“When memory is contested: Relating the memory-activism nexus to cultural appropriation debates” – Marit van de Warenburg

In recent years, and with the emergence of social media debates, intangible carriers of memory circulating in the public sphere have become sites for discussion about the ‘apt’ transmission of cultural products. Such discussions, which are often referred to as cultural appropriation debates in public and scholarly discourse, explicitly draw attention to the unequal—and often racialized—power dynamics that underpin processes of cultural exchange. Cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture’ (Rogers 2006). However, Paisley Rekdal proposes that, in cultural appropriation debates, what ‘people are fighting over aren’t the products of culture so much as the historical memories that get attached to them.’ By opting to cast cultural appropriation as a process of remembering rather than an issue of ownership, Rekdal’s reframing opens up valuable inroads to rethinking contested cultural transmission. But her reframing also invites rethinking the role of memory in activism, as well as the framework of the memory-activism nexus at large. Whereas memory in activism is often seen as the mobilization of memory for the political agendas of contemporary activists and memory-activism highlights activists’ attempts to steer future remembrance, appropriation debates show that, sometimes, it is specific afterlives of memorial objects themselves that become the center of activist intervention. This presentation explores the extent to which debates surrounding cultural appropriation may be understood as memory-activism or memory in activism. It proposes that instances of cultural appropriation can be interpreted as a specific form of memory activism, in which activists reinstate the cultural transmission of popular cultural objects with ‘forgotten’ or neglected memories. Doing so, they not only steer remembrance, but also remembrance as linked to the transmission of particular objects. To address this, the paper zooms into case studies relating to contemporary appropriations (and contestations) of black spirituals, a musical genre that originated on North American plantations in the 19th century.

 “Metamorphoses of memory in Brazilian grassroots social movements” – Pablo Pamplona

During the military-corporate dictatorship (1964-1985), Brazil faced the advancement of grassroots social movements led by thousands of Base Christian Communities (CEBs, acronym for Comunidades Eclesiais de Base) in the countryside and the outskirts of large cities. Following the development of Latin American Liberation Theology, in the CEBs, impoverished communities were encouraged to arrange and hold religious commemorations and to draw inspiration from the biblical past to guide their collective action. They are known to have organized several local activities, both religious, cultural and political in nature, and for mobilizing and inspiring social struggles for local and national issues. CEBs commemorative practices established what would become the concept and praxis of mística in some of the biggest and most influential social movements in Brazil to this day, such as the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Homeless Workers’Movement (MTST). These movements raised with mística a form of secular liturgy, notably through the performance of complex opening rituals for their meetings and activities, which bring together various images, discourses and memories in a structured manner. Based on the analysis of the commemorative work in the CEBs, the MST and MTST, this paper addresses the metamorphoses of memory – the dialectical relationship between its malleability and permanence – between these social movements. The continued experimentation that Liberation Theology and the CEBs had in relation to its liturgy, now in the form of mística in contemporary social movements, demonstrates the ways in which memory and memory work is transmitted and transformed according to their needs and cultural and political references. Their praxis can offer us a contribution to the field of Memory Studies, notedly for the discussion on the dynamics of memory in activism across different generations.

 “Memory From Below: The Covert Violence of Bongbong Marcos” – Patrick Peralta

Since the 2022 presidential election, liberal leaders and mainstream media have found a strange bedfellow in Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., whose namesake late father ruled the Philippines under martial law and whose immediate predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, oversaw a campaign of mass killings. Through policy tweaks and a mild demeanor, Marcos has distanced himself from the authoritarian past, assuring Western audiences in particular that the Philippines is committed to liberal democracy. The country’s human rights groups, however, have been raising alarm. They point to the government’s extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, brutal counterinsurgency, and economic violence as evidence that Marcos has, in fact, quietly kept repressive practices. This essay explores how such violations are being exposed and challenged by memory activists in the Philippines, many of whom draw from the political left. Based on twenty-two in-depth interviews with activists in Metro Manila, I examine how they deploy various tactics to bring into mass view the persistence, and concealment, of historical injustice today. While these practices are often besieged by the state and expose activists to great danger, they offer a uniquely creative power that cannot easily be dismissed. This essay aims to reveal how memory work can gain social and political purchase in the everyday, beyond elections or the otherwise spectacular, to resist the endemic violence of forgetting.

Assembly of Sleepless Matter – Yara Haskiel

My practice-based PhD. Research, Assembly of Sleepless Matter, investigated minoritarian memory, rebellious mourning and the border crisis in post-austerity Greece. The project started from the vanished Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki and the recent ‘refugee cemetery’ in Lesvos, both contested sites that point to reminiscences of traumatic traces and produce spatial-auto- temporalities (Parr, 2008) of nomadic matter through city and landscapes. It is developed through a video essay (Thessaloniki) and essayistic text (Lesvos) based on research interviews and fieldwork around the two contested cemeteries. This resulted in resonances that relate traumatic histories to each other, thus creating a sensitivity for different (transgenerational) affects that make critical memory work possible. The border, difference and racialisation are inevitable aspects of migration and diaspora history that persist in their singular memory despite attempts at ‘purification’ and ‘civilising’ (Hamilakis and Greenberg, 2022; Goldberg, 2009) within official commemoration. Fragmented gravestones and neglected cultural material of the dead became legacies of racial violence and ‘bad debt’ (Harney and Moten, 2010) that circulated through the soil and oral histories of local agents. My research, situated at the intersection of multidirectional memory studies (Rothberg, 2009), philosophy, and cultural studies, illuminates the pressing question of responsibility between the dead and the living. It traced a complex interaction between cartographies, sites, cultural matter, and affect. I investigated cemeteries as cartographies and burial grounds as sites to challenge neoliberal abandonment, ‘implicatedness’ and places of transcultural (co-) figurations. In this panel, I wish to present excerpts from my audiovisual fieldwork and an interview with an activist from Lesvos who fought for dignified burial sites on the island for over a decade. Memory activism, in this sense, was not an explicit concern but became part of the urgencies that emerged in the local social movements with the affected families.