Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:43:42.119Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Memory, Migration and Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2016

Svend Erik Larsen
Svend Erik Larsen*
Affiliation:
School of Communication and Culture, Department of Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Langelandsgade 139, DK 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

More often than not, memory is taken to be the storehouse of past experiences situated in a local context. However, recent theories have moved the focus to the process of memory which, in any present moment, allows the past, collective or individual, to emerge as a construction that works as a strong driving force of identity formation. In this perspective the memory process selects features of the past and turns them into more or less coherent structures, which then will have to be checked out with others in order for them to exercise their role as valid interpretations of the past and building blocks of present and future identity. Memories are therefore dialogical phenomena shaped by discussion, or more broadly by exchanges in various media, concerning the selected features, their configuration and the identities they promote. Today, the globalized flows of migration open up a new set of problems for the understanding of memories and their functions. When migration becomes a dominant experience across the globe, the concepts of locality and of local experiences changes and raise a new question: can we imagine and attach any meaning to globalized memories? Today, a huge amount of literatures from all corners of the world takes issue with this question, the so-called literatures of migration, where the literary imagination suggests answers to the open question of what memory might mean in a globalized world. To address this question, the Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap (2008) and the Australian context will serve as my point of reference.

Type
Regimes of Memory II
Information
European Review , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 2016 , pp. 509 - 522
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Tsiolkas, C. (2008) The Slap (London: Atlantic Books).Google Scholar
2. Walkowitz, R. (2006) The location of literature: the transnational book and the migrant writer. Contemporary Literature, 47(4): Immigrant Literature, pp. 527–545, cf. K. Gelder (2010) Proximate reading: Australian literature in transnational reading frameworks. In: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature: Common Readers and Cultural Critics (special issue). http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1535/2082 (2 October 2014). See also E. Pavlides (2013) Un-Australian Fictions. Nation, Multiculture(alism) and Globalisation, 1988-2008 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing).Google Scholar
3. Adelson, L. (2005) The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan).Google Scholar
4. Hage, G. (2000) White Nation. Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge); L. Jayasuriya, D. Walker and J. Gothard (eds) (2003) Legacies of White Australia. Race, Culture, Nation (Crawley: Western Australia Press); B. Hodge and J. O’Carroll (2007) Borderwork in Multicultural Australia (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin); D. Carter (2006) Dispossession. Dreams and Diversity. Issues in Australian Studies (Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education); J. Jupp (2007) From White Australia to Woomera. The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
5.In social theory the notion ‘mediated social interaction’ is often used to indicate that no social interaction, however spontaneous it may appear, happens without the use of various cultural tools, discourse in particular, but also objects, institutions and behaviour. The relation to collective memory of this mediation is underlined by James Wertsch, among others, in Voices of Collective Remembering from 2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), cf. his Mind as Action from 1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). However, embodiment as a crucial aspect of mediation is only rarely taken into account, but Henri Bergson does in Matière et Mémoire (1896) (as do Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Memory may emerge in the present as embodied habits which are decontextualized repetitions of past experience like the use of a keyboard, separated from conscious reflection when performed, but not when interrupted by, for example, a slap. I am developing the relation memory, mediation and embodiment further in an ongoing collective enterprise ‘Text, Action, Space’, now working with a project ‘Exploring Texts, Media and Memory’ (www.folk.uib.no/hlils/tasweb).Google Scholar
6.Novels by Christos Tsiolkas: Loaded (1995), The Jesus Man (1998), Dead Europe (2005), The Slap (2008), Barracuda (2013).Google Scholar
7. Arendt, H. (1957) Karl Jaspers: citizen of the world. In: P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle: Open Court), pp. 539–549.Google Scholar
8. Glissant, E. (1981) Le discours Antillais (Paris: Seuil), p. 180.Google Scholar
9. Walcott, D. (1974) The muse of history. In: A. Donnell and L. Welsh (eds) (1996) The Routledge Reader of Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge), p. 357.Google Scholar
10.See also Larsen, S. E. (2011) Memory constructions and their limits. Orbis Litterarum, 66(6), pp. 448–467.Google Scholar
11.Cf. the term ‘travelling’ in Bal, M. (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Toronto: Toronto University Press).Google Scholar
12.Cf. the term ‘negotiation’ in Nuttall, S. and Coetzee, C. (eds) (1998) Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
13. Halbwachs, M. (1925) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Alcan); M. Rothberg (2009) Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press); cf. D. Levy, and N. Sznaider (2002) Memory unbound. The holocaust and the formation of cosmopolitan memory. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(1), pp. 87–106. On recent trends in memory studies, A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) (2008) Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: de Gruyter).Google Scholar
14. Larsen, S. E. (2012) Forgiveness as a challenge to the law. In: H. Porsdam and T. Elholm (eds), Dialogues on Justice (Berlin: de Gruyter), pp. 141–159; S. E. Larsen (2012) After the battle. Complexities of emotional post-war reactions. In: S. Fauth, K. Green Krejberg and J. Süsselbeck (eds), Repräsentation des Krieges (Göttingen: Wallstein), pp. 355–369; S. E. Larsen (2014) Emotion and forgiveness in literature. In: P. Lombardo, L. Sætre and J. Zanetta (eds), Exploring Text and Emotions (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press), pp. 63–89.Google Scholar
15. Nuttall, S. and Coetzee, C. (eds) (1998) Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press); R. Wilson (2001) The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); F. du Bois and A. du Bois-Pedain (eds) (2008) Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
16. Griswold, C. L. (2007) Forgiveness. A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
17. Schudson, M. (1995) Dynamics of distortion in collective memory. In: D. L. Schacter (ed.), Memory Distortion. How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 346–364.Google Scholar
18. Minow, M. (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness. Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press).Google Scholar
19. Tsiolkas, C. (2013) Barracuda (London: Atlantic Books), p. 454.Google Scholar