#sites of memory

[girloleander]

toni morrison in her essay sites of memory and beloved

“how loose the silk. how fine and loose and free.”

[gosmelters]

Cites of Memory: Reconceptualizing Virtual Subject Positions

My RefWorks account has gone from being completely empty to holding fifteen unique citations on furry culture, video games, and ethnographic research. And some of the best ones – the most provocative, the most gripping, the most reckless – have left me in a state of relative disappointment come their conclusions.

What I am finding most valuable about them are their Works Cited pages -- a testament to both the amount of amazing work some of these critical theorists have done (Briagotti into Haraway into Deleuze and Guattari? Y’all are the best) and myself for becoming wise enough to look at citations. In a nutshell, I’ve consumed more food for thought than I’d ever need to hibernate through the next term. But here I am, still typing away, because I have questions to answer.

Kyrie Caldwell’s “‘This Is My Story:’ Representation and Change in Final Fantasy X-2″ was a heartening subject-positional piece that taught me a few bits about my own relationship to video games and culture. Despite my preexisting biases for her work, I’d actually never read this piece in its entirety -- perhaps because of my lack of first-hand knowledge of FFX-2 -- so my revelations were altogether new. At one point during the description of her adolescent years, she mentions falling in love with strategy guides for the "vibrancy" of their pages: "My conception of games has always been the bright colors and animations that brought to life the worlds within, due in no small part to the concept art, character models, and screenshots reproduced in the printed 60 materials I poured over daily and to which I am still drawn" (Caldwell, 60). The amount of love put into those books, realistically just another mode of vicarious living, always gripped me in a way unintelligible until that connection was made. Of course strategy guides and all manner of game materials would mean so much to me outside of the games: they’re externalizations of my favorite virtual experiences, and signs that others have tread those same paths and the ones yet to come.

I cannot stop thinking of these manuals and guides through Pierre Nora’s concept of the “site of memory” -- that phenomenon in which, when memory must be archived in a modern world that values the devaluation of history, memory becomes a tangible construct associated with a particular spatial structure (Nora, 8). If video games are sites of memory, as argued by Dennis Washburn in his own take on Final Fantasy X’s construction of narrative, then these spots of varied association must be, too. And that argues intriguingly that the differences between these books -- that which we can carry around in backpacks and flip through like magazines, picking out sphere grid patterns as if they were merchandise -- and these games are, on the collective level, rather small. 

I’m alluding to a thought that I will proceed to develop over the course of the next few weeks: what does it mean for video games to be collective sites of memory? How does the “site of memory” take hold within discourse? What happens as a result of their being sites of memory? And while I may not be researching strategy guides in particular, they’re a good starting place for understanding that concept of the memorial: they’re representative of the subject positions we create when interactions with these games occur, and the potential for even the most “objective” works within video games (please, drown me with weapon stats!) to become interpretive tools for understanding the virtual worlds within those subject positions.

Answers will be forthcoming over the next month (EEE!), but I want to provide a basic framework beforehand by arguing for the transitive properties of video game positions. That is, try to imagine video games as not simply entities, but locations within which we nestle; strategy guides not merely data collections, but as travel booklets and brochures for brighter futures; and, ultimately, that video games could be more like pit stops in our quest for what Rosi Braidotti calls “the cultivation of affirmative relations” (Braidotti, 413).

Because -- well, speaking of stops, we’re going to have to make a few this week.

ALL ABOARD THE PHANTOM TRAIN!

(Works Cited:

 Braidotti, Rosi. "Nomadism: Against Methodological Nationalism." Policy Futures in Education 8.3-4 (2010): 408-18. 

 Caldwell, Kyrie E. H. "“This is My Story”: Representation and Change in Final Fantasy X-2." Well Played 4.3 (2015): 56-68. 

 Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire." Representations.26 (1989): 7-24.)

[profkew]

In this country, we don't talk about slavery. We don't talk about lynching. Worse, we've created the counternarrative that says we have nothing about which we should be ashamed. Our past is romantic and glorious. ... I think we have to increase our shame — and I don't think shame is a bad thing. I worked with people in jails and prisons, and most parole boards will make my clients say, “I am sorry,” before they can get parole. It's a requirement in many states that you have to show remorse, even if you have a perfect prison record, before they will let you out. We require that because our sense of comfort, our sense of safety, is compromised if we don't think you appreciate the wrongfulness of your criminal act. In faith perspectives, to get to salvation — at least in the Christian tradition — you have to repent. There is no redemption without acknowledgement of sin. It’s not bad to repent. It's cleansing. It's necessary. It's ultimately liberating to acknowledge where we were and where we want to go. We haven't done that collectively.

Bryan Stevenson explains how it feels to grow up black amid Confederate monuments

[profkew]

Removing the [Confederate] statues will not remove the racial gaps in wealth, health, and education which plague the region today and which stem from the very institution of human bondage those men atop the monuments fought to preserve. But it will demote these figureheads, who symbolize the material harm the Confederate ideology inflicted on so many citizens of the South, to the museums in which they belong. They will no longer be shrines haunting the city from on high.

Talmon Joseph Smith, My Hometown Is Finally Getting Rid of Its Confederate Monuments

[dtrblackbrooklyn-blog]

*sings* some strange things are happening!

So basically all my sites of memory are in Northern Brooklyn. This is not at all shocking given the history of silence (segregation, little to no documentation, etc.) but it does make me uneasy for some reason. What’s also shocking is the absence of photography for Central Brooklyn - is that because of the recency of this population density. How do I represent that recency with a memory project which is heavily entwined with history?

Maybe this is the haunting feeling that I was initially talking about... The knowing that these people were there, but even in the most creative way I could have thought up of pulling this history forward and magnifying the silence, that there exist a silence that I still cannot make visual. That I know these people lived there, not even photos can serve as material entities that have become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of the black community. Its overwhelming but I’m sure some reckoning with silence and haunting and memory will provide clarity. 

On another note, I’ve finally made an account on Scalar, the digital platform that will host my thesis. Woohoo! Now to play around with it, work on my thesis so it doesn’t look like mumbo jumbo, and plug it into the webpage.

[dtrblackbrooklyn-blog]

When certain minorities created protected enclaves as preserves of memory to be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what is true of all lieux de mémoire: that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away.

Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory

[profkew]

Project aims to mark dozens of American slave trade ports

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A project aimed at memorializing America's slave-trade ports is moving to Rhode Island, where some 1,000 slave-trading voyages were launched.

The Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project has been working to place markers at 40 ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where slaves arrived or where ships were sent to be used in the trade. The Middle Passage refers to the forced migration across the Atlantic Ocean of more than 10 million Africans, many of whom died on the way.

"We're just simply saying mark the place where it began," said Ann Chinn, who founded the Middle Passage project. "In the same way, people marked Plymouth, they marked Jamestown, they marked St. Augustine. Well, in each of those places, Africans were there too."

The project is rolling out as places around the country have been coming to grips with their roles in the slave trade, including the North, where the region's history of fighting against slavery is more widely known than its less noble roots of trading and profiting from slavery.

Keep reading.

List of cities targeted for Middle Passages Markers.