share a notion of simple living, of a life with little money, Gandhi pushes this much further than Mandela: Mandela, we feel, reading his book, is not in principle opposed to the idea of the good life. The simplicity of his life in prison is imposed upon him and he makes something of it. And, while Mandela, as we have seen, keeps the inside and outside, surface and underneath, of his self increasingly separate, Gandhi seeks passionately for a way to harmonize the two facets of self, interior and exterior, private and public. While Gandhi actively seeks joy as a philosophical attitude, Mandela seldom speaks of joy, though we see in him, in his laughter and in his engagement with others, a sense of joy. While Gandhi considers silence a part of his spiritual discipline, Mandela too talks of the silence of the heart, or of silence in the face of death. Finally, both men train for and practice law – and both make the political move of putting on trial and unjust system. Both, nally, take seriously, and try to get inside of, the points of view of their opponents, and become interested in political compromise and negotiation. Though Mandela read Gandhi’s writing, he confesses in Conversations With Myself that it was Nehru who was really his ‘hero’. This may well be because of Nehru’s determinedly secular and statist form of nationalism. Yet, there is much in Gandhi’s life and politics that we can put ‘in conversation’ with Mandela’s. Even as we take seriously Mandela’s liation for Nehru, we can see ways in which, unforeseen by Mandela himself, Gandhi’s notion of a non-liberal politics of the neighbour and the examined inner self at the heart of a politics of the poor extended and elaborated on Mandela’s own transgurations of self during the impo- sition of his long prison sentence.

CONCLUSION:DREAMWORLDS

Susan Buck-Morss, in Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000), suggests that the dream of the twentieth century, its collective political desire, was for a social world in alliance with personal happiness. She borrows the notion of a dreamworld from Walter Benjamin, who used it not only as a poetic description of a mental state but as an analytical concept, one that was central to his theory of modernity as the re-enchantment of the world. The dreamworlds of modernity – political, cultural, economic – are, for both thinkers, expressions of a utopian desire for social arrangements that transcend existing forms. For some, that dream is being left behind as consumerism appears to become what Buck-Morss terms ‘the rst global ideological form’. Commodities, she suggests, have not ceased to crowd people’s private dreamworlds; they still have a utopian function on a personal level. But the

– 155 – Sarah NUTTALL abandonment of the larger social project connects this personal utopianism with political cynicism, because it is no longer thought necessary to guarantee to the collective that which is pursued by the individual. Mass utopia, once considered the logical correlate of personal utopia, is now ‘a rusty idea’. The work of so many critical theorists working at present is, it seems, an attempt to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. That passing, it is suggested, marks the true ending of the Cold War. The closing of the Cold War, on this reading, is signicant not so much for its political effects as for marking the end of the twentieth century. Mandela stands then for the twentieth century in some of its deepest dream- scapes. His death signals the moment of its passing, pressing against it, on it. South Africa, too, is a conundrum, a volatile mix of all the currents of the twentieth century, and of its passing.

REFERENCES

Allo, A. (2010). “The ‘Show’, in The Show Trails: Contextualizing the Politicization of the Courtroom”, Barry Law Review, vol 15, no 1 Buck-Morss, S. (2000). Dreamworlds and Catastrophe. Cambridge M.A: MIT Press Harlow, B. (1993). “Speaking From the Dock”. Callaloo 16.3.: 874-890 Mandela, N . . . (1995). Long Walk to Freedom. Boston: Bay Bay Books Mandela, N. (2010). Conversations with Myself. London: Macmillan

Joffe, J(2007). The State versus Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa. Oxford: One World Gandhi, M. K. (2007 [1982]) The Story of My Experiments With Truth: An Autobiography. Translated by Mahadev Desai. London: Penguin Books (First published in Gujarati in two volumes in 1927 and 1929) Nuttall, S. and A. Mbembe (2014). “Mandela’s Mortality”, in Barnard, R. (ed.) The Cam- bridge Companion to Nelson Mandela. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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SPACE ODDITIES.MUSIC AND THE MAKING OF LIVING ARCHIVES

Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON

”No place is a place until the things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments” – Wallace Stegner1

INTRODUCTION –THE PEOPLE’S PARK IN POPULAR SONGS

The chapter explores a recent attempt to archive and make publicly visible, on the Internet and in the city as well as through contemporary recording, a productive historical era of popular folk song writing in the city of Malmö. The archive is also discussed in relation to how globally dispersed recordings are unpredictably reactualized and recontexualized, as is the case with the music of Rodriguez and Dengue Fever. Project Malmövisan (Project Malmö Folk Song)2The People’s Park, is used throughout the article – and so is Project Malmö Folk Song, our translation of Project Malmövisan., initiated by the cultural association/society Gyssla (Cul- tural Society/Association)3 , has over the last decade compiled over 500 historical

1 Wallace Stegner in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 1992/2002: 202 (Ran- dom House, New York.) 2 Our English translation of Folkets Park (The People’s Park, Malmö), 3 This chapter grew out of the research project Living Archives at Malmö University, a project funded by the Swedish Board of Science for a four-year period 2013-2017 and with participation by a range of researchers (including the authors). An earlier version of the chapter was presented at the Orecomm Festival, September 2013.

– 157 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON folk songs, penned and performed in and around the city of Malmö. The activists, counting several musicians, have so far mainly concentrated on a productive era around 1880 to 1930 and gathered song lyrics with information and search options in one online archive from many scattered private, as well as some public, collections. Performances of the songs as well as city walks and a recording of a CD with new interpretations have also taken place in the city in recent years. The chapter concentrates on a dozen of songs from the archive and their portrayal of one of the oldest public parks in the world, Folkets Park (The People’s Park) in Malmö. It questions how the park is represented as a place for different forms of public memory and citizen-activity, socially and politically. The chapter also engages with Project Malmö Folk Song and its various means of preserving and revitalizing a musical heritage as a ‘living archive’. Several of the Malmö songs attempt either to construct the park as space for cherishing a particular local, political and class heritage, while others construct dream space or imaginations that go far beyond the city, nation or continent. In- spired by these threads of meaning, the chapter at its end gathers examples of other traditions of songs and their rebirth, reconguration or second life amongst new fans or performers sometimes far from the countries or continents of their origin.

ARCHIVES,MAGISTRATES AND WALLS

The introduction mentions the notion of the ‘archive’ and pairs it with ‘living’ to make us contemplate the two terms, not necessarily as oxymorons, but as possibly uncomfortable sisters, that may hopefully have become less so in a time where the archivist, archiving and archives have received renewed interest. We experience, in Derrida’s words, a certain archive fever (Derrida, 1995). Cultural institutions across Europe are faced with the question of how to make their archives public. Initiatives as Europeana believe that making these archives available online will make them more public and democratic. Google has established collaborations with a range of international museums – through their platform Art Project to make galleries available online via high-resolution images. The wall of the museums has thus expanded. It is therefore not surprising that a renewed interest has arisen in Malraux’ problematic notion of the musée imaginaire (museum without walls) (1947) where disparate items can reside side-by-side, forming arbitrary collages. The aspiration to create non-institutional archives that goes against ofcial remembering, or adds new and different stories to an existing picture, has a long- standing history. During the last decades, the debate around monuments and the

– 158 – Space Oddities. Music and the Making of Living Archives creation of process-oriented memorials as well as anti-monuments is one expression of a critical engagement with xed, shared and ofcial memory practices (see e.g. Björgvinsson and Høg Hansen, 2012). Such critical approaches have emphasized the need for more temporary approaches to memory and archiving and a cultural engagement that opens up for critical and creative practices around memory and the present. With the advent of the Internet and practices of downloading and upload- ing, copying and pasting, and remixing, Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) argues that all of us have become archivists and interested in practices of archiving. Archiv- ing practices today face some fundamental questions: does the traditional distinction between citizen and magistrate/archivist/archon hold true? (a professional archon selecting and organizing archival content for the arkheion, the place of the archive, Derrida, 1995) If distinctions are blurred, can new publics be reached – and collaborated with – when driven by an activist-archivist? What forms of new, and possibly collaborative, archiving practice can emerge? In relation to the case study of folk songs relating to The People’s Park, it is also of relevance to ask, how or to what extent does Project Malmö Folk Song bring alive a musical heritage? Project Malmö Folk Song is so far particularly concerned with the lyrics and music of historical folksongs from the period 1890 to 1930. A heritage of songs about places and people in Malmö – often penned and put into music by Malmö people, as noted. Interestingly, though, a range of additional activities taking the archive to the street or converging content to other media takes place: such as city walks, concerts and recordings. An early thought when preparing this chapter was that Project Malmö Folk Song activities may become reservoirs of stories portraying people, events and spaces in Malmö, linking past with present. The lyrics archive may unfold a spatial labyrinth or underground of quirky Malmö tales. Research by a few eager society members since 2006 has resulted in about 500 songs (from the turn of the 19-20th century and the rst decades) on the project’s website. In this chapter, we concentrate on selected song lyric representations of one of the oldest public park in the world, in Malmö, The People’s Park, and its relation to its means of narrating public space mirroring real and living social memories, but also collective memory. Social memory may be understood as a shared social experience held by a group, family or local community, while collective memories that may be recalled in roughly similar ways in a population, i.e. distributed over a larger group where individuals do not know each other (see e.g. Phillips, 2004: 1-12 and Casey, 2004: 14-42 for an elaboration of terms).

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SONGLINES

The Project Malmövisan archive places the public at least in the possible role of the archon,orarchons (as in the Greek City state, Derrida, 1995: 9), i.e. the magistrates that contribute with archiving to the house/arkheion. On the Malmövisan site, the public is invited to add song lyrics to the collection. Then, there are questions of localization or walls of the archive – apropos Malraux ‘museum without walls’. The traditional Greek arkheion needed a place, i.e. domiciliation and guardians (1995: 10). The new archons are interpreters of the arkheion, those that gather together or consigns. The question of power and walls remains. An initial song lyric4 appears as it is, often in original print and scanned for the Project Malmö Folk Song site. But then if you are interested in the possible appropriation or ‘liveliness’ of the archive material, what options are there? Added photos, stories, mash up, sound, re-interpretations? We return to this after some general reections on folk songs and folk music in historical Malmö. Folk songs can be viewed as actualized through performance or the printing of the lyric or recording of the song that people can sing or re-play. A singer may apply for copyright on a lyric often based on a well-known and simple melody to which young and old folks would recognize and sing (Cultural Society Gyssla, 2012). These may be named ‘traditionals’. In any case, the former traditional song was already ‘distributed’ or was an appropriation of former pieces. Today, the society organizes walks and other activities where songs come into play with urban wanderers, including one record where famous Swedish singers interpreted the old songs. Many live performances and audio recordings are available on YouTube. The dispersal and appropriation of cultural expressions have often fallen under various restrictions and centralized instances of control. In the case of Malmö folk songs, ‘the wandering’ was to some extent controlled territorially since singers had to stick to particular places/territories when performing (Lindkvist, conversation, 2012). Furthermore, singers’ lyrics were, in many cases, copyrighted. The copyrighted text became a representation that aimed to freeze an otherwise mobile cultural history for a specicarkheion and interpreter/magistrates. The website has only limited means of interaction; visitors can inform/mail the society about a song they know and suggest its inclusion in the archive. This may leave the initiative with limited means of interaction and horizontal engagement with the archive. In this sense, the archive as it is today can be viewed as a rather traditional repository where the archivist, the cultural society people collecting and arranging, appears as a neutral custodian of truth (Cook, 1995: 176), i.e. archivists exterior to the material (Derrida, 1995: 12).

4 Derrida notes that archival practices have an obsession with beginnings, apropos his application of the notion of commencement (1995:9).

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The Malmövisan website, however, contains a range of brief texts of interpretation of context such as a historical introduction to Malmö at the turn of the century, presentation of some key writers/composers, various examples of the role of particular locations (e.g. People’s Park), various cafes and related cultural forms. The contextual presentation of stories of Malmö folk songs/“Malmövisorna berät- tar” in the period 1890 to 1930 is done in ve brief theme introductions: work, misery, news, fun and love5. As noted, to limit the scope of the chapter and concentrate on a particular space of collective and social signicance in Malmö’s cultural and political history, we focus on music lyrics relating to Folkets Park. A search on ‘Folkets Park’ in the folk song archive unveiled thirteen lyrics when the rst draft presentation was done in September 2013 (and it was seventeen in April 2014). The archive is slowly growing. When reading the People’s Park related lyrics, it is interesting to see which themes and forms of activity are engaged with in the texts. What was the identity of The People’s Park, according to these songs? It turns out that in the majority of lyrics, People’s Park is portrayed as a place of escape, leisure, joy, music, sun and bird song. Bodies are in motion, driven by their senses and lured by the leisure potentials and temptations of the park. Two of the lyrics, though, stand out, offering a stronger public and educational message in engaging with the Axel Danielsson monument in the park – Danielsson was a key working class activist and writer. One lyric is specically about Danielsson and the inauguration of the monument for the public in 1900. The other is dated 1901.

THE PEOPLE’S PARK AS A PLACE FOR POLITICAL COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The cultural material of Malmövisan engages with manifestations of what we could call ‘living memory’, which may (suggestively) also be termed public memory, and can be broken down into three different, but often overlapping, forms (inspired by Edward Casey, 2004), which are individual, social and collective memory6. This is just one way of organizing some of the many related terms in

5 The original Swedish language categories: arbetarna, eländet, nyheterna, nöjena, kärleken. 6 Moving beyond the rst and fundamental form of individual memory, social memory is held by a group afliated as family, in a neighborhood, community or common project, while the third and broadest form, collective memory, involves communities where people do not necessarily know each other, i.e. distributed over a population. Collective memory relies on roughly similar recalling or retelling of an event. The term can be critiqued as belonging to the era of mass communication and clear producer-receiver distinctions (see e.g. Hoskins in Neiger et al., 2004) However, Collective as well associal memories naturally rely on each individual’s idiosyncratic manner of reminiscence and unique experience tied to memories.

– 161 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON the eld of memory studies in the social sciences and humanities. Media and cultural studies writings on memory draw to a strong extent on the work begun by Halbwachs (e.g. On Collective Memory, 1941) and on the historian Pierre Nora’s work from the 1980s and on onwards on the ‘Les Lieux de memoire/Realms of Memory’ (e.g. in Representations, 1989), which addressed the lieux or symbolic realms of memory for symbolic and collective ritualized memorialisation versus the real sites or milieux of everyday experience (1989: 1). Nora’s work also posed intriguing distinctions between memory and history, the rst understood as a living, plural and popular/public memory opposed to history writing as a xed, singular, and ofcial ‘H’istory produced by professionals/authorities. The focus on public memory, however, is derived from a ‘from the below’, citizens-created agonistic and plural engagement with a society’s memory/ofcial History, whether social or collective, returning to the former denition by Edward Casey.7 A note of interest in relation to the two projects explored here in relation to much of the dominating theories in memory studies is that oral history, according to Hamilton and Shopes (2008), has had a complicated relationship to memory studies.Oral history has (according to the authors) a tendency to focus on the concrete, individualistic, particularistic and empirical and often is not heavily theorized. Memory studies is often strongly theory informed or more abstract in its discourse and focuses on group identity and collectives. However, the editors, Hamilton and Shopes, are quick to note that the merging of the elds has been pioneered by, e.g. Raphael Samuel and Michael Frisch (2008, introduction chapter). We leave Hamilton and Shopes argument and move on to examples of representations of memory that signify particular spaces. Selected The People’s Park lyrics, as noted above, in different ways engage with not only journeys of leisure- seeking people, but also, in a few cases, with commemoration of signicant people in local political history. Firstly, Vid avtäckningen av Axel Danielssons byst i Folkets Park I Malmö 18 juli 1900 (At the inauguration of Axel Danielsson’s memorial) introduces a play with the phenomenon of the memorial that may take the form of a site for the mourning and celebration of a public gure and a particular past – for the future generations to be reminded and inspired by. Danielsson is sung to in the form of

7 Also, Jan and Aleida Assmann have produced signicant works on cultural and communicative memory (e.g. JA + AA 2010), the latter close to what we call living memory. The notion of the archive is also prominent in Aleida Assmann’s argument on cultural memory, which she divides into an active form, involving a working memory including canon, and a passive form of a storehouse archive as reference memory (A Assmann, 2010: 98-99). Aleida Assmann’s model possibly misses out on appropriation of the material?

– 162 – Space Oddities. Music and the Making of Living Archives an imperative request: step forward (“träd fram”), in new form/gestalt, you giant (“du kämpe”), who fell in the days of men (“som föll i mandoms da’r”). Further, it is indicated that Danielsson awoke the workers’ struggle and still speaks through him/her, the worker, after Danielsson’s death. The lyric calls him to appear in the clear form of the monument (“stodens ovanskliga form”) after he was taken away too early. The last version presents further metaphors on his re- appearance: your seeding will grow for coming days/ (“din sådd dock skall gro för kommande da’r”). The days now, 1900, are portrayed as rocky roads (“gungande våg”), but he is embraced with a hero’s honour, at the victorious train of socialism (“segrande tåg”). There is little about what Danielsson actually did, e.g. founding the newspaper Arbetet, but his impact is portrayed. The lyric is from a private collection and made to a known melody (Låt dina portar opp). The name/writer attached to the lyric is Henrik Menander, a poet of the day particularly engaged in and writing about worker’s issues. He was also the Copenhagen correspondent of the newspaper (Arbetet), which Danielsson had initiated. Another song related to Danielsson’s memorial, Axel Danielssons Byst Den 15 Juli 1901, has no name or writer attached to the lyric as it appears in the Gyssla archive. This one comes from the Workers’ Movement Archive. Below, the italicized words are translated:8

“Jag stod I Folkets park betagen (in awe) I julisolens milda sken Och skåda de kände dragen” (known features)

Jumping to the 6th line, it says:

“Det var en bild af konstnärn gjuten (cast, frozen) Uppställd på sockeln af granit (stone) Och folket bjudits på invit (invite) I korta sommardags minuten” (minute)

The intriguing italicized words capture what an establisher of the memorial may want to achieve with the audience. The audience is to be captured mentally, caught in awe (“betagen”), at least, for a little while, as any visit is eeting and temporal (“sommardagsminuten”). The eeting moment works as a replacement and a reminder of the known features (kände dragen + gjuten) now elevated and exhibited (“uppstäld”) in a lasting form (“granit”). It at least plays with the idea of a long lasting replacement where people form a public, gather or are invited, – invit here neatly rhymed with granit.

8 All translations of lyrics of folk songs from the Malmövisan archive in the paper are by the authors.

– 163 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON

The lyrics, thus, directly address how public memory intertwines permanent and impermanent elements. Later in the song, it is also articulated how the thoughts we get in such situations are not straightforward:

“Och underliga tankar smögo (strange thoughts wander) Uti min hjärnas labyrinth (in the labyrinth of my brain) Till tid svunna hän de ögo” (to times past they ew)

And memories are not only eeting, the lyrics seem to suggest, but also unruly, as they drift in time and space. The issue of memory is also brought up, literally: ‘you were reminded’ (“man blef påmint’”) and also the publicness of his deeds and the rights he taught that man should be able to take:

“Han slungade sitt fria ord (he swung his free word) Om rätten till naturens bord (about the right to the table of nature) Att ut till massorna få sprida” (for the masses)

Public memories are not public, the lyrics seem to imply, if not allowed to reign under free speech and decent living conditions. Centralizing and controlling public memories would thus go against the fundamental ground public memories are based upon. When searching historical sources, it becomes clear that Danielsson was seen as a sharp writer with literary skills and that he wrote for what became a major newspaper. Further lines in the lyric may play with position and writing skills: ‘cast his free word’ (“slungade sitt fria ord”), ‘the right to nature’s table’ (“naturens bord”), ‘knight of the free word’ (“det fria ordets riddersman”). The lyric ends up framing the position of the memorialized gure and the on- looker, the wording/framing is classical, there is the gure ‘på piedestalen’ given soul anew: ‘Och blickar på oss alla ned’, through the future’s generals ‘Från släkte och till släkters led’. The on-looker is belittled, looking up in awe; ‘we small ones from the huts in the valley’ (“Vi små från kojorna I dalen”).

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Picture 1: The Danielsson monument on a freezing day, children skating in the background.

– 165 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON

A clear majority of the lyrics in the Gyssla archive, so far, related to The People’s Park, engages more generally with leisure and pleasure in the park. Some examples follow: In Till Folkets Park it literally is ‘’Där är det lif, Där är det lust”. The issue of belonging is phrased twice ‘our eld’ (“egen mark”), ‘It is ours’ (“den är jo vår”). ThePeople’s Park was the rst people’s park in the world open for the general public. The lyric is of a celebratory nature, as the two songs on Danielsson, but here of the park itself, our ‘escape’ (“tillykt”) as it is said ‘with tinkling music’ (“med klingande music”) and ‘bird song’ (“fågelns sang”).

THE PEOPLE’S PARK AS A PLACE FOR THE MAKING OF SOCIAL MEMORIES

Further, two different lyrics with the same title Folkets Park and another Det är just då det är våri sta’n (Right here it is Spring) engages with similar issues. Det er just då det är vår associates the park with spring – ‘Spring is a waking clock’, it begins (“väckareklocka”) – and also, in contrast with the other lyrics, introduces a range of gures/characters, not all just associated with the park itself or the time of the lyric. Hellqvist, a director of the park in the 1920s and 1930, is there, but also the roman Petronius, a rektor Ekedahl, who warmly takes care of students (“ruvar på studenter”) and many others. Various places in the park are referred to and so are the city snobs who got their hair set up. This lyric (and Kråkans morgondröm introduced below) reminds us of a kind of mid-1960s Dylanesque carousel of characters – ctional, religious and real – brought together in a montage of different times and arranged as a journey or road trip (see e.g. Wilentz, 2010, Høg Hansen, 2012). The lyric makes some kind of satirical sense of the park as a new heterogeneous gathering place for the public. One lyric, Kråkans morgondröm (The morning dream of the crow), uses the gure of the crow to elaborate on a way out in the world and back again, from the way over Öresund, down to Italy at the tower of Pisa, further to the land of Kanaan, the Pyramids of Egypt and back to the north and to Folkets Park. There is a peculiar footnote in the song greeting the crow for its impressive biblical knowledge. This lyric is a remarkable journey/road trip through history, also the longest in the thirteen-song collection on Folkets Park. It also stands out in its use of a global collective memory, marking particular achievements of humans throughout history. Another lyric also connects the Park with elsewhere in the world. The song, Bierlockout, also in the humorous mood as many others, moans about beer problems in the region, yet with a possibility of getting a drink nearby in Copenhagen, a short boat trip from Malmö (the bridge between the two cities was established

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Picture 2: The rst page of an original songlyric, Det är just då det er våri sta’n) – 167 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON ninety-one years later, in 2000). The song refers to a particular lockout in 1909. Another song engages with the process of becoming a man. You walk the park arm in arm with a girl, or the girl to be. A few other songs engage with romance and play, one with the notion of the lustful wanderer, the hussar. In most of the songs archived so far, the park is as space for an almost ritual- istic cleansing of the every day rhythm of work and other tedious matters; yet, as shown in the rst examples: it is also a place for commemorating local important people. The elevated Danielsson monument (bust, from chest and up) appears outside the action viewed a wintery afternoon. At the time of the photograph (15 Feb 2013), younger living bodies skate on a frozen lake behind the monument. Yet, he is not quite outside the action: some had appropriated the monument with the words ‘love’ in red. The lyrics can be said to, in different ways, document activities in the park, all in different ways engaging with the identity of the park, mostly as a place of leisure and imagination, but also a place for the public’s memories and mytholo- gies – those that need to be shared: as with gures of importance, like Danielsson, but also in a more satirical and playful sense where local and other people come together in the park in a lyrical ‘merry go-around’. The writers of folk lyrics become ‘the peoples’ oral historian with ‘songlines’. This notion borrowed from the Aboriginal Australian peoples name for place- related tracks and routes dreamt by ancestors and performed in painting or song (See e.g. Chatwin, 1986). In our cases in Malmo, we have the tracks, spaces and people of the city, in and out of the People’s Park and elsewhere, by its past dream- ers. The narration techniques of the lyrics mentioned can be viewed as close to convention – although the many pieces or scenes of the Kråkans morgondröm as well as Det är just då det är vår I stan may be viewed as invitations to resam- pling. Also, the gallery of characters could invite for a present-day portrayal of movement activity to and from the park.9

9 The lyrics on the People’s Park or other clusters in the archive may be material to be used for various forms of educational activity where spaces, people and events can be linked and where one piece of sought information or answered can be triggered by a new search or educational task. Such educational wheels or non-formal educational tasks form a part of the challenge for working with archives in the Living Archives project.

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ARCHON MAGISTRATES AS SOCIAL ACTIVISTS

The songs for the Malmovisan archive have primarily been collected by a key group of passionate music lovers – several of them also active folk musicians. The era covered so far may lead one to ask, how far and well this historical work will reach into contemporary scenes? The availability of the lyrics in one space/online archive adds to the writing of Malmö history – not as retrospective history, but with a plurality of artistic articulations at an early stage of the park’s and the city’s modern history. The lyrics in the archive is so far limited to songs almost beyond the memory of living generations – yet the material is ‘coming to life’ in present re-recordings and performances. Beginnings, or at least emergences, of folk song and immigration in/to Malmö is of key concern. Derrida (1995: 9) argues that archival practices are obsessed with beginnings, or commencement, a notion that can be understood as a coming into force of an original document. Then, there is the question of the archive magistrates, who select and run the archive. The folk song writers assemble impressions of The People’s Park, combining elements from Malmö events from their present time as well as historical references that are geographically dispersed. Through singing these songs, they would create a temporary public/archon. The folk song artist did not, however, aim at creating a unied archive housed under a single room/place. In this sense, the musicians draw upon existing uid and dispersed collective and social memories (returning to Edward Casey’s conceptualization), adding to a repertoire or tradition always open for reinterpretation and appropriation. Another way of talking about the question of interaction and an archive of a more horizontal nature is through the notion of reciprocal ethnography (Kerr after Lawless in Hamilton and Shopes, 2008: 235) where the subjects engage with the material with the magistrates of the archives. It is unclear whether Project Malmövisan can get a grip on contemporary cultural life, unless it develops archival practices that clearly connects to contemporary folk song and its off spring, as hip-hop or something other. The archives may, in this sense, become more of an ongoing collective discussion rather than a repository controlled by a custodian. However, the project rst and foremost makes a scattered lyrics production available – and now and then reinterprets the songs in public. That is a remarkable act of cultural work in itself. Edward Casey framed the three forms of memory individual, social and collective memory10 under the arch of public memory, where the nal term functions as an external horizon or potentiality. To address the agonistic and plural aspect of

10 The inner circles of memory, not necessarily public, are the distinguishable but, in practice, intertwined modes ofindividual and social memory, with the latter depending on rather intimate circles of co-reminiscing (a family, neighborhood). The third form, collective memory, is here understood as allowing for a co-remembering without a shared social experience of the same event.

– 169 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON collective remembrance, we may nuance Casey’s distinction (2004) with David E. Young’s notion of collected memories (2000) that may pay attention to the diversity of public memory when going beyond, or rather beneath, ofcial history or dominating narratives. With Young’s attention to the plurality of ‘gathered pieces’ (a collection), we are back to a truth construction similar to the labyrinth of stories in both projects, as well as more specically, the parade of characters in some of the People’s Park lyrics. Hopefully, the diversity will be the picture. In the cunning play with Malmö icons and public gures in the lyrics (as well as a more globally well-known cast of characters), it may be argued that a continuous translation of traditions takes place, drawing from the personal/social trajectories of memory (citizens wandering in Malmö) and merging it with broader, public and shared impressions and memories of particular places. In parts, an amateur anthropology or documents of the local adaptations of the global. The songs can also be seen as an attempt of moving storage or reference memory back to working memory (Aleida Assmann, 2010: 99), but without read- ers and users. ‘Digital dust’ (no visits, uses in public or recongurations in new songs) will ‘just’ preserve Project Malmövisan as another more or less dormant archive where a not so well known heritage is preserved. It may, in this context, be interesting to look at other examples of the revitalization of singers, songs or song traditions either through fan/listener actions or other musicians attempt to re-communicate the music, or bring it back to working memory. Allegedly, the Detroit based folk-rock singer, Sixto Rodriguez, sold about six copies of his rst album, Cold Fact, in 1970. He also recorded another little successful second album in 1971 – but later, during the 1970s while Rodriguez was largely forgotten in his home country and mainly taking other jobs, a fan-base had developed in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Pirate copies and tapes oated around. The South African case is maybe of particular interest since Ro- driguez’s songs were taken and used as representing an anti-conservative stance, promoting dreams of another and more just and free society than the Apartheid and cultural conservatism that ruled. The largely unknown Rodriguez became a signicant voice in or for some counterpublics of South Africa (the notion of counterpublics developed by Katriel, 2014, this anthology). In the late 1990s, a music journalist and a record storeowner in Cape Town tried to trace Rodriguez through references to spaces and areas in his songs. Was he dead, as it was ru- moured in the South Africa circles? No, he was alive. They found him nally and invited him to SA, where he gave a series of sold out concerts in the late 1990s and with several return visits. He has never nished his third album, which was begun in 1973, but his two rst albums are now sold in much larger numbers than 6. The story is documented in the Oscar-winning lm Searching for Sugar Man from 2012 (its soundtrack contains songs from the two albums, and the unnished third).

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Dengue Fever is the name of a tropical disease but it also became a name of an American West Coast band in 2001. Two brothers (Ethan and Zac Holtzman), one of them previously ‘smitten’ by an earlier visit to Cambodia, looked for a lead singer of Khmer origin to their band. They found Chhom Nimol, a Khmer singer, in Long Beach’s Long Phomh Penh area. Although a well-known singer in Cambodia, she had visited her sister in the US to earn money to send home. Zac had been intrigued with how Western psychedelic rock, surf and 1960s pop had blended with more traditional Cambodian and East Asian styles. The presence of Western/American solders in the late 1960s and early 1970s and foreign waves of music on their radios had inuenced the local musicians to invent what became a popular repertoire of Cambodian popular music and made Sins Sisamouth, Ros Sothea and other singers an unquestionable part of Cambodia’s musical canon. They disappeared, probably killed, it is assumed, in the Pol Pot era. Tapes remain, played and copied – and some of the old musicians remain alive. After their rst albums, Dengue Fever were able to do a tour in Cambodia, meeting old musicians and playing the old tunes and new original Dengue Fever compositions in their own fusion of styles, sung in Khmer and English. This is documented in the lm Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. Since then, the band, although hardly mainstream, has won so-called ‘world music’ nominations and awards (terrible label, yet a conventional way of compartmentalizing non-Western music) and also has become ambassadors for development work in Cambodia. A music tradition that had been stimulated by new psychedelic, surf and pop music sounds11 from the radio during the late 1960s disappeared almost during the Pol Pot era. The credit of its awakening should not be given to Dengue Fever only. However, interestingly, an American traveller who found traces of a tradition’s former glory, travelled back to the US humming, ran into a Cambodian singer there, then, began making songs (as well as recording Cambodian classics) before bringing it all back home to Cambodia again. Rodriguez and the dedicated followers and music lovers in Cape Town, as well as the genre-travelling Dengue Fever, are just two examples of unpredictable means of the globalization or cross-continental spread of limited or less known oddball public memories12 that in various ways have been given new elds to play on. Beautiful.

11 Dengue Fever has also, in addition to their primary orientation towards Khmer songs, blended in African inuences, adding to the genre a travelling and mixing approach. They have covered, e.g., Astatke’s Ethanopium. 12 Public memory is less often researched in relation to processes of globalization and the possible global character of public memory, yet Phillips (2011) and Olesen (2014), in this volume, have made attempts.

– 171 – Anders Høg HANSEN, Erling BJÖRGVINSSON

TEMPORARILY CLOSING THE ARCHIVE

An archive may become living when it, aside from stimulation by passionate magistrates thinking beyond traditional walls, nurtures an interplay between then and

now beyond the canonized memory of previous generations versus a present communicative, dialogic memory, roughly speaking (inspired by A Assmann, 2010: 99). A living archive opens a door for contemporary material in historical context, next to/in relation to the forgotten. They are potential linkages of one story to another, including continuous re-working of stories. This may be viewed as an institutive (returning to Derrida, 1995) format, a working memory, or just a real- ization that “a memory is never really nished as long as we are alive”, quoting the character, Jesse, in the movie Before Sunset, 2004.

REFERENCES

Assmann, J. (2010). “Communicative and Cultural Memory”, in Erll and Nünning (eds.) A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter Assmann, A. (2010). “The Dynamics of Cultural Memory between Remembering and Forgetting”, in Errl and Nünning Before Sunset (2004). Dir. R. Linklater. Castle Rock Entertainment Björgvinsson, E. and A. Høg Hansen (2012). “Mediating Memory: Strategies of interaction in public art and memorials”, in Journal of Arts and Communities Chatwin, B. (1986). Songlines London: Franklin Press Derrida, J. (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, in Diacritics 25/2: 9-63 Bolter, J. D. and R. Gruisin, (1999). Remediation Boston, Mass.: MIT Press Casey, E. (2004). “Public Memory in Place and Time”, in Phillips 2004 Europeana portal www.europeana.eu (accessed Sept 2013) Goldsmith, K. (2011). “Archiving is the New Folk Art”. www.poetryfoundation.org, Har- riet blog (accessed Sept 2013) Google Art Project googleartprojet.com (accessed Sept 2013) Halbwachs, M. (1992 [1941]). On Collective Memory Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hamilton, P. and L. Shopes (eds.) (2008). Oral History and Public Memories.Phil.,PA: Temple University Press Hoskins, A. (2011). “Anachronims of Media, Anachronisms of Memory”, in Neiger et al (eds.).Media Memory. London: Palgrave Høg Hansen, A. (2012). Bob Dylan 1961-1967. Kærlighed, krig og historie. Copenhagen: Frydenlund Høg Hansen, A., Hemer, O. and T. Tufte (eds.) (2014). Memory on Trial: Media, Citizen- ship and Social Justice. Münster: Lit Verlag Katriel, T. (2014). “Countermemories, counterpublics”, in Høg Hansen, Hemer and Tufte

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Kulturföreningen Gyssla, www.gyssla.se and Project Malmövisan (accessible from Gyssla website): www.malmovisan.gyssla.se (Accessed April 2014) Lindkvist, L. (2012). Conversation/meeting in Malmö, Nov 2012 (with E. Björgvinsson, A. Høg Hansen and others). Malmö City, Malmö Museums http://www.malmo.se (Accessed Sept 2013) Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media Mass., MIT Press Olesen, T. (2014). “Global Injustice Memories”, in Høg Hansen, Hemer and Tufte Philips, K. (ed.)(2004). Framing Public Memory Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press Phillips, K. and G. M. Reyes (2011). Global Memoryscapes Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press Nora, P. (1986). “Between Memory and History”, in Representation 26, Spring 1989: 7-24 Searching for Sugar Man (2012). Dir. Malik Bendjelloul. Protagonist Pictures. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong (2009). Dengue Fever CD + DVD Wilentz, S. (2010). DylaninAmericaNew York: Doubleday Young, D. E. (2002). At Memory’s Edge. New Haven: Yale University Press

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NOTES ON AUTHORS

PART I

Kendall R. Phillips, Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies and Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. His publications include the edited volume Framing Public Memory (University of Alabama Press, 2004) and the co-edited (with G. M. Reyes) volume Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (University of Alabama Press, 2012). E-mail: [email protected] Jo Tacchi is Professor at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Aus- tralia. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with a strong research record and publications in the eld of Communication for Development and Media Anthro- pology. She is currently Director of Research and Innovation and Deputy Dean at School of Media and Communication. Recent publications include Evaluat- ing communication for development: a framework for social change (2013), co- authored with June Lennie. E.mail: [email protected] Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and a prolic author in many genres. His research is focused on cultural complexity, globalization and identity politics, and he has carried out eld research in Trinidad, Mauritius, Australia and Norway. He is currently directing a research project on the three crises of globalization: economic, environmental and cultural. His books published in English include: Ethnicity and Nationalism, Small Places: Large Issues, Globalization: The Key Concepts, Engaging Anthro- pology and Tyranny of the Moment. His most recent book in Norwegian (2013) is a biography of the anthropologist, Fredrik Barth. E.mail: [email protected] Thomas Olesen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Government at Århus University, Denmark. His latest publications address injustice symbols, solidarity movements, and the Rwanda 1994 Genocide. E.mail: [email protected]

– 175 – Thomas Tufte is Professor in Communication at Roskilde University (2004-), co- founder and co-director of the bi-national research centre Ørecomm – Centre for Communication and Glocal Change. Tufte’s research covers media ethnography, health communication, media and globalization, and communication for development and social change. Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Hand- book of Development Communication and Social Change (2014) and Speaking Up and Talking Back? Media, Empowerment and Civic Engagement among East and Southern African Youth (2013). E-mail: [email protected]

PART II

Tamar Katriel is Professor of Communication and Education at the University of Haifa, Israel, working on patterns of communication and culture in Israeli society from an ethnographic perspective. She is author of Talking Straight (1986); Communal Webs (1991); Performing the Past (1997); Dialogic Moments (2004), as well as a collection in Hebrew and range of articles in journals and books. E.mail: [email protected] S. Elizabeth Bird is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of South Florida. Her research has focused on media studies, and she has published four books and over 70 articles in that area. She is currently working on issues of collective memory of a massacre of civilians during the Nigerian Civil War. She is also the editor, with Fraser Ottanelli, of the forthcoming anthology The performance of memory as transitional justice. E-mail: [email protected] Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron is a development communication specialist, lmmaker, and writer from Bolivia, with working experience in Africa, Asia, South Pacic, Latin America and The Caribbean. He is the author of various studies on lm and communication, as Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change (2001) and with Thomas Tufte Anthology: Communication for Social Change Anthology (2006). He has been the Managing Director for Programmes at the Communication for Social Change Consortium (2004-2009), and the coordinator of the Communication and Social Change thematic group at the Latin American Association for Communication Research (ALAIC), 2006 – 2012. E-mail: [email protected] Toby Butler (Dr) is Programme Leader, BA History and MA Heritage Studies at the University of East London. He has directed oral history projects in India, the USA, Wales and England and has created oral history trails for museums and local

– 176 – authorities. Toby is also an editor of the History Workshop Journal and a research associate at the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde University. E.mail: [email protected] /memoryscape.org.uk Oscar Hemer is Professor of Journalistic and Literary Creation, Head of the master programme in Communication for Development at Malmö University, and co- founder and co-director of the binational research centre Ørecomm. He holds a Dr. Philos. degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo. Recent work includes the monograph Fiction and Truth in Transition: Writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina (2012) and the novel Misiones (2014), which concludes his Argentina Trilogy. E.mail: [email protected] Ayisha Abraham lives and works in Bangalore, as an installation artist and experimental lmmaker. She works at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, as a visual arts consultant. Her work has been shown at numerous international exhibitions and festivals such as Artists Space, Tribeca, New York (1992); Japan Foundation, Tokyo (1997); Mostra Internacional de Cinema, São Paolo (2008); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2012), and many more. E-mail: [email protected] Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reections on Postapartheid, editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics and co-editor of many books including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Mem- ory in South Africa and Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Recent essays include “Private Lives and Public Cultures in South Africa” (co-authored with Kerry Bystrom) and “Mandela’s Mortality” (co-authored with Achille Mbembe). Email: [email protected] Anders Høg Hansen is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University where he is primarily involved in the MA in Communication for Development. He studied Cultural Studies in England, UK (M.A. and PhD.) and worked as a Research Associate in Museum Studies (also UK) before beginning work at Malmö. His work is broadly concerned with issues around memory, cultural heritage, and social change with work in e.g. Israel-Palestine, Germany, Scandinavia and Tanzania. At present he is active with co-author Erling Björgvinsson in the research project Living Archives. E.mail: [email protected] Erling Björgvinsson is a Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he also gained his PhD. His PhD Socio-Material Mediations was given an award as best PhD of the year at

– 177 – Malmö University in 2007. With co-author Anders Høg Hansen, Björgvinsson is a key researcher in the project Living Archives. The aim of the research is to explore, through a range of case studies, how archives for public cultural heritage can become a signicant social resource. E.mail: [email protected] / livingarchives.mah.se

– 178 – KEYWORDS AND NAMES INDEX

12 Years a Slave, 47 Artsadmin, 111 Asaba Day, 91 Abbott, Tony, 41, 104 Asaba Massacre, 86, 97 Aboriginal, 168 Asia, 26, 27, 54, 130, 131, 143, 176 Abraham, Ayisha, 11, 51, 55, 177 Assmann, Aleida, 4, 45, 54, 96, 162, 170, Achebe, Chinua, 88, 93, 97 172 Action, 22, 33, 70, 100 Assmann, Jan, 4, 45, 54, 96, 162, 170, 172 Activism, 70 Astatke, Mulatu, 171 Adorno, T., 41 Attenborough, Richard, 52 Agency, 33, 57 Australia, 41, 42, 131, 170, 175 Ahmedabad, 130, 131 Autonomous Movement, 58 Aksu, Esref, 45, 54 Awol Allo, 145 Albert Maysles, 103 Alex Gibney, 104 BAFTA (British lm awards), 122 Alexander, Jeffrey, 45, 47, 48, 53, 54 Balkan, 48, 50, 53 Alexandra Segerberg, 61 Bartrop, 85, 96 Allende, Salvador, 54 Bartrop, Paul, 85, 96 Amnesia, 35 Bateson, Gregory, 41, 43 Anderson, Benedict, 53, 54 BBC, 13, 122, 125 Anglo-Indian, 135, 136, 142 Before Sunset, 172 Anthropocene, The, 39 Bell, Duncan, 45, 54 Anthropology, 34, 127, 175–177 Ben Gazzara, 103 Apartheid, 45–48, 51–55, 66–68, 129, 170 Bendjelloul, Malik, 173 Aporia, 15 Bengaluru, 11, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, Appadurai, Arjun, 25, 30, 33, 132, 136– 137, 142, 143 138, 143 Berlin, 12, 47, 105, 143, 172 Appearance, 23, 34 Bertolt Brecht, 104 Arab Spring, 58 Bethnal Green Disaster Project, 123 Arbetet (The Worker, newspaper), 163 Bethnal Green Memorial Trust, 124 Archive Fever, 172 Bickford, S., 31, 33 Archives, 157, 158, 168, 177, 178 Big Brother, 36 Archon, 169 Biko, Stephen, 52 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 68, 70, 146 Bird, Elizabeth S., 6, 7, 10, 12, 85–88, 90, Argentina, 7, 12, 58, 100, 107, 127, 128, 91, 94, 96, 97, 176 135, 140, 143, 177 Björgvinsson, Erling, 11, 159, 172, 173, Aristotle, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22 177, 178

– 179 – Black Consciousness Movement, 51 City, The, 67, 68, 86, 123, 133, 138, 160, Blackpally, 140 173, 183 Blitz, the, 124 Civil society, 71 Bolter, Jay, 172 Club of Rome, 39 Booth, James W., 47, 48, 54 Cold Fact, 170 Bosnian Muslims, 49 Collective, 54, 55, 70, 96, 97, 99, 161, 162, Brahmin, brahmins, 135, 141 172, 180 Brazil, 58, 62, 101, 110 Collective Action, 70 Breaking the Silence, 9, 10, 73–76, 78–83 Communication for development, 8, 32, 62 Bristol, 27, 28 Communication for Social Change, 61, 70, Bronx, the, 121 110, 176 Brooks, Peter, 77, 83 Communities (gated/fractured), 54, 172 Buck-Morss, Susan, 155, 156 Connecticut, school massacre, 134 Buettner, Angi, 46, 54 Connective Action, 70 Burton, Richard, 134 Connerton, Paul, 35, 43 Buskens, 25, 26, 32, 33 Conrad, Sebastian, 45, 54 Butler, Toby, 11, 112, 124, 176 Controversies, 13, 23 Conversations with Myself, 147, 151, 154, Cahiers du Cinema, 100 156 Cambodia, 171 Cook, 160 Campbell, David, 85, 97 Cooke Town, 140, 142 Canary Wharf, 118, 123 Cookman, Claude, 97 Cantonment, The, 133 Copperbelt, 40, 43 Cape Town, 170, 171 Corruption, 137 Caron, Gilles, 85, 97 Couldry, Nick, 29, 33 Casey, Edward, 159, 161, 162, 169, 170, Countermemories, 73, 172 172 Counterpublics, 83 Catch 22, 131, 143 Crimea, 13 Chambers, R., 31, 33, 34 Cry Freedom, 52 Change, 11, 38, 61, 70, 71, 110, 176 Cubbon Park, 133, 140 Charles Ferguson, 104 Cultural Heritage, 134 Chatwin, Bruce, 168, 172 Culture, 23, 33, 34, 38, 43, 54, 55, 83, 98, Chile, 54, 58, 107 125, 177 Chinese, 5, 13, 40 Cutty Sark tea clipper, 117 Chris Marker, 101 Christianity, 37 Chukwuma, Okechukwu, 88, 97 Dalit, dalits, 134, 137, 141 Cicero, 17 Dalrymple, William, 134, 143 Cinéthique, 100 Daniels, Steve, 119, 161–166, 168 Cine de Base, 107 David Maysles, 101 Cine Liberacion, 107 De St Jorre, John, 97 cinema direct, 100 Death, 131, 134, 152 cinema eye, 101 Degrowth, 42 cinema verité, 100, 103 Dengue Fever, 157, 171, 173 CinemAction, 100 Derrida, Jacques, 158–160, 169, 172 Citizenship, 3, 11, 33, 70, 172 Detroit, 79, 83, 170

– 180 – Development, 25, 33, 34, 41, 71, 97, 175– Freedom Park, 47 177 Friedman, J, 115, 124 direct cinema, 101, 103 Frisch, Michael, 162 documentary lm, 10, 11, 76, 101–109, 142 Frosh, Paul, 73, 83 documentary of discovery, 103 Fuller, G., 33 Donner, J., 32, 33 Donors, 26 Gandhi, Mahatma, 11, 145, 152, 154–156 Dreher, 31, 33 Gaza, 48 Drinot, Paulo, 93, 96, 97 Genocide, 47, 48, 50, 55, 96, 97, 132, 175 Dugri (straight talk, Israeli speech culture), Germany, 42, 50, 55, 61, 177 83 Gibson, William, 134 Durban, 127, 128, 135 Giesen, Bernhard, 54 Durkheim, émile, 53, 54 Glasgow, 121 Dylan, Bob/Dylanesque, 172, 173 Global memory, 97 Dziga Vertov, 99, 102 Globalization, 35, 140, 175 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 159, 172 East London, 111, 116, 122, 123, 176 Gopal, Ram, 142 Edkins, Jenny, 45, 54 Gorgias, The, 16, 23 Edouard Bailby, 101 Gourevitch, Philip, 132 Edwards, Derek, 55 Gowon, Yakubu (Colonel), 86, 87, 90, 91 Egypt, 58, 166 Gray, John, 40, 43 Ekwe, Okwuduri, 88, 97 Greece, 40, 58, 138 Ekwelie, Sylvanus A., 89, 97 Greek, 14, 18, 19, 29, 80, 160 Electronic City, 138 Greenwich, 116, 117 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 53, 54 Growth, 39, 43 Engels, 37 Gujarat, pogroms, 131, 141 Enlightenment, 40 Guston, Phillip, 3 ENRON, it is only a matter of business, 104 Guy Fawkes, 58, 59 Erwin Wagenhofer, 104 Guy Hennebelle, 100 Ethnic, 43 Gyssla, 157 Europe, 45, 47, 54, 55, 85, 101, 129, 132, Gyssla (Cultural Society/Association), 160, 158 163, 166, 173 Europeana, 158, 172 Expectations of Modernity, 40, 43 Habermas, Jürgen, 18, 22 Eyerman, Ron, 47, 48, 54 Hackney, 111, 122 Haditha, 49 Falk, 146 Haines, Harry, 20, 23 Ferguson, 25, 34, 40, 43, 104 Halbwachs, Maurice, 162, 172 Ferguson, James, 25, 34, 40, 43, 104 Haley, Alex, 43, 47 Fiction, 12, 110, 127, 128, 143, 177 Half of a Yellow Sun, 88 Finding a Voice, 30, 31, 34 Hamilton, Paula, 162, 169, 172 Folkets Park, 157 Hammersmith, 116 Folkets Park (The People’s Park, Malmö), Hannah Arendt, 5, 68, 146 11, 158, 161, 162, 166 Harari, Yuval, 79, 83 Forgetting, 23, 50, 172 Hariman, Robert, 23, 46, 47, 54 Forrest Gump, 108 Harlow, Barbara, 145, 156 Foucault, Michel, 80, 83 Hart, Frederick, 20

– 181 – Hartley, J., 30, 34 Johannesburg, 47, 67, 128, 154, 177 Hauser, Gerard A., 18, 23 John Cassavetes, 103 Hebron, 75, 76 John Grierson, 105 Hemer, Oscar, 6, 7, 11, 12, 35, 70, 71, 128, Jones, Patrick, 13, 109 143, 172, 173, 177 Jorge Gonzalez, 69 Hernando Salcedo Silva, 101 Jorge Sanjinés, 100, 102 Hillbrow Blues, 128, 129, 143 July Systems, 131 Hirsch, Marianne, 6, 7, 12 Justice, 3, 11, 12, 54, 70, 172 History, 4, 6, 18, 23, 55, 83, 97, 111, 124, 134, 162, 172, 173, 176, 177 Kagame, Paul, 50 History (‘H’istory), 4, 6, 18, 23, 55, 83, Kanaan, 166 97, 111, 124, 134, 162, 172, 173, Kannada, 133, 136, 137 176, 177 Katriel, Tamar, 9, 80, 82, 83, 170, 172, 176 Hobsbawn, Eric, 53, 54 Kelmscott House, 116 Hoffman, Eva, 7, 12, 90, 97 Khmer, 171 Hoffman, Ewa, 7, 12, 90, 97 King, Martin Luther, 11, 13, 14, 145, 152 Holocaust, 6, 7, 12, 21, 45–48, 53–55, 108 Kiruna, 38 Holtzman, Ethan, 171 Kitch, Carolyn, 88, 89, 97 Holtzman, Zac, 171 Knesset (Israeli parliament), 81 Hoskins, Andrew, 3, 5, 12, 161, 172 Kosovo, 48 How Societies Remember, 35, 43 Kratzman, Miki, 75 Human nature, 40 LaCapra, Dominick, 78, 83 Hutus, 50 Lal Bagh, 133 ICTs, 26, 27 Lance Bennett, 61 Igbo, 86–88, 90, 92–94, 97 Langenbacher, Eric, 45, 55 IIIT-B, 138 Lasch, Christopher, 38, 43 India, 7, 28, 30, 42, 104, 129–135, 137, Latin America, 10, 58, 62, 100, 101, 107, 138, 140–144, 176 176 India, partition, 7, 28, 30, 42, 104, 129–135, Leadville: A Biography of the A40, 112, 137, 138, 140–144, 176 124 Indignados, 58 Legum, Colin, 89, 97 Indonesia, 30 Levy, Daniel, 45, 53, 55 Injustice memories, 48, 52, 65, 66 Lieux de memoire (Realms of memory), Inside Job, 104 162 International Criminal Court, 94 Limits to Growth, 39, 43 Israel, 10, 48, 73, 74, 77, 82, 132, 176, 177 Lin, Maya (See Vietnam War Memorial), Istanbul, 70, 138, 142 20, 21 Ito, M., 32, 34 Lincoln, Abraham, 51, 55 Lindkvist, 160, 173 Jaijee, R., 113, 124 Linked (sound art installation), 111, 112, Japan, 13, 49, 131, 177 124 Jasper, James, 74, 82, 83 Linux Spirit, The, 138 Jean Pierre Beauviala, 100 Lior Zylberman, 109 Jean Rouch, 100, 101, 105 Listening, 32–34, 183 Jennifer Abbott, 104 Listening Project, The, 32, 34 Joffe, Joel, 147, 156 Lister, R., 30, 34

– 182 – Location-based technology, 121 Michael Moore, 104 London City Airport, 123 Middle Ages, 17, 18 London Docks, 116 Miller, Graeme, 49, 55, 111, 112, 118, 124 Long Walk to Freedom, 147, 156 Miller, Paul B., 49, 55, 111, 112, 118, 124 Lovell’s Wharf, 117–119 Mladic, Ratko, 49, 50 Lovelock, James, 38, 43 Moana, 105 Lucaites, John, 46, 47, 54 Mobilization, 97 Modernity, 34, 35, 40, 43, 127, 129, 133, Müller, Jan Werner, 45, 55 134 Magistrates, 158, 169 Modi, Narendra, 141 Maharaj, Mac, 149 Mondo cane, 102 Malmö, 11, 12, 35, 37, 127, 157–162, 166, Monica (informant), 28, 29, 31 169, 170, 173, 177, 178, 181 Moral Protest, 83 Malmövisan, 157, 160, 161, 163, 169, 170, Morris, Williams, 116 173 Movements, 70, 83 Malraux, 158, 160 Muhammed, Murtala (Colonel), 86, 90 Mandela, Evelyn, 11, 51, 52, 55, 145–156, Munt, I., 113, 124 177 Museum of London, 111, 118 Mandela, Nelson, 11, 51, 52, 55, 145–156, Museums, 173 177 Muslim invasion, The, 141 Mandela, Thembi, 11, 51, 52, 55, 145–156, Naipaul, V. S., 133 177 Nairaland, 93 Mandela, Winnie, 11, 51, 52, 55, 145–156, Nandi Durga Road, 133, 138 177 Nanking massacre, 49 Mandela, Zinzi, 11, 51, 52, 55, 145–156, Narayan, D., 31, 34 177 Neiger, , 96, 161, 172 Mander, Harsh, 134, 140 Nepal, 30 Manuel Scorza, 101 New Media, 85, 88, 173 Mark Achbar, 104 New Zealand, 170 Marx, Karl/Marxism, 37 NGOs, 4, 60, 62, 67, 68, 75 Matt Whitecross, 104 NGOs (and International NGOs), 4, 60, 62, Mbembe, Achille, 67, 70, 146, 156, 177 67, 68, 75 McCullin, Don, 85 Ngwu, C. Chrisian, 88, 97 Mead, Margaret, 38 Nigeria, 10, 86–91, 94–97 Meadows, Donella H., 39, 43 Nigerian Civil War, 10, 85, 86, 97, 176 Media, 3, 11, 33, 34, 70, 71, 83, 85, 88, 97, Nimol, Chhom, 171 98, 124, 162, 172, 173, 175–177 Nora, Pierre, 18, 21, 23, 47, 55, 92, 97, 162, Mediating Modernity, 133, 134 173 Melvern, Linda R., 50, 55 Norris, Bill, 89 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Nostalgia, 34, 94 47 Memories of Agency, 57 O’Connell, James, 89, 97 Memories of Modernity, 40, 127, 129 Occupy Movement, 58 Memory work, 4, 69 Octavio Getino, 100 Memoryscapes, 55, 111, 173, 175 Odogwu, Louis, 91 Menander, Henrik, 163 "Ocalan crisis, 138

– 183 – Ogbe-Osowa, 86 Rebuilding Memory, 85 Ojukwu, Emeka, 86 Recollection, 17 Olesen, Thomas, 9, 45, 47, 48, 51, 55, 65, Reddy, Rajesh, 131 66, 70, 171, 173, 175 Rene Predal, 101 Olick, Jeffrey, 45, 55 Reservation, 141 Onitsha, Biafra, 86 Resistance, 57, 97 Oral history, 162 Revenge of Gaia, The(Gaia hypothesis), 39, Orecomm, 157 43 Origin of Species, The, 36, 37 Revolution, 144 Orwell, George, 36, 43 Reyes, G. Mitchell, 45, 55, 87, 96, 97, 173, Osaghae, Eghosa E., 87, 97 175 Osorio, F., 32, 34 Rhetoric, 13, 16–19, 21–23, 71, 83 Ottanelli, Fraser, 6, 7, 12, 85–88, 90, 91, 96, Ricoeur, Paul, 15, 19 97, 176 Rivonia trial, 146 Robben Island, 149–151 Pakistan, 137, 143 Robert Flaherty, 102, 103 Palestine, 10, 48, 177 Robert Greenwald, 104 Participation, 57, 70, 137 Rodriguez, Sixto, 157, 170, 171 Partition, 7, 141 Rogers, Everett, 138, 144 Paul Rotha, 105 Roman, 14, 17 Paulo Freire, 69 Roots, 47 Pentzold, Christian, 91, 96, 97 Royal Docks, 122, 123 Phillips, Kendall R., 5, 8, 9, 12, 14, 23, 34, Rwanda, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55, 66, 88, 45, 55, 64, 65, 70, 71, 96, 97, 159, 132, 175, 184 171–173, 175 Rwanda genocide, 45, 48, 50, 66 Pickett, Kate, 38, 43 Pieterson, Hector, 46, 47 Samuel, Raphael, 124, 125, 162 Pinochet, Augusto, 54, 107 Sarlo, Beatriz, 7, 12 Plato, 16, 17, 20, 23 Schlegel, Amy, 46, 55 Platt, E., 112, 124 Schutz, 3 Pol Pot, 171 Schwartz, Barry, 51, 55 Ponty, Jean-Luc, 131 Schwarz, Bill, 12, 97 Poole, 48 Scott, C. E., 19, 23, 25, 34 Postmemory, 7 Scott, Charles, 19, 23, 25, 34 Poverty, 33, 34, 40 Searching for Sugar Man, 170, 173 Progress, 38, 43 Serb-Bosnian army, 49 Public memory, 21, 171 Seremetakis, 27–29, 34 Publics, 23, 83 Severin Blanchet, 100 Quarry, 32–34 Shain, Yoss, 45 Quintilian, 17 Shaw, Martin, 53, 55 Shivajinagar, 138, 140 Radio, 34, 83 Shopes, Linda, 162, 169, 172 Radstone, Susannah, 12, 97 Simola, Raisa, 87, 97 Ramirez, 32–34 Sinclair, I., 112, 125 Ramus, Peter, 18 Singapore, 134, 140 Ranger, 53, 54 Sisamouth, Sinn, 171

– 184 – Sisulu, Walter, 149 The Courage of the People, 102 Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, 171, The Shock Doctrine, 104 173 Theatres of Memory, the, 124, 125 Slodkowski, Antonio, 14 Thomas Olesen, 9, 65, 175 Smelser, Bernard, 54 Three Soldiers, The sculpture, 20 Smith, Anthony D., 36, 40, 52, 53, 55, 109 Till, K., 115, 125, 164, 166 Smith, Winston (and O’Brien), 36, 40, 52, Time of the Writer, 128 53, 55, 109 Times (Newspaper/media company), 14, Social Change, 61, 70, 71, 110, 176 89, 134, 185 Social memory, 159 Times of India, The, 134 Social movements, 58 Tom Hanks, 108 Social Movements, 70, 83 Tradition, 54 Soltan, Neda Agha, 47 Transition, 12, 143, 177 Songlines, 160, 172 Translation, 67 Sothea, Ros Serey, 171 Trial, 3, 11, 12, 70, 145, 147, 156, 172 Soul City, 67, 68 Truth, 12, 83, 104, 127, 128, 143, 154, 156, South Africa, 12, 66–68, 88, 127, 129, 136, 177, 185 143, 146, 147, 150, 156, 170, 177 Truth of Fiction, The, 127 South African Apartheid, 46 Tunisia, 58 South American, 54 Turkey, 49, 58, 138, 142 South London, 122 Tutsis, 50 Soweto uprising, 46 Spain, 7, 12, 58, 59 Ukamau, 102 Spain, civl war, 7, 12, 58, 59 Ukiwo, Ukoha, 87, 97 Ukraine, 13 Spirit Level, The, 38, 43 Uncovered: The Truth About the Iraq War, Sri Lanka, 30 104 Srishti School of Art, Design and Technol- United States, 13, 45, 48, 54, 58, 104 ogy, 127, 177 Urdu, 137 Stegner, Wallace, 157 USAID, 60 Stengel, Richard, 151 Ut, Nick, 46, 47 Stillness, 26, 28, 33 Sturken, Marita, 20, 23 Varanasi, 130, 131, 133 Subjunctive (tense), 19 Vertovec, Steven, 39, 43 Subramaniam, Lakshminarayana , 131 Verwoerd, 149 Super-diversity, 43 Veterans, 20, 23 Sznaider, Natan, 45, 53, 55 Video nas Aldeias, 110 Sztompka, Piotr, 54 Vilbr, Rosa, 122 Vincent Carelli, 110 Tacchi, Jo, 8, 9, 27, 30, 34, 175 Vinitzky.Seroussi, Vered, 45, 55 Tambo, Oliver, 149 Vogel, Bob, 13 Tamil, 133, 136, 137 Vutela, Sefton, 147 Teddington, 116 Tel Aviv, 75 War Resisters International, 79 Thörn, Håkan, 52, 55 Warner, Michael, 73, 82, 83 Thames, 11, 111, 112, 114–116, 125 Washington, Denzel, 14, 52, 55, 71 The Corporation, 104 Waters, Ken, 85, 97

– 185 – Watt, James, 20 We Feed the World, 104 West Bank, 48, 74, 81 West London, 112 Wilentz, Sean, 166, 173 Wilkinson, Richard, 38, 43 Winter Soldier Investigation, 79 Wired, 134 Wolf Koenig, 104 Wright, Patrick, 112, 116, 125

Yasukuni Shrine, 13 Yates, Frances, 17, 18, 23 Young, David E., 6, 12, 170, 173 Young, James, 6, 12, 170, 173 YouTube, 47, 66, 70, 93, 96, 97, 160

Zehfuss, Maja, 45, 55 Zelizer, Barbi, 88, 98 Zeppelin raids, 117 Zionist, 80 Žižek, 41

– 186 –