PROOF Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Owain Jones and Joanne Garde-Hansen Part I Identity 1 Clearing out a Cupboard: Memory, Materiality and Transitions 25 John Horton and Peter Kraftl 2 Copper Places: Affective Circuitries 45 Caitlin DeSilvey 3 Mapping Grief and Memory in John Banville’s The Sea 58 Avril Maddrell 4 Brooding on Bornholm: Postmemory, Painting and Place 68 Judith Tucker Part II Place 5 Family Photographs: Memories, Narratives, Place 91 Elisabeth Roberts 6 The Southdean Project and Beyond – ‘Essaying’ Site as Memory Work 109 Iain Biggs 7 ‘The Elephant Is Part of Us and Our Village’: Reflections on Memories, Places and (Non-) Spatial Objects 124 Marc Redepenning 8 Graffiti Heritage: Civil War Memory in Virginia 139 terri moreau and Derek H Alderman v PROOF vi Contents Part III Becoming 9 Geopolitics and Memories: Walking through Plymouth, England 167 James D Sidaway 10 A Domestic Geography of Everyday Terror: Remembering and Forgetting the House I Grew Up In 184 Belinda Morrissey 11 Moving Through Memory: Notes from a Circus Lot 199 Ariel Terranova-Webb 12 Making Memories Our Own (Way): Non-State Remembrances of the Second World War in Perak, Malaysia 216 Hamzah Muzaini 13 Lobotomizing Logics: A Critique of Memory Sports and the Business of Mapping the Mind 234 Gareth Hoskins A Memoir: (On Terra Firma) 14 Surfaces and Slopes – Remembering the World-Under-Foot 253 Hayden Lorimer Index 258 PROOF 1 Clearing out a Cupboard: Memory, Materiality and Transitions John Horton and Peter Kraftl Introduction This chapter is about moments in life when – perhaps in the course of leaving home, or moving house, or living-on after bereavement – we find ourselves clearing out a cupboard, sorting through its con- tents, sifting through shelves full of a life’s materiality. We reflect upon some personal memories and emotions occasioned by such a task: some- times haunting, sometimes odd, sometimes joyful and sometimes banal. In particular, we will suggest that small practices with/around mate- rial things and memories are central to doing, resolving and dealing with major life-course events and transitions. The chapter has a fourfold structure. Firstly, we outline some key conceptual frames of reference, which direct attention towards complex intersections between memo- ries/affects, material objects and geographies of life-course transitions. Secondly, we locate the chapter within social scientific experiments with longer-standing methodological traditions of autoethnography and memory work. Thirdly, at the heart of the chapter, we present three autoethnographic vignettes: cataloguing the contents of three particular cupboards and narrating something of the circumstances in which they were cleared out. We use these very particular, situ- ated, individual reflections as points of departure to consider broader ways in which material things are folded into the timing of lives, biographies and memories. Finally, we open out some concluding ques- tions about the ways in which memories may be unearthed, recast or (re)made in/through encounters with material objects, in/through particular life-course events. 25 PROOF 26 Identity Frames of reference: Childhood, affect, materiality Three lines of research and theory have been touchstones in our research. Although these lines of work have emerged and developed somewhat disparately, we contend that there are numerous points of possible connection between them, and that these connections demand closer consideration of the material and affective geographies of mem- ories, childhood and life courses. Our first frame of reference is some recent work on memory carried out by geographers concerned with childhood, youth and ‘growing up’. For geographers like Philo (2003), considering memories and emotions is a way of exploring ‘lines of con- nection residing in the continuity of psychic materials from childhood through into adult life’ (p. 15). These ‘lines of connection’ and the complex ways in which they affect, shape or haunt us are crucial in the development of identities across the life course (Jones, 2003/2008). We suggest that this body of work has been exemplary in seriously con- sidering the importance of memories – and related emotive materialities, landscapes and happenings – in and for geographies of growing up (that is to say, all human geographies). While highlighting this importance, however, Philo and Jones have always already demonstrated a kind of critical humility and vulnerability in their considerations of memory. They explicitly acknowledge and implicitly demonstrate the complexi- ties of interconnections between memories and everyday social/cultural geographies: what Jones calls the ‘deep’, ‘stunningly complex’, always ‘conjoined territories’ of memories, emotions, selves, spaces (2005, p. 205), and the ultimately ‘unreachable’ ‘otherness’ of past and child- hood experiences (p. 29, also 2001/2008). In so doing, this line of work has opened a space in which understandings of childhood, youth and life-course transitions have been enlivened – and, we would argue, extended – via experimentation with creative and autoethnographic styles of research/writing and encounters with non-representational the- ories (for example, relating to bodies, affects and materialities). Our second frame of reference is recent social scientific work on emotions and affects (Bondi et al., 2005; Williams, 2001), and particularly the always-bodily nature of emotions/affects: that is, how consideration of emotions/affects necessitates a blurring of long-standing conceptual divides ‘between the mind and body [ ...] between actions and passions [ ...] between the mind’s power to think and the body’s power to act, and between the power to act and the power to be affected’ (Hardt, 2007, p. xi). As others have noted, this blurring likewise demands acknowl- edgement of the always-corporeal/affective nature of memories and, for PROOF John Horton and Peter Kraftl 27 example, the challenges posed by ‘bodily memories’ and ‘involuntary memories’: memories sparked by everyday sensory/spatial experiences and events, and/or memories which catch us unawares, which are pre- cognitive or pre-prepositional (Jones, 2003, p. 27). We have found recent explorations of quotidian affective experiences particularly important in this context. For example, work such as Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007) might be read as implicitly directing attention to the complex presence and significance of memories within everyday lives. Stewart defines ‘ordinary affects’ as: the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences. They’re things that happen. They happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encoun- ters and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion, and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment and agency, and in publics that catch people up in something that feels like something. (2007, p. 2) Memories are crucially and complexly involved in this ‘something that feels like something’, in/through particular spaces, moments and con- texts. Two further comments by Stewart (2007) are instructive here. Firstly, Stewart (2007, p. 3) describes the process through which ordi- nary affects ‘pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas and social worldings of all kinds’. Memories are surely but complexly important in this process. As part and parcel of this, memories similarly ‘pick up density and texture’ through bodies, sit- uations and spaces: and as we suggest below, doing this demands consideration of the presence and importance of material objects. Sec- ondly, Stewart reflects upon the ‘significance’ of ordinary affects and counsels against a social scientific urge towards representation and interpretations of meaning. For, their significance lies in the intensities they build and what thoughts and feelings they make possible. The question they beg is not what they might mean in an order of representation, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attend- ing to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance. (Stewart, 2007, p. 3) PROOF 28 Identity Indeed, Stewart (2007) calls for social scientists to resist or ‘slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate us because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us’ (p. 4). We suggest this critique of social scientific codifications of affective experiences can again be extended to the consideration of memories, and countless contexts in which memories/affects are significant. That is, we would advocate such a ‘slow’, non-representational sensibility for any work on the geographies of memories for understanding identity. Moreover, we suggest that such methodological slowness can – via a willingness to dwell upon inchoate complexity and detail – often pre- cipitate critical reflection on the long-standing ways of knowing and writing the topic at hand. Running through this chapter, for example, is a sense that dwelling upon details, memories and affects associated with particular life-course events leads us to reflect critically upon broad social scientific theorizations of life-course