Lecture 3
Geographies of memory
‘An inherently geographical activity: places store an evoke personal and collective memories,
memories emerge as bodily experiences of being in and moving through space, and
memories shape imaginative geographies, and material geographies of home,
neighbourhood, city, nation and empire’
- Johnson N and Pratt, G. 2009 – the dictionary of human geography
The past isn’t dead, its lively, it lives in our everyday
‘Memory changes through both time and space’
- Legg, 2007:457
Overtime our understanding f something happens in the past changes at the present
-chrono politics – politics of memory work out in physical space
Statues:
- Memorials are never neutral representations of the past
- Sites of memory become arenas for cultural politics
- Memory is a lens on the present not the history of a past
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’
- William Faulkner
Memory is collective VS memory is contested
Theoretical overview: Les Lieux de Memoire
- Nora argued that French no longer live in ‘environments of memory’
- As a result people created ‘sites of memory’
- Memory must be deliberately evoked
- Memory is memorialised: in stone in archives in eulogies
- Nora = show how memory is collective and contests over it are rooted in place
Monuments
‘built icons of identity usually I the form of public statues or symbolic building that are
designed and executed to evoke national and regional identity’
Geographies of memory
‘An inherently geographical activity: places store an evoke personal and collective memories,
memories emerge as bodily experiences of being in and moving through space, and
memories shape imaginative geographies, and material geographies of home,
neighbourhood, city, nation and empire’
- Johnson N and Pratt, G. 2009 – the dictionary of human geography
The past isn’t dead, its lively, it lives in our everyday
‘Memory changes through both time and space’
- Legg, 2007:457
Overtime our understanding f something happens in the past changes at the present
-chrono politics – politics of memory work out in physical space
Statues:
- Memorials are never neutral representations of the past
- Sites of memory become arenas for cultural politics
- Memory is a lens on the present not the history of a past
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’
- William Faulkner
Memory is collective VS memory is contested
Theoretical overview: Les Lieux de Memoire
- Nora argued that French no longer live in ‘environments of memory’
- As a result people created ‘sites of memory’
- Memory must be deliberately evoked
- Memory is memorialised: in stone in archives in eulogies
- Nora = show how memory is collective and contests over it are rooted in place
Monuments
‘built icons of identity usually I the form of public statues or symbolic building that are
designed and executed to evoke national and regional identity’
