Remaking memory and the agency of the aesthetic

Abstract

This article examines the role of the creative arts in renegotiating the border between memorable and unmemorable lives. It does so with specific reference to the (un)forgetting of the colonial soldiers in European armies during World War One. Focussing on the role of aesthetic form in generating memorability, it shows how the creative use of a medium can help redefine the borders of imagined communities by commanding the attention of individual subjects and hence providing conditions for a cognitive and affective opening to the memory of strangers. It concludes that future studies of transformations in collective memory should take a multiscalar approach which takes into account both the shifting social frameworks of memory and the small changes that occur in the micro-politics of viewing and reading.

Decolonizing Flanders fields: Flemish Great War commemoration and the agency of literature

“…What allows works of art and literature to contribute to mnemonic change is, as Ann Rigney (2021: 14) explains, not only “[i]ntegrating memories into existing narrative schemata,” but also mobilizing “defamiliarisation—or, more precisely the defamiliarisation constitutive of aesthetic experience” that can disrupt customary habits of identification. Lamrabet’s analysis makes clear that, in the Flemish context, it is precisely the particularity of aesthetic experience that is being denied to migrant voices.…”

“…Still, these developments have not affected the memory of the First World War, and the unreflective ethnic homogeneity of First World War memory points to certain blockages in contemporary Flemish cultural memory. Less a matter of forgetting, denial, or repression (Bobineau, 2017), the failure to articulate the memories of war, of colonialism, and of postwar labor migration points to “a mnemonic pathology” that Ann Rigney (2021), following Ann Laura Stoler, calls “colonial aphasia” (p. 12): an inability to see connections between or find meanings in memories that fall outside of available memory frames. As Sarah De Mul (2012: 173) observes, the problem is less “a general absence of a collective postimperial memory discourse”—indeed, there is a plethora of isolated performances, protests, and interventions—than the “incoherent and inherently diversified nature of Belgian postcolonial cultures” that allows “specific, repetitive memory patterns of empire” to persist and preclude a more robust articulation of different experiences and traditions.…”

“…Rigney (2021: 18–19) emphasizes that artistic and literary interventions have a slight but undeniable agency in creating new sites of memorability: “small qualitative changes do matter,” and minor shifts in the “micropolitics of reading, viewing and reacting” have the potential to be incrementally scaled up. Art and literature, then, have “a distinctive role to play in what is a multi-sited and multi-medial process.” While Rigney’s examples from the British, German, and French contexts illustrate the incremental agentive power of literature, this power only accrues over time (one of her examples, Mulk Raj Anand’s 1939 novel Across the Black Water , took over 60 years to enter a productive dynamic of remediation), and tells us little about how contemporary literature can intervene in a situation of memorial aphasia when its interventions do not immediately resonate with dominant memory frames.…”

Refracting implication: The question of silence in (A)pollonia

“…The recognition of the Righteous is meant as an example of the past in the present, raising its own questions of and for the inter-generational transmission of civic (distinct from religious) values. As Ann Rigney (2021) writes:…”

Pre-emptive memories: Anticipating narratives of Covid-19 in practices of commemoration

“…Nonetheless, the events portrayed in these images seem intentionally designed to be "memorable" in some way, constructed as a recognizable synecdoche of the whole crisis in which they are framed, affecting the collectivity also at an emotional level. They have been packed and directed in order to fit the current grammars and aesthetics of memorability (Rigney, 2012(Rigney, , 2021, to become an event, as they are bygone although they are in progress, inscribed in the collective memory while they are still happening (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017).…”