Constructing collective memory for (de)colonisation: Taiwanese images in history textbooks, 1950–1987

ABSTRACT

History curriculum and textbooks, as a key mechanism of constructing collective memory, play a critical role in shaping national, social, and cultural imaginations of the young. This paper analyses history textbooks in Taiwan during the martial law period (1950–1987) to explore narratives about Taiwan and examines the ways in which those narratives as collective memory created particular images of Taiwan. The analysis indicates that history textbooks delineated two threads of narrative, one is a Sinicisation narrative, namely Chinese colonisation, and the other is Chinese restoration narrative. The Sinicisation narrative constructed particular collective memory about Taiwan being of Chinese descent and an inheritor of Chinese culture, lost and restored by China after World War II. In the narrative of restoration, Taiwan was imagined as reborn to be the model child of Chinese descent that was obligated to emancipate all Chinese compatriots from Communism and to ultimately realise the goal of Chinese reunification. These narratives served for emancipating Taiwan from Japanese colonisation and constructed particular collective memory that Sinicised Taiwan for Chinese restoration. The image of Taiwan as Chinese descent, identified with Chinese culture, has endured to the present and continue to shape imaginations and discourses about Taiwan in the present.     

Reading the Reparations Debate

This essay examines the ways in which the rhetoric of the reparations debate elucidates the varying accounts of history favored by Americans of different backgrounds, the political and ideological foundations underlying different perspectives on the nature and uses of history, and the norms guiding public deliberation in the contemporary U.S. about how to remember the past. Because the controversy explicitly connects questions about race and cultural memory, it has generated positions that seem irresolvable; yet, ironically, the debate suggests ways in which rhetoric about race in the U.S. might begin to move beyond current impasses.     

Prejudiced,historical witness,and responsible: Collective memory and liminality in the Beit Hashoah museum of tolerance

In terms of collective memory, few issues match the import of the representation of the Holocaust and the ways in which such collective memory is presented is often fraught with controversy. A recent controversial site of memory is the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. This essay examines the representational strategies of the museum, arguing that its critics have failed to consider important aspects of the museum's representational practices. Specifically, the museum's representation of the Holocaust involves liminality, structured to engage audiences, preserving the Holocaust as a profoundly important historical event while emphasizing personal responsibility in the prevention of hatred, violence, and genocide. By exploring the museum's novel approach of leading visitors through breach, liminality, and reintegration, we may better understand the ways in which historical presentations can accentuate a liminal and thus a potentially significant experience with the past, and we may learn more about how collective remembrance can be promoted to encourage contemporary responsibility.     

“Second Line to Bury White Supremacy”: Take 'Em Down Nola,monument removal,and residual memory

ABSTRACT

As Lost Cause statues come down across the country, communities are forced to reckon with monumental absences. While the rhetorical significance of monuments is well-established in scholarly literature, the rhetoric of monumental absence is not as thoroughly covered. To better understand the role that monumental absence plays in both public space and civic life, this essay theorizes residual memory as the remaining rhetorical potency that clings to a commemorative site after the focal object or structure of memorialization is removed. To demonstrate the theoretical utility of residual memory and contribute to ongoing public debates about Lost Cause monuments, this essay uses rhetorical field methods to conduct a rhetorical analysis of Take 'Em Down NOLA's “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy.” The secretive night time removal of the Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans on April 24, 2017 and the activist celebration that followed two weeks later provide an exemplary case for exploring how residual memories can be used to resist and revise regressive practices of public memory.     

“Unpacking my Library”: Children's Literature in the Writings of Walter Benjamin

In recentyears as the works of Walter Benjamin, the German‐Jewish cultural critic and philosopher, have become more widely available in translation commentaries have emerged which focus on what his writings have to offer current practices of cultural history. Benjamin was an avid collector of children's books. He also wrote extensively on children's literature, forgotten children's stories, the compulsion and cultures of book collecting and about his own childhood experiences in Berlin. This essay concerns itself with Benjamin's relationship with children's literature, both a child and as a collector, and his insights into the process of engaging with the internal world of the child. In doing so consideration is given to his innovative approach to memory‐work and the relationship between “remembering”, memory, artefacts and history. In this sense, this essay is about the book and education and the writing of cultural history.

     

Jefferson's other

This essay investigates how various representations of the public memory of Thomas Jefferson function rhetorically. Curiously, such representations depict a past for which no certain record exists. The portrayal of Jefferson's alleged affair with Sally Hemings in novels, films, and other discourses demonstrates that the rhetoric of public memory, which preserves the relevance and utility of the past for audiences in the present, is often sustained, not by a transparent or even plausible understanding of former persons and events, but by profound and potentially irresolvable confusions over the relationship between what is commemorated and those doing the commemorating. The essay scrutinizes how three different forms of rhetoric respond to such confusion by fashioning memories of Jefferson that reflect contemporary desires to explain the mysteries of his enigmatic past. Consequently, the essay argues that the contemporary public memory of Jefferson is defined by a discursive haunting of his official reputation in which various ghostly counterparts are said to represent what the official record can only suggest.     

Collective memory,political nostalgia,and the rhetorical presidency: Bill Clinton's commemoration of the March on Washington,August 28, 1998

This essay offers a reading of President Bill Clinton's address on August 28, 1998 in which he commemorates the 35th anniversary of the March on Washington. Specifically, Clinton's August 28th address reveals how the presidency has become a hermeneutic site for the formation of collective memory and political nostalgia. This analysis discusses the uses of political nostalgia for the purposes of political image (re)construction as evidenced by Clinton's exploitation of the civil rights movement to explain and excuse his personal failings and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. We also present a divergent version of Clinton's rhetoric, giving specific attention to how his particular use of nostalgia in this address works to articulate and confront many of the powerful dichotomies (masculine/feminine; war/peace; black/white; private/public) that define his presidency, his public persona, and the larger political culture in postmodern America.     

Sanitizing the Struggle: Barack Obama,Selma, and Civil Rights Memory

In this article, I examine Barack Obama’s use of collective memory during his 2007 campaign speech in Selma, Alabama. Specifically, I argue that Obama appeals to collective memory to challenge the Black community’s relationship to the past. He reframed the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in a manner favorable to his political aspirations. While this frame was politically expedient, it weakened Black political agency. It robbed the Black community of crucial rhetorical resources used to challenge structural inequalities in society. This article offers insight into the complex relationship between metaphor and collective memory. Specifically, I interrogate the role of metaphor as a crucial site where public memory is formed, disrupted, and rearticulated. Furthermore, I consider the implications of his use of memory for the future of the Black freedom struggle.     

Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century

This essay critically examines the reemergence of World War II in public culture. By analyzing four popular memory texts (the World, War II Memorial, Saving Private Ryan, The Greatest Generation, and the Women in Military Service for America Memorial) as well as the discourse circulating about them, it argues that these reconstructions of the past function rhetorically as civics lessons for a generation beset by fractious disagreements about the viability of U.S. culture and identity.     

公有所有权：一个分析集体土地所有权的新视角

公有所有权,是指一定区域范围内的人群基于共同利益而对特定财产所享有的所有权,具体包括国家所有权和集体所有权。公有所有权具有公益性、利益主体抽象性、权利行使间接性以及权利保护方面的易侵性等特征。我国的集体土地所有权在性质上属于公有所有权。公有所有权理论是一个分析我国集体土地所有权的崭新视角,它可以正确解释我国集体土地所有权的历史和现状并为其完善提供理论基础。     

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting

This essay reviews key controversies in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate in 1860, early twentieth-century debates about the heritability of acquired characteristics and the consistency of Mendelian genetics with natural selection; the 1925 Scopes trial about teaching evolution; tensions about race, culture, and eugenics at the 1959 centenary celebration Darwin’s Origin of Species; adaptationism and its critics in the Sociobiology debate of 1970s and, more recently, Evolutionary Psychology; and current disputes about Intelligent Design. These controversies, I argue, are etched into public memory because they occur at the emotionally charged boundaries between public-political, technical-scientific, and personal-religious spheres of discourse. Over most of them falls the shadow of eugenics. The main lesson is that the history of Darwinism cannot be told except by showing the mutual influence of the different norms of discourse that obtain in the personal, technical, and public spheres. Nor can evolutionary biology successfully be taught to citizens and citizens-to-be until the fractious intersections between spheres of discourse have been made explicit. In the course of showing why, I take rival evolutionary approaches to be dynamical historical research traditions rather than static theories. Accordingly, I distinguish Darwin’s version of Darwinism from its later transformations. I pay special attention to the role Darwin assigned to development in evolution, which was marginalized by twentieth-century population genetical Darwinism, but has recently resurfaced in new forms. I also show how the disputed phrases “survival of the fittest” and “social Darwinism” have shaped personal anxieties about “Darwinism,” have provoked public opposition to teaching evolution in public schools, and have cast a shadow over efforts to effectively communicate to the public largely successful technical efforts to make evolutionary inquiry into a science.     

(White) women on the move: Suffrage memory and the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference (IWY), a historic gathering of women in Houston, Texas—tasked to put forward a series of policy recommendations, many informed by a feminist perspective—undercut its own intersectional impulse by leveraging collective memory of U.S. suffrage activism. I analyze the conference program, a document distributed to every conference attendee, that called up early woman’s movement history and suffrage memory in its language, ephemera, and image to constitute a certain narrative for the 1977 IWY audience. I argue that by linking the IWY conference to a specific narrative of women’s rights and suffrage activism, the planners made the conference more explicitly political and feminist, and imbued the event with historical significance and legitimacy. At the same time, the deployment of suffrage memory ultimately positioned white women as mobile and engaged in social movement while effacing Black women and women of color who had been involved in suffrage activism, thus rendering them immobile, invisible, silent, and locked in the past. I conclude by examining a concurrent counter-narrative, one not included in the program, as a productive, intersectional rupture in suffrage memory at IWY.     

Remembering “A Great Fag”: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space

This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's “gay pioneer,” Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue—the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory—I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both materializing queer memories and how space and identity are understood in the city. Based upon these visualizations, I extend arguments for how rhetoricians critique memory texts and contribute to defining “queer public memory” in light of this statue.     

Clinton and Vietnam: A case for amnestic rhetoric

Bill Clinton's 1993 Memorial Day speech at the Vietnam Wall is an example of amnestic rhetoric, which seeks to discourage public debate and to diminish public memory. In this essay I argue that Clinton's epideictic discourse camouflages an act of apologia in which he defends his controversial opposition to the Vietnam War. Second, I argue that Clinton simultaneously directs his audience's attention away from the past and toward the future, urging them to remember the buried, but to bury the memory of Vietnam. Third, I argue that the speech culminates with an act of rhetorical investiture for Clinton as commander in chief. Finally, I propose the concept of amnestic rhetoric as an addition to public memory scholarship.     

Neoliberalism,the public sphere,and a public good

This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective “we” for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordinated action, neoliberalism envisions a public of atomistic individuals who compete with one another for comparative advantage. Flattening difference and obscuring inequality, a neoliberal public presumes a universal subject that obscures its own particularity and discounts the uneven burdens faced by those who cannot seamlessly identify with its mode of subjectivity. Further, for a neoliberal public, inequality serves as the condition and end of competition. Resistance to neoliberalism may arise in the networked locals of a multiple public sphere, as advocates reclaim connections that neoliberalism seeks to deny.     

广东畲族乡文化传承和乡土历史教材的开发探究

乡土历史教材是少数民族文化传承的重要载体。在对广东畲族乡的族群记忆建构现状调研的基础上,分析乡土历史教材对当地畲族文化传承和保护的影响和作用,以河源漳溪畲族乡为例,对该地区的乡土历史教材的编撰作一定的编辑和补充说明。     

Digital archives in the cloud: Collective memory,institutional histories and the politics of information

The archive is a cultural institution that creates a framework for the social and collective memory and as such is one of the collection of knowledge institutions that not only preserves and classifies “texts” but uses them to re-create collective memory and sometimes to invent cultural histories. Like all knowledge institutions, the archive is also a construction deeply implicated in knowledge politics or what Foucault calls power/knowledge. In the past the archive has functioned as a central metaphor for the construction of human knowledge in all it is different institutional forms and like the encyclopedia and the camera, the archive produces highly coded representations that make implicit validity claims to the truth and justice of the past. Politically speaking, those who control the archive control the past. In the digital world, the archive is used to describe a machine-readable location as a store for “data” and “information.” Digital technologies radically alter our existing institutions, making access to their embedded knowledge widely available and enable learning and research anytime, anywhere. Data analytics algorithmically can manipulate electorates and entire democracies in new ways, while destabilising the free press. This article asks what digitizing an archive means for collective memory, for the history of institutions and for politics in the Cloud.     

Seeing History: Malaika Favorite's Furious Flower Poetry Quilt Painting and Pan‐African Memory

Malaika Favorite's Furious Flower Poetry Quilt (2004) is an acrylic painting that depicts 24 portraits of leading poets of the African Diaspora. Commissioned by Dr Joanne Gabbin, English professor and director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the painting is part of a larger programme of poetry education. The painting's interweaving of the portraits with fragments from the poets’ writing functions to create an interactive visual‐textual body of poets and poetry, a collection which has been taught at all levels of education from primary school to university. Its quilt structure pays homage to the historic role of women in preserving history and memory. The painting also serves to construct a pan‐African identity and collective memory about slavery, African American history and empowerment.     

朱熹蜀汉正统论

朱熹不光是理学的集大成者,也是一位见解深刻、思想独特的史论家。在朱熹之前,以陈寿《三国志》为代表,到司马光的《资治通鉴》以魏为正统一脉始终占据三国正统史观的主流,至朱熹在《资治通鉴纲目》中完整系统的阐述自己的正统观念,这种局面才开始慢慢被打破,逐渐动摇甚至取代了魏正统观,对后世产生了深远的影响。使得后来很多史学文学作品也受到影响而洋溢着尊刘抑曹倾向,如郝经的《续后汉书》和小说《三国志通俗演义》。     

公共痛苦中的历史信赖--论"伤痕文学"时期小说的历史叙事

"伤痕小说"本是新中国成立以来前所未有的个人化叙事,是从个人立场出发的对历史之痛的叙述.但这种伤痛不仅仅是个人性的,也是属于整个民族的,个人性的历史记忆便同时又成了对于公共事件的叙述,个人之痛成为公共痛苦.由于痛苦的公共性和对历史感的关注,最终,个人化历史叙事反而成为更加"集体性"的宏大叙事.