Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape

Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples, ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collective traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their pain and thus enable people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-century traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s characters in The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), which combines the collective and the personal narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels.     

From Hope to Escape: Post‐Soviet Russian Memory and Identity

Drawing on letters written by citizens of the USSR to US Congressman James Wright following his 1987 congressional visit and Soviet television appearance as well as follow‐up interviews conducted by this author with many of the same individuals in 2002–2004, this paper will recount the memories of several Muscovites and argue that although the western collective memory of the Cold War is one of victory, the individual accounts of Russians reveals a created memory of the Soviet past which, when confronted with the dire socioeconomic conditions that exist in post‐1991 Russia, leads to a crisis of identity.     

But I'm Just an Artist!? Intersections,Identity, Meaning,and Context

This article revisits the complex intersections of identity and meaning in the context of a world in which cosmopolitanism is increasingly questioned. The role of the artist with regard to activism and cosmopolitan flows becomes difficult to navigate but important to probe. Findings drawn from fieldwork indicate that the artist is highly conflicted; often ephemerally aligned with various social movements that may or may not be related; and in a constant state of self‐negotiation and identity formation that are highly dependent on local context. Intersectionality may be a useful frame to reconceptualize the artist as a relationally connected set of constantly shifting identities rather than an assumed category, as sometimes portrayed. Key to this is an appreciation of the role of the observer in this process. Singapore is envisioned as a place of intersecting identity; so, too, are the artists within it, caught between local context and global currents.     

Mother Knows Best? Intergenerational Notions of Fashion and Identity

This paper presents research into intergenerational notions of fashion and identity. It uses examples drawn from the case study interviews with mother–daughter family groups and the participatory method of draw and write with the daughters to illustrate the influences on young girls' fashion choices in the key spaces of childhood: the home, school and community. The findings reveal that young girls both identify and disidentify with fashions and identities available to them. Their mothers play a key role in allowing and restricting certain outfits in certain spaces, with particular distinction being drawn between public and private space. This paper contributes to children's geographies by focusing on intergenerational relationships between mothers and their daughters in relation to theories of identity formation. In doing so this paper highlights how both intergenerational relationships and the girls' identities are mediated through fashion, consumption, peers and the home, school and community spaces.     

Your Tacitism or mine? Modern and early-modern conceptions of Tacitus and Tacitism

The purpose of this article is to show, by the example of Hugo Grotius's Annales et Historiae de rebus Belgicis (AH), that the nature and content of the concept of Tacitism (Tacitist, Tacitean) in the period around 1600 was markedly different from modern perceptions of the style and political purport of Tacitus's works. This gap between current and early-modern conceptions of Tacitus is important to bear in mind for intellectual historians dealing with early-modern intellectual currents such as Reason of State, Neo-Stoicism, Tacitism, and others.This article first describes how the Tacitean style is characterised in literary criticism around 1600; then it explores the qualities of Hugo Grotius's imitation of Tacitus from the 17th-century perspective and from that of some main aspects of the present-day view of Tacitus. It concludes that Grotius's imitation shows Tacitus's style in a characteristically 17th-century mirror, in that it puts emphasis on Tacitean syntax, brevity and choice of words (the stylistic micro-level), as well as on political iudicium and Reason of State, but omits imitation of the narrative and structural qualities of Tacitus's composition, and their implications, which are central to modern interpretations.     

Hating America? Great Britain and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

This article examines reactions in Great Britain to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953. Through an assessment of the papers of the British National Rosenberg Defence Committee and other archival sources, it challenges the view that British responses were characterised by anti-Americanism. It suggests that the protest movement was heterogeneous, motivated by various concerns and even had significant intellectual and political links with the US. Moreover, the bipolar international system of the early Cold War and desire not to jeopardise the nascent Anglo-American relationship prevented the growth of a more popular movement. This research adds to work on perceptions of the US in the political culture of post-war Britain.     

The Decline of English Popular Politics?

Politics and the People. A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867. By James Vernon.     

High-Tech Foragers? Folsom and Later Paleoindian Technology on the Great Plains

Archaeologists generally argue that early (ca. 11,000–8000 B.P. populations on the North American Great Plains moved over very large areas, relying on sophisticated, biface-based flaked stone technology and on extensive resharpening and recycling of tools to cope with unpredictable access to raw material sources. This paper reviews the development of this reconstruction and considers the degree to which data from assemblages of Paleoindian flaked stone tools support it. Published information implies that patterns of raw material use vary greatly over the Plains, that bifaces were not the centerpiece of Paleoindian technology, that there are no published efforts to document an unusual degree of resharpening or recycling, and that the data that are available on these topics do not suggest that either was important. Detailed analysis of one assemblage, from the Allen site in southwestern Nebraska, carried out with these issues in mind, shows similar patterns. The great difference between what the literature says about Paleoindian technology and the documented character of that technology suggests that Paleoindian lifeways were far more variable than current discussions suggest.