Mediations of Outrage: How Violence Against Protestors is Remembered

In January 2010, Prageeth Ekneligoda, a journalist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka was forcibly disappeared. Since then, his wife Sandya has been searching for truth and justice while organising periodic protests to keep his memory alive in the public sphere. In some of these protests, she invokes Kali, the Hindu mother goddess of death and destruction, beseeching her to punish the perpetrators. Foregrounding public cursing as a form of memory activism, with its own aesthetics, this article makes three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that protest performances that foreground impunity can be analysed as powerful enactments of ‘dissident memory’ that challenge ‘official political memory’ and its manifestations in the ‘memoryscape’ of a nation. Second, I locate Sandya’s protest performance within a broader local and global vein of gendered activism in contexts of mass disappearances that shifts the aesthetics and affective mood/register of the disappearance protest from grief and mourning to rage and vengeance, taps into memory differently, and intervenes in the postwar memoryscape from a different agentive location. Third, I argue that Sandya’s increasing reliance on cursing must be apprehended as a response to continued impunity, which decentres the victims and survivors in favour of insistently centring and remembering the perpetrators.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disappearances, dissident memory and magic: Sandya Ekneligoda’s struggle for justice

Kodikara

2024

“…Amid this collective flow, there is one point when the camera zooms in on two individuals, an injured and bleeding young man being cradled in the arms of a friend, apparently dying before our eyes. This moment of zooming in gives a face to the memory of protest, making it ‘concrete, condensed, portable’ (Rigney, 2020: 720). In its portrayal of immediacy, urgency, collective terror and individual suffering, the footage of Santa Cruz produces a powerful affect which, at the time of its reception by western audiences, was experienced as the ‘shock of catastrophe’ (McCosker, 2004: 74).…”

Section: The Santa Cruz Massacre: Travelling Out Into the Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Adding to this shock was the fact that this was footage of a civic massacre of unarmed civilians. Civic massacres, suggests Rigney (2020: 717–718), are ‘highly memorable’ because they present a powerful opposition between good and evil, ‘capturing in a condensed form the opposition between rights and might, between the rights of citizens to make their voice heard and the repression of that right on the part of the state’ (Rigney, 2020: 718). In the case of Santa Cruz, the contrast between ‘might and right’ is made vividly real due to the heartrending depiction of the youth of the victims.…”

Section: The Santa Cruz Massacre: Travelling Out Into the Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Travelling and multiscaler memory: Remembering East Timor’s Santa Cruz massacre from the transnational to the intimate

Kent

2023

This article tracks the memory of East Timor’s Santa Cruz massacre across time and space, attending to the multiple scales at which it is imbued with meaning. While footage of the massacre initially had a strong impact in the west, helping to mobilise new audiences and spark a new wave of international solidarity for East Timor’s independence, the memory of Santa Cruz has now come ‘home’, increasingly solidifying as a foundational narrative of the Timor-Leste state. Ethnographic attention to the intimate scale, including the home and the neighbourhood, reveals, however, that Santa Cruz exceeds its ‘national’ meanings. In these spaces the families and friends of the dead communicate with, and care for, them, and the spirits of those whose bodies have not been recovered activate a questioning of continuous losses and absences. The case study demonstrates that an analysis of ‘travelling’ memory through a multiscaler lens can provide a fuller picture of its social and political import. It also shows how ethnographic methods can generate rich insights into the intersections between the transnational, national and intimate and shed light on the affective power of lived, embodied memory.

“…The emerging interest in the entanglements between memory, activism and social and political change is an exciting new direction in Memory Studies (Gutman, 2017; Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023; Katriel and Reading, 2015; Rigney, 2018). Scholars have begun to make sense of the ‘memory-activism nexus’ (Rigney, 2018) by exploring the interplay between memory activism : how activists produce cultural memory that aims to challenge hegemonic narratives (Gutman, 2017; Rigney, 2018: 372; Wüstenberg, 2017), the memory of activism : ‘how earlier struggles for a better world are culturally recollected’ (Rigney, 2020: 708; see also Katriel and Reading, 2015) and memory in activism: ‘ how the cultural memory of earlier struggles informs new movements in the present’ (Rigney, 2020: 708). These approaches offer rich lines of inquiry to guide our understanding of memory and activism.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory, activism and the arts in Asia and the Pacific

Black,

Kennedy,

Kent

2024

The emerging interest in the entanglements between memory, activism and social and political change is an exciting new direction in Memory Studies. This special issue aims to extend the repertoire of histories, cultural practices, and epistemologies from which theorizing about the memory-activism nexus is drawn through a focus on Asia and the Pacific, including diasporic communities in Australia. By centring engagements with memory in Asia as well as the Pacific, the issue opens new lines of inquiry.