Five Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Poems by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

Past

I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree. The past is pulped, palpable; it is large and too-huge to choke down. When I live in the present, I feel newly cleaned and scrubbed by sun. When I face the day brightly, I see the world through baby-eyes; I see freckles of color and rainbowed-light. So what to do?

What I shall do: I shall defy hauntings. I digest the past, in all its spikes; then I will forget it. I will know the past; it has kissed me blithely and squatted in my house; I will feel the wild grip of past and know it still struggles under my skin but I will not see it. It will be in me, but I will not love it. The past: that ghosted hunger; look, I’m going to ignore my appetite.

Oh present, I open my mouth to consume you in full.

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023.

A post by Catherine Nesci

Sonja Stojanovic. Mind the Ghost. Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French. Liverpool UP, 2023. xi + 307 pp. 

This book offers fascinating insights into the return of ghosts and memorial passages across generations in contemporary French-speaking narratives about the Shoah, the Algerian War of Independence, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and mass crimes during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. Starting with an expected and yet fresh discussion on haunting and spectrality in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and continuing with a most innovative review of recent texts by Hélène Cixous, whose writing opens and weaves lines of communication with the disappeared, Sonja Stojanovic highlights the key notion of double suffering (double souffrance or double douleur in Cixous), which allows empathy and listening to the cry of others, without appropriating the latter’s suffering.

Hauntology and Lost Futures: Trauma Narratives in the Contemporary Gothic

A post by Emma Dee

Introduction

We begin, not with a text, but with an image.

This is a depiction of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a well-known German Romantic painter and explorer of the sublime. Not only is this a representation of what many of us might think of when we hear the term ‘Gothic,’ but the story of this particular image might help elucidate a concept of hauntology that this article is exploring. This picture is not the original.

D(igital)éjà Vu: AI, Mnemohistory, and the Future of Memory

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Mnemohistory, a term coined by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, refers to the study of how societies remember and construct their historical narratives. Unlike traditional historiography, which focuses on the objective recording and analysis of past events, mnemohistory emphasises the subjective processes through which memories are formed, preserved, and transmitted across generations. It explores the ways in which collective memory shapes, and is shaped by, cultural, social, and political contexts. Mnemohistory investigates the symbols, rituals, and narratives that communities use to create a sense of shared identity and continuity with the past. Originating from the Greek word “mnemos” meaning memory, and “historia,” meaning enquiry or knowledge, mnemohistory looks into the interaction between memory and history, recognising that our understanding of the past is not static but constantly reinterpreted through the lens of present concerns and future aspirations.

Monsters in Qualitative Data

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Understanding qualitative data poses a significant challenge for many researchers. Despite available resources providing insights into data management strategies, researchers often struggle in this area. Researchers, especially those operating within collaborative contexts, ought to go into how individuals’ self-perceptions and their perceptions of others influence their environments, and to position themselves accordingly in relation to the varied narratives encountered.

The Ghost of the Ottoman Scourge: Ottoman Hauntology and Dystopia in Socialist Yugoslav History Textbooks (1945–1990)

A post by Bakir Ovčina

INTRODUCTION

In 1991, prominent Yugoslav Communist-turned-dissident Milovan Đilas reflected on how the egalitarian utopia of Marxism-Leninism was rapidly coming to its end. He pondered whether a ‘body of new and attractive ideas might arise – perhaps a call for a new utopia’ (Djilas and Urban 1991, 178). When the world was looking to the future, former Yugoslavia was in a deep crisis. Djilas did not believe Yugoslavia would fall apart (Djilas and Urban 1991, 175). He was wrong. The end of the Bolshevik utopia in Yugoslavia brought a devastating war. In that war, Serb forces sought to create their own new utopia, ‘a state cleansed of any “foreign” elements – a nationally pure Greater Serbia’ (Weitz 2003, 236). Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević’s promised state was bound up in utopian language of ‘all Serbs in one state,’ ‘fast railways’ and ‘Swedish job protection’ (Korać 2014). This utopia also meant wholesale genocide of the Bosniak/Muslim population in Bosnia, culminating on 11 July 1995 in Srebrenica, where the forces of General Ratko Mladić, in his words, ‘took revenge on the Turks’ by butchering some 8,372 men and boys (Suljagić 2021, 1). The ‘Turks’ he referred to were the Bosnian Muslims, identified with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire (ca. 1299–1922) controlled much of former Yugoslavia, Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. Its influence profoundly shaped the culture, customs and language, of especially the Balkan nations (Lory 2015, 391–404). Maria Todorova (1997, 46–47) argued it is ‘preposterous to look for an Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. The Balkans are the Ottoman legacy.’ However, this heritage has been often maligned, and the Ottoman Empire vilified.

Re-imagining the History of British Abolition: The New Historical Consciousness in Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights

A post by Xiting Qiao

Introduction

Abolitionism, the movement that aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade and to free the enslaved people, was important in the historical development of countries in Western Europe and the Americas. Although the movement began earlier in France and Britain, the United States is written in the history of abolition to have played a more important role. From a historiographical perspective, the movement in the United States was more intense, as a backdrop to the American Civil War. Moreover, it operated in tandem with other social reforms, such as the Prohibition and women’s suffrage movements, thus adding the complexity. On a literary level, slave narratives, abolitionist fiction, and neo-slave narratives also constitute important genres in the African American literary canon, playing an ongoing role in opposing slavery, preserving historical memory, and documenting the progress of civil rights. In the 21st century, the neo-slave narratives produced by cultural industries (musicals, films, documentaries, etc.) have also occupied a central place in the representation of abolitionist history.