Social Semiotics

Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2012, 143
153

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Collective memory: theory and politics
Chris Weedona* and Glenn Jordanb,c
a

Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK; bUniversity of
Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Cardiff, UK; cButetown History
& Arts Centre, Cardiff, UK
(Received April 2010; final version received November 2011)
This essay outlines key issues in current approaches to cultural and collective
memory. It reflects on memorys relation to history and its social, cultural and
political roles, drawing on theoretical insights from Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Nora and
Hirsch. It addresses the issues of affect, postmemory and counter-memory, locating
the articles in the special section within this broader cultural political field.
Keywords: cultural memory; collective memory; postmemory; history; countermemory; affect

Introduction
The memorial presence of the past takes many forms and serves many purposes, ranging
from conscious recall to unreflected reemergence, from nostalgic longing for what is
lost to polemical uses of the past to reshape the present. The interaction between
present and past that is the stuff of cultural memory is, however, the product of
collective agency rather than the result of psychic or historical accident. (Bal, Crewe,
and Spitzer 1999, vii)

Recent years have seen the rise of widespread interest in cultural and collective memory
and their relation to questions of power, voice, representation and identity. Interest in
collective memory has been fuelled by developments both within and outside the
academy. These include those forms of social and cultural history that have produced
not only oral history but also a focus on testimonies, popular memory and forms of
memorialisation and the related focus within cultural studies on questions of history,
memory and identity. Outside the university, pressure from marginalised groups,
reinforced by state concerns over social inclusion, have produced moves within the
museum and heritage sectors towards more inclusive narratives of the past. Important
in this process has been the increased accessibility via media and digitisation of source
materials and of the resources needed to collect and produce new materials.
Collective memory, as we conceive it here, signifies narratives of past experience
constituted by and on behalf of specific groups within which they find meaningful
forms of identification that may empower.1 Collective memory and the institutions
and practices that support it help to create, sustain and reproduce the imagined
communities with which individuals identify and that give them a sense of history,
place and belonging (Anderson 1981). The groups connected with particular
*Corresponding author. Email: WeedonCM@cf.ac.uk
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.664969
http://www.tandfonline.com

144

C. Weedon and G. Jordan

articulations of collective memory vary radically in size and complexity, ranging

from nations and ethnic or religious groups to local communities and families.
The control of collective memory by nation-states and their constituent social and
cultural institutions has increasingly been challenged by changes in the ethnic
constitution of nations, continuing anti-colonial struggles, shifts in religious
orthodoxy and globalisation.2 In recent decades, collective memory in national
contexts has been challenged and augmented by a range of interest groups, often not
previously included in hegemonic constructions of the nation, who are fighting to
have their histories acknowledged, documented and commemorated, with the aim, in
part, of reshaping national stories. In the British context, for example, the history of
Britains involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery offers
important recent examples of such challenge. This cultural political struggle began in
Britains Black communities and initially focused on the public history of former
slaving ports as it affected the museum and heritage sectors and education. Olivette
Oteles contribution to this journal analyses the ways in which the Bristol Industrial
Museum in the west of England has represented the transatlantic slave trade, raising
questions about collective memory and communities of interest. It analyses an
attempt by the local state and curators to re-present a history previously constituted
by strategies of forgetting. This was part of a wider struggle over collective memory
of the slave trade in Britain, which reached a measure of national visibility in 2007
with nationwide events to commemorate the 200th anniversary of its abolition by the
British parliament in 1807.3
The articles in this special section address some of the key issues in the study
of collective memory. The major focus of all four articles is the role of cultural
institutions and practices in constituting collective memory. The articles look at
how individuals and groups have challenged or modified hegemonic versions of the
past in ways that validate marginalised groups and histories. They ask what is the
relation between collective memory and constructions of identity? They focus on
aspects of the cultural politics of memory, in particular what motivates the ways in
which nations remember the past. The articles are interested in how collective
memory is constituted via processes that involve both forgetting and remembering.
In the preface to his seminal book Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur (2004)
writes of the just allotment, the duty of memory. He is troubled by
the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of
forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses
of memory
and of forgetting (Ricoeur 2004, xv). He proposes the idea of a policy
of the just allotment of memory as one his avowed civic themes (2004, xv). This
concept of just allocation immediately raises the question of who is responsible for
such a policy and who decides what is just and does the allocating. While states and
state institutions play important roles in facilitating collective memory
just or
otherwise
it is clear from the examples in this special section that collective memory
is a site of contestation for a wide range of different interest groups. Always a social
product, collective memory is shaped by specific interests and power relations, and
the constitution of memory is above all a terrain of cultural politics.
In constructing collective memory, groups draw on a range of source materials
that include remembered experience as related by members of the group and
narratives of history found in books, libraries, museums, monuments, archives, film
and television. Important, too, are literary and visual culture, family photographs and

Social Semiotics

145

memorabila.4 The potential for the articulation of new and marginalised formations
of collective memory has been radically enhanced by the spread of new media. Both
the Internet and the expansion of digital technology have worked to democratise
the means of cultural production in ways that facilitate the articulation of marginalised formations of collective memory. New media have made the articulation of
marginalised collective memory both relatively affordable and accessible to interested
people way beyond the physical borders of specific communities. With the growth of
the Internet, the individuals and groups represented by and contributing to
constructions of collective memory can easily transcend geographical location,
finding their coherence as imagined communities and documenting and sharing their
memory in cyberspace.
Memory and history
A central issue in recent debate has been collective memorys relation to history.
While some academic history rejects memory-based sources as unreliable, we would
not want to place history in opposition to collective memory. History is often
concerned with placing memory-based work within more general narratives of the
past, a process that inevitably implies a large measure of selection and forgetting that
represents interests in the present. These interests also inform articulations of
collective memory. The turn to issues of collective memory has been driven in part by
the need to remember the traumatic events that marked the twentieth century
in
particular, wars and the Holocaust
as the number of people able to offer first-hand
individual testimonies diminishes. In his seminal work On Collective Memory, first
published in 1925, Maurice Halbwachs locates individual memory as a part of or an
aspect of group memory formed in relation to a societys various (group)
articulations of collective memory (1992, 53). It is groups within society that are
responsible for both collective memory and the social frameworks for memory that
facilitate it. Thus, whereas memory might appear to be a personal matter, born out of
ones own individual experience, it is located in the ways the society as a whole
remembers, and makes sense of things. These change over time and with them not
only how we, as individuals, make sense of the world but also how we remember our
experiences in the world. Halbwachs insists on the importance of the group in the
articulation of both recent and older individual and collective memory, a point borne
out by Oteles article on the Bristol Slave Trade Gallery and Linkes article on lifewriting in Scotland. The latter clearly shows how inexplicit narratives of national
identity shape both the individual stories collected in oral history projects and how
they are edited. In this context it is broader discourses of nation that produce
frameworks of social and collective memory. As Halbwachs describes it: [T]he
framework of collective memory confines and binds our most intimate remembrances to each other. It is not necessary that the group be familiar with them
(1992, 53).
Halbwachs suggests in The Collective Memory (first published in 1950) that
General history starts only when tradition ends and social memory is fading
or breaking up (1980, 139). This idea is taken up and developed in the work of
French historian Pierre Nora via his influential concept of sites of memory (lieux
de me moire).5 In the introduction to his major project on the national memory of
France, Between Memory and History, first published in English in 1989, Nora

146

C. Weedon and G. Jordan

argues that modernity brings with it the demise of organic forms of memory and
their replacement by the cultivation of sites of memory (1989, 7).6 For Nora, sites
of memory are where memory crystallizes rather than the real environments
of memory (milieux de memoire) that you find in societies with strong oral traditions
(1989, 7). This is an effect of what he calls the acceleration of history,
an increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for
good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear:
Our interests in lieux de me moire, sites of memory, where memory crystallizes and
secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where
consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been
torn
but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in
certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de me moire,
sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de me moire, real environments of
memory. (Nora 1989, 7)

While Noras metaphor of crystallisation tends to mask the cultural political

formation of and struggle over sites of memory, critical engagement with his
theorisation offers useful starting points from which to develop a theoretical
framework for the study of collective memory. Noras sites of memory
museums,
archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments,
sanctuaries, fraternal orders (1989, 12)
are precisely concerned with narratives
of history and identity that are imbued with relations of power rooted in the present.
As can be seen from the articles on the Bristol Slave Trade Gallery and a Partition
museum in India, for many individuals and groups the sites of memory are an
important source in the constitution of collective memory. For Nora, memory and
history involve different conceptions of time: memory is the property of the living,
speaking subjects who hold it and it is constantly evolving. As such it is open to the
dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations,
vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant
and periodically revived (Nora 1989, 8). History, in contrast, is the reconstruction,
always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer (1989, 8).7 The distinction
between history and memory is useful once we recognise that collective memory is
constituted by a range of cultural practices for living speaking subjects and
that the process of change is related to broader questions of social power. Collective
memory still has real environments, but today these are not only based in shared
physical locations but also in the imagined communities that are facilitated by the
social media, especially the Internet; they offer a useful way of thinking
the relationship between groups and specific articulations of the past that inform
the cultural politics of the present.8
A unifying thread running through the articles included here is that collective
memory involves the agency of groups and it works via the interpellation of
individuals within specific narratives of the past that give them a sense of individual
and shared identity and belonging. These narratives of the past are very much
the property of social groups and are often also reproduced within social institutions.
They may be at variance with aspects of documented history mobilising narrative of
the past from diverse sources and helping to frame attitudes to and understanding
of the present. In this sense, they make history present. Even where aspects of
collective memory do not coincide with documented history
be this mainstream or

Social Semiotics

147

marginalised
its variations are important in understanding the power relations in

play in a particular society. The articles in this special section all reference relations
of power rooted in the present. For Otele, they revolve around questions of race;
for Torres, hegemonic American narratives of the Japanese in the Philippines;
and for Raychaudhuri, the interests of the Indian state. In Gabriele Linkes article,
both class and gender are at stake.

Postmemory
Many aspects of recent debate on the mechanisms and cultural politics of memory
have found their focus in Holocaust Studies. These include the status of survivors
testimonies, the social role of public forms of memorialisation, the motives informing
strategies of remembering and forgetting, the therapeutic importance of transforming traumatic memories into narratives that are socially recognised, and the concepts
of trauma, postmemory and cultural memory. In his article Before Holocaust
Memory: Making Sense of Trauma between Postmemory and Cultural Memory,
Jon Stratton (2005, 54) argues that the Holocaust was a discursive construction of
the 1960s that allowed the trauma caused by the Third Reich to be voiced.
It created, in Ernst van Alphens words, the terms to transform living through the
event into an experience of the event (Alphen 1999, 27). The discourse of the
Holocaust, Stratton suggests, becomes the vehicle for the articulation of both
individual and cultural trauma and the idea of western culture as posttraumatic:
The discourse of the Holocaust not only gives us a way of understanding certain past
events, it is a means of remembering those events and, more, a way of understanding
individual trauma that is removed from those events
trauma, we might say, as
transgenerational haunting. (Stratton 2005, 57)

In her work on the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch uses the term postmemory:
to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to
the experience of their parents, experiences that they remember only as stories and
images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to
constitute memories in their own right. (Hirsch 1999, 8)

Hirsch argues that this is memory of a different qualitative and temporal order from
the memories of survivors, since it is marked by its secondary or second generation
memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness (1999, 8).
Writing of his own mothers trauma in witnessing at a mediated remove what
had happened to others, a trauma that continued to affect her day-to-day response to
German people and to media reports about Germany or Germans, Jon Stratton
comments that it was:
not strictly postmemory in that it was a reaction that was passed on, a reaction,
expressing an emotional complex made up of fear, anger, perhaps sadness and other
emotions. All these passed on without realisation, a legacy composed of affect. (Stratton
2005, 61)

148

C. Weedon and G. Jordan

The concepts of postmemory and the legacy of affect are useful beyond
Holocaust studies for understanding the power of collective memory for other
groups who are the descendants of and identify with the victims of traumatic past
events. Writing of her emotional relation to slavery in the New World in the foreword
to Unheard Voices, an edited collection of writings published to coincide with the
200th anniversary of the abolition of British involvement in the slave trade, Malorie
Blackman writes:
From my own point of view, although the voyage through my past may make me weep, I
can still draw strength from the fact that my ancestors were slaves in the West Indies.
Why? Because they survived the inhuman, barbaric transportation from Africa. They
survived the inhuman regime they encountered once they reached the West Indies. They
survived. I am descended from survivors and that thought makes me strong. (2007, no
page)

Hirsch defines postmemory as:

not an identity position, but a space of remembrance, more broadly available through
cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance,
identification and projection. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences

and thus also the memories
of others as ones own, or more precisely, as experiences
one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into ones own life story. (1999, 8
9)

This signals a shift from individual to a broader cultural, collective memory in which
it is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the
same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other

proximate or distant
cultures and subcultures (Hirsch 1999, 9). Hirsch argues
that this can bring the question of ethics to the fore since it signals an ethical
relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a
model: as I can remember my parents memories, I can also remember the
suffering of others (1999, 8
9). Raychaudhuris article on why there is no national
museum of partition in India points to nationalist frames of interpretation in official
narrative of partition and the impossibility of doing justice to the memory and
postmemory of Partition.

Affect
Collective memory embraces the social, cultural and affective dimensions of
memory, which always exceed what is actually incorporated in specific articulations
of collective memory. Memory exists in multiple forms of text, embodied practice
and affect (see Connerton 1989). Individual memory-related and memory-constituting texts and practices, which are at their most effective when they engage affect,
offer individual subjects ways of locating themselves in relation to the past. The
article by Otele offers a good example of this. As Otele shows, the feedback from
visitors to the Slave Trade Exhibition in Bristol highlighted how the specificity of the
individual or group encountering acts of memory in public museums shapes affective
responses. Writing of oral history, Della Pollock argues that Performance
whether
we are talking about the everyday act of telling a story or the staged reiteration of
stories
is an especially charged, contingent, reflexive space of encountering the

Social Semiotics

149

complex web of our respective histories (2005, 1). This is arguably also true of
attempts to stage the past through film, which also promotes subjective engagement
in the production of the meaning of the past.9 Otele shows how the processes
whereby the Bristol Slave Trade Gallery came into existence offers an example of
strategic remembering and forgetting and of the problems of representing a
traumatic history that still speaks directly to black people and, like the more recent
trauma of partition in South Asia, cannot be adequately expressed in words.
An important common theme explored in the articles is what Ilan Gur-Zeev and
Ilan Pappe (n.d.) describe in their article Beyond the Destruction of the Others
Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue as the destruction of the collective memory of the Other, through the construction of ones own.
Otele shows how the history of the slave trade in Bristol was rendered invisible until
members of Bristols black community raised the issue. Raychaudhuri analyses how
strategies of memorialisation have shaped the partial collective memory of the Indian
partition in India, and Torres engages with the memory of the Japanese in the
Philippines before World War II. In each case study, the cultural political struggle
over voice and memory had effectively removed the memory on the non-dominant
group and given rise to forms of counter-memory that challenge hegemonic
constructions of collective memory and history. The degree of violence involved in
the suppression of the collective memory of the other does vary from the almost
polite silencing and forgetting that produced the absence of the history of the slave
trade in former British slaving ports to the active suppression of history and memory
in Spain in the immediate post civil war years. Gur-Zeev and Pappe (n.d.) link their
argument to the formation of national identities, arguing that Violence, direct as
well as symbolic, plays thereby a crucial part as collective memories are produced,
reproduced, disseminated and consumed within concrete historical power relations,
interests and conceptual possibilities and limitations. Writing of the case of
Palestine/Israel, where the issues involved relate to the present as much as to the past
and are directly grounded in ongoing struggles over land and sovereignty, they argue
that:
control of the collective memory is part of the internal and external violence each of the
rival collectives applies to secure its reconstruction. That is, the way the two sides to the
conflict construct their collective identity is a dialectical process whose impelling force is
the total negation of the Other. Within this dialectic each side sees itself as a sole victim
while totally negating the victimization of the Other . . . In the case of the Israeli/
Palestinian coexistence, the struggle over the control of the memory of victimization is a
matter of life and death, and suffering and death, as actuality and as memory, are
philosophical, political and existential issues. (Gur-Zeev and Pappe n.d.)

As Gur-Zeev and Pappe (n.d.) write:

The violence used in order to conquer the centers of power relations and dynamics aims
at positioning more effectively ones own narrative, interests, values, symbols, goals
and criteria while at the same time securing those of the Other are marginalized,
excluded or destroyed.

This was, for example, the case in Spain during Francos regime, when the mass
killings of Republicans were erased from collective memory. It is only recently, with

150

C. Weedon and G. Jordan

the passing of the Law of Historical Memory put before parliament in 2006
the
Spanish governments Year of Historical Memory
that this history has been placed
on the agenda for both public and collective memory. The Law of Historical Memory
was opposed as historical revisionism by right-wing conservative groups. As in other
cases such as New World slavery, the debate is also linked to questions of reparation.

Collective memory and counter-memory

Another important issue for collective memory is the question of what constitutes
counter-memory. We would argue that counter-memory is memory that challenges
the interests at stake in collective memory. These interests relate to broader social
relations in the society in question. In a special issue of Signs on cultural memory,
Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith suggest that feminist scholarship can be
understood as a project that seeks to construct counter-memory that gives voice to
womens history (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 4).10 They argue persuasively that, beyond
feminist paradigms of womens history, it is crucial to analyse how the technologies
of memory, the frames of interpretation, and the acts of transfer they enable are in
themselves gendered, inasmuch as they depend on conventional paradigms and
received cultural models, on codes that are culturally shared and available (2002, 7).
Thus while memory is often gendered, alternatives to the dominant do not
necessarily constitute counter-memory. For example, Linkes article in this special
issue, which looks at working-class womens oral history and autobiography, shows
how this can be read both as gendered and as a contribution to hegemonic and often
nostalgic national narratives of recent Scottish history. While not all womens
collective memory belongs to the terrain of counter-memory, it specifically
contributes to the process whereby individuals and groups constitute their identities
by recalling a shared past as the basis for identities based on common and therefore
often contested norms, conventions and practices (Hirsch and Smith 2002, 5).
Counter-memory emerges much more clearly in Torress piece on collective memory
of the Japanese in the Philippines after World War II, which shows how American
colonial interests shaped this memory and looks to literature for sources of countermemory. It presents the disparity between mainstream representations of the
Japanese presence in the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century
and the counter-hegemonic representations in the fiction of Filipino writer Sinai
C. Hamada.
It is clear from the articles included here that multiple power relations shape
collective memory. Many factors affect collective memory and the counter-memories
to which it can give rise; for example, constructions of nation, region, family, class,
political affiliation, ethnic group and religion. State supported cultural and
educational institutions and practices, together with the cultural industries, play
crucial roles in creating and sustaining collective memory. Above all they serve as
gatekeepers facilitating processes of remembering and forgetting. Yet it is also clear
that collective forms of counter-memory can be mobilised to challenge hegemonic
collective memory. Alternative narratives of the past can offer socially excluded
groups a sense of ownership, which can empower through positive identification.
They can also work to transform dominant narratives and help produce a more
nuanced and just understanding of the past.

Social Semiotics

151

Notes
1. In addition to our academic interests in Collective Memory (see, for example, Jordan and
Weedon 2000, 2010), we have been working practically in the area of collective memory for
nearly 25 years. Glenn founded the organisation now known as Butetown History & Arts
Centre (www.bhac.org) in Cardiff Docklands in 1987 as Butetown Community History
Project, with weekly meetings in the local community centre. This collaborative,
community-based initiative developed with project funding and the work of dedicated
volunteers. The Centres unique peoples history archive includes some 7000 photographic
images of old Cardiff docklands and hundreds of portraits of people of ethnically-diverse
backgrounds in Wales; paintings and drawings; more than 500 hours of life-histories and
life-stories from local residents, many of whom are from immigrant and ethnic minority
groups; some videotaped interviews; television and radio programmes; various documents
and reports; and so forth. For an account of the development of the project, see Jordan
and Weedon (1995, 134
173).
2. For many scholars working on memory, concepts of individual, social and collective
memory require another term, cultural memory, which is not so obviously allied to specific
social groups. As Mieke Bal argues in the introduction to the 1999 collection of essays
Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, cultural memory allows a way of thinking
outside the roles played by particular social institutions in the formation of memory.
Cultural memory recognises that cultures reproduce and reform themselves and that, in
this process, understandings of the past are transformed (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer
1999, 57). In this special section we are concerned with the specificity of collective memory
as linked to social groups.
3. Activities were promoted throughout the United Kingdom, funded by the Heritage
Lottery Fund. For more on the politics of memorialising the anniversary, see Weedon
(2008).
4. For an example of this, see Jordan (2011).
5. Nora explores sites of memory in his seven-volume project on the national memory of
France, Les Lieux de me moire (1981
1992). A three-volume English edition, Rethinking
France, was published between 2001 and 2009 (Nora 2001/2006/2009).
6. He suggests that the demise of peasant culture and traditions (which he links to
organicism, immediacy and the sacred) gave rise to the need to create memory via
archives, anniversaries, celebrations, and so forth.
7. In this argument, real memory is seen as pre-modern, the province of so-called
primitive or archaic societies (Nora 1989, 8) that are seemingly timeless, and where it is
linked to ritual and the sacred and juxtaposed to history, which is seen as what comes to
replace collective memory in modern societies.
8. In a critique of Noras theory, John Frow suggests that Noras argument is both nostalgic
and idealist, since it sees memory as unstructured by social technologies of learning
or recall; it is incapable of reflexivity (it cannot take itself as an object), and its mode of
apprehension is thus rooted in the inherent self-knowledge and the unstudied reflexes
of the body; it is organically related to its community and partakes of the continuity of
tradition (Frow 1997, 151). Frow finds this no longer tenable because it cannot
account for the materiality of signs and of the representational forms by which memory is
structured (1997, 151). We would also want to take issue with the nostalgic view of real
environments of memory marked by a memorial consciousness that has barely survived
in a historical age. This has primitivist echoes, suggesting a timeless organicism that
disavows the constructed nature of rituals and other traditional practices and their place
in the reproduction of power relations within particular societies. At the same time we
would want to emphasise the effectivity in the present of Noras sites of memory that fulfil
a much more important role than that of a nostalgic counterpart to history.
9. For another example of this in relation to the Middle Passage, see Jordan (2008).
10. In autumn 2002, Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith edited a special issue of Signs on
Gender and Cultural Memory that focused attention on theoretical questions related to
memory and trauma from the perspective of gender. It included work on national countermemories, testimony and nostalgia, as well as a roundtable on Gender and September 11.

152

C. Weedon and G. Jordan

Notes on contributors
Glenn Jordan is Reader in Cultural Studies & Creative Practice at the University of
Glamorgan and Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre, a community-based archive,
gallery and educational resource in Cardiff, Wales. He has published widely on peoples
history, race, visual culture and immigrants and minorities in Wales. His books include
Cultural Politics (with Chris Weedon; Blackwell, 1995) and Somali Elders: Portraits from
Wales (Butetown History & Arts Centre, 2004). He is currently working on two projects
combining photography and oral history: Mothers and Daughters: Portraits from Multi-ethnic
Wales and Hineni, a project on elderly Jewish migrants in Wales, some of whom survived the
Holocaust. A Sikh Face in Ireland, an exhibition of his photographs accompanied by lifestories, ran from May to September 2010 at the prestigious Chester Beatty Library in Dublin
Castle.
Chris Weedon directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. She
has published widely on feminist theory, cultural politics, womens writing and minority
writing. Her books include Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987 and 1996),
Cultural Politics (with Glenn Jordan, 1994), Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference
(1999), Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging (2004), and Gender,
Feminism and Fiction in Germany 1840
1914 (2006).

References
Alphen, E. Van. 1999. Symptoms of discursivity: Experience, memory and trauma. In Acts of
memory: Cultural recall in the present, ed. M. Bal, J. Crewe, and L. Spitzer, 24
38. Hanover:
University Press of New England.
Anderson, B. 1981. Imagined communities. London: Verso.
Bal, M., J. Crewe, and L. Spitzer, eds. 1999. Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present.
Hanover: University Press of New England.
Blackman, M. 2007. Unheard voices. London: Corgi.
Connerton, P. 1989. How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frow, J. 1997. Toute la me moire du monde: Repetition and forgetting. In Time and commodity
culture: Essays in cultural theory and postmodernity, ed. J. Frow, 222
9. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gur-Zeev, I., and I. Pappe. n.d. Beyond the destruction of the others collective memory:
Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli dialogue. construct.haifa.ac.il/ ilangz/shoa84.html.
Halbwachs, M. 1980. The collective memory. Trans. F.J. Ditter and V.Y. Ditter. New York:
Harper Colophon Books. (Orig. pub. 1950.)
Halbwachs, M. 1992. On collective memory. Trans. L.A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press (Les Cadres sociaux de la me moire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952).
(Orig. pub. 1925.)
Hirsch, M. 1999. Projected memory: Holocaust photographs in personal and public fantasy.
In Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present, ed. M. Bal, J. Crewe, and L. Spitzer, 3
23.
Hanover: University Press of New England.
Hirsch, M., and V. Smith, eds. 2002. Gender and cultural memory. Special issue, Signs
28, no. 1, 1
498.
Jordan, G. 2008. On history, cultural politics and the birth of the Black subject (after Foucault
with assistance from the artist Tom Feelings). In Culture and power: The plots of history in
performance, ed. R.V. Miyares and C.R. Gonza lez, 133
44. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Press.
Jordan, G. 2011. Re-membering the African American past: Langston Hughes, Aaron
Douglas and the Black art of the Harlem Renaissance. Cultural Studies 25, no. 6: 848
91.
Jordan, G., and C. Weedon. 1995. Cultural politics: Class, gender, race and the postmodern
world. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jordan, G., and C. Weedon. 2000. When the subaltern speak, what do they say? In Without
guarantees: Essays for Stuart Hall, ed. L. Grossberg, P. Gilroy, and A. McRobbie, 165
80.
London: Verso.

Social Semiotics

153

Jordan, G., and C. Weedon. 2010. The construction and negotiation of racialized borders in
Cardiff docklands. In Gendering border studies, ed. J. Aaron, H. Altink, and C. Weedon,
222
41. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Nora, P. 1989. Between memory and history. Representations 26, no. 1: 7
12.
Nora, P. 2001/2006/2009. Rethinking France. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pollock, D., ed. 2005. Remembering: Oral history performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ricoeur, P. 2004. Memory, history, forgetting. Trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Stratton, J. 2005. Before Holocaust memory: Making sense of trauma between postmemory
and cultural memory. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1,
no. 1: 53
71.
Weedon, C. 2008. Memorialising the slave trade in Britain. In Culture and power: The plots of
history in performance, ed. R.V. Miyares and C.R. Gonza lez, 125
32. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Press.

Copyright of Social Semiotics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users
may print, download, or email articles for individual use.