Download or read book From Memory s Shrine The Reminscences of Carmen Sylva written by Carmen Sylva and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been said by a well-known German novelist of our day in one of his most recent works that as we approach our fiftieth year our hearts nearly always resemble a grave-yard, thronged with memories, a far greater share of our affection belonging by that time to those who are already at rest beneath the earth than may be claimed by those still left here to wander with us on its surface. This remark of Rosegger’s is above all true of such of us as have been accustomed from our earliest youth to stand mourning beside new-made graves, and see our nearest and dearest prematurely carried off in Death’s relentless grasp. It is in this cemetery of mine, sacred to the memory of all whom I have loved and lost, that I would linger this day, holding commune as is my wont with my beloved dead; but for once I would not that my pilgrimage were altogether a solitary one. As in thought I stand before each grave in turn, gazing with the spirit’s eyes on the dear form so clearly recognisable under the flowers I have strewn above it, I would fain retrace for others than myself every line of the features I know so well, that all you to whom I speak may learn to know and love them also. Even the best are all too soon forgotten in this busy, restless world, but it may be that my words, coming from the depths of my heart, will strike a responsive chord in the hearts of those who read them, and kindling in their breasts a feeling like my own, will keep alive for a little space these figures I call back from the shadowy Past. My aim will be achieved if I can but convey to other souls something of the impression my own received from the noble and beautiful lives with whom I have come in contact, and which my pen will now strive with the utmost fidelity to portray. I am about, then, to throw open the sanctuary I have so long jealously guarded from the world—the private chapel within whose niches my Penates are enshrined. Those to whom I pay a constant tribute of love and gratitude were either the idols of my early youth or the friends of riper years. I shall try to show them as they appeared to me on earth, in every varying aspect, according to season and circumstance, and to the changes of my own mood and habits of thought during the different stages of my mental development. To my youthful enthusiasm many of them became types of perfection, in whom I could discern no human weakness—to have known them was my pride and happiness. All that was best in myself I attributed to their influence, and their presence has never ceased to dwell with me since they have been removed to higher spheres. They, on whose lips I hung with such rapt attention, drinking in every word that fell from them, very possibly paid but small heed to the silent, earnest-eyed child, nor guessed how fondly those lessons of wisdom and holiness were being treasured up in that little heart. For to none of us is it ever given to know the precise hour in which our own soul has spoken most clearly and forcibly to another soul, nor to fathom the full import of the message with which we are entrusted towards our brethren. We cast our bread upon the waters of life, not knowing its destination, and the seed we scatter with a lavish hand is borne in all directions by the winds to take root it may be in the soil we should have deemed least fit for culture. Children often observe more keenly and reflect more thoughtfully than their elders would give them credit for. We need but look back each of us to our own childhood, in order rightly to understand how deep and lasting are the impressions then received, and how they may colour the whole after-current of our lives. Now, as I recall those days, I feel myself, as it were, suddenly transported into the midst of an enchanted garden, among whose rare and luxuriant blossoms I would fain gather together the fairest specimens for a garland. But they spring up around me in such wild profusion, and their beauty is so radiant, their colours so rich, their fragrance so intense, that I am embarrassed in my choice, and only stretch out my hand timidly and hesitatingly towards them, fearing lest in plucking I should injure the least of these fairest works of Creation. Well, indeed, may I feel diffident as to my own skill in selecting and grouping them aright.

Download or read book Yasukuni Shrine written by Akiko Takenaka and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan’s modern national identity. It traces Yasukuni’s history from its conceptualization in the final years of the Tokugawa period and Japan’s wars of imperialism to the present. Author Akiko Takenaka departs from existing scholarship on Yasukuni by considering various themes important to the study of war and its legacies through a chronological and thematic survey of the shrine, emphasizing the spatial practices that took place both at the shrine and at regional sites associated with it over the last 150 years. Rather than treat Yasukuni as a single, unchanging ideological entity, she takes into account the social and political milieu, maps out gradual transformations in both its events and rituals, and explicates the ideas that the shrine symbolizes. Takenaka illuminates the ways the shrine’s spaces were used during wartime, most notably in her reconstructions, based on primary sources, of visits by war-bereaved military families to the shrine during the Asia-Pacific War. She also traces important episodes in Yasukuni’s postwar history, including the filing of lawsuits against the shrine and recent attempts to reinvent it for the twenty-first century. Through a careful analysis of the shrine’s history over one and a half centuries, her work views the making and unmaking of a modern militaristic Japan through the lens of Yasukuni Shrine. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar is a skilled and innovative examination of modern and contemporary Japan’s engagement with the critical issues of war, empire, and memory. It will be of particular interest to readers of Japanese history and culture as well as those who follow current affairs and foreign relations in East Asia. Its discussion of spatial practices in the life of monuments and the political use of images, media, and museum exhibits will find a welcome audience among those engaged in memory, visual culture, and media studies.

Download or read book Memories of the Slave Trade written by Rosalind Shaw and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-04 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.

Download or read book Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan s Empire written by Edward Boyle and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-19 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ongoing arguments over how histories are honoured – as evidenced by the conflict between South Korea and Japan over the opening of Tokyo's Heritage Information Centre in June 2020 – reveal the extent to which heritage processes enable states to assert legitimacy and power on a global stage. Here, Contesting Memorial Spaces of Japan's Empire shines a timely spotlight on the complicated histories and disputed legacies of various sites associated with Japan's empire in Asia and the Pacific. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this transnational study sees contested memorial spaces as windows for us to explore how borders are created, moved and altered in everyday life. From the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall in Guam and the Puppet Emperor Palace in China to Japan's Ainu Museum and the Cowra War Cemetery in Australia, the diverse range of case studies examined here foreground the complex relationship Japan and its neighbours have with their imperial past and reveal how these relations stand at the intersection of individual actions, societal choices and memory collectives. In doing so, this innovative collection of essays bridges history, geography and heritage studies to provide an invaluable new approach to the study of imperial conflict and memory politics in modern Japan.

Download or read book Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab written by Yogesh Snehi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as well as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.

Download or read book Heritage Contested Sites and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and reflect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory. This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.

Download or read book Memory and Presence of Female Saints in Ksar El Kebir Morocco written by Rachid El Hour and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original and relevant study on female sanctity in Morocco that relies both in oral and written hagiographical sources. Memory and Presence of Female Saints in Ksar el Kebir focuses on the local to reflect on the wider and very relevant phenomenon of religious devotion and women in Western Islam.

Download or read book Landscape Race and Memory written by Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory is seldom explored through the experience of geographically mobile, racialized populations. Whilst the relationships between the political value of landscape and national memory have previously been written through, there has been little mention of postcolonial, 'diasporic' racialized citizens. Using both visual and material culture, this book examines the value of 'landscape and memory' for postcolonial migrants living in Britain. It uses memory to examine how postcolonial citizenship in Britain is experienced - through remembered citizenships of 'other' geographies abroad. By reflecting on the cultural landscapes of British Asian women, the book reveals social-historical narratives about migration, citizenship and belonging. New spaces of memory are presented as mobile and as politically charged with meaning as the more formal spaces of memorialization. The book offers a refiguring of race memory as being critical to English heritage and postcolonial politics and makes an important contribution to the writings on memory, race and landscape.

Download or read book Memory and the Future written by Yifat Gutman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself hinders efforts to move forward. Unhinging memory from the past, this book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars who bring the future into the study of memory.

Download or read book Interrogating Trauma written by Mick Broderick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the past century, traumatic experiences have been re-enacted frequently by evolving media and art forms. Now there is a significant body of theory across academic disciplines focused on the representation of cataclysmic European and US historical events. However, less critical attention has been devoted to the representation of havoc outside the West, even though depictions of Third-World disasters saturate contemporary media and art around the globe. This book considers traumatic histories internationally in a broad range of creative arts and visual media representations. Deploying diverse applications of the conventional theories of trauma, it examines the theoretical limitations at the same time as considering alternative methodologies. Interrogating Trauma is concerned with the examination of the concept of trauma, and how it is (often unproblematically) used to theorise the cultural representation of disaster and atrocity. It offers a theorisation of trauma, in order to reappraise the relationship between cultural representation and the socio-historical processes which are marked by violence, conflict and suffering. This book was published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Download or read book Perspectives on Social Memory in Japan written by Yun Hui Tsu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays represents the first interdisciplinary study in English to consider social memory in Japan across a wide range of issues and phenomena. The volume examines a variety of memorialization subjects, including music and poetry, artefacts and tools, oral testimonies and written documents, ritual and ceremonies as well as art and artists.

Download or read book From Memory to Marble written by Elizabeth Rankin and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, the 92-metre frieze of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, one of the largest historical narratives in marble, has been made the subject of a book. The pictorial narrative of the Boer pioneers who conquered South Africa’s interior during the 'Great Trek' (1835-52) represents a crucial period of South Africa’s past. Conceptualising the frieze both reflected on and contributed to the country’s socio-political debates in the 1930s and 1940s when it was made. The book considers the active role the Monument played in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the development of apartheid, as well as its place in post-apartheid heritage. The frieze is unique in that it provides rare evidence of the complex processes followed in creating a major monument. Based on unpublished documents, drawings and models, these processes are unfolded step by step, from the earliest discussions of the purpose and content of the frieze, through all the stages of its design, to its shipping to post-war Italy to be copied into marble from Monte Altissimo, up to its final installation in the Monument. The book examines how visual representation transforms historical memory in what it chooses to recount, and the forms in which it is depicted. The second volume expands on the first, by investigating each of the twenty-seven scenes of the frieze in depth, providing new insights into not only the frieze, but also South Africa’s history. François van Schalkwyk of African Minds, co-publisher with De Gruyter writes: From Memory to Marble is an open access monograph in the true sense of the word. Both volumes of the digital version of the book are available in full and free of charge from the date of publication. This approach to publishing democratises access to the latest scholarly publications across the globe. At the same time, a book such as From Memory to Marble, with its unique and exquisite photographs of the frieze as well as its wealth of reproduced archival materials, demands reception of a more traditional kind, that is, on the printed page. For this reason, the book is likewise available in print as two separate volumes. The printed and digital books should not be seen as separate incarnations; each brings its own advantages, working together to extend the reach and utility of From Memory to Marble to a range of interested readers. For more material you can browse at Stanford's database "Voortrekker Monumentality: a digital archive".

Download or read book Memory and Medieval Tomb written by Elizabeth Valdez Del Alamo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2000: Reverent memorial for the dead was the inspiration for the production of a significant category of artworks during the Middle Ages - artworks aimed as much at the laity as at the clergy, and intended to maintain, symbolically, the presence of the dead. Memoria, the term that describes the formal, liturgical memory of the dead, also includes artworks intended to house and honour the deceased. This book explores the ways in which medieval Christians sought to memorialize the deceased: with tombs, cenotaphs, altars and other furnishings connected to a real or symbolic burial site. A dozen essays analyze strategies for commemoration from the 4th to the 15th century: the means by which human memory could be activated or manipulated through the interaction between monuments, their setting, and the visitor. Building upon from the growing body of literature on memory in the Middle Ages, the collection focuses on the tomb monument and its context as a complex to define what is to be remembered, to fix memory, and to facilitate recollection. Remembering depended upon the emotionally charged interaction between the visitor, the funerary monument, strategically placed images or inscriptions, the liturgy and its participants. Commemorative artworks may consolidate social bonds as well as individual memory, as put forth in this volume. Parallels are drawn between mnemonic devices utilized in the Middle Ages, the design of monuments and contemporary scientific research in cognitive neuropsychology. The papers were originally presented at the 1994 meetings of the College Art Association and the International Congresses of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the University of Leeds, England, in 1995.

Download or read book War Memory and Social Politics in Japan 1945 2005 written by Franziska Seraphim and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japan has long wrestled with the memories and legacies of World War II. In the aftermath of defeat, war memory developed as an integral part of particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy. In the last six decades, the demands placed upon postwar democracy have shifted considerably—from social protest through high economic growth to Japan’s relations in Asia—and the meanings of the war shifted with them. This book unravels the political dynamics that governed the place of war memory in public life. Far from reconciling with the victims of Japanese imperialism, successive conservative administrations have left the memory of the war to representatives of special interests and citizen movements, all of whom used war memory to further their own interests. Franziska Seraphim traces the activism of five prominent civic organizations to examine the ways in which diverse organized memories have secured legitimate niches within the public sphere. The history of these domestic conflicts—over the commemoration of the war dead, the manipulation of national symbols, the teaching of history, or the articulation of relations with China and Korea—is crucial to the current discourse about apology and reconciliation in East Asia, and provides essential context for the global debate on war memory."

Download or read book Frontiers of Memory in the Asia Pacific written by Shu-Mei Huang and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. Taken together, the studies presented here suggest new directions for comparative research into difficult heritage across Asia and beyond, applying an interdisciplinary and critical perspective that spans history, heritage studies, memory studies, urban studies, architecture, and international relations. ‘Bringing together an excellent range of cases from diverse locations across the Asia Pacific, this book is an important contribution not only to this part of the world but to understandings of heritage struggles, especially in relation to colonial histories, more widely.’ —Sharon Macdonald, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin ‘This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the place of Asia within global memory culture. Going beyond the “tunnel vision” of national memories, it provides us with a sophisticated examination of the ways the “difficult heritage” of colonialism, revolution, and war intersects with contemporary politics to produce an Asia-Pacific memory sphere.’ —Ran Zwigenberg, Pennsylvania State University

Download or read book Ancestral Memory in Early China written by K. E. Brashier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancestral ritual in early China was an orchestrated dance between what was present (the offerings and the living) and what was absent (the ancestors). The interconnections among the tangible elements of the sacrifice were overt and almost mechanical, but extending those connections to the invisible guests required a medium that was itself invisible. Thus in early China, ancestral sacrifice was associated with focused thinking about the ancestors, with a structured mental effort by the living to reach out to the absent forebears and to give them shape and existence. Thinking about the ancestors-about those who had become distant-required active deliberation and meditation, qualities that had to be nurtured and learned. This study is a history of the early Chinese ancestral cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. Its goals are to excavate the cult's color and vitality and to quell assumptions that it was no more than a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food for longevity, of prayers for prosperity. Ancestor worship was not, the author contends, merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.

Download or read book From Memory to Written Record written by Michael T. Clanchy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seminal work of scholarship, which traces the development of literacy in medieval England, is now fully updated in a third edition. This book serves as an introduction to medieval books and documents for graduate students throughout the world Features a completely re-written first chapter, ‘Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest', and a new postscript by the author reflecting on the reception to the original publication and discussing recent scholarship on medieval literacy Includes a revised guide to further reading and a revision of the plates which illustrate medieval manuscripts in detail