The thesis discusses the remembrance of the Ottoman heritage and presentation of Ottoman culture at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. The study emphasizes the role and importance of memory and historical interpretation in the contemporary museum practice at the museum. The historical memories of a collection of 6 curators will be discussed and represented in order to examine the influence these recollections have on the exhibition of culture in the museum. The thesis gives the reader a further understanding of the mechanisms behind the continuous neglect and lack of appreciation of the Ottoman heritage in the Serbian society. In line with the current research within memory studies, this study focus on a museum as a site of memory, or a "lieux de mémoire" in Pierre Nora's term. The author concludes that there is a lack of awareness and emphasis in the museum on the Ottoman heritage. She also argues that the museum as a site of memory does little to provide for an arena where memories of different cultures and identities are channeled and presented in the society. Further studies should also emphasize museum presentations in other Southeast European countries in order to discuss the ways in which folk culture, cultural history and memory are presented to the public. / <p>Master program in International studies - specialization Eurasian studies</p>

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study seeks to contribute to the literature on the colonial war, genocide and memory studies in Namibia. I review the way in which communities in southern Namibia have developed practices in which to recall and re-enact the colonial war by focusing on narrative genres and public commemorations. I also document how these practices in southern Namibia and the Northern Cape, South Africa symbolically connect and cut across colonial and national borders. I have used the idea of re-constructed and sensorial memory practices within which to view the various narrative genres which display a range of performance repertoire projected onto persons, monuments and land. The study also focuses on the ways in which these memory practices are engaged in order to develop strategies within which to historicise practices of freedom. These have been inserted in the dialogue on national reconciliation through the debates on reparations and the repatriation of human bodies exported to Europe during the colonial war. I argue that these practices depart from a conventional way in which to view an archive and history, and that these memory practices point to the ways in which the logic and acts of the colonial war and genocide were diametrically opposed through acts of humanisation. / South Africa

Sixteen years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland remains a deeply segregated society. One driver of this ongoing separation is the divergent ways in which the Troubles are remembered. Paramilitary groups in particular have been quite successful at inscribing their exclusionary conflict memories into public space. However, this work departs from the larger sub-field by arguing that narratives of violence are spatially and discursively resisted in Northern Ireland. I argue additional claimants have asserted their rights to remember in public space and have challenged the appropriation of their loved ones' bodies. Public space in Northern Ireland increasingly is becoming evocative of multiple pasts; it is splintering and diversifying. I argue that one of the chief drivers of this diversification is the reclamation and reinscription of the bodies of those 3,700 men, women, and children who violently lost their lives during the Troubles. / 10000-01-01

Thesis advisor: James M. Smith / This dissertation examines individual experiences of grief and trauma in Irish writing from 1935 to 2013, focusing specifically on novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, and Eimear McBride. It offers a feminist reclamation of personal forms of loss that fall outside the purview of documented history and that typically go overlooked in literary criticism. Examples in this study include the suffering caused by the natural death of a family member, infertility, domestic and sexual abuse, social ostracism, institutionalization, and forced adoption. Through careful close readings of Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938), Beckett’s Molloy (1955), Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), and McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), I unpack how women’s insidious vulnerability to grief and trauma manifests in modern and contemporary Irish fiction. The works I discuss here reveal the depth and complexity of grief—making visible forms of loss and violence that society tends to ignore, working through what impedes the grieving process, and giving voice to underrepresented experiences of emotional and psychological suffering. Over three chapters, I engage with the discourses of trauma theory, Irish memory studies, and modernism and its afterlives. I draw on feminist psychiatrist Laura S. Brown’s discussion of “insidious trauma” to inform my own concept, “insidious vulnerability,” which I use to refer to the persistent threat of loss and violence that haunts marginalized groups in their daily lives. Likewise, I make reference to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to distinguish trauma from other forms of emotional and psychological distress. I contribute to Irish memory studies by extending the critical conversation beyond public historical events (like the Easter Rising of 1916)—to include private forms of grief and trauma, particularly in the lives of women. Furthermore, I focus on authors who innovate, whose novels exhibit dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional realist narratives and who attempt new modes of representation in an effort to articulate the inexpressible and the unexpressed. Bowen and Beckett stand as representatives of late modernism (1930s-1950s), while Barry and McBride help extend literary modernist afterlives into the twenty-first century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

In 1861, the U.S. Congress, responding to the growing number of Civil War dead, passed legislation regulating the burial practices of the Union Army. Six years later, the legislative body established a government-administered national cemetery system (NCS) that only interred Union soldiers killed in action. Subsequent pressure, from veterans groups, families, concerned citizens, and Congress led to the expansion of the institution’s eligibility regulations and funerary landscapes. As the product of over a century and a half of political and social negotiations, the NCS now consists of nearly 200 cemeteries, on domestic and foreign soil, that inter a vast array of individuals whom the government has deemed patriots. Drawing on cultural history, memory studies, anthropology, and art history, “These Honored Dead” illustrates how the NCS evolved from necessary wartime burial grounds into a federal memorial institution whose activities defined and announced the nations’ geographic, political, and social boundaries. Through an administrative and cultural history of the institution, this dissertation considers how Americans from diverse backgrounds and within divergent historical contexts have turned to the NCS to understand their individual and national identities and ideals. I look to the institution’s funerary landscapes as physical and affective evidence of how the federal government and the U.S. citizenry negotiate social and political relations. In the process, I interrogate “whose deaths matter?” to the national democratic mission. I argue that by developing national cemeteries and maintaining exclusionary interment regulations, the federal government announced a racialized, gendered, and politicized hierarchy of national belonging. The persistence of the NCS demonstrates that the nation mourns and memorializes patriotic sacrifice, regardless of martial victory, to make sense of contemporary anxieties. This dissertation illustrates the ways that the federal government mediates cultural and social politics, alongside its own interests, to construct a politically and socially useful memorial embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.

In this essay I employ memory theories to examine Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. How are the memories depicted and how do they function in the novel? What are the characters 'allowed' to remember? Scholars that have written about William Faulkners usage of memories and narrative time in his novels, often claim that they together represent and create a sense of determinism and/or fatalism. Even though I agreed with that opinion, regarding time and memory in a lot of Faulkners novels, I wondered if these features in the text might not represent/mean something more, beyond that. One scholar have expressed the view that William Faulkners characters resemble blind marionettes of Destiny. I instead claim that the characters themselves, via their individual memories and temporal relations, create an internal determinism, connected with cultural memory, norms and traditions. I try to examine both the individual memories, as depicted in the novel, and the novel in its entirety, using different memory theories and narratology.

The border between Russia and Estonia has undergone significant changes in the past two and a half decades from a border between two Soviet republics to an international border and external EU border. In the public discourse and the scholarly literature, this border has been characterised as a battlefield shaped by divergent geopolitical visions and evaluations of the shared past. While Estonia has sought to distance itself from Russia and condemns the Soviet past as an occupation, Russia derives pride from its historical role in liberating Europe in World War II and continues to hold on to positive memories of the Soviet past and its role in the Baltic states. The thesis looks at how these official narratives have been negotiated locally in the once united border towns of Narva and Ivangorod in the Russian-Estonian borderland. Based on an extended fieldwork stay and the analysis 58 life-story interviews with people living on both sides of the border, it examines how people living in the borderland position themselves in the context of shifting narrative and structural frameworks. How do they re-evaluate the relations to the other side and reconsider their memories of the shared past? In examining these questions, the thesis seeks to make two general contributions to existing literature: it brings together the fields of border studies and memory studies to explore the reconfiguration of both temporal and spatial orderings in the making of a border. Secondly, it outlines a model for studying border change that focuses on the interrelations between the vernacular and the official level. The first part of the thesis looks at the politics of temporal orderings in the borderland and explores how people belonging to different ethnic groups and generations remember the past in the context of changing borders. It shows how people in part reproduce the polarised narratives mobilised at the official level but also how local experiences and generational change lead to a diversification of temporal orderings. The second part of the thesis explores the politics of spatial orderings in post-socialist memories. It looks at how by remembering the past people both reproduce and undermine borders; it demonstrates that it is not simply the memories of a shared past but also new inequalities following the establishment of the border that shape the ways in which people relate to their cross-border neighbours. Overall, the thesis provides a complex and differentiated account of border change in which different temporalities and spatialities at the vernacular and official levels can interact, interrelate and stand in opposition to each other. It shows that although people living in the borderland experience constraints and even powerlessness in the face of changes in the border, they have an active role in negotiating the changes and develop multiple responses to official narratives. It demonstrates how by appropriating official narratives and relating them to their own purposes, people articulate local concerns and make claims for belonging, recognition and state care in the face of the changes.

Calls for examining the interrelations between individual and collective processes of remembering have been repeatedly made within the field of memory studies. With the tendency being to focus on either the individual or the collective level, there have been few studies that have undertaken this task in an empirically informed manner. This thesis seeks to engage in such an examination by undertaking a multi-level study of the remembrance of the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984. The gas leak in Bhopal (India) was one of the world s worst industrial disasters and has seen a long-running political contestation involving state institutions, social movement organisations (SMOs) and individual survivors. Employing an ethnographic methodology, incorporating interviews, participant observation and archival research, the study seeks to examine similarities and divergences in how these institutional, group-level and individual actors have remembered the disaster. It identifies the factors that modulated these remembrances and focuses on examining the nature of their interrelationship. The study conceptualises remembering as memory-work : an active process of meaning-making in relation to the past. The memory-work of state institutions was examined within the judicial and commemorative domains. The analysis demonstrates how state institutions engaged in a limiting of the meaning of the disaster removing from view the transnational causality of the event and the issue of corporate liability. It tracks how the survivors suffering was dehistoricised and contained within the framework of a localized claims bureaucracy. The examination of SMO memory-work focused on the activities of the two most prominent groups working in Bhopal. The analysis reveals how both organisations emphasise the continuing suffering of the survivors to challenge the state s settlement of the event. However, clear differences are outlined between the two groups in the wider frameworks of meaning employed by them to explain the suffering, assign responsibility and define justice. Memory-work at the individual level was accessed in the memory narratives of individual survivors generated through ethnographic interviews. The study examined how individual survivors have made sense of the lived experience of suffering caused by the disaster and its aftermath. The analysis revealed how the frameworks of meaning imposed by the state are deeply incommensurate with the survivors needs to express the multi-dimensionality of their suffering; it tracks how the state imposed identities are resisted but cannot be entirely overcome in individual remembrance. Engagement with the activities of the SMOs is demonstrated as enabling the development of an alternative activist remembrance for a limited group of survivors. Overall, the thesis seeks to provide a complex and empirically grounded account of the relations between the inner, individual level processes of memory linked to lived experience and the wider, historically inflected, collective and institutional registers of remembrance. The examination of the encounters between these diverse individual and collective remembrances in the context of an on-going political contestation allows the study to contribute to ongoing discussions within the field about memory politics in a global age and memory and justice.

Depuis une quinzaine d'années, l'Espagne traverse un mouvement de réflexion complexe ayant trait au legs de la violence d'Etat perpétrée sous la Guerre Civile (1936-1939) et sous la dictature franquiste (1939-1975). Ce mouvement de « récupération de la Mémoire Historique », selon la dénomination autochtone, regroupe un ensemble d'initiatives militantes (mobilisations « mémorielles », de « victimes », de lutte contre l' « impunité »), qui reproduisent les lexiques et les pratiques en vogue dans les contextes de post-conflit (lutte pour la « justice, la vérité, la réparation, exhumations de fosses communes,»...). Cette thèse analyse les logiques de production de catégories nouvelles de la protestation (« disparus », « victimes », « vérité et justice »...), la circulation internationale de compétences militantes propres au post-conflit (exhumations, militantisme des droits de l'homme »...), des nouvelles lectures à porter sur la violence passée. Cet espace protestataire étant majoritairement composé par un personnel héritier ou issu de la gauche républicaine espagnole, cette thèse rend compte des manières dont ce nouveau militantisme des droits de l'homme a contribué à recomposer l'espace protestataire de la gauche espagnole. / Over the last decade in Spain, the legacy of the political violence perpetrated throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist regime (1939-1975) became a significant issue among various protest movements. “The Recovery of Historical Memory Movement”, according to the local denomination, gathers a large scale of collective actions in which prevails the use of typical “postconflict” resources, practices and registers : collection of testimonies, mass grave exhumations, mobilization for “Justice, Truth and Reparation”, etc. This thesis analyzes the social logics underlying the production of new protest categories (“disappeared”, “victims”, “truth and justice”), the international circulation of specific “conflict resolution” expertises and authorities (exhumations, human rights militancy), and new readings of past violence. This protesting space being predominantly composed of actors heiring or stemming from the Spanish republican left, I will analyze the ways by which this new human rights militancy has contributed to the recomposition of the local leftist militancy.

This research has identified elements of the social memory of librarianship from the last half of the twentieth century by collecting and examining thirty-four oral history interviews of librarians at the end of their careers. These professional life stories trace an important arc through the history of library and information science. Many of these librarians began their careers prior to the use of any form of computer technology in libraries. This cohort ushered in a wave of technological innovations that has revolutionized the access to information. These oral history interviews are part of the Capturing Our Stories Oral History Program of Retiring/Retired Librarians sponsored by the American Library Association and the School of Information at the University of Texas. The social memory includes regret and nostalgia for the librarianship practiced at the beginning of their careers, excitement and wonder about how technology has fundamentally changed the profession, and perspectives on the popular stereotype associated with their careers. / text