This post is part one of a four-part forum: "Transnational Memories: Sites, Knots, Methods." An earlier version was presented as part of a roundtable at the Modern Language Association's 2015 Convention in Vancouver that featured Rosanne Kennedy, Ann Rigney, Michael Rothberg, and Debarati Sanyal. The imperative to remember foundational violence such as the Holocaust, slavery, apartheid, partition, or colonialism has often led the study of memory to compartmentalize these events as singular ethno-cultural or national traumas. Yet in the past two decades, we've seen a shift from memory contained to memory unbound. Spatial models of remembrance such as Pierre Nora's lieux de memoire, or “sites of memory,” and the containment that they can presume, have been yielding to figures of process and motion. Richard Crownshaw describes this as a shift from centripetal models of memory, where group or national identity coalesces around collective memories of events, to a centrifugal movement that releases cultural memory from ethnic, territorial, and national particularisms into transnational flows and cosmopolitan contents.[1] Today, memory is on the move, and national histories are being rethought through models of motion, entanglement, crossings and linkage in order to capture the fluid practices of remembrance in a postcolonial age of globalization, mass migration, and technological connection. These include the compelling models developed by my co-panelists: Rosanne Kenney's moving testimony, Ann Rigney's transnational memory, and Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory.[2] In the few minutes that I have today, I'd like to sketch out how complicity can be a useful term as we consider memory's movement across national and ethno-cultural borders.[3] In a time of unprecedented connection with other peoples and histories, complicity and solidarity may be two sides of the same coin. Today, the recognition of marginalized histories of violence and loss remains an urgent task. But this is not to say that an additive model of recognition and remembrance is enough, or that memory's movement is inherently progressive or inclusive. If this movement can shake up traditions of remembrance, allowing new identities and affiliations to emerge, its pathways can also lead to dangerous intersections, where identification leads to appropriation, where political uses of memory collide with the ethical obligations of testimony, where difference is eclipsed into sameness, or where particular pasts are absorbed under one paradigm of historical trauma. We see a particularly dangerous intersection in the transnational movement of memory in France right now, where the shootings at Charlie Hebdo and an Hyper Cacher are referred to as "the French 9/11" and analogized to Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht... All this to say that even as we look at memory's movement across nations, histories and identities, we must also look out for the range of causes that this movement serves, the solidarities that are opened but also those that are foreclosed. If, as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have observed, "the container of the nation state is in the process of slowly being cracked," memory still moves within the political constraints of an often national or identitarian field whose channels are limited by competing political interests and ideological investments. [4] Complicity, I want to suggest, helps us track the complexity of memory's movement across national borders and ethno-cultural difference. Now, complicity usually means participation in wrongdoing, or collaboration with evil. But its Latin root, complicare, 'to fold together' reminds us of its secondary and now archaic usage, which is 'the state of being complex or involved'. In French, the word complicité also means understanding and intimacy. Complicity as a term can help us think about the folding together or gathering of subject positions, histories and memories, that characterizes the emerging methods of transnational, transcultural memory studies. The recognition of complicity—of the folds that bring different histories into contact, but also of the places we occupy in a historical fold— requires us to consider our contradictory position within the political fabric of a given moment, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, witnesses, bystanders, consumers or spectators, and more often than not, an uneasy combination of the above (as Rosanne Kennedy suggests on this panel, in the context of the "Say Sorry for '65" campaign). Since the 1990's, memory studies in conjunction with trauma theory has tended to address historical violence, from the Holocaust to 9/11, primarily through the perspective of the victim. Yet more recently we've witnessed a turn towards complicity and perpetration, a turn that might well be a return, since in the aftermath of World War Two, at least in the French-speaking context, complicity was a key vector of transnational memory (e.g. the folding together of Nazi atrocity and French colonial violence). On the contemporary international cultural scene, examples of this renewed turn to testimony's "darker side" include Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, Rithy Panh's documentary on the Khmer Rouge, S21, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, or Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes, to which I'll return. This potential reorientation of cultural imaginaries towards complicity and perpetration rather than trauma and victimhood is valuable provided it doesn't congeal into facile pronouncements on– and handwringing about– our structural complicity with global violence. An animating, rather than paralyzing, awareness of complicity can alert us to what legal scholar Christopher Kutz calls "our mediated relationship to harms."[5] It can lead to a better understanding of the past's reverberations in the present, a clearer grasp of the many forces that mediate our agency. Complicity, as I understand it, is not a fixed stance but a structure of commitment that provides an alternative to affect-based discourses of trauma, melancholy or shame, and opens up a robust, yet self-reflexive, engagement with the violence of history. I only have time for one literary example here: Franco-American author Jonathan Littell's monumental Les Bienveillantes, translated as The Kindly Ones. Published in 2006, this bestseller unleashed polemics in France and beyond due to its transgression of several taboos on Holocaust representation. I will simply evoke its transgressive treatment of identification. Holocaust testimony is usually understood to be the account of a survivor and victim; its reception is theorized through models of intimacy and identification. Readers or viewers are invited to become secondary witnesses and hosts to the representation of a victim’s trauma. The Kindly Ones, however, is a first-person narrative that coerces us into complicity with its Nazi protagonist for over 900 pages, even if this identification with the perpetrator is constantly sabotaged by the text's irony. Thus, we are asked to sustain the tension between intimacy and irony, identification and distance, as we witness the atrocities of the Third Reich in their visceral horror and bureaucratic abstraction. To readers who inhabit a potentially reified culture of Holocaust memory, this alternation between complicity and irony forces us to reimagine Nazism in relation to ourselves, without abdicating to facile claims about the banality of evil or that "we are all perpetrators." The Kindly Ones is also a historical investigation of transnational atrocity. It explores the colonial archive of Nazism's Eastward expansion, reminding us that for Hitler the Russian space was analogous to British India. In doing so, it highlights the conceptual and strategic complicities between the Final Solution, other Nazi programs of extermination, and the massacres and genocides of Western imperialism including American settler genocide, the US in Vietnam and France in Algeria. The novel aims to create a sounding board ("une caisse de résonance," as Littell puts it) between these distinctive legacies of racialized violence while gesturing towards the contemporary horizon.[6] Its author is also a journalist who has written about current sites of conflict such as Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The interplay of complicity and irony in The Kindly Ones, its cognitive, affective, and ultimately ethical demands on readers, reminds us that if fiction can experiment with historical archives and practices of remembrance, the responsibility to animate these virtual memories lies in their reception. Reading is where an ethics of memory in motion can develop. To conclude, last year at an MLA presidential panel on vulnerability, Andreas Huyssen asked us to think about the relationship between memory discourses and human rights in order to energize present and future-oriented struggles. It seems to me that complicity has a role to play in this as well. An attunement to one's complicity with both catastrophic and slow forms of violence that one might seek to prevent, challenge or repair would nuance the universalism of humanitarian discourses and help to identify the constraints under which certain subjects are produced as objects of intervention, compassion and assistance. Here too complicity and solidarity may be two sides of the same coin. [1] Richard Crownshaw, Introduction to the special issue on transcultural memory, Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011):1. [2] Rosanne Kennedy, "Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere," in Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney (ed.), Transnational Memory Circulation, Articulation, and Scales (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, October 2014); Ann Rigney, Introduction to Transnational Memory Circulation, Articulation, and Scales (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). [3] For an expanded version of this argument, see Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). [4] Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 195 [5] Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2. [6] Jonathan Littell and Pierre Nora, “Conversation sur l’histoire et le roman,” in Le débat 144 (March/April 2007): 43–44. Other Posts in this Forum
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This post is part two of a four-part forum: "Transnational Memories: Sites, Knots, Methods." An earlier version was presented as part of a roundtable at the Modern Language Association's 2015 Convention in Vancouver that featured Rosanne Kennedy, Ann Rigney, Michael Rothberg, and Debarati Sanyal. In 2012, Joshua Oppenheimer’s celebrated film, The Act of Killing, was released to significant acclaim, garnering awards at film festivals around the world.[1] The film remembers the massacre of 500,000 alleged communists in Indonesia in 1965-66. In interviews, Oppenheimer states that he hoped to open a national conversation in Indonesia on the killings, abetted and protected by the military under the leadership of General Suharto. During Suharto’s reign (1966-1998), the killings were not so much ‘forgotten’ but deliberately misremembered: a four and a half hour propaganda film -- mandatory viewing for all school students -- narrated the slaughter as a patriotic act of ridding the nation of the ‘evil’ of communism.[2] The Act of Killing aims to bring into visibility the culture of impunity that still persists in Indonesia, and enables perpetrators, who have never faced justice, to live as ‘free men’. Over a five-year period, Oppenheimer and his anonymous Indonesian co-director filmed one of the executioners, Anwar Congo, and his circle of friends as they discussed and re-enacted their acts of killing through a range of Hollywood genres. In focusing the camera exclusively on Indonesian perpetrators and locations, The Act of Killing represents the genocide through a national frame. My focus here is not on the film, fascinating though it is, but rather on its human rights packaging. The film has been embedded in campaigns for justice on behalf of the victims, tying publicity for the film with advocacy for human rights. Leaving aside the moot question of the efficacy of such campaigns, their websites provide insight into how the film is packaged for travel, to promote the film and address transnational audiences. Of particular relevance for transnational memory studies, these human rights campaigns productively illustrate the workings of the global memory imperative. As elaborated by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, the ‘global memory imperative’ refers to the idea that “memories of the Holocaust …have the potential to become the cultural foundation for global human rights politics.”[3] In interviews, Oppenheimer repeatedly invokes Holocaust memory to justify making the film and thereby ‘breaking the silence’ surrounding the mass violence in Indonesia. For instance, he contends that Medan, the town in which Anwar lives, is like Nazi Germany “forty years after the Holocaust” with “the Nazis still in power…” He acknowledges Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust film, Shoah, and particularly his testimonial methods, as a major influence on his approach to filming The Act of Killing. Of particular significance for my analysis, Levy and Sznaider argue that the global memory imperative is “transforming nation-state sovereignty by subjecting it to international scrutiny,” and by empowering the human rights regime to intervene into current sites of violation.[4] On this conception, the moral imperative to remember the victims of mass violence, activated through the film-human rights campaign assemblage, functions as a spur to global civil society to pressure a nation-state that refuses to acknowledge accountability for violating the rights of victims. How then do these advocacy campaigns use the film’s act of memory to solicit and address their intended publics? How do concepts of the national and transnational play out in these campaigns? ‘Say Sorry for ’65’: Art, Advocacy and Transnational Accountability The official website for The Act of Killing includes a ‘Take Action’ hyperlink to a bright yellow page titled ‘Say Sorry for ‘65’.[5] The ‘Minta Maaf: Say Sorry for ‘65’ campaign was launched in London on June 28, 2013 by the British human rights organization, TAPOL, which campaigns for human rights in Indonesia, especially in East Timor, West Papua and Aech.[6] (TAPOL means ‘political prisoner’; the organization was formed in 1973 by Carmen Budjiardjo, who was a political prisoner in Indonesia following the massacres.) The campaign is supported by another human rights organization, East Timor Action Network (ETAN), which describes itself as ‘a U.S.-based grassroots organization working in solidarity with the peoples of Timor-Leste (East Timor), West Papua and Indonesia’.[7] The publicity for the ‘Say Sorry’ campaign on The Act of Killing website asks visitors, if they can do one thing, to “write to your local representative and let them know your feelings about the genocide in Indonesia and ask that we put pressure on the government there to acknowledge their past so they can try to fix the wounds left from the killings.”[8] Through this humanitarian appeal, the ‘Say Sorry for ’65’ campaign aims to generate support from global civil society to pressure a national government – Indonesia - for its failure to prosecute the perpetrators and thereby secure justice for the victims. With its familiar rhetoric of ‘feelings’ and ‘wounds’, this campaign positions non-Indonesian signatories as humanitarian subjects, who can express empathy and transnational solidarity with activists working for justice in Indonesia by signing an online petition. The ‘Say Sorry for ‘65’ campaign is an example of deterritorialized advocacy: the ‘you’ that is addressed could be in any geo-political location, as could the ‘local representative’. By contrast, the target is territorialized: the invitation to ‘put pressure on the government there to acknowledge their past’ locates the violence and the responsibility in Indonesia. The ‘Say Sorry’ publicity on the film website asks viewers: “if you can do two things, please ... sign the Say Sorry for 65 Petition: The Indonesian president [at the time, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono] is very conscious of his international image, and support from outside of Indonesia is really important to persuade him that he has to act now.”[9] In this instance, we see the global memory imperative at work: film viewers are addressed as members of a transnational ‘witnessing public’ who can do something to right the wrongs in Indonesia.[10] The ‘Say Sorry’ campaign grounds transnational solidarity in humanitarian values of compassion, justice, witnessing and empathy, but it does not require viewers to consider their own positioning or implication. Although ETAN, a US-based grassroots human rights organization, supports the ‘Say Sorry for ‘65’ campaign, it has launched a linked campaign to demand that the United States government acknowledge its role in the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965.[11] It invites visitors to watch The Act of Killing on PBS, the American Public Broadcasting Station, and to “take action on US support for mass violence in Indonesia.” It includes fact-sheets detailing the role of the United States in the killings, and a link to Brad Simpson’s article, ‘It’s Our Act of Killing Too,’ published in The Nation.[12] By including these ‘factsheets’ and links, the ETAN campaign acts as a prosthetic to the film, extending its act of memory beyond the nation. It thereby addresses one of the criticisms of The Act of Killing – that is fails to reveal the extensive involvement of the United States and other Western nations in the massacres. The rhetorical address of the ETAN campaign for US accountability differs markedly from the ‘Say Sorry for 65’ campaign. The ‘Say Sorry’ campaign directs international scrutiny in one direction only – ‘over there’ – and solicits global civil society to pressure the Indonesian government to apologize. While supporting the ‘Say Sorry’ campaign’s call for justice for victims in Indonesia, ETAN’s campaign for US accountability directs attention to the American home front and thereby reterritorializes accountability for the genocide. It addresses Americans as participants in a national public sphere, and – to borrow a term from Michael Rothberg -- as ‘implicated subjects’ in this past.[13] The campaign solicits Americans to pressure their own government to acknowledge its complicity in the massacre by, for instance, signing a petition asking the United States government to “declassify and release all documents related to the U.S. role in the 1965/66 mass violence, including the CIA's so-called "job files."[14] As these two campaigns illustrate, human rights discourse and organizations provide a transit lane that facilitates the global travels of The Act of Killing. But these border-crossing campaigns have different effects: the ‘Say Sorry’ campaign, while soliciting a transnational humanitarian public to pressure Indonesia, nonetheless reinforces nationalism by locating responsibility for the mass killings within Indonesia alone. By contrast, the ‘Acknowledge US Support’ campaign uses the film’s memory of genocide to demand accountability from the US, thereby transnationalizing accountability. World Memory and the Transnational Public SphereWhat issues does this case raise for transnational memory studies? To the extent that The Act of Killing aims not simply to remember the killings, but to facilitate a dialogue, in the present, about the genocide and justice for survivors and victims’ families, it brings into play the issue of the public sphere, for it is in the public sphere that advocacy does its work. As Nancy Fraser (2007) has argued, the concept of the public sphere has implicitly assumed a Westphalian frame, in which the public sphere was “a bounded political community with its own territorial state”, which authorized citizens to hold their national governments accountable.[15] In memory studies today it is widely acknowledged that ‘sites of memory’ are no longer contained by the nation-state, and that memory texts and practices circulate across national borders. The transnational travels of memory render the issue of the public sphere – and of how memory texts are addressed to transnational publics (who are also simultaneously ‘national’) -- a compelling one for memory scholars.[16] As we have seen in relation to the human rights campaigns that aid the transnational circulation of The Act of Killing, global civil society – rather than a national public sphere - is called upon to police nation-states of which its members are not citizens. This is, of course, a significant development facilitated by the growth of a powerful global human rights regime. But as the ETAN case shows, citizens can also exercise transnational solidarity – and perhaps with more integrity and self-reflexivity – with victims and survivors elsewhere by acting as members of a national public sphere, to hold our own governments to accountability for their actions, and simultaneously recognize our own implication in these events. [1] The film is directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and an anonymous Indonesian co-director; see http://www.actofkilling.com. Accessed 4 March 2015. [2] Scenes from this film are featured in the Director’s Cut of The Act of Killing. [3] Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Trans. Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006: 4. [4] Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. Human Rights and Memory. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010: 149. [5] See the ‘Take Action’ link on the film’s website: http://www.actofkilling.com/#action. Accessed 4 March 2015. [6] http://www.tapol.org/press-statements/say-sorry-‘65-campaign-launches-tapol’s-40th-anniversary [7] http://www.etan.org/action/saysorry.htm. Accessed 4 March 2015. [8] See the ‘Say Sorry for 65’ campaign publicity on The Act of Killing website: http://www.actofkilling.com/#action. This page has a hyperlink to an online petition, hosted by ‘change.org’ (https://www.change.org/p/president-sby-say-sorry-for-65). Accessed 4 March 2015 [9] http://www.actofkilling.com/#action. Accessed 4 March 2015. [10] On the concept of a ‘witnessing public’ see Meg McLagan, “Principles, Publicity, and Politics: Notes on Human Rights Media.” American Anthropologist 105.3 (2003): 609–612. [11] http://www.etan.org/news/2014/09breaking_the_silence.htm. Accessed 4 March 2015. [12] Originally published in The Nation, Feb. 28, 2014; see: http://www.thenation.com/article/178592/its-our-act-killing-too. Accessed 4 March 2015. [13] Rothberg, Michael. “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma Theory for Implicated Subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone.London: Routledge, 2013. xi–xviii. [14] http://www.etan.org/action/14taokpbs.htm [15] Fraser, Nancy. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World.” Theory, Culture and Society 24.4 (2007): 7–30. [16] For further discussion of global memory and the transnational public sphere, see Rosanne Kennedy, "Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere," in Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (ed.), Transnational Memory Circulation, Articulation, Scales, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and Boston, 2014: 51-78. Other Posts in this ForumThis post is part three of a four-part forum: "Transnational Memories: Sites, Knots, Methods." An earlier version was presented as part of a roundtable at the Modern Language Association's 2015 Convention in Vancouver that featured Rosanne Kennedy, Ann Rigney, Michael Rothberg, and Debarati Sanyal. In October 1998, a battle took place near Van in eastern Anatolia between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK). In many ways this was an “ordinary” battle in an area some consider North Kurdistan. Over the course of the 1990s, the Turkish state waged a brutal war of counter-insurgency against Kurdish militants that killed tens of thousands of fighters and civilians, destroyed thousands of villages, and displaced as many as a million people, all while denying the substantial minority of Kurds in Turkey basic human rights to language, culture, and political representation. The PKK, considered a terrorist organization by the European Union, the US, and Turkey, has fought for decades in the name of Kurdish independence and autonomy. A certain liberalization and de-escalation of the crisis within Turkey occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the reputation and political program of the PKK have been undergoing significant change. Yet, the Kurdish question remains an unresolved flashpoint in Turkey and the region, as recent fighting near the Turkish border in Syria and Iraq and the highly visible resistance in Kobanê make clear. The battle in October 1998 ended as many did, with the army capturing and, it seems, summarily executing a number of the Kurdish fighters. Among those executed fighters was one who would become an icon of the Kurdish cause: Sehît Ronahî—Martyr Ronahî—from the YAJK, the women’s brigade of the PKK. While the iconography of Kurdish martyrs is extensive—and includes many women who have fought with this secular, revolutionary movement—Sehît Ronahî represents an unusual case. Ronahî was born in Munich in 1965 and was known by her birth name, Andrea Wolf, before she joined the PKK in the mid-1990s. Previous to enlisting in the women’s brigade, Wolf had been involved in radical left politics in Germany, had served time in jail, and may have been affiliated with the Red Army Faction. Her experience in the radical left—and possibly the threat of returning to prison—eventually moved her to align herself with the Kurdish cause. In this short paper, I want to use the unexpected, but not unique, case of Wolf/Ronahî to reflect on some of the issues central to our roundtable. As a non-national who died in the national liberation struggle of a people long denied a nation-state, Wolf provides an occasion to reflect on memory and politics within and across borders. Her case challenges us to examine the status of lieux de mémoire beyond the context of the nation-state; the relevance of migration, media, and diaspora to memory studies; and the political and methodological implications of the transnational turn. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in the years since her murder, Wolf has been transformed into a transnational lieu de mémoire that condenses an array of not-entirely-compatible currents. In addition to being a martyr for Kurdish national liberation, Wolf has become both a symbol of socialist internationalism and an object of human rights campaigns by Turkish, German, and European organizations. Various groups claiming allegiance to Wolf’s legacy have commemorated her death in multiple sites by constructing what Astrid Erll would call a “plurimedial” constellation of memory. In 1999, at the PKK’s yearly convention, the party voted unanimously to make Wolf a symbol of internationalist struggle, and her memory remains central to the Kurdish cause. In 2013, two years after a Turkish human rights organization discovered a mass grave holding Wolf’s remains along with those of forty other militants, a massive tomb in the region near Van where she died was named in her memory. Speaking at the tomb’s dedication ceremony in Çatak, a Kurdish guerilla evoked Wolf as “a manifestation of the diversity and internationality of the Kurdish movement.” At the same time that Wolf circulates in the transnational Kurdish region, her memory has also remained present in Germany. There her story and image have been memorialized and remediated in books, posters, exhibitions, ceremonies, street demonstrations, and videos—most of them produced or organized by coalitions of radical German leftists and Kurdish activists in Europe. But her memory remains alive even in the mainstream press; a recent report in the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel evoked Wolf while discussing the suddenly fashionable topic of Kurdish women fighters in Kobanê. Finally, at an angle to both radical and mainstream currents in Germany, the internationally known artist Hito Steyerl—who was Wolf’s friend as a teenager in Munich—has produced an ongoing series of videos, essays, and performances that reflect on Wolf’s engagement with the PKK and mourn her death at the hands of the Turkish army. Videos such as November (2004) and Abstract (2012) constitute a requiem for internationalism, an interrogation of what she calls “traveling images” of revolutionary martyrdom, and an indictment of contributions by the German state and multinational corporations to the Turkish war against the Kurds. Steyerl begins her aesthetic engagement with Wolf’s memory by asking how a German “friend” can become a Kurdish “terrorist.” But Steyerl’s attempt to answer this question takes a self-reflexive turn as she realizes that she has herself in some fashion become, through her work, a “Kurdish protestor” and that the art world in which she moves is itself implicated in the transnational economies that produce the military technologies that killed Wolf. What can we make of this heterogeneous mnemonic activity, which I have only superficially evoked, and how does it help us think anew about transnational memory? Many of us have criticized Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire project for the way it remains within a nation-state framework and purifies the nation of colonial, postcolonial, and minority memories. Yet, Nora’s paradigm does help illuminate this case study. As Ann Rigney has often pointed out, lieux de mémoire make available an impressively flexible methodology because they highlight centripetal, condensed meanings along with the possibility of centrifugal ongoing metamorphosis. Following Rigney, we might say that this combination of condensation and displacement also has the potential to speak to the transnational work of memory. In this case, the mnemonic figure of Wolf-as-Ronahî condenses Kurdish nationalist aspirations, radical internationalist ideologies, and mainstream Euro-American fears about Third World terrorism. At the same time, those meanings demonstrate the possibility for mnemonic metamorphosis, as the recent reactivation of Wolf’s memory in the context of Kobanê exemplifies. But the Wolf case also reveals the limits of Nora’s project. If, as he puts it in “Between Memory and History,” the “differentiated network” of memory sites ultimately operates at the level of “national history,” then the conditions of possibility for Wolf to become a lieu de mémoire lie, as I have tried to indicate schematically, in the interaction of activities at a series of scales: between national aspirations, state repression, diasporic political organizing, histories of internationalist solidarity, and transnational media—a mixture that pushes the limits of the metaphor of the “site,” no matter how flexibly we conceive it. Steyerl’s notion of “traveling images”—which anticipates Erll’s notion of “traveling memory”—may be more evocative. Wolf’s story also complicates the linear narrative of continuously eroding “real” milieux de mémoire central to Nora’s project. Despite—or perhaps because of—the fully globalized context that made Ronahî possible and that has nourished her rise to iconic status, “real” communities continue to cluster around her memory sixteen years after her death: both in the Kurdish struggle and in extreme left milieus in Germany. But this case study also poses challenges to the emergent transnational memory studies that has arisen in response to Nora and what Erll calls the “second phase” of memory studies. Most important, from my perspective, it requires that we think more imaginatively about the status and scale of the political in memory studies. Nora’s focus on the nation retains plausibility because the nation-state continues to function as a memory-wielding agent of legitimation, discipline, and identity formation. Thus far, the primary referent for memory politics beyond the nation has been human rights, as Rosanne Kennedy discusses with great nuance in her contribution to this forum. As I’ve suggested, the discourse and practice of human rights do play a catalytic role in the Wolf case. Yet, the human rights framework is insufficient to describe both the salience of Ronahî’s memory and the political aspirations it evokes. An alternate term also emerges from this material: I want to propose that internationalism retains power both as a memory and an aspiration. The concept of “internationalism” may seem passé, and it is certainly not innocent, but it best describes the tradition of long-distance solidarity for which the traveling memory of Wolf stands. Remembering Ronahî leads us across national boundaries; but it also leads us to confront the borders that still exist and that are themselves forms of violence and injustice—in Kurdistan and elsewhere. We need new internationalisms because we still live in a world of nations. Other Posts in this ForumThis post is part four of a four-part forum: "Transnational Memories: Sites, Knots, Methods." An earlier version was presented as part of a roundtable at the Modern Language Association's 2015 Convention in Vancouver that featured Rosanne Kennedy, Ann Rigney, Michael Rothberg, and Debarati Sanyal. On Sunday 30 January 1972, a paratroop regiment of the British army killed 13 participants in a civil rights demonstration in the Northern Irish city of Derry; a 14th victim died later. This event has come to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ It has been remediated time and again since 1972: in literature, theatre, cinema, the visual arts, music. It has been the subject of memorials, and of two major judicial inquiries, one of which (the Widgery report of 1972) exonerated the army of all blame, while the other (the Saville report of 2010) acknowledged almost four decades later that their actions were “unjustified and unjustifiable,” an admission of culpability that lead to an official apology on the part of the British Prime Minister in that same year. The desire to see justice served with regard to this atrocity has been an important motor behind the intensity with which it has been remembered. As a result of all this attention, the significance of Bloody Sunday has extended beyond the particular city in which the atrocity occurred to become a shorthand for the long-term struggle of the catholic minority for civil rights in Northern Ireland as a whole. Bloody Sunday has thus become a classical ‘site of memory’ in Pierre Nora’s sense, a site-specific and locally-experienced event that stands for itself and, by a process of condensation and displacement, for much more besides.[1] What exactly it stands for is open to debate, and this polyvalence is arguably part of its resilience as a site (see further Rigney 2015).[2] What concerns me here today, however, is less how Bloody Sunday was remembered in Northern Ireland than its position within a larger, transnational field. The chances are that many of you reading this will also ‘recall’ Bloody Sunday, if only thanks to Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002) or U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1983). For if Bloody Sunday is a site-specific, locally-inflected memory site bound up with the city of Derry, it is also an example of what Astrid Erll (2011) has called a ‘travelling memory’ that operates across different national borders with the help of its mediations.[3] Bloody Sunday did not just become a transnational memory after the fact, however: it has always already been transnational. Bloody Sunday belonged, and was perceived from the outset as belonging, in what might be called a ‘canon’ of atrocities – many of which are called Bloody Sunday too - in which a peaceful demonstration by citizens is violently suppressed by state forces. These events are specifically related to the modern conditions of urban living as well as to the political condition of democracy, or would-be democracy, in which the will of the nation aspires to be represented in the workings of the state. The first Bloody Sunday to be named as such took place in Trafalgar Square in 1887. This involved the brutal breaking up of a march for civil liberties in which a coalition of socialists, workers organisations and Irish nationalists took part. Exactly a year later, this first Bloody Sunday was commemorated in a new mass gathering in London, which was also connected through a gesture of internationalist solidarity to the first anniversary of the deaths of the so-called Chicago Martyrs. It would appear that the mass shootings of demonstrators in St. Petersburg in 1905 was subsequently called ‘Bloody Sunday’ by analogy with the one in Trafalgar Square. There’s no time to go into details about these other ‘Bloody Sundays’, including the ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Dublin in 1920 and at Selma in 1965. Most important here is the fact that multidirectional comparisons between these various outbursts of state violence were very common on the part both of participants and observers.[4] As the Dublin-based Irish Times wrote in reaction to the atrocity in Derry, for example: “Sharpeville, Amritsar, Bloody Sunday 1920 – the parallels are inadequate” (31 January 1972). So from the get-go the 1972 Bloody Sunday resonated with outrages that had taken place elsewhere. I use the word resonance here deliberately as a way of designating particular linkages between events that are not based on chronological connections, but on systemic similarities that work across space and time. ‘Bloody Sunday’ is an event-type that, like a mnemonic wormhole, connects locations, more specifically, cities across the world. The result is a multi-sited, city-to-city memory that invites us to think of transnationalism not merely as a broadening of geographical scale but as a rethinking both of scale and of the relations between distance and proximity.[5] Each ‘Bloody Sunday’ is a singular event at the same time as it is grafted onto the memory of other civilian massacres in other cities as these have travelled through the international media and the arts. The perceived resonances between these multiple Bloody Sundays is enhanced by the visual record where the underlying drama of ‘citizens in action’ becoming victims of state violence is performed over and again in iconic images that capture the movement of the crowd, as they first assert their right to demonstrate and then have to flee from violence. This ambivalent combination of victimhood and agency seems to feed into the mobilizing power of such images, exemplifying Aby Warburg’s concept of Pathosformel (Pathosformula), a visible constellation that arouses both deep memory and deep affect.[6] So what sort of general issues can we distill from this very briefly presented example? Three interrelated things come to mind that bear on the issue of transnational memory and which are central to my research in progress. To begin with the case serves as a reminder that the transnational movements of memory are not a recent phenomenon, though transnationalism as an analytic perspective may be. Nation-building has always stood in tension with the movement of ideas, stories, and images across borders – with the help of media but also regularly supported by the actions of groups and individuals with a self-consciously internationalist agenda working to make common cause with people elsewhere. Recuperating the archive of such transnational entanglements will allow cities and the civic, rather than nations, to take centre stage in our analysis and help us go beyond methodological nationalism while still giving due account to the role of the state. Secondly, the case challenges cultural and literary studies to account more precisely for the movements of memory across borders – what gets remembered, picked up elsewhere and how? Judging by the resilience of ‘Bloody Sundays’ in the visual and textual record, there is something particularly potent about the combination of state violence and the right to protest. The ‘stickiness’ of these events in cultural memory, the fact that they are recalled over and again, could at least in part be explained by their melodramatic form.[7] A Bloody Sunday involves the dramatic conversion of scenes of innocence and hope into scenes of brutal repression. The result is a double-faced, literally outrageous figure of memory that dramatizes the ideals and shortcomings of democracy in a melodramatic form, encapsulating both the agency of citizens (as evidenced in their power to demonstrate and to flee) and the limits of that power in face of the state. In the future we need a greater understanding of the role of such aesthetic forms in mobilising people, both within and beyond state borders, and for particular causes and not for others. Finally, the case of Bloody Sunday challenges us to think more about, or to think in new ways, about the relationship between activism and memory, building further on Kristin Ross’s work on the afterlives of 1968.[8] Certainly in the cases briefly considered above memory and activism are deeply entangled: the commemoration of the outrage feeds back into the broader struggle to which the original demonstration already belonged – be this the struggle for workers’ rights or for national liberation. Distentangling the commemoration-activism nexus might help us move beyond the over-emphasis on the traumatic in memory studies and to think more clearly about the ways in which remembering the past, acting in the present, and shaping a different future have worked together, and continue to do so, across national borders. [1] Nora, Pierre, ed. 1997 [1984-92]. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. [2] Rigney, Ann. 2015. "Do Apologies End Events? Bloody Sunday, 1972-2010." In Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory, edited by Marek Tamm, 242-261. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [3] Erll, Astrid. 2011. "Travelling Memory." Parallax 17 (4): 4-18. [4] Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [5] See also De Cesari, Chiara, and Ann Rigney, eds. 2014. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter. [6] Hurttig, Marcus Andrew. 2012. Die entfesselte Antike: Aby Warburg und die Geburt der Pathosformel. Köln: Walther Hönig. [7] Brooks, Peter. 1995 [1976]. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [8] Ross, Kristin. 2002. May ’68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Other Posts in this ForumThroughout the Fall 2014 semester, the University of Illinois marked the centenary of World War I with a faculty-led, cross-campus initiative, The Great War: Experiences, Representations, Effects. We are pleased to conclude this series of blog posts on the initiative with reflections from Michelle Salerno, graduate research assistant for the initiative and Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre Department. Michelle is currently finishing her dissertation, “Playing American: Citizenship and Race in American Theatre and Performance during the Great War, 1917-1919,” on theatrical representations of the Great War. By Michelle Salerno When coordinators Michael Rothberg and Marcus Keller offered me the opportunity to work as the programming assistant on “The Great War: Experiences, Representations and Effects” I was eager to combine my experience in event planning with my dissertation research on the circulation of notions of race and citizenship in American theatre and performance during the First World War. The scale of the initiative quickly developed as our core projects were enhanced by upcoming events from all parts of the campus and the community. An impressive list of cross-campus sponsors, that continued to grow over the semester, helped to support and publicize lectures, symposiums, exhibits, performances, films, and courses to foster a continuing dialogue about the war and its influence. For me, as I’m sure it was for many others, it was a true privilege to be immersed in the themes, topics, and questions raised throughout the fall and we hope to continue to encourage this dialogue. Highlights of the Initiative In considering the numerous events of the project, it is important to note the work of students, both undergraduate and graduate, in the initiative. In connection with the Illinois Theatre production of Oh What a Lovely War, the department’s programming committee helped to organize “Then and Now: Theatre and Performance of The Great War.” The program included a reading of Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918) performed by actors from the MFA and BFA Acting and Theatre Studies programs, theatre minors, non-theatre students from across disciplines, and a community member. The play is a key component of my dissertation and the chance to share this rarely performed work was an incredible opportunity. Following the performance, several Theatre Studies doctoral students presented papers on 21st century responses to the war including graphic novels, video games, and twitter war re-enactment. Mine Eyes Have Seen offers a look at an African American family on the day they discover their youngest brother has been drafted. They debate, with their Jewish and Irish neighbors, if they are willing to contribute to the war effort on behalf of a country that allows lynch mobs and vigilante violence, racism, and segregation. The characters’ arguments for and against participating in the war profoundly resonated with current protests articulating the violence of institutional racism and the frequent disconnect between the rhetoric of nationalism and inclusion and the lived experiences of minority citizenship. Through directing and presenting the reading, my own understanding of the play expanded in innumerable ways thanks to the diligent work of the actors and the thoughtful feedback of the audience. In addition, the graduate students of “The Great War: Transnational Literary Response” reading group concluded their semester of meetings by discussing the play and offering comparative insights to the British and Irish literature they read for previous meetings. This group also worked with the English Student Council to organize a “Literature and War” event with readings of poetry and drama and the performance of live music. There were also numerous undergraduate students who encountered events on the First World War through their courses. The core course World War I and the Making of the Global Twentieth Century, offered by Tamara Chaplin and Peter Fritzsche from the History department, delved deeply into the complexity of the war and its commemoration, and many of these students attended initiative events. In addition, we also know of other courses with World War I content or classes that required, requested, or encouraged their students to attend particular events or exhibits to enhance classroom discussions. The IPRH “Inside Scoop” undergraduate event, with Lessons from Sarajevo author James Hicks, was particularly popular and facilitated a remarkable conversation about literature and war within the group. One of my favorite moments came in the final minutes of Oh What a Lovely War, a highly immersive theatre experience, when the relationship between the actors and the audience abruptly shifted in an extraordinary way. Since the department has chosen to remount the production in late February, I’ll refrain from divulging specifics, but I will note that the shift asks the audience to contextualize the First World War as part of a continuum of warfare through the sharing of personal history. Just as the Vietnam War ghosted the play when Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop first produced it in 1963, Robert Anderson’s production does not allow the audience to disconnect the First World War from our current moment. Instead, participants are encouraged to think through the complexities of war, violence, sacrifice, nationhood, citizenship, and personal history as a means to a deeper understanding of the continual making and re-making of history. The Great War Commemoration that Surrounds Us "The Great War: Experiences, Representations and Effects” was just a small contribution to the global recognition of the 100th anniversary of the start of the war including such responses as the beautifully somber 888,246 ceramic poppies that overwhelmed the Tower of London in Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, each standing for a British military fatality during the war. Research trips to other exhibits and events across the country have given me the opportunity to see how many American institutions examine the commemoration of the war. I highly recommend the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, MO that offers extensive collections on the war from a variety of perspectives and includes exhibits on its particular resonance in the Midwest. This museum also served as the primary American locus for the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, hosting a large scale Twitter re-enactment of the event discussed by Theatre doctoral student BJ Gailey in “Acting is Reenacting: Twitter, Archduke Ferdinand, and the Performance of History” in the aforementioned panel. College students from the University of Kansas and members of the Kansas City community are still tweeting as historical First World War characters so you can continue to watch the story unfold by following @KU_WW1 on Twitter.
In fact, propaganda posters were the most prominent feature of the exhibits I’ve seen this summer and fall including our own “La Grande Guerre: French Posters and Photographs from World War I” at the Krannert Art Museum. The museum shop at the National World War I Museum sells reproductions of many of these posters including a “Destroy This Mad Brute” iPhone cover based on the notorious anti-German propaganda poster (a horrifying and tempting item for a researcher writing about race and enemization during the war). Even our own Classic Home Consignment store in Champaign has been selling World War I propaganda posters and I’ve been told they’ve sold quite a few already.
If you are attending the MLA Convention in Vancouver, please join us for this roundtable, which is affiliated with the Presidential Theme, “Negotiating Sites of Memory.” It will take place Sunday, January 11, 2015 from 10:15-11:30 am in room 3, Vancouver Convention Centre East. Transnational Memories: Sites, Knots, Methods In the past 25 years, memory studies has emerged as a new interdisciplinary field of cultural inquiry. It aims for insight into practices of public remembrance and the sociocultural dynamics through which mediations of the past shape collective identities and inform social action. The development of this field was linked from the outset to investigations of national memory cultures and institutions, with the nation‐state taken as the most self‐evident framework for analysis. Pierre Nora’s pioneering, influential, and contested study Les Lieux de Memoire (1984‐1992) encapsulated the link between “territorialization” (focusing on how memory narratives are fixed, located, contained, “inherited”) and the nation (as the self‐evident frame within which narratives operate and identities are shaped). With the turn towards transnational approaches in the last decade, however, the concept of “sites of memory” has come under pressure as the assumed framework for memory studies. This roundtable will explore the consequences of the transnational turn for the study of sites and practices of memory.
In our increasingly globalized, networked, and mediated world, alternatives to national models of memory as a resource for identity constructions are beginning to emerge without yet being fully understood. Memory discourses are variously deployed in the mobilization of social and political causes in the international arena, for instance, between the former East and former West in Europe. Illustrative of such transnational dynamics is the international spread of “public apologies” for past injustices or the recent evocation of “Dachau” on the part of Greek protestors against German‐led economic policies. Developing better methodological and conceptual tools for studying these dynamics has now become a matter of scholarly urgency. This roundtable aims to introduce and discuss recent theoretical models that emphasize the dynamic and generative character of memory practices beyond the nation-state. Important groundwork has been done on this (by members of this roundtable among others), e.g. on "cosmopolitan memory" (Levy/Sznaider 2001), "multidirectional memory" (Rothberg 2009), "memory in the global age" (Assmann/Conrad 2010), “noeuds de mémoire/knots of memory” (Rothberg, Sanyal, Silverman 2010), "transcultural memory" (Crownshaw et al 2011), “travelling memory” (Erll 2011), “dialogical memory” (Assmann 2011), “moving testimony” (Kennedy 2014), and “transnational memory” (De Chesari/Rigney 2014). The roundtable will bring together four scholars of cultural memory, based on three continents, who have been actively involved in promoting the transnational turn in memory studies: Rosanne Kennedy (ANU), Ann Rigney (Utrecht), Michael Rothberg (Illinois), and Debarati Sanyal (Berkeley). Three of the presenters (Kennedy, Rigney, and Rothberg) are part of an internationally funded research project called Network in Transnational Memory Studies (NITMES) and they will be able to draw on their experiences of collaboration across national borders. During the roundtable, each participant will provide a brief “position statement” of 10 minutes addressing some of the questions above; plenty of time will remain for discussion. Question to be addressed may include the following: To what extent is the concept of “sites of memory” still relevant? Can alternative models, such as “noeuds de mémoire/knots of memory,” supplement Nora’s original formulation? What methodological innovations are necessary for moving the study of remembrance from local and national sites to transnational and global knots of memory? How have phenomena such as migration, new media, and the formation of diasporic communities challenged the nation-state as framework of remembrance? How will global environmental challenges that exceed the nation state - climate change, species extinction – be remembered? Can global environmental challenges provide new methods for memory beyond the nation? How have commemorative practices circulated beyond the nation? (Possible, internationally relevant examples for consideration: 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I; 2015 is the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli as well as the Armenian Genocide.) Earlier this year, I invited Professor Taner Akçam to speak to students and faculty at the University of Illinois about the Armenian Genocide and the Turkish state’s denial of that genocide. Professor Akçam, the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Professor of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, is one of the world’s leading genocide scholars and one of the first Turkish intellectuals to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide. Last week he informed me that he is cancelling his visit to Illinois to honor the boycott that has arisen in the wake of the university’s decision to revoke a job offer to Dr. Steven Salaita because of comments Dr. Salaita made on twitter about the recent bombing of Gaza. As Professor Akçam makes clear in the statement below, his personal experience with censorship, imprisonment, harassment, and violence makes it impossible for him to visit our campus until a just resolution to the Salaita case is found. While I deeply regret that our students and faculty will not have the opportunity to meet and hear from Professor Akçam this fall, I understand and respect his decision. His own story demonstrates all too clearly what happens when those in power attempt to cut off debate about matters of public concern, including controversial political conflicts. The recent controversy on our own campus concerns the hot-button issue of Israel-Palestine, but Professor Akçam’s experience illustrates the all too real risks to academic freedom and freedom of speech that can emerge in any field of research once political expression is limited. --Michael Rothberg, Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois I personally know the value of freedom of expression and I have paid a heavy price for it in my life. I was thrown in prison in 1976 simply because Turkish authorities did not like what I wrote and said about democratic rights and the rights of Kurdish people. The government, the judicial system and law enforcement authorities held tremendous power in Turkey, while I was a mere citizen, a young student at the time; next to them, I was a nobody and freedom of expression was just some words written on paper.
Later, I became the target of a hate campaign here in the US organized by extreme nationalists from Turkey because they did not like my scholarly work on the Armenian Genocide. I was not only threatened with death but I was also physically assaulted in New York in 2006 and had to be protected by campus police. I was detained at the Canadian border in February 2007 because those who did not like what I had to say on the Armenian genocide vandalized my Wikipedia web-page and portrayed me as an “enemy of Turkey and a terrorist.” Letters have been sent to universities to cancel my lectures when I have been invited to speak and in some of those cases university officials were intimidated. I was also on the hit-list of a covert organization in Turkey known as “Ergenekon” which consists of some members of both the armed forces and civil bureaucrats. These circles arranged the assassination of my dear friend, the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, in Istanbul in January 2007 because they did not like what he said and wrote. So, I know the value of freedom of speech and the weight of it resides deep inside my flesh and bones. It is indeed very sad for me to experience practices here in American universities where certain power centers can hold sway over an individual’s right to express their opinion. This is doubly saddening to me because when I was the target of attacks it was American universities that came to my defense and who always had my back. They ignored the threats and intimidation and were stalwart defenders of freedom of speech. America is indeed that safe haven for so many of us who have escaped persecution in our home countries. For that reason, perhaps out of gratitude, we are willing to give the benefit of the doubt when we see injustices played out here, believing that the US has a just system of governance and law and, even more importantly, a strong democratic moral center. But when you learn that someone can lose a job opportunity simply because of something they expressed about a political issue, you suddenly feel quite naked, as if a warm cozy blanket had been pulled off you. Naked, because you realize that the “powers that be” reside here too and you are just as vulnerable as you were before when “they” could decide they don’t like what you have to say and make your life hell because of it. The job offer to Professor Steven Salaita was withdrawn based solely on his strongly worded expressions via Twitter on Gaza and Palestine. Whether or not Professor Salaita’s utterances were appropriate is not the point here! Let’s even accept that they are inappropriate! This has nothing to do with my argument. His statements may have disturbed a university president, someone with a sensitive temperament, but then that president might be equally disturbed by the violence of bombs falling on innocent children and the utterances of the cheerful supporters of those bombs. Persecution, intimidation, harassment and abuse of power against those whose thoughts and views do not suit the “powers that be” is nothing new. This has been a problem since the origins of humanity. We should never let power be abused in this reckless way. The boundaries of freedom of speech cannot be determined arbitrarily, but must be determined by the rule of law, which is the product of the fight of humanity against any kind of ideology and practice based on discrimination, hate and racism! I am canceling my lecture at the University of Illinois to show my solidarity with Professor Steven Salaita and to protest the decision of the Chancellor, the President, and the Board of Trustees of the University. This semester the University of Illinois is marking the centenary of World War I with a faculty-led, cross-campus initiative, The Great War: Experiences, Representations, Effects. During the course of the semester Days and Memory will be publishing a series of posts related to the war. We are pleased to continue this series with Dennis Baron's reflections on the impact of World War I on language policy in the United States. By Dennis Baron In April, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. In addition to sending troops to fight in Europe, Americans waged war on the language of the enemy at home. German was the second most commonly-spoken language in America, and banning it seemed the way to stop German spies cold. Plus, immigrants had always been encouraged to switch from their mother tongue to English to signal their assimilation and their acceptance of American values. Now speaking English became a badge of patriotism as well, a way to prove that you were not a spy. The war on language was fought on two fronts, one legal, the other, in the schools. Its impact was immediate and long-lasting. German was the target, but the other “foreign” tongues suffered collateral damage. Immigrant languages in America went into decline, and there was a precipitous drop in the study of foreign languages in US schools as well. Speak English, it’s the law Boycotting German was the first step in the campaign, but legislating against the language quickly followed. Scribner’s was urged to publish no German titles during the war. Sheet music dealers refused to handle German songs. At least one American Berlin was renamed Liberty. Even German foods were rebranded. Just as later, during the Iraq War, French fries would become freedom fries, in the America of World War I, German fried potatoes became American fries, sauerkraut morphed into liberty cabbage, and superpatriots even caught the liberty measles. In addition, new laws regulated the use of foreign languages. Responding to a growing sentiment that using anything but English gave aid and comfort to the enemy, the Trading with the Enemy Act (50 USC Appendix), passed in June, 1917, suppressed the American foreign-language press and declared non-English printed matter unmailable without a certified English translation. Across the country, state and local ordinances forbade the use of foreign languages, urged immigrants to switch to English immediately, and punished those who failed to comply. On May 23, 1918, Iowa Gov. William Harding banned the use of any foreign language in public: in schools, on the streets, in trains, even over the telephone, a more public instrument then than it is today. For Harding, the First Amendment “is not a guaranty of the right to use a language other than the language of this country—the English language.” Harding’s English-only order covered freedom of religion as well: “Let those who cannot speak or understand the English language conduct their religious worship in their home.” And he told one reporter, “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.” Speaking in Des Moines five days later, former president Theodore Roosevelt endorsed Harding’s “Babel Proclamation,” introducing a phrase that would become a refrain of today’s official English movement: "America is a nation—not a polyglot boarding house. . . . There can be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes; one nationality—the American—and therefore only one language—the English language." Such attitudes had a chilling effect on language use. 18,000 people were charged in the Midwest with violating the various new English-only statutes. Many of the wartime English-only laws were later repealed or allowed to expire. But the decline in non-English languages in America that they initiated continued, reinforced by postwar immigration reform. Responding to a new wave of isolationism, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, slowing immigration from the nonanglophone countries of Europe to a trickle and denying admission to nonanglophones from just about everywhere else (Asians were banned completely, and in the debate over the bill, Jews were singled out as particularly unassimilable). When immigration re-opened again in 1965, Americans who, after more than 40 years of “reform” simply assumed that their country had always been monolingual, reacted to the new, unfamiliar immigrant languages by declaring English endangered, attacking bilingual education, and passing new laws making English the official language of government, the workplace, and the schools. Speak the language of your flag The schools opened up a second front in the Great War on foreign languages in World War I America. In 1918, the New York Times reported that as many as 25 states had already removed German from the curriculum, an action the newspaper applauded as “a matter of polity, of patriotism, of Americanism” and “good hard common sense.” Schools banned foreign-languages from classrooms and schoolyards, promoting English not just as the best way to succeed in life, but also as the language for patriots. In 1918, the Chicago Woman’s Club launched Better American Speech Week to further this agenda. With slogans like “Speak the language of your flag”; “American Speech means American loyalty”; and “Better Speech for Better Americans,” children were encouraged to learn English, and those who already spoke the language were asked to speak it better. Schoolchildren had to take a “Watch Your Speech” pledge which began, “I love the United States of America. I love my country’s language,” and included among its promises, “that I will say a good American ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in place of an Indian grunt ‘un-hum’ and ‘nup-um’ or a foreign ‘ya’ or ‘yeh’ and ‘nope.’” Better American Speech Week reflected the spirit of wartime American, encoding patriotism, the assimilation of immigrants, and a rejection of minority languages and dialects. It resonated with popular opinion and was embraced by schools and by the press from coast to coast. In addition to pledges and posters, schools recruited students to spy on the usage of their peers. Those caught committing crimes against the language were interned, hauled before student tribunals certain to convict them, and made to wear signs testifying to their shame. Exposing the enemies of English was the least that children could do while their parents were busy exposing the enemies of the state. After the war the US Supreme Court threw out laws in Nebraska and Iowa banning foreign-language education (Meyer v. Nebraska [262 US 390] 1923), but the damage was already done. Before World War I, 25% of American high school students studied German. By 1922, that figure had plummeted to 0.6%, a level from which it never recovered. World War II did not see the same language restrictions as World War I, and by then learning the language of the enemy rather than banning it had become an important tool for national security. Still, in 1948, only 0.8% of American students were studying German in high school.
The War to End All Wars failed to do that. But the Great War on language that began in 1917 rages on despite having met its goals. Today, with immigrants abandoning their first languages faster than ever and foreign-language enrollments still precarious, many Americans still regard English, and therefore America, as under attack. States like California and Arizona, where ongoing immigration still creates large numbers of minority-language speakers, ban bilingual education in the mistaken belief that this will hasten the switch to English, and Iowa, where only 3% of residents speak a language other than English (and many in that number speak English as well), revive the Babel Proclamation and declare English the state’s official language to save it from imminent destruction. American culture has always been hostile to foreign languages, and to native languages that aren’t English, so even without World War I, we still wouldn’t be celebrating National Heritage Language Day. But even though the war didn’t make the world safe for democracy, it did its bit to make the country “safe” for English. In fall 2014, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host a cross-campus initiative marking the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. The Great War: Experiences, Representations, Effects will bring together faculty, students, and community members to explore the impact of the war from multiple perspectives—historical, cultural, political, and artistic. During the course of the semester-long initiative, Days and Memory will serve as the project blog, publishing reflections and reports on issues related to the Great War. As you can see from the initiative’s website, a diverse array of activities is planned for the fall, including a team-taught history course on “World War I and the Making of the Global Twentieth Century,” lectures by such renowned scholars as Timothy Snyder and Taner Akçam, performances of the musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, a film series, an exhibition of French propaganda posters, and much more. Most of us involved in the organization of The Great War: Experiences, Representations, Effects are not scholars of World War I. My own work has been on the representations, memories, and legacies of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but it was clear to me that such an important anniversary deserves to be marked and that its implications need to be explored. Indeed, as the historian Jay Winter argues in Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, World War I spurred the confrontation with trauma, mass violence, and memory that we now associate especially with World War II: “it is in the Great War that we can see some of the most powerful impulses and sources of the later memory boom, a set of concerns with which we still live, and—given the violent landscape of contemporary life—of which our children and grandchildren are unlikely to be free. . . . [I]t is important to recognize the extent to which in Europe and elsewhere the shadow of the Great War has been cast over later commemorative forms and cadences.” Because of research I have been doing on Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany, I have spent the last two weeks in Berlin—perhaps the center of commemorative confrontation with National Socialism and its legacies. This year, however, reflection on World War I has taken over and can be found in different forms throughout the city. The Deutsches Historisches Museum (the German Historical Museum) has a large exhibit running called simply Der Erste Welt Krieg, 1914-1918 (The First World War, 1914-1918). The State Museums of Berlin are sponsoring a full program of exhibitions and conferences, and the Humboldt University has organized a series of discussions and lectures under the rubric “The Berlin University in the First World War: What History does the University of the Present Need?” No doubt this is just the tip of the iceberg. As a cultural critic, I have been especially interested in artistic confrontations with the war. The HAU Theater—one of Berlin’s most experimental venues—hosted an ambitious documentary theater production this month created by Hans-Werner Kroesinger and Regine Dura under the title Schlachtfeld Erinnerung, 1914/2014 [Battlefield Memory, 1914/2014]. Schlachtfeld Erinnerung is a multilingual play; the four actors alternate between German, English, Bosnian, and Serbian, and frequently layer two languages on top of each other. The script draws on diverse historical, political, and literary sources to present a multi-perspectival reflection on Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as well as consideration of the prehistory and long-term legacies of conflict in the Balkans. As recent news reports have illustrated, the meaning of the assassination in Sarajevo remains a hotly contested matter bearing on contemporary politics in ex-Yugoslavia and the play provides important context for those debates. Schlachtfeld Erinnerung is also accompanied by Dura’s exhibit Open Spaces, which was staged first in Istanbul and focuses especially on German-Turkish relations during World War I. Like the play, the exhibition is fashioned from an array of documentary materials; it assembles an archive of interviews, documents, and images that reframes understanding of relations between Germany and Turkey that are currently dominated by the aftermath of guestworker migration and conflicts over Turkey’s potential accession to the European Union. These are also very current, contested issues, and the exhibition successfully makes the case for the war’s continuing resonance in Turkey—as in this example of a recent campaign poster by the ruling AKP calling on the memory of Gallipoli in order to convince Turks of continuing threats to their sovereignty. Schlachtfeld Erinnerung is not an entirely successful production, but even its miscues raise interesting questions for those of us reflecting on the Great War’s commemoration. One wonders, for example, about the decision to tell this story through the voices of four men. Doesn’t that confirm a long-outdated association of war solely with men’s experiences? How would the play have changed if women’s voices were also included? This surprising absence of those voices (albeit less surprising in Germany than it might be in the US) prompts reflection on how questions of gender will enter into the centenary. Another dramaturgical choice I wondered about involves the way the play’s documentary mode leads it to privilege carefully dated events. It is filled with monologues that begin something like this: “On October 8, 1908…” While historical specificity will be important to any understanding of the war, the fetishization of the date—even if meant ironically, as may be the case here—may distract from larger underlying forces and, in any case, simply doesn’t work well as theater. The highpoints of the play were occasions in which personal stories broke through the accumulation of chronology, and humor lightened the (understandably) serious tone of the work. The insistence on the date raises questions about narrative: how can the story of the war be told in a way that coordinates the specificity of events, the singularity of experiences, and the deeper structures out of which events and experiences emerge? How can this work of coordination be done in a way that engages audiences without trivializing history? Finally, there is the question of language and the larger issue of perspective that it opens up. Schlachtfeld Erinnerung is especially innovative, as I’ve mentioned, in insisting on the use of multiple languages. It catches audiences’ attention immediately by starting not in the language of the play’s title (German), but rather in Bosnian. Throughout the play, speeches and dialogue were usually translated, sometimes sequentially, but often simultaneously. Over the course of the almost two hour long play, this strategy became irritating, as the simultaneity of the languages meant that often neither language could be understood. There are good aesthetic and political reasons for experimenting in this way, but in insisting on the opacity of language the play also pushes once again the boundaries of reception. When we tell stories of violence and trauma—especially stories that are necessarily transnational and transcultural—how can we calibrate the balance of translatability and opacity? A performance like Schlachtfeld Erinnerung is a perfect venue for exploring this issue, but the play also demonstrates (despite itself) the difficulty of creating multi-perspectival and multilingual narrative. It’s obvious that the issues at stake here are not unique to World War I, but the Great War provides an occasion for renewed reflection on these and many other questions. We hope that this blog can serve as one site for such reflection in the coming months. Please join us and take part in the discussion. If you would like to follow the events associated with the The Great War: Experiences, Representations, Effects at the University of Illinois, you can find the website here, or join our Facebook group page here. A calendar of upcoming events around campus can be found here. By Priscilla Charrat Nelson The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies is pleased to co-sponsor the upcoming graduate conference entitled The Future of Trauma and Memory Studies, which will take place April 11th-12th. To mark the occasion, University of Illinois graduate student, Priscilla Charrat, takes a look at the recent work of the conference’s keynote speaker, Stef Craps (Ghent University), and looks forward to his keynote presentation, “Trends in Trauma Theory.” Stef Craps's 2014 MLA talk entitled "‘You call it disorder ... We call it life’: Postcolonial Trauma in Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love" proposed an analysis of Forna's 2010 novel, which addresses Sierra Leone's eleven-year civil war and its aftermath. Craps's analysis, and its strength, lies undeniably in the unsettling premise that while war survivors can obviously be identified as vulnerable (vulnerability being the theme of the 2014 MLA convention), this vulnerability might not only come from the trauma of war, but also from the professional psychological help survivors receive from European psychologists. This help, Craps argues, might prove partly detrimental because it does not address the cultural specificity of the locus of trauma. The expected trauma-diagnosis-treatment-healing process is therefore disrupted by the inadequacy of the direct importation of Western psychology to a non-Western setting. Craps's talk was very much in line with the arguments he develops in his latest book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013), where he advocates for addressing trauma in a postcolonial context on the postcolonial subject's own cultural terms rather than privileging the Western, Freudian, event-based notion of trauma. His position reflects a larger turn within memory studies, away from founding branches like psychoanalysis and Holocaust studies, toward an interest in more structural and diffuse phenomena such as slow ecological violence, quotidian violence linked with race, gender, and sexual orientation, or the day-to-day violence of living in a postcolonial setting. For Craps, the European bias jeopardizes trauma theory's own goal of ethical engagement in three distinct ways. Firstly, it does not take into consideration non-Western forms of violence, and fails to deliver on its promise of transculturalism by not acknowledging non-Western trauma on its own terms. Secondly, the direct import of a Western concept precludes discussions of how a traumatic stressor might be defined in a non-Western context, as illustrated by the quote from Forna's novel included in Craps's talk title, "You call it disorder…We call it life." Finally, trauma theory tends to focus on the individual rather than on societal dynamics. Craps further pointed out that trauma theory tends to favor modernist aesthetics of aporia and fragmentation as well as validate the failure of narrative as a literary technique, which leads to a narrow canon of trauma narratives considered by critics.
In the Q&A session following his talk, Craps insisted, however, that he does not want to essentialize Western and non-Western trauma, but rather advocates for a larger consideration of all types of trauma, including insidious trauma. He pointed out that insidious trauma could also happen in the West, and that event-based trauma happens in non-Western contexts. With this in mind, one might also want to consider further the interaction between event-based trauma and a context of structural trauma. We are extremely excited to have Stef Craps as our keynote speaker at the upcoming graduate conference on The Future of Trauma and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His keynote, “Trends in Trauma Theory,” will address recent turns in the field, such as globalization, de-aestheticization, perpetration and limitation. We look forward to the discussion his talk will inspire as well as the work by graduate students to be presented throughout the conference. For a full schedule of The Future of Trauma and Memory conference, you can find the conference’s webpage here. |
Illinois Jewish Studieswww.facebook.com/IllinoisJewishStudies/The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studiesis an interdisciplinary program based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Founded in 2009 and located within the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, HGMS provides a platform for cutting-edge, comparative research, teaching, and public engagement related to genocide, trauma, and collective memory.
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