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Danielle Drozdzewski, Sarah De Nardi and Emma Waterton
Memory is a powerful tool. It invokes the senses: a smell, a familiar touch, an image, a sound once heard before can transport us not only to different times but also to different places (see Tuan 1977). With each memory stimulus we conjure the context of those places, whether they be spatially defined and geographically delimited or immaterial, allegorical places – we situate our memories to place and to time. Memory can connect us to our individual pasts and to the past (as we know it) of those of our closest kin, and does so through the narration of family histories. These connections can be facilitated by sharing ancestral objects, passing down photographs and family names, and reciting habitual practices such as cooking, singing and speaking other languages. Place memory lies at the core of this volume, as illustrated by contributions that acknowledge how deeply this kind of memory is enmeshed in everyday corporeality through ‘practices of incorporation’ and ‘practices of inscription’ (Hill 2013: 381). These entanglements link our present-day places and contexts to our pasts and to those of our forebears. Our ability to locate memories shows how the absence of memory is ‘evoked, [and] made present, in and through enfolded blendings of the visual, material, haptic, aural, olfactory, emotional-affective and spiritual’ (Maddrell 2013: 505). As Bell (1997: 813) has reasoned, places are ‘personed … even when there is no one there’. Extending Bell’s thought to the non-human, places can also be occupied by the presence of objects, animals, thoughts and so on. Thus, we can use place in memory as a positioning tool. The focus on the spatiality of memory is the point of departure for this collection, which comprises the concomitant and geographically contextualised discussions of how these memories are positioned in place and used in the construction and maintenance of identities.
We often think about memory most readily as a personal ‘thing’. But memory has a ‘sticky’ resonance (after Ahmed 2010), drawing in wider contexts and places, including nations and places within them. Memory’s adhesive quality attends our capacity to remember trauma. Indeed, as Till (2005: 108) has argued, in ‘societies that experienced violence, individuals return to particular places to revisit difficult feelings of loss, grief, guilt and anger’. Likewise, Nordstrom (1997: 4) has reasoned that we revisit these memories, literally and figuratively, and that ‘because the encounter with violence is a profoundly personal event, it is fundamentally linked to processes of self-identity and the politics of personhood’. Such is the conclusion reached by the authors of chapters in this volume, who variously suggest that encounters with violence – whether direct or indirect – affect place and space in meaningful ways.
Violence thus facilitates the production of remembrance-scapes; while such ‘scapes’ undoubtedly have performative capacities, they simultaneously locate memory’s absent presence, too. In respectfully navigating our way through the difficult territories of trauma, we are mindful of the impact that emotion and embodiment of violence and conflict can have on both individuals and society, and its affects – both on those recounting, sharing and (re)visiting it (De Nardi 2015; Drozdzewski 2015). Such mindfulness has opened up spaces in which to consider the longevity of memory in place notwithstanding its traumatic impact (e.g. Saunders 2004; Diken and Bagge Laustsen 2005). These sorts of affective and emotional connections between person and place develop, for example, through the presence of people at a particular commemoration, and in the absence of those being commemorated. Our witnessing of memory’s absent-presence, together with the increasing patronage on days sacred to national remembrance, means that places of and in memory cannot be explained away as solely dictated by a linear, mainstream narrative or representational process or material markers of memory.
Physical places that may have been erased by the ravages of war can ‘remain present, yet invisible, in the city’ and in our memories (Till 2005: 101–102). War wounds cities: it marks them as places that have been ‘harmed and structured by particular histories of physical destruction, displacement and individual and social trauma resulting from state-perpetrated violence’ (Till 2012: 6). Incidents of war and conflict are remembered for their traumatic impacts, and for ‘unsettling ghosts of place’ (Bell 1997: 827) that firmly imprint inhumanity, despair, deprivation and struggle – and it is because these imprints are uncomfortable and unsettling that we remember them, individually and collectively. War and conflict codify sets of behaviours as atrocities, as immoral. We memorialise such events to remember victims, and to remember our capacity to act in such ways. In remembering war, we remember victory and suffering – both have been used by ruling elites to convey much about war’s influence on the character of nations and of the capacity of peoples to resist, endure and succeed. While war is often experienced and remembered collectively – on a national scale – it is also experienced and remembered by individuals, whose encounters with it may or may not accord with how the ruling elite chooses to commemorate, if it chooses to commemorate at all.
The power of commemorative choice (Nora 1989) is an overarching component of investigations concerning public memorialisation. Memory is ‘spatially constituted’ whether in ‘concrete and physical’ form such as monuments and museums, or in ‘non-material’ form such as narrative, discourse and stories of the war (after Hoelscher and Alderman 2004: 349). With this power also comes the authority to place memory, which portends to memory’s purposeful positioning in place. In the case of war memorials, memorialisation might occur where an actual battle or event took place. It might also be positioned in a strategic locale in a city – a busy thoroughfare or public square perhaps. As Birth (2006: 182) points out, creating and maintaining monuments often involves a great deal of attention being paid to the discursive messages that accompany sensory impression. Marking a certain memory in place – in a city square, for example – is thus strategic; it asserts a ruling elite’s interpretations of the past and its notions of identity in the present. By using plaques, candles, flowers, national narratives of heroism, remembrance days, and by creating reverential atmospheres, those who remember provide the tools for varied publics to read, encounter, feel and experience that event.
Pivotal to memory’s power, then, is its politics or intrinsic usefulness (see Said 2000). A politics of memory speaks to the rationales and operations of memory, as well as the motivations behind place-based choices of representation for certain groups of people. Our contention in this collection is that memory of place is crucial to understanding how identities are rooted to places; comprehending this link may help us better understand reasons for war and conflict in the first place. Consider how, for example, sites of war and conflict in the Ukraine, Syria and Iraq demonstrate the entanglement of memories of place and the rootedness of constructions of identity in, and to, those places. A critical geopolitics of memory ‘pits the division and marking of space as a contest’ (Drozdzewski 2014: 66) in which the complex relations of place/people/identity become materialised in conflict and invariably fuel territorial incursions into places that certain groups hold in their memory, but do not physically occupy or have authority over. There is longevity to memories of territorial subjugation, whether these remembrances are personally and/or collectively recalled, such as in national groups. For example, the First World War centenary (2014–2018) has so far seen nations once allied to the Western Front commemorate the seventieth anniversaries of different battles including the Gallipoli campaign, the Battles of the Somme, Frommel and Ypres, as well as D-Day. Despite direct lines of (familial) lineage to the First World War and the Second World War in rapid decline, war remembrance and the centrality of championing a nation’s collective identity (and as a corollary its cohesiveness to war remembrance) continue to gain currency.
It seems fitting, then, that we borrow from Jones (2011: 2) to submit that ‘memory makes us what we are’. Memories both inform and are informed by identities and these articulations take different forms in different places. The mobilisation of memory has the capacity to transform places and keep our articulations of places of, and in memory, fluid. We (re)construct memory in our present-day contexts (see Halbwachs [1926] 1992) and these social frameworks of memory have significance for how contemporary understandings of past events colour remembrance of those same events. In a rapidly changing world, where an ever present ‘danger’ of the Other retains a sustained presence in both political and popular discourse, assertions of what we (including we as the nation) are by focusing on what we are not remains at the forefront of politicians’ and policymakers’ rhetoric. Reacting to this seeming stoicism in how identity is broached, Macpherson (2010: 7) has questioned why ‘in a world of potential and movement’ have ‘patterns of life become so sedimented and static’. Part of the answer to Macpherson’s question can surely be found in analyses of how the framing of identity draws from past (and in some cases present) engagements in war and conflict in ways that cement particular interpretations of identity as collective and shared among citizens of a nation. We contend that as scholars we should agitate for a greater recognition of how a politics of memory is used to attain political and territorial advantage. By confronting and delineating how memory is used for ill purpose, we have the capacity to exercise an ethics of care (see, for instance, Cloke 2002; Olson 2015) in our analysis ‘of those evils which, in our time, most menace our capacity to form human lives’ (Curtis 1999: 12).
While developing a more nuanced understanding of the intersections between place, identity and memories of war holds relevance for expanding our understandings of the past, it is also ‘fundamental to becoming’ (Jones 2011: 2) and thus has continued potency for framing future responses to war and conflict. Understanding memory as a process bound to action is also central to the dynamic (see Salerno and Zarankin 2014), vibrant affective life of places of conflict. Far from being static – even when literally ‘set in stone’ through a monument – cultural memory is ‘an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continually modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future’ (Bal 1999: vii). While at the forefront of academic discourse in studies of culture and society since the cultural turn there have studies of identity, and particularly of ethno-cultural identities and multiculturalism, yet there has also been relatively little attention focused on understanding how memories and their politicisation play a role in forming and maintaining identities. Indeed, Johnson (1995: 52) declared that geographers have hesitated to address ‘the ways which national cultural identity at the popular level is constructed, maintained, or challenged’. This collection addresses this diffidence by examining how memories of war work both as key components in the constructions of individual, familial and national identities and as markers of places.
Considering memory, identity and place
Integral to our focus on the nexus of memory, place and identity has been an attempt to build on authors such as Butler (1993, 1997, 2004), Taylor (2013) and Barad (2007), who have challenged the centrality of representational thinking and discourse as primary modes of data analysis. We are also indebted to Birth (2006: 176), who has contended that ‘remembering is far more than the written word … it can rely on buildings, spaces, monuments, bodies and patterns of representing self and others’. To guide our approach, we have borrowed from Barad’s work (2003, 2007) in order to better understand the intersections of place, memory and identity by examining interactions between human and non-human elements in memoryscapes. This strategy, we think, will serve to open further the spaces of enquiry needed to examine both how events happen to intersect and influence ourselves and our lives, and how our thinking, feelings, emotions and affects are influenced and shaped by the agency of humans (our respondents, passers-by, visitors to memorials) and non-human actants (places, objects, atmospheres). Thus, we have followed Macpherson’s (2010: 8) call that there is ‘need to attend to the agency of things as well as people’, and Birth’s (2006: 169) proposition that ‘as much as humans may seek to mould the material of memory in particular ways, this may not always be successful when the material itself can exert its own influence on humans in unpredictable ways’. Drawing on the rich seams of embodied experience in this collection, we contend that memory and places of memory have the capability to move us and to generate, for example, haptic, somatic and spontaneous responses.
A key agenda for this collection is to understand the linkages among memory, identity and place in the context of war and conflict. To advance how we think about memory, memorialisation and remembrance, we have turned – both theoretically and methodologically – to those ways of thinking most commonly associated with affect theory, the more-than-human, the more-than-representational and the post-human. Notions of practice and experience are paramount. A key seam binding the chapters in the collection together, then, is the use of innovative and adaptive qualitative methodologies that position research as lived process and not simply product. Cumulatively, the chapters shift and expand memory research beyond more traditional and normative conceptions as routinely articulated in and across landscapes and in the cultural calendar, to something that involves fluid, multiple and often unexpected configurations and interpretations that can be variously and perhaps even simultaneously felt, embodied and encountered.
Underpinning this focus are other intellectual labours articulating the convergence of landscape, heritage and spaces of remembrance (see also Johnson 2014; Tolia-Kelly 2004). The work of Dwyer and Alderman (2008) lays out three distinct approaches to studying the nexus between place and memory: first, memorial landscapes as text; second, memorial landscapes as arena; and, third, memorial landscapes as performance. Through this last approach they have sought to recognise the ‘important role that bodily enactments, commemorative rituals, and cultural displays occupy in constituting and bringing meaning to memorials, suggesting that the body itself is a site of memory’ (Dwyer and Alderman 2008: 166). Similarly, Brockmeier (2002: 8) has drawn attention to the value of a post-positivist approach to memory, as localising ‘memory in culture and, as a consequence, understand[ing] remembering as a cultural practice – be it under the name of social, collective or histor...
