Death and Memory: From Santa María del Monte to Miami Beach

Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 25:1

A s multiple communities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East reel from the impact of traumatic events, wrestle with how to remember and mourn those events, and struggle to reconstruct selves and societies, it has become increasingly urgent to theorize and understand processes of mourning and memory. This volume originated in a number of questions about the operation of traumatic memory in these regions, the ideological and political work done by mourning rituals and commemorations, the interaction between private and public forms of memory, the significance of recently devised structures for remembering (such as truth commissions and oral history projects), and the dynamics between psychological and material recovery. It was also prompted by the recognition that trauma is a category largely codified by Western medical and psychological institutions, that "trauma studies" as a field has been grounded in events and processes of Western modernity-such as industrialization and world wars-and that there has been insufficient exploration not only of how Western theoretical and diagnostic models translate into a "non-Western" context but of how sites of traumatic memory in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (dis)confirm, challenge, or revise dominant Western conceptions of trauma and memory. Coediting this volume of CSSAAME offered us a unique chance to explore these issues from a comparative perspective; to assess experiences, narratives, and concepts that cross national and regional borders; and to do so not from the uncluttered comfort of abstract theory and essentializing axiom but from the intractable complexity of local detail, irreducible specificity, and contestatory cultural and personal perspectives. 1 Traumatic experiences of individuals and groups, whether physical or psychological, leave deep scars and have long-lasting social, psychological, political, and material effects. But does traumatic memory operate in the same way in communities as it does in individuals? The vast bulk of research on trauma has focused on individual psychology and has been dominated by the clinical parameters of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The category of PTSD is based on the concept that, as Ruth Leys puts it:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most prominent writers from Latin America, who managed to capture the nuances of life in the sub-continent in a realistic yet magical fashion. His works have as their background, the throbbing, vital life of his native soil and this is best reflected

This introduction to a special issue of MEMORY STUDIES sketches out some spatial and locational aspects of memory and mourning in postdictatorial Latin America. The special issue aims to shed light on memorial sites’ role in the process of reclaiming individual and collective stories from victims of dictatorial repression. If, as Susana Draper has argued, during Latin America’s “return to democracy,” an “architectonics of transition” inscribed in urban spaces new diagrams of citizenship and exclusion predicated on the timeless present of consumption, memory’s “architectures of affect” commemorating victims of past state terror represent both an interruption and a challenge to neoliberalism’s postdictatorial city. Beyond the limits of the urban, rural landscape and the marking of diasporic locations of exile overseas also speak to the dispersive and uprooting effects of violence. The collection also asks for the frictions emerging between global forms of commemoration and local constellations of historical experience as manifest in particular sites.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2005

s multiple communities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East reel from the impact of traumatic events, wrestle with how to remember and mourn those events, and struggle to reconstruct selves and societies, it has become increasingly urgent to theorize and understand processes of mourning and memory. This volume originated in a number of questions about the operation of traumatic memory in these regions, the ideological and political work done by mourning rituals and commemorations, the interaction between private and public forms of memory, the significance of recently devised structures for remembering (such as truth commissions and oral history projects), and the dynamics between psychological and material recovery. It was also prompted by the recognition that trauma is a category largely codified by Western medical and psychological institutions, that "trauma studies" as a field has been grounded in events and processes of Western modernity-such as industrialization and world wars-and that there has been insufficient exploration not only of how Western theoretical and diagnostic models translate into a "non-Western" context but of how sites of traumatic memory in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (dis)confirm, challenge, or revise dominant Western conceptions of trauma and memory. Coediting this volume of CSSAAME offered us a unique chance to explore these issues from a comparative perspective; to assess experiences, narratives, and concepts that cross national and regional borders; and to do so not from the uncluttered comfort of abstract theory and essentializing axiom but from the intractable complexity of local detail, irreducible specificity, and contestatory cultural and personal perspectives. 1 Traumatic experiences of individuals and groups, whether physical or psychological, leave deep scars and have long-lasting social, psychological, political, and material effects. But does traumatic memory operate in the same way in communities as it does in individuals? The vast bulk of research on trauma has focused on individual psychology and has been dominated by the clinical parameters of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The category of PTSD is based on the concept that, as Ruth Leys puts it: Owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic 1. Several recent collections that have explored traumatic memory in "non-Western" contexts include Antonius C.

Research in Phenomenology, 2003

Jacques Derrida has written much in recent years on the topic of mourning. This essay takes Derrida's insights into mourning in general and collective mourning in particular in order to ask about the relationship between mourning and politics. Taking a lead from a recent work of Derrida's on Jean-François Lyotard, the essay develops its argument through two examples, one from ancient Greece and one from twentiethcentury America: the role mourning plays in the constitution and maintenance of the state in Plato's Laws and the controversy surrounding the consecration of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier of Vietnam in Arlington National Cemetery. This latter example provides the occasion for questioning the possibilities of mourning the unknown or the unidentifiable and for addressing some of the ways in which the United States has mourned or failed to mourn, remembered or failed to remember, in the wake of September 11.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2004

Memory has undoubtedly played a crucial role in the postmodern literary discourse. The dismantling of a monolithic, static and unquestioned history has given place to the predominance of a revisionary narrative impulse to “historicize the event of the dehistoricized” in Homi Bhabha’s terms. Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat joins the number of contemporary authors who are determined to uncover and recover the forgotten and manipulated histories of the dead. Taking the Massacre River dividing Haiti and the Dominican Republic as a site of memory as well as a site of mourning, Danticat writes The Farming of Bones (1998) as a tribute to those nameless and faceless who died victims of the abuses of power and racial persecution, providing them with names and voices against silence and oblivion. It is my aim to analyze the dimension of the use of memory in Danticat’s novel, especially in relation to the workings of history. Issues of power and racial oppression will be especially re...

2016

Cemetery islands–islands of death–are simultaneously real places as well as symbols of the ways in which death has been marginalized in the modern city. Since the nineteenth century, cemeteries on islands have tended to be quietly invisible places, reserved for the bodies of those who, in life, occupied the margins of human society: the deviants, the forgotten, the diseased and the insane. Places such as Hart Island, the vast potter’s field of New York City and Poveglia, the island where Venice’s plague victims were sent to die, remain resolutely out of sight and mind, hidden behind the shiny façade of the urban metropolis. Yet today such islands are also sites of transformation brought about by a growing interest in death-tourism, calls for public access to sites of heritage, and the continued real estate development of ‘authentic’ urban spaces. Even while some cemetery islands lie abandoned and ruined, other islands of death and marginalization have emerged to take their place as ...