Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ReAct (Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe)
Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-06-30
Mass demonstrations regularly make the headlines. This project studies how they are also remembered when they are no longer news. Focusing on developments in Europe since 1871 it examines how stories about protest are produced and shared in different media and how that culturally produced memory informs later generations of activists. Where previous research has focussed on particular movements and the actors involved in them, ReAct examines the cultural work that happens in the intervals between protest cycles. We investigate how stories of civil resistance are produced, shared, and transmitted across generations and national borders in the form of documentaries, memoirs, commemorations, and archiving projects as well as in the visual arts and literature. ReAct shows how and why cultural memory is important to new protest movements.
Relevance for society:
ReAct posits that the cultural memory of earlier protests informs civil resistance by shaping expectations and offering models for action. Scenarios for the future are informed by narratives about the past. More insight into the way stories about protest are culturally constructed, disseminated, and adapted to new circumstances will help us understand better the nature of protest in today’s world. ReAct provides new critical literacies about how the meaning of protest is produced across different media and cultural forms. By offering a historical perspective reaching back to the late nineteenth century, it also gives new insight into long-term trends and provides valuable context for analysing contemporary developments. More generally, it helps us understand how collective identities are produced outside traditional ethno-national frameworks and in the context of collective action. Our focus is on protest movements in Europe, but given the transnational entanglements our project has brought to light, our findings also have relevance for the understanding of movements elsewhere.
Overall objectives:
The overall objective is to provide new insight, on the one hand, into the ways in which narratives about protest are produced and transmitted across generations and national borders and, on the other hand, into how that cultural memory informs new social movements. In terms of its empirical focus, ReAct provides the first in-depth account of the remembering and forgetting of civil resistance in Europe since 1871. In terms of its disciplinary positioning, it effects a necessary reorientation within the field of cultural memory studies, hitherto dominated by trauma and victimhood, towards the cultural memory of civic life and of hope in social transformation.
Relevance for society:
ReAct posits that the cultural memory of earlier protests informs civil resistance by shaping expectations and offering models for action. Scenarios for the future are informed by narratives about the past. More insight into the way stories about protest are culturally constructed, disseminated, and adapted to new circumstances will help us understand better the nature of protest in today’s world. ReAct provides new critical literacies about how the meaning of protest is produced across different media and cultural forms. By offering a historical perspective reaching back to the late nineteenth century, it also gives new insight into long-term trends and provides valuable context for analysing contemporary developments. More generally, it helps us understand how collective identities are produced outside traditional ethno-national frameworks and in the context of collective action. Our focus is on protest movements in Europe, but given the transnational entanglements our project has brought to light, our findings also have relevance for the understanding of movements elsewhere.
Overall objectives:
The overall objective is to provide new insight, on the one hand, into the ways in which narratives about protest are produced and transmitted across generations and national borders and, on the other hand, into how that cultural memory informs new social movements. In terms of its empirical focus, ReAct provides the first in-depth account of the remembering and forgetting of civil resistance in Europe since 1871. In terms of its disciplinary positioning, it effects a necessary reorientation within the field of cultural memory studies, hitherto dominated by trauma and victimhood, towards the cultural memory of civic life and of hope in social transformation.
Research was organized on a case-study basis around three intersecting lines of inquiry: (1) Changing Mediations (on the role of specific media in remembering protest); (2) Afterlives of Activism (how particular movements are later recalled); and (3) Memoryscapes of Activism (how activists mobilize the memory of earlier movements)
(1) Changing Mediations: this translated into two post-doc projects focusing in images and words respectively, created an over-arching framework for the other subprojects by identifying the affordances of visuality and language as media of protest memory.
(2) Afterlives of Activism: this translated into three projects focusing on the cultural remembrance of activist and movements:
The first project examines the cultural afterlives of women revolutionaries active in the period 1871-1930. The second one examined the cultural afterlife of Turkish revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş. Together these two projects brought out the range of cultural forms used to represent the lives of the activists, but also the importance of gender and of stakeholders in keeping their memory alive. A third project turned to movements rather than individuals, and studied the cultural afterlife of anti-austerity movements from the period 2011-2014, especially in regard to their self-archiving practices, another way of keeping the memory of activism alive.
(3) Memoryscapes of Activism: this translated into three subprojects examining how activists themselves reference earlier movements as a source of inspiration and as a model for action. One subproject focussed on socialists and anarchists in the 1880s; a second on social movements in Germany and Greece in the 1960s; a third examined recent movements with a special emphasis on the role of slogans as carriers of protest memory.
In parallel ReAct produced a searchable database linking cultural carriers to protest events; available at www.rememberingactivism.eu.
These results have been synthesized in Ann Rigney, Remembering Hope: The Cultural Afterlife of Protest (Oxford UP, forthcoming) and, in addition to multiple articles and two dissertations, elaborated across the following collections: The Visual Memory of Protest (ed. A. Rigney & T. Smits; Amsterdam UP, 2023); Archiving Activism in the Digital Age (ed. D. Salerno & A. Rigney; Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam; 2024); Remembering Contentious Lives (ed. D. Erbil, A. Rigney & C. Vlessing; Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming); Memory and the Language of Contention (ed. S. Van den Elzen & A. Rigney; Brill, forthcoming). In addition a special issue of Memory Studies on Remembering Activism: explorations in the memory-activism nexus (October 2024; ed. S. Merrill and A. Rigney) present these findings.
(1) Changing Mediations: this translated into two post-doc projects focusing in images and words respectively, created an over-arching framework for the other subprojects by identifying the affordances of visuality and language as media of protest memory.
(2) Afterlives of Activism: this translated into three projects focusing on the cultural remembrance of activist and movements:
The first project examines the cultural afterlives of women revolutionaries active in the period 1871-1930. The second one examined the cultural afterlife of Turkish revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş. Together these two projects brought out the range of cultural forms used to represent the lives of the activists, but also the importance of gender and of stakeholders in keeping their memory alive. A third project turned to movements rather than individuals, and studied the cultural afterlife of anti-austerity movements from the period 2011-2014, especially in regard to their self-archiving practices, another way of keeping the memory of activism alive.
(3) Memoryscapes of Activism: this translated into three subprojects examining how activists themselves reference earlier movements as a source of inspiration and as a model for action. One subproject focussed on socialists and anarchists in the 1880s; a second on social movements in Germany and Greece in the 1960s; a third examined recent movements with a special emphasis on the role of slogans as carriers of protest memory.
In parallel ReAct produced a searchable database linking cultural carriers to protest events; available at www.rememberingactivism.eu.
These results have been synthesized in Ann Rigney, Remembering Hope: The Cultural Afterlife of Protest (Oxford UP, forthcoming) and, in addition to multiple articles and two dissertations, elaborated across the following collections: The Visual Memory of Protest (ed. A. Rigney & T. Smits; Amsterdam UP, 2023); Archiving Activism in the Digital Age (ed. D. Salerno & A. Rigney; Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam; 2024); Remembering Contentious Lives (ed. D. Erbil, A. Rigney & C. Vlessing; Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming); Memory and the Language of Contention (ed. S. Van den Elzen & A. Rigney; Brill, forthcoming). In addition a special issue of Memory Studies on Remembering Activism: explorations in the memory-activism nexus (October 2024; ed. S. Merrill and A. Rigney) present these findings.
The project has provided overwhelming evidence of the importance of cultural production as a factor in transmitting the memory of protest to later generations: besides films, documentaries and memoirs, archives, slogans, and protest songs emerged as unexpectedly interesting objects of study. In contrast, the relative absence of public monuments in our corpus, except as objects of contestation, was striking; it indicated that the memory of oppositional groups is transmitted along different pathways than narratives that have received some measure of official recognition.
The different case studies, all relating to protest and how it is culturally remembered, thus challenged some ingrained assumptions relating to collective memory and its transmission. In particular, the project showed how remembering can be future-oriented, that looking back can also be a way of looking forward. This is a key insight for our understanding of collective memory as such, It also helps in rethinking the usual association between memory and nostalgia by showing how important memory is in the pursuit of social change. Using the concept of retro-prospective memory work, the project has provided the analytic tools and empirical evidence for showing how progressive remembering is possible; moreover, it shows how cultural acts of remembrance on the part of stakeholders are themselves ways of intervening in the present. Finally, the project’s longitudinal approach shows the evolution of different understandings of time and narrative; this challenges a-historical approaches to the memory- activism nexus and demonstrates the need for more context-sensitive approaches.
The different case studies, all relating to protest and how it is culturally remembered, thus challenged some ingrained assumptions relating to collective memory and its transmission. In particular, the project showed how remembering can be future-oriented, that looking back can also be a way of looking forward. This is a key insight for our understanding of collective memory as such, It also helps in rethinking the usual association between memory and nostalgia by showing how important memory is in the pursuit of social change. Using the concept of retro-prospective memory work, the project has provided the analytic tools and empirical evidence for showing how progressive remembering is possible; moreover, it shows how cultural acts of remembrance on the part of stakeholders are themselves ways of intervening in the present. Finally, the project’s longitudinal approach shows the evolution of different understandings of time and narrative; this challenges a-historical approaches to the memory- activism nexus and demonstrates the need for more context-sensitive approaches.