History And Memory Analysis

suggests that the modernist techniques of representation, such as anti-narrative non–stories, hold the potential of “de-fetishizing both the events and the fantasy accounts of them” (p. 32) which pose a threat by pretending to represent realistically. De-fetishizing holds the potential to open a way to the process of mourning which, White argues, can relieve “the burden of history” (p. 32).
Andreas Huyssen also relates renewed interest in memory to “a crisis of ideologies of progress and of modernization, as well as the technology's role in the collapsing of modernity's established temporal order” (as cited in Radstone, 2000a, p. 3). Huyssen argues that memory has been a getaway both from modernity's faith in progress and threat posed to memory

History and memory are relational but two distinct concepts. To make their distinction clear in this study, I will use Pierre Nora's conceptualization of history and memory. Nora (1989) describes memory as “in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” and history as “reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer” (p. 8). Memory bonds us to the present as history is a mere representation of the past. Memory is multiple, every group / individual has their own memories. History, on the other hand, claims to have universal authority. “Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things” (p.

She argued that prosthetic memory “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum” (p. 2). Such a contact forms an experience in which subject relates herself to larger histories although there is not any connection to person's own past. Subject does not directly become loaded with new memories rather engages them deeply and affectively. Landsberg further argued “the resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics” (p. 2). Prosthetic memories are transferrable and transportable. This form of memory challenges the authentic nature of memory. Prosthetic memory emerged in capitalist economic system in which everything is commodified. Memories could be commodified and made available to people all over the world. Landsberg invited us to recognize power and political potential of this new memory making