Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles

Powerful Times

A. Reading, T. Katriel, A. Reading, T. Katriel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349441228, 9781137032713
• eBook ISBN: 9781137032720
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

If societies have only memories of war, of cruelty, of violence, then why are we called humankind? This book marks a new trajectory in Memory Studies by examining cultural memories of nonviolent struggles from ten countries. The book reminds us of the enduring cultural scripts for human agency, solidarity, resilience and human kindness.

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Introduction

Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel

No torch shall light a fear in us; we will come out to peace alone

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

Our name is humankind, not humancruel. Yet, it is sometimes difficult to recognize our kindness with war memorials that dominate public spaces and a relentless culture of human atrocity and death depicted 24 hours a day on world news. Is it then that world cultures remember violence and trauma but not human resilience, struggle and agency? Or is it that the widespread memorialization of war exploits and heroism has been so dominant in the commemoration of valuable pasts as to completely submerge the cultural memories of struggle and agency in nonviolent¹ contexts? Certainly the field of memory studies has given a great deal of emphasis to examining the cultural memories of war and atrocity whereas the cultural memories of nonviolent struggle remain little examined. Implicit in this foregrounding of violence and trauma is a concern with violence in the form of warfare on the one hand (with its ever-present potential for heroic action) and with victimhood and lack of agency on the other hand. This book foregrounds an alternative line of memory work, one in which the linkage between struggle and violence is disrupted and agency comes to be associated with the rejection of violence. This is not to deny the significance of memories of war and atrocity as these are culturally inscribed by both perpetrators and victims in various modes and sites of enactment. It is, however, an attempt to call scholarly attention to cultural arenas in which human agency and moral vision find their expression in nonviolent action that transforms social landscapes and remakes human histories.

Indeed, the cultural memory of nonviolent struggle – as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata suggests in the women’s protest against the war between the Greeks and Spartans – has a several thousand year old cultural history. By focusing on the significance of these particular memories rather than those of violence and trauma, this book seeks to mark a new trajectory within the field of cultural memory studies. The collection brings together an array of international case studies that address different kinds of memory work and cultural mediations of memory. Some of these have been long recognized as part of the inventory of nonviolent struggles in research on social movement media (Downing 2011). They include media-based practices such as digital archiving, documentary video-making, digital witnessing, video-gaming, and a variety of traditional on-the-ground practices of memorization, such as the use of music and song, the establishment of memorial museums, or the building of monuments.

The development of the field of memory studies at the end of the nineteenth century is very much rooted in attempts to understand the collective imaginaries of nation states. By the end of the First World War this attention to the nation state inevitably turned to the question of how nations remember war. Following the Second World War, this focus on war and subsequently trauma, specifically the trauma of genocide and the Holocaust, has remained at the core of memory studies. Historically, then, the field of memory studies tends to direct our attention to shared (or contested) memories of conflict, atrocity and human warfare. The thematic focus on memories of trauma has added a new layer to the cultural conversation surrounding the violence of war and genocide, reflecting the sidelining of the heroic and romanticizing discourses of war that had infused the war-related media products of an earlier era (Potzsch 2012). Thus, the study of Holocaust-related memory sites and media products has heralded the current focus on war atrocities and on the victims of oppression in sites of memory around the world (Lamberti and Fortunati 2009; Violi 2012). These sites mark concerted attempts to acknowledge the plight of the victims of violence and generate empathy for them. Hence, the emphasis placed on the exploration of the cultural memories of war (Winter 1995), on the commemoration of physical violence (Bar-Tal 2003), on the public memory of the Holocaust and other genocides (Epstein and Lefkovitz 2001; Pollock and Silverman 2014), and on media witnessing and memories of terrorism (Brown and Hoskins 2012) has been accompanied by a conceptual concern with the dynamics attending the roles of victim, witness and perpetrator as well as by the theoretical development of paradigms addressing the legacy of public conflict and trauma. This change of focus from the commemoration of the heroics of war to a recognition of its many victims and sufferers has greatly expanded the field of cultural memory studies, yet it has sidelined the shared memories of human agency associated with nonviolent resistance that are also part of the cultural legacy of those same periods in history.

A similar state of affairs has been recently identified in relation to historical research, as pointed out in an edited collection entitled Recovering Nonviolent Histories, which was designed to ‘bring to light the existence and impact of nonviolent organizing where it has not been commonly noticed’ (Bartkowski 2013: 1). It does so by providing a range of examples of little-known histories that reveal the role of nonviolent resistance in national struggles against foreign domination in different parts of the world. These histories have been left largely unrecorded or sidelined in mainstream history-writing about national independence struggles (but see Roberts and Garton Ash 2009). Taken together, the wide range of cases that this book brings to readers’ attention points to a notable lacuna in historical research. This lacuna is echoed in research into the ways in which nonviolent struggles – and not just those battling for national independence – have been inscribed in local, national and global memory projects. Consequently, an important domain of memory-work that takes place in various corners of contemporary civil societies around the globe is rarely addressed in the field of memory studies. This results not only in oversights with regards to some vibrant cultural arenas that make up part of our contemporary memoryscapes but also in a significant neglect of important questions regarding the role of memory work in the constitution of human agency, resistance and resilience.

Moreover, the scarce attention given to the myriad ways in which engagements in nonviolent struggles have been commemorated and culturally mobilized by individuals, grassroots groups, states, public memory institutions, media organizations and social movements over time has resulted in the obfuscation of the close links that exist between memory-work and political agendas for social change. The iconic events, legendary figures and narratives of struggle that emerge out of civil disobedience campaigns are routinely mobilized in the construction of cultural memories and group identities; in turn, the shared memories of solidarity and trust these struggles generate feed into future nonviolent struggles by investing them with the unique sense of possibility cultivated by the concrete actuality of past examples. Thus, the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory seeks to contribute to ‘a society which remembers its pasts, listens to all its voices, and pursues social justice in order to promote peace, human rights and democracy’ (Nelson Mandela Centre for Memory 2014). In this loop, memory and social action are indelibly intertwined. A major goal of our book, therefore, is to throw light on this under-explored nexus of memory-work and nonviolent activism as it relates to the field of memory studies.

Indeed, it is not without significance that the study of civil resistance has recently become highly pertinent in studies of culture and change. Nonviolent action – even when not branded as such – has come to the fore in the struggles for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, in anti-corruption struggles in Southeast Asia, as well as in what have become known as the Arab Spring or the Springtime of student protests in a number of European countries and the US (Solomon and Palmieri 2011; Werbner et al. 2014).

Furthermore, the media through which nonviolent struggles and their memories can be articulated are rapidly changing through the combined dynamics of digital technologies and globalization as Paulo Gerbaudo (2012), among others, has shown in his study of new protest movements of the twenty-first century. Within this broader context of scholarly interest in dissident groups and movements, this volume seeks to provide a historically and culturally situated critical understanding of the juncture of cultural memory and nonviolent action from a trans-disciplinary perspective. It offers new analyses within the field of cultural memory studies and suggests how researchers and advanced students can develop appropriate dynamic methodologies and modes of enquiry into the study of the memory of nonviolence. We thus consider this book a major intervention that seeks to reshape knowledge about how past struggles are remembered, and we believe that – given the centrality of conflict in cultural memory studies – the more nuanced perspective advanced by attention to the doctrine and practices of nonviolence can offer an original and significant research direction within the cultural memory field.

While recognizing the long-standing tradition of nonviolent action and the wide range of ongoing grassroots efforts to commemorate it in various parts of the world, we have given the book a contemporary edge by including several chapters that deal with online memory-work, such as digital data bases, social media and the world of digitized video games. Before reviewing the studies themselves, however, we turn to a discussion of key themes and concepts that bind them together. In particular, we elaborate on the notions of cultural memory and nonviolent struggle.

The cultural memory framework

While authors in this volume have been free to use their own theoretical underpinnings and key concepts, our overall framing, as the title of the book suggests, has been cast in terms of the cultural memories of nonviolent struggles. Cultural memory itself is of course an evolving concept, but there is some consensus around the general meaning and key precepts that underpin it and its uses in the field of memory studies. Max Saunders has suggested that ‘cultural memory’ – as contrasted with personal memory – can be understood to denote those memories of events we ourselves did not directly experience but of which we are nevertheless aware:

You fought in World War II and remember it. It is part of your personal memory. I did not, so it forms part of my cultural memory. Cultural memory is the part of history we feel most inward with: including things we did not witness, but now feel as if we did. (Saunders 2009: 178)

The by now classic introduction to cultural memory by Aleida Assman Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (2008a) makes clear, however, that there are multiple dimensions to this concept: as living memory based on personal experience gives way to different forms of cultural memory, the latter is articulated through different media that traditionally include archives, museums and memorials but also film and other mass-media products. Cultural memory is reconstructed over time and across generational lines, and although it may have institutional carriers it is not tightly regulated or fully organized. Rather, cultural memory emerges out of a blend of individual preferences and choices framed by institutional decisions and media constraints. In Aleida Assman’s words:

The transposition of individual living to artificial cultural memory and thus short-term and long-term memory is a highly complex process fraught with problems: it brings together temporal extension with the threat of distortion, reduction and manipulation that can only be averted through continuous public criticism, reflection and discussion. (Assman 2008a: 6)

The term ‘cultural memory’ goes back to the late nineteenth century (Straub 2008), and draws on the sociological idea of ‘collective memory’, which was theorized by Maurice Halbwachs (1992) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Working within a functionalist framework, Halbwachs argued that continuity with the past provided societies with cohesion and unity. Adopting a presentist approach to the study of collective memory, he suggested that groups, communities and nations construct collective memories in relation to the needs of the present – so that particular collective memories are edited out, rearranged, and given new emphasis over time in order to meet present-day challenges, concerns and understandings. Thus, when we speak of ‘cultural memories’ in this collection, we broadly designate a range of communally shared symbols and meanings relating to the past that have resonance in the present. These may be articulated by various forms of media that incorporate yet go beyond individual memories. In some cases, studies include attention to the ways in which individual memories are translated into cultural memories and vice versa.

Pierre Nora (1989) further developed the study of collective memory by arguing that it is constructed by groups and communities in such a way as to enable them to interpret and appropriate history. Memory in this account is separate and detached from history. History is a representation of the past that is subjected to analysis and criticism in the particular arena of historiographical research. Memory, on the other hand, relates to the role played by the past in public culture, as a living force that shapes people’s identities in an ongoing, often conflicted social process. Nora claimed that in past times memory-work was infused into people’s day-to-day living and ritual practices while in modern times cultural memories are often lodged and reconstructed in spatiotemporally specified and demarcated spaces that he famously called lieux de memoire. These include museums, monuments and commemorative occasions, and in all of them memory has become both attenuated and the object of nostalgic sentiments.

Michael Schudson (1997) proposed a distinction that resonates with Nora’s history/memory dialectic, but one which is applied to the field of memory itself – the distinction between commemorative and non-commemorative memory. In our case, non-commemorative memory refers to the mundane weaving of memories of past nonviolent struggles into the planning, implementation and narration of ongoing nonviolent activist projects, as in references to the suffragette struggle of the early twentieth century in the contemporary feminist digital British magazine discussed by Red Chidgey (Chapter 3), or the use made of the figure of Mahatma Gandhi in the Palestinian struggle against the Wall discussed by Katriel and Gutman (Chapter 11). Indeed, as popular histories of the globalized scene of nonviolent struggles indicate (Ackerman and DuVall 2001; Kurlansky 2007; Schell 2003), the nonviolent actions of various activist groups and social movements often include the symbolic invocation of past struggles as sources of legitimization and inspiration and/or as models for action. This cultural memory work becomes an integral part of the processes of social action, generating memory-in-action practices that do a great deal to infuse contemporary nonviolent struggles with a sense of the past. They also promote a universalistic presumption of shared humanity since they create mnemonic links between nonviolent struggles that are widely diverse in both content and context.

Over the years, this memory-in-action has been increasingly complemented by projects designed to construct what Schudson calls ‘commemorative memory’, a term which pertains to the memory-work involved in the symbolic reproduction and ratification of the cultural significance of past events in cultural spaces set aside for memory-work – the lieux-de-memoire that Nora (1989) views as the hallmark of modern memoryscapes. These may include – in the case of the memory of nonviolence – monuments of prominent leaders of nonviolent struggles, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, exhibitions and archives that inscribe the history of civil resistance, peace museums and sites of conscience, as well as designated calendrical occasions, some of which figure in this book’s chapters.

We have chosen to use the term ‘cultural memory’ rather than the related one of ‘collective memory’ because – as Erll and Nunning (2008) suggest – cultural memory is a broader term. As already noted, studies of cultural memory may draw on cultural history, on memories inscribed in literature (‘literary memory’), on memory that is predominantly articulated through mass media (‘media memory’), as well as on socially designated physical ‘sites of memory’. Thus, studies of cultural memory are resolutely trans- and inter-disciplinary, drawing on theoretical and empirical insights derived from history, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, social psychology and neuroscience (Erll and Nunning 2008: 3). In recent years, the notion of cultural memory has also been expanded so as to incorporate insights relating to technologically driven cultural change, including those associated with digital media as studied within the fields of human-computer interaction, cyber studies, game studies and Internet studies.

Indeed, recent work on the interface of digital media technologies and memory studies offers new insights that can further illuminate the conceptual distinction proposed by Jan Assman between ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’. Assman contrasts cultural memory, which he views as ‘the basis of a people’s collective culture and identity’ (2008b: 110) with the quotidian, non-institutionalized communicative memory that is ‘not cultivated by institutions of learning, transmission, and interpretation; it is not cultivated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occasions ... It lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no further back than 80 years, the time span of three interacting generations’ (2008b: 111).

Halbwachs includes such functional transmissions of the family and religion in his conception of collective memory, yet collec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gandhi’s Salt March: Paradoxes and Tensions in the Memory of Nonviolent Struggle in India
• 3 ‘A Modest Reminder’: Performing Suffragette Memory in a British Feminist Webzine
• 4 Krieg dem Kriege: The Anti-War Museum in Berlin as a Multilayered Site of Memory
• 5 Film as Cultural Memory: The Struggle for Repatriation and Restitution of Cultural Property in Central Australia
• 6 Remember the Russell Tribunal?
• 7 Peace and Unity: Imagining Europe in the Founding Fathers’ House Museums
• 8 Singing for My Life: Memory, Nonviolence and the Songs of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
• 9 Who Owns a Movement’s Memory? The Case of Poland’s Solidarity
• 10 Documenting South Asian American Struggles against Racism: Community Archives in a Post-9/11 World
• 11 The Wall Must Fall: Memory Activism, Documentary Filmmaking and the Second Intifada
• 12 Remembering to Play/Playing to Remember: Transmedial and Intramedial Memory in Games of Nonviolent Struggle
• Index