Memory Archives - Page 2 of 4

Migration

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Tyrone Chambers, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera Grant, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dan Shore, Marci Shore

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore, Krzysztof Czyżewski, Vera I. Grant, Dan H. Shore, Tyrone Chambers, II and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Edited and abridged by Marci Shore KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI: I’m here in Krasnogruda. It means at the border between Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, in the northeastern corner of Poland. In my Borderland Centre, which, with my friends, I established 30 years ago, thinking of being more engaged in art, for solidarity with ...

‘The Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life’

Migration

Creating Linkages

Witnessing the trauma of child separation

October 19, 2020 • by Arielle Rubenstein

In his three-volume work on the child’s tie to his mother, Bowlby includes this passage from a colleague’s description of the young child who has been separated from his mother. At the time, parent-child separation happened in routine circumstances, like the hospitalization of the mother or the child. Before it ...

Migration

The Universal within the Particular

October 19, 2020 • by Eneken Laanes

But the nagging question that has accompanied academic work on cultural memories of violence, apart from the historical knowledge it produces and helps to keep alive, is its relevance for our contemporary world, its ability to contribute to change. As much as the collage of Holocaust testimonies makes us painfully ...

Psyche

In Search of Lost Time—And Misplaced Memories

June 24, 2020 • by Sergio Infante

You are in your twenties but have lived with petit mal epilepsy your entire life. Dr. Penfield has promised you a solution: he will peel back your scalp, open up your cranium, and probe your brain with electrodes for signs of injury. He believes that your epilepsy is due to ...

In Search of Lost Time—And Misplaced Memories

Fashion

Mnemonics of (Re)Used Clothes

Sustainable fashion requires grappling with the relationships and memories clothing represents

February 14, 2020 • by Sanem Odabaşi

Looking inside my wardrobe, I see a pile of clothes, dresses on hangers, shawls in boxes, and my favorite tote bags. If only they could speak, they would probably tell stories about my past experiences. I am not a collector, nor so attached to artifacts that I must keep them ...

Feature

Collective Amnesia in Post-Communist Poland

Why history, not memory or mythology, is the path to Polish-Jewish reconciliation

June 14, 2019 • by Magda Teter

After WWII, many European countries engaged in what some scholars dubbed “collective amnesia.” Austria, for example, began to redefine itself as the first victim of the Nazis. France amplified the Resistance, forgetting about its Vichy days; Western Germany, after the trials of several high-profile Nazi leaders, allowed for silence to ...

Feature

The Perils and Promise of Collective Memory

Reflections on Imagination and Forgetting

December 7, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“We should remember with caution, even as we must proceed boldly.” This is the way I have already tried to succinctly summarize my approach to “gray memory” earlier this year. I know that memory holds great promise, as Milan Kundera once put it: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of ...

The Perils and Promise of Collective Memory

Education

Etchings of Democracy

School desks and the politics of nostalgia

June 1, 2018 • by Campbell F. Scribner

Desks have been ubiquitous in American schools since the mid-nineteenth century. Made of wood and iron, bolted to the floor, they began as fixtures in the truest sense of the word. So firmly did they anchor the classroom that when progressive reformers finally introduced movable models in the early 1900s, ...

Feature

Gray Memory

On a Self-limiting Collective Imagination

April 13, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” So wrote Milan Kundera. Years ago, I found in his bold assertion confirmation of the findings of my first major research project on the sociological dynamics of cultural freedom. I would like to think my study of ...

Feature

Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

October 19, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...

Feature

Giulio Regeni

Toward a Radical Use of Memory

January 24, 2017 • by Franco Palazzi and Michela Pusterla

“A highly promising young scholar of social and economic development in the Middle East,” as his obituary reads, Giulio Regeni was a PhD candidate at Cambridge, who moved to Cairo for his fieldwork, researching independent trade unions, especially that of street vendors, in post-Mubarak and post-Morsi Egypt. After disappearing on ...

Feature

It Is About Time.

February 3, 2016 • by Yemima Cohen

New York is the empire of the present, for in this city the past is gone and the future is already here. For me, coming to America was a form of time travel. Not into the future or into the past, but rather from them and into the ...