[ecrea] CFP / "When memories take a stand: cultural memory and mediations" - IC Journal

*When memories take a stand: cultural memory and mediations*
edited by Miguel Vázquez Liñán ((mvazquez /at/ us.es)) and Rubén Díaz 
((rdialop /at/ acu.upo.es))

Deadline for proposals 15/05/2018
IC Scientific Journal of Information and Communication 
(http://ic-journal.org/)
All submissions should be made via IC´s OJS platform at: 
http://www.icjournal-ojs.org/

For more information, please contact David Montero ((davidmontero /at/ us.es)) 
or Rubén Díaz ((rdialop /at/ acu.upo.es))

_Description_

Semioticians at Tartu School Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky defined 
culture as the non-hereditary memory of the community, namely, a memory 
that is not contained within genes, but within a symbolic system made 
out of prescriptions and contradictions, restrictions and conflict. This 
is what Aleida Assmann, among others, has called cultural memory. This 
memory is disputed through social practices that we can referred to as 
mediations: processes of cultural circulation that occur between the 
institutionalized productions of meaning and the appropriations 
resulting from the use that the commons make of it.

If political uses of memory tend to select, stabilize and, ultimately, 
neutralize the past in an intentional and biased way (a common past that 
must be preserved and commemorated; a past to be proud of and to take to 
one’s heart), the memories that take a stand (Didi-Huberman, 2008) are 
set into motion and evolve from the impact of repressed affects (Freud, 
Benjamin, Warburg), unveiling “a past that is still alive, plural and 
off beat; activating it in order to destabilize a certain autism of the 
present” (Martín Barbero, 2011). When the rediscovery of the trauma and 
the coming into being of the awareness about the historic wounds (which 
is to say of the shift from a narrative of the winner to a narrative of 
the scars, from the place of heroism to the place of the victim’s 
suffering) do not find their recognition in the institutional figures, 
icons and symbols (whether it is due to censorship, lack of political 
interest or ignorance), they end up resulting in the suppuration of 
those wounds, which eventually find visibility in the popular culture 
that’s reproduced through mass means or through mass means which are 
circumscribed to the popular (for we mustn’t forget that such mediations 
are subjected to a two-way movement).

Where political uses of memory take sides and defend a common memory (a 
single memory, cliché-memory, derived from “common sense” and closed, 
inasmuch as it represents the authorized and canonical version of it), 
the memories that take a stand survive disseminated and are built 
through interconnections, through share points which are nevertheless 
unique, as an infinite amalgamation of monuments, signs, untraceable 
tracks, victories and defeats (Delgado, 2008). The power of these 
memories is not what they have become, but rather what they are to 
become. These memories do not ambition power, though they challenge 
power through the distortion of the temporal order fixed by the politics 
of memory and its institutional derivations.

Memory has today become a controversial and contradictory realm, not so 
much threaten by suppression or censorship but by the overabundance of 
information (Todorov), as well as by the so-called “empire of the 
instantaneous” (Reyes Mate), to which a narrative industry –turned 
factory of the present that rapidly loses its consciousness of the past– 
is constantly subdued. In an age marked by generalized amnesia and by a 
lack of historical consciousness, this feeling of rupture between past 
and present finds a counter-point in the nostalgic enthusiasm towards an 
over-represented past in the so-called “commemoration era”: the 
proliferation of memorial museums and of cities as museums, the 
touristification of memory places, the fascination towards retro and 
vintage design, the renewed appreciation of flea markets, the rise of 
historical novels and TV series. While media policies about memory help 
articulate a “common memory”, which is usually the representation of the 
national memory, subjected to chauvinistic appropriation, 
commercialization and fetishism, we cannot ignore that the past is 
always up for debate. Memories do not belong to a single time. They 
imply a confrontation sometimes dormant, a tense coexistence of 
disparate times. Thus, we better think of memory as a palimpsest and a 
collage, not as a linear narrative.

As harvesters who bend down to collect what’s left after the crop of 
memory, in this issue of the IC Journal we invite researchers to explore 
the ways in which a community relates to its past through mediations 
taking place, often suddenly and unexpectedly, through all sorts of 
social mechanisms (both material and immaterial) that belong to the 
realm of social imaginaries and perform a symbolic role within processes 
of remembrance.

Contributions focusing on how memory can take a stand or on the ways in 
which mediated discourses on the pasts (including the mechanisms these 
mediations use, or their sociopolitical effects) will be particularly 
welcome. Therefore, we are looking for original papers that can 
contribute to a deeper understanding of the intersections between memory 
studies, and culture industry and media studies.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

  * The relationship between history, memory and mediation
  * Memory discourse, war, peace and human rights
  * Official memories and counter-hegemonic memories (the memory of the
    labor movement, memorialists’ proposals from different social
    movements, or the memory of the Revolution)
  * Memory policies and communication and media regulations
    (communication policies of the past), as they both are the framework
    in which the dialogue about memory will be addressed. We would like
    to put the accent on the need to reorganize culture industries, as
    well as the communication policies that may help in this respect,
    thus broadening the possibilities of minority memory discourses of
    accessing mainstream communication channels
  * Memories, symbols and mediations: flags and emblems, maps and
    cartography, biographical texts about heroes, monuments and ruins,
    text-books, travel guides, graffiti, film, dark tourism, plazas,
    marginal suburbs, music, rites and commemorative celebrations,
    comic, photography, contemporary art, science-fiction and digital
    practice, popular religion, superstition, ghosts and its regression
  * Memory, trauma and commemoration: how to narrate the traumas of the 
past

*Book reviews*

IC Journal is now considering proposals for book reviews to be published 
at the “Bibliografica” section. Reviewers might send their proposals at 
e mail address “(info /at/ ic-journal.org)” or to Belén Zurbano 
((bzurbano /at/ us.es)) as coordinator of this section.

*References*

Assmann, A. (2011). Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, 
Media, Archives. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Delgado, M. (2008). Lo común y lo colectivo. El espacio público como 
espacio de y para la comunicación. Madrid: Medialab Prado. Disponible en 
http://medialab-prado.es/mmedia/0/688/688.pdf
Didi-Huberman, G. (2008) Cuando las imágenes toman posición. Madrid: 
Antonio Machado
Lotman, Y. y Uspensky, B. (1978). “On the semiotic mechanism of 
culture”. En New Literary History 9(2): 211–232. Disponible en 
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Lotman-SemioticMechanism-1978.pdf
Martín-Barbero, J. (2011). El país que no cabe en el museo de doña 
Beatriz. Recuperado de: 
http://www.revistaarcadia.com/impresa/articulo/el-pais-no-cabe-museo-dona-beatriz/25905
Mate, R. (2013). La piedra desechada. Madrid: Trotta.
Todorov, T. (2013). Los abusos de la memoria, Barcelona: Paidós.


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