Jessica Rapson

The transcultural turn : interrogating memory between and beyond borders

Acknowledgements / Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson -- Introduction -- Theorising transcultural memory / A. Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg -- Problematizing transcultural memory / Lars Breuer -- The possibilities of transcultural memory / Wendy Koenig -- Contributors -- Index.

Introduction: Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction

This special issue considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. As Naomi Klein has recently argued, confronting the problem of anthropogenic climate change alters everything we know about the world: demanding wholesale recalibration of economic and political priorities; destabilising the epistemic frameworks through which quotidian life is interpreted and enacted; and decentring the dominant cultural imaginaries that seek to give form to historical experience

Mobilising Lidice: Cosmopolitan Memory between Theory and Practice

This paper interrogates the orthodoxies of cosmopolitanism via the example of an emerging commemorative network surrounding the Czech village of Lidice, drawing attention to a disjunction between idealised theories of memory and actual, instrumental memory practice. Razed by Nazi officials as an act of retaliation for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague, 1942, Lidices male inhabitants – mainly miners and factory workers – were shot, and women and children deported. In a notable example of productive transnational identification, a group of coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, England began a fundraising initiative which resulted in the construction of a new Lidice overlooking the former site (1947). Whilst the field-defining work of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006) suggests that cosmopolitan memory-work avoids the homogenisation of Holocaust memories in the global sphere, I explore here the possibility that the complex motivations that guide such practices may undermine this premise. Accordingly the paper explores inscriptions of Lidice into local contexts via processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation, focusing on its mobilisation in the 21st century in an examination the twinning of Lidice with Khojaly, Azerbaijan (February 2010) and with Stoke-on-Trent (underway). Campaigners in Stoke aim to inaugurate a new museum restore the towns ‘emotional bond’ with Lidice (Alan Gerrard 2010), whereas in Khojaly Lidices memory is polemically aligned with the massacre of over 600 Azerbaijanis during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between ethnic Armenians and the Republic of Azerbaijan (1988–1992). The chapter considers the Lidices twinning network as an example of cosmopolitan, supranational ‘glocalisation’ (Levy and Sznaider 2006). Whilst both cases rely on a sense of global-local solidarity rendered possible by the mobilisation of Holocaust memory, the motivations that ground them are significantly divergent; this essay assesses to what extent this may interfere with the potential of the twinning initiatives discussed to avoid a global homogenisation of Holocaust memory.

‘Family territory’ to the ‘circumference of the earth’: local and planetary memories of climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour

ABSTRACT This article argues that Barbara Kinsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour (2012) responds to the transformations of climate change by charting interactions between local and planetary environments, prompting readers to contextualise the micro – geographically bounded human experience and memory – within the macro context of the Anthropocene. As a long-standing process in the past, present and future, climate change requires epistemological frames attuned to complex scales of time and place which are central to this special issue’s interest in planetary memory. In accordance with these dynamics, the novel suggests a definition of planetary memory in which remembrance is both human (and global) as well as more-than-human (exceeding the global, moving to the planetary). The novel is also explicitly concerned with imagining (or re-membering) the future as much as the past and present. Echoing the dynamics of the novel itself, the article works from the ground up, beginning with a consideration of the environmental contexts of Tennessee, Appalachia and the South, before moving to a wider sense of the planetary. In all, though rooted in a specific part of the rural South, Kingsolver’s novel has an imaginative reach beyond its pages and locale.

Refining Memory: Sugar, oil and plantation tourism on Louisiana’s River Road

This article explores the contemporary mediation of memory at two plantation heritage sites on Louisiana’s River Road. These sites, I argue, are systematically ‘refining’ cultural memories of African American enslavement, in a metaphorical echo of the industrial processing of commodities (oil and sugar) which takes place in the same landscape. The essay draws on initial informal ethnographic fieldwork at Oak Alley (the most-visited River Road plantation) and St Joseph (a working plantation) in 2015. I identify ways in which curatorial direction, guided tours and visitor facilities at each site elide the reality of slave sugar production. The results of this fieldwork are considered in light of a range of existing literature on contested heritage and environmental criticism, enabling a provisional contextualisation of ‘refined’ memory-making within the broader socio-economic and environmental context of River Road.