INMS Working Paper Series

The INMS Working Papers Series (WPS) provides members with the opportunity to publish research papers in progress on the INMS website. The aim of the working paper series is to foster innovative research culture in Memory Studies and provide researchers with the necessary guidance and tools to work on research papers which can potentially be published in academic journals.

Memory and mobilization: The representation of collective trauma in the #Metoo movement – Kanchan Panday

March 7, 2023

Technological aids now play a more significant role in mobilizing popular movements. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have provided survivors with a virtual space to publicize their trauma-laden mental, physical, and sexual assault memories. These virtual spaces, therefore, provide a space for collective trauma, having the potential to ignite popular movements. The #MeToo movement, #YesAllWomen, and #BLM movement show that the traumatic chunks of memories possess the potential to uncover hidden patterns of suppression and sexual violence in public spaces ranging from films to MNCs to academia. Acknowledging the controversial nature of the consequent events of the #MeToo movement, in this paper, I intend to explore the role of social media in providing a space for memory mobilization in the #MeToo movement. Furthering the discussion in this direction, I also aim to conceptualize the role of Twitter in constructing an emancipatory debate for survivors of sexual assault.

(How) do we memorialise COVID-19 in the digital age? – Utkarsh Sharma

March 7, 2023

This paper tries to understand the politics involved in memorialising COVID-19 in the digital world. The COVID-19 pandemic brought forth multiple challenges in front of the world and is expected to continue to do so. How we remember the pandemic is critical to our responses towards challenges that will be posed by it in the medium to long terms. An approach that recognises failures of state policies may yield completely different answers than one that considers COVID a natural disaster. The question is as much of remembering COVID-19 as it is of how it ought to be remembered. While the privately curated National COVID Memorial exists online, it falls short in drawing any relevant connections between the dead and fails to imbue their deaths with any common meaning other than their cause of death. The question of if a memorial is required at all is relevant to this paper, especially in the digital age when images, videos and writings are widely accessible. We can view with hindsight different responses of the Indian masses to the pandemic in each subsequent wave. As videos and images swirled over the digital domain, different kinds of responses to the pandemic were generated. This paper will try to answer if a unitary meaning ought to be given to COVID-19, especially to the backdrop of alternate discourses and experiences available digitally.

Materialisation of existential aesthetics – Dr Neha Khetrapal

March 7, 2023

Maes’ proposal on existential aesthetics, which appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 2022, has the potential to be extended in myriad manners. Here, the attempt is to confer a material or tangible extension to his proposal. Material existential aesthetics provides scope for dialogues between artists, philosophers, historians and architects. Through their endeavours, viewers can expect to access a tangible platform for addressing existential concerns. Simultaneously, materialisation of existential aesthetics provides an avenue for researchers to examine how material forms, that include cemeteries and memorials, may help salvage people’s existential fears. As the gap between the material and existential aesthetics narrows further, the world may witness new forms of memorials that have the potential to be appreciated for both their utilitarian and artistic values.

Resisting political forgetting through cultural productions: Viewing the Kashmir Question through the frames of collective memory – Sana Shah and Aishwarya Bhattacharyya

March 7, 2023

The present paper will attempt to understand the interfaces of history and memory, in Kashmir, by looking at the kind of challenges presented by memory, as a mode of engagement, response, and resistance to the statist reading of the Kashmir Question. The paper attempts to focus on the counter-memory practices as alternative means of expressions and protests, that the local population has lately devised through popular cultural productions like musicals and arts in circulation through latest media technologies. The paper in particular will look at the potential of cultural productions, not only as alternative means of protest and resistance but also as archives of resistance, building on the works of scholars like David Lowenthal and Patrick Hutton. The paper highlights the potential for simultaneous uses of memory-making as an artifice by both the oppressor groups and the oppressed groups to necessitate further research into identification and self-identification premised on memory-politics as conceptual categories towards determining the nature, scope and challenges of memory-making for different types and scales of nationalist projects.

Camp as Moral Architecture: Memory, Migration and Resistance – Adhila Abdul Hameed

March 7, 2023

Remembrance seems to be about the past. While the Holocaust is an event in the past, the Nakba did not end in 1948. The relationship between film and reality is historically and politically infused in the films of the Palestinian new wave to create a cultural weapon that also serves as resistance. These movies are works of oppressed people’s history. This paper intends to focus on the intersections of memory and trauma in Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours and Mai Masri’s Children of Shatila, by examining the themes of traumatic identity, global and prosthetic memory in the films. The study further explores the representation of memory and how it externalizes and historicizes traumatic emotions which would otherwise remain at the level of internal and individual psychology.

Pan-African identity: A standpoint of Memory Studies – Dr. Divya Sharma

March 7, 2023

Essentially, there are three approaches to Africana history – the griotic methodology, liberation historiography, and Afrocentricity. All these have been to the end of free Africans empowering their identity politics. The griotic methodology of African historiography or the griotic framework particularly conjures up a dialogue between the present and the past as it involves helping turn oral to written. It has been used particularly by the free African Americans of the antebellum North to chart the oral/performance basis of history ascending into the textual production of history. As a distinct approach of history production, the griotic methodology started taking hold from the late 1700s through the 1830s. It was meant to counter the Eurocentric American discourses. The intelligentsia sought to liberate themselves through re-interpreting the connotational meanings/implications of “Africa,” which was viewed as a metaphorical source and destiny of the black race. While this holds true for the African-Americans, African historiography displays a similar pedestal for oral history (orature) which it sees deeply tied to identity politics. Pan-African Cultural Nationalism in African literature, therefore, intersects with the griotic engagement of African historiography and identity politics. The proposed research paper endeavours to look at this historiographical engagement in identity politics from the standpoint of memory studies.

“I was disconnected from my emotions, like a hand severed from a wrist”: Trauma, Plasticity, Unprecedented Identities and Coolness in Alex Michaelides’ ‘The Silent Patient’ – S. Kirubakaran

March 7, 2023

The last few decades have seen an increase in the research on human memory. Human brain is an extremely complicated and a unique device among the living beings. The topics covered are Plasticity, Unprecedented Identities and Coolness in correspondence to trauma, which are depicted in Alex Michaelides’ novel ‘The Silent Patient’. The characters in the novel go through various psychological conditions. Literature is an important field of introspection on memory studies. A fiction is an amalgamation of realities and possibilities. The articulation of absence in a fiction makes it a cognitive medium, for the interplay of Memory Studies and Medical Humanities. A rigid understanding of remembering and forgetting is achieved through a critical study.