Hello my dear readers,

today I will give you a brief overview of how scholars define the term of Cultural Memory and how the book  Obasan by Joy Kogawa is a great example for an artifact that creates Cultural Memory.

The term of Cultural Memory is often defined by scholars as a process of remediation of the past and the base for a cultural common identity. The scholars of cultural studies Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka claim in the journal The German Critique that “for the most part […] each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity“ (132) on it.

In the article Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith and Identity the cultural scholar Jeanette Rodriguez defines cultural memory as an transmitter for “an experience rooted in history that has reached a culturally definitive, potentially transformative status“ (12)

Trauma is seen as an essential part of cultural memory. The book Obasan by Joy Kogawa is a good example for cultural memory and how it is produced though a traumatic event. It tells the story of a japanese canadian family during the second world war, though the eyes of the little girl Naomi growing up during this time. The book also shows how the traumatic events shape her life after her childhood.

The cultural scholars Astrid Errl and Ann Rigney claim that remembering is the “active engagement with the past“ (Errl, Rigney 2). Though the fact that the novel “was the first novel in North America to tackle the subject of Japanese-Canadian internment directly“ as Theresa Toten says in the introduction of the book (Kogawa xi) it was the beginning of are remediation of memory and the shaping of a cultural memory.

The book brought the topic of the “Japanese-Canadian internment“ (Kogawa xi) into the “public arena“ (Errl, Rigney 2) and became an “agenda-setter[s] for collective remembrance“ (Errl, Rigney 2). It shapes the way we see and remember the events happening in Canada during the Second World War. Probably the highpoint of the book’s presence in the public sphere was the extract read in the ceremony of the Redress Settlement Agreement 1988 (Kogawa xi). It reached a great importance even if the characters in it are fictional and became part of Canada’s cultural memory.

But how reliable is cultural memory if it is based on constant remediation of previous memories?  Is it possible to get a real picture of a historical event? Could one say that remediation falsifies memory or how we remember events?

 

 

 

 

Works cited:

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Anchor, 2014. Print.

Rodriguez, Jeanette. “Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith and Identity“. University of

Texas Press, 2007. Print

Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. De Gruyter, 2009. Print