Seminar Blogs
“Cultural Forgetfulness” – Daniël Everts
In my recent academic endeavors, I have been focussing on memory on a cultural level. Primarily, I have been interested in the way some memories are given precedence over other memories in digital social media. However, when performance studies scholar Mike Pearson of Aberystwyth University spoke of his contribution in re-creating a particularly dark moment in Cardiff’s history during one of Utrecht University’s (online) Transmission in Motion seminars in 2020, I was suddenly made aware of a particular process that plays a role in remembering, but that I had thus far somehow forgotten to properly take into account: forgetting itself.
Cultural memory and identity
Memory is per definition selective. French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs once coined the term collective memory in order to describe how humanity reconstructs the past through interpersonal relations; they reminiscence together (Halbwachs 1992, 38–40; 51). German historian Jan Assmann later understood this type of memory as the first step in creating cultural memory – a specific construction of knowledge around a fixed moment in the past. According to Assmann, the past first exists in ‘living memory’, meaning that those alive to personally experience the past communicate about it. As such, the past becomes part of ‘oral’ history (Assmann 1995, 126–127).
Some of these ‘lived’ memories may eventually become manifest in objects, rituals, and traditions, thereby outliving those present at the original event; think war films, Holocaust monuments, or the Dutch 4th and 5th of May commemoration ceremonies. Whatever becomes part of cultural memory has quite an impact on how society as a whole understands itself. As Assmann writes, “cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image” (Assmann 1995, 132).
Forgetting the past
The project Pearson was part of, National Theatre Wales’ The Cardiff Race Riots (1919): retraced, redrawn, tells the story of a four-day racial riot in the city of Cardiff in June 1919, where a mob of primarily white workers descended upon various houses and shops owned by non-white citizens, leaving multiple wounded and three dead (Legall 2020). The story has been told in different ways, the most recent (online) version using drawings, text, sound effects, and narration to paint as immersive a picture as possible.
As Pearson explained, the project’s aim was to reanimate a nearly forgotten piece of history by primarily reconstructing the course of these tragic events from reports in local newspapers. It was the project’s reliance on newspaper reports – that put my mind to thought. Surely, newspaper articles fall under those types of objects in which cultural memory becomes manifest? How, then, could it have almost been forgotten?
Upon being asked, Pearson explained that no previous play, film, or ritual existed to commemorate the tragic events of 1919. All that remained were a few newspaper reports that, of course, had for a long time been sitting in archives, gathering dust. To me, the lesson was clear. Even when they have become manifest into an object, memories continuously need to be cultivated, lest they be forgotten, the lessons of the past unlearned and – here I obviously exaggerate for dramatic effect – society taken back to a darker past, not in memory, but in actuality.
References
- Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” Translated by John Czaplicka. New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133. DOI: 10.2307/488538.
- “Cardiff 1919: Riots Redrawn.” 2020. National Theatre Wales, October 29, 2020. https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/wild-scenes-at-cardiff-2/.
- Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. “Preface.” In On Collective Memory, translated by Lewis A. Coser, 37–40. London and Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.