The increasing centrality of memory to work being done across a wide range of disciplines has brought along with it vexed questions and far-reaching changes in the way knowledge is pursued. This timely collection provides a forum for demonstrating how various disciplines are addressing these concerns. Is an historian's approach to memory similar to that of theorists in media or cultural studies, or are their understandings in fact contradictory? Which methods of analysis are most appropriate in which contexts? What are the relations between individual and social memory? Why should we study memory and how can it enrich other research? What does its study bring to our understanding of subjectivity, identity and power? In addressing these knotty questions, Memory and Methodology showcases a rich and diverse range of research on memory. Leading scholars in anthropology, history, film and cultural studies address topics including places of memory; trauma, film and popular memory; memory texts; collaborative memory work and technologies of memory. This timely and interdisciplinary study represents a major contribution to our understanding of how memory is shaping contemporary academic research and of how people shape and are shaped by memory.

This essay responds to Astrid Erll’s question about what it might mean to do memory studies in different parts of the world. We offer a response from the perspective of three researchers based in Australia. Focused on a season-opening gala performance, a photographic series, a site-specific protest, and a film that takes a choir from Central Australia to Germany, the essay tracks the emergence, in culture, of something we term the ‘here-now’. The essay argues that this ‘here-now’ belongs neither to historical temporality’s linear time-line, nor to the cosmology of an unsullied Indigenous culture – and cannot easily be addressed in the language of memory studies. Taking our lead from four case studies, we try to find words for what it is that the ‘here-now’ makes present, as it emerges in the artworks and events we discuss. We find that the ‘here-now’s’ ordering of place/time insistently evokes a yet-to-be realized Australia, while prompting recognition of the hard truths that still stand in its way.

Using as a case-study a clock that belonged to the author's father, this chapter begins with an exploration of memory research's studies of migration and memory through migrant objects. The chapter argues that by overlooking memory's involuntary, unbiddable, and rhetorical aspects, these studies overstate migrants' capacity for agentic remembering. The chapter then uses its case-study of the author's clock to make a case for an alternative approach to migrant objects and memory through the French psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche's writings on translation and the enigmatic message.

How do migrants make themselves at home—or not—in new worlds and what sorts of work are involved in this process? This chapter’s opening premise is that of an inextricable connection between the material, physical worlds of place and location and the psychical and experiential worlds of memory and the unconscious. Using as a case study my own experience of migrating from London to Melbourne, this chapter draws on Laplanchian psychoanalytic theory to explore the role of memory in the process of making a home in a new place.

This essay discusses the TV series Top of the Lake (Campion 2013) within the frameworks of theories of trauma and psychoanalytic object relations. The essay's focus falls on the prominence given to the New Zealand landscape in the series and in reviews, and on Top of the Lake's apparently paradoxical combining of a narrative concern with extreme violence and performances that evoke childlike playfulness. Having examined the possibility of categorising the series as a trauma text, the essay concludes by proposing that its formal and narrative elements combine to produce a spectatorial experience that evokes potential space while triggering reparative impulses.

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent. This interdisciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory. The chapters in this volume offer a complex awareness of the workings of memory, and the ways in which different or changing histories may be explained. They explore the relation between individual and social memory, between real and imaginary, event and fantasy, history and myth. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record, are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memory's own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book. Topics covered range from the Basque country to Cambodia, from Hungary to South Africa, from the Finnish Civil War to the cult Jim Jarmusch movie Dead Man, from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Australia. Part I, Transforming Memory, is concerned primarily with the social and personal transmission of memory across time and generations. Part II, Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History, brings the after-effects of catastrophe to the fore. In Part III, Patterning the National Past, the relation between nation and memory is the central issue. Part IV, And Then Silence..., reflects on the complex and multiple meanings of silence and oblivion, wherein amnesia is often used as a figure for the denial of shameful pasts.

"Dossier: Screen Genres of Reconciliation in Australia, Chile, Rwanda, and New Zealand." Critical Arts, 31(5), p. 77

This essay explores Alex Seton's artwork Someone died trying to have a life like mine in terms of its initiation and sustaining of a dialogue with gallery visitors. Focused on the moving qualities of this dialogue as well as on its ethics, and starting out from approaches developed within memory and trauma research, the essay discusses Someone died's relations with witnessing, testimony, trauma and memory trails. Having concluded that certain aspects of the dialogue between Someone died and its visitors remain outside the terms of these approaches, the essay concludes by shifting its terms to consider how Hannah Arendt's writings on thought might illuminate how artworks - and Seton's Someone died in particular - work and what it means to be moved'.