Week 10: Cultural Memory, Personal Memory and Collective Memory

Housekeeping:

1.    Zine making workshop.

2.    Event

-       Discussion around a book launch

-       Indigeous rights, and fighting for their morals

3.    Next two weeks

-       Week 11: Research that challenges traditional paradigms of power

-       Exam prep excursie student input.

-       Week 12: Zine Showcase in KW130 (participation Required Hand in Zine 9:10-  10:15. Exam Review

Guest Lecture: Preeia Surajbali - Cultural Memory, Personal Memory and Collective Memory: Powerful Tools for Knowledge Production

-       Teaching and learning is a collaborative learning environment,

-       Using your identity as a way of understanding and learning, and using their feelings.

-       Land acknowledgments- as a way of bringing the past into practice

1.    What is Diaspora

o    Historical term:  Communtites that have been dispersed reluctantly, dislocated by slavery, genocide, coercion, and expulsion, war in conflict zones,  indentured labour, economic migration, political exile, or refuge exodus.

o   Term diaspora is often used to describe a community of people,

o   A diaspora includes both emigrants and their descendants.

o   Many people have mixed heritage, and can claim membership in different communities

Reading: Disapora and cultural memory/ what is memory?

-       What is memory?

o   Memory doesn’t revive the past, but constructs it.

o   Official and unofficial memories of the past, as unofficial memories can invoke the geography of dissent and protest

-       Cruical to ask: who wants, whom to remember what and why?

§  Forgetting is more active than we think. Forgetting is an act, a creative invention, a performance,a selective loss.

Personal and collective memory

-       Personal memory: Represents the memeory of a singular individual     , contained within a limtime, often founded on FIRST HAND

-       Cultural/colllective memory: Consititues th collective memeory of many, encompassing generations. Shared past retained by members of a group, class, or nation.

o   Food, recipes, indentured (Speakers memeory)

-       Collective memory:  Shared representation and knowledge of past social events that have not been personally experienced but collectively constructed

Cultural memory

-       Involves acts of transfer in which individuls and groups construct and perform their identities by recollecting a shared past of contest norms, conventions and practices.

-       Cultural Memory: Cultrual negation through which different stories vie for a place in history.

-       A hierarchy of what is represented and told, vs. What isn’t told and isn’t represent, the lack of history for Indio Indians.  

Paul Gilroy: Ethnic Absolutism

ethnic absolutism,’ in which all individuals of a particular diaspora are perceived as inherently linked by heritage, collective history, and racial descent. (194)

Feminist scholars/ Counter Memorializing

-       Feminist scholars, like quilters, construct new stories that tell from their perspective how their lives were imbued with gender, race, and class hierarchies and testify to their resistance to varied and intersecting oppressions.

-       Converting Indivual ownership of memory into collective remembrance turning personal grief and mourning into a call for social responsibilites,

-       Critical remembrance- make women’s individual and collective pain and suffering made Public.

Reclaimed- Indo Caribbean HerStories

-      Heidi McKenzie aims to change that for Indo-Caribbean women, bringing centuries-old herstories into focus through a feminist lens.

-      Explores themes of ancestry, race and migration, and decolonization through her practice.

-      Work is based on the past and present livide experiences of indo carribean women from the mid 19th and early 20th centuries through to today.

Heidi Makenzie (In her own words)

-      Works with socio-political landscapes of my Indo- Caribbean ancestors

-      Highlights under represented stories of indo-carribeean women.

-      Postcards used as a way of excoticized and commodified for western  tourist.

-      Wore their saving on their oldies, jewellery fashioned from their earnings.

-      What do colonizers want us to see, vs what is being erased.

Disapora Stories podcast

-      Diaspora Stories represents a conscious decisions to step away from the word immigrant and the politics it embodies

-      Highlights of those that left their homes behind to find the many worlds beyond, into the stories fo their children and their children’s children.

-      Recast immjugration in there truth and courage that they deserve.

Black Disapora Feminism and writing: Memories, storytelling, and the narrative world as sites of resistance.

-      Hua: Examines how black Disapora women writiers deploy storytelling, critical theoirzing, and remeberance practices to comprehend, resist, transform, and heal from patriarchy, racism, colonization, and the history of slavery.

-      Why do women write: Give voice as a counter-memeory to hegemonic representation or silencing.

-      Create community, and make sense about the work of revolution and social change.

-      How is my zine representing a new way of looking at it, or representing it.

Morrison: the site of memeory

-      Framework to comprehend how remembrance practices allow the rewriting of of history to counter national and historical amnesia

-      Concerned with how memeores of how those who are marginalized are elided or displaced by dominant discourse.

-      •Morrison reveals that when Black communities adopt two dangerous Western notions physical beauty and romantic love without taking blackness into account, we are faced with the traumatic effects and danger of all-encompassing assimilation and integration (Williams 2009, 72). 

-       Internalized whiteness.

The power of Autobiography

-      One way to counter theses western ideals of physical beauty with oppositional consciousness is to examine the wealth of persona life stories the emotive, intimate, sensual spiritual, imaginative and political experiences of women and girls of color.

-      Use their own personal stories to counter various negative stereotypes of black women and girls. In order to highlight the complexities of black lives.

Vim Ali Midizi Ted Talk

-       Controlling your narrative,

-       Representing yourself and highlight your stories and understanding

-       All histories- tell particular versions usually with a male lenses,

Personal To Arrive at the Polotical

-       Autobiographical narratives by critical academic women of color, are often infused with theorizing about race and gender to give weight to lived expiernces of women and people of color.

Indo Caribbean Feminist epistemology: A personal and scholarly journey

-        Highlights Indo-Carribeean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology

-       Discussion around the scholarly work of indo- Caribean feminist epistemology.

-       Highlight the specific conditions which emerged within the region and highlights the cross racial solidarities.

-       Learning term of who a person is.

-       What gives u emotion, highlight your own personal feelings.

-       Ethos which informs the way I choose to frame my identitiy  and the type of knowledge.

Building solidarity

-       Suggest to look within outsleves and making sense of our experiential memories.

-       Work in solitary with other women of color and men.

READ- The Bluest EYE!

Talk to your grandparents throughout your life

-       As every time we discuss something we love something new.

-       Marsala a  blending of diffrnet spices all together.