Issue No. 3 (June 2002) — Cultural Memory
abstracts
Drum’n’bass is a musical form that expresses the antagonisms of British identity in the 1990s and it also situates itself outside of the dominant terms of African-American expressions of black identity. It speaks of a more productive possibility in the traditional relationship between national and global polarities or public and private histories. Being at once an expression of the crucial significance of place in any characterisation of identity, it also recognises the influence of circumstances that exist outside of the narrow terms of national affiliation. Drum’n’bass represents a metonymic formulation of the long history of race and migration and its (often invisible) effects on the nature of British cultural identity in particular and popular music in general.
Key terms: Drum’n’Bass, British cultural identity, Black cultural identity, electronic dance music, rave, Harry Beck, London Underground Map.
This article investigates the (history) lessons revealed by THE FACE about the present. As such it concentrates on one area of deviation that exists within THE FACE – the yearly fashion issue. The seductive, and highly hegemonic, nature of fashion is no more obvious than in the pages of monthly style and genre journals. Within these pages, fashion literacy is assumed and naturalised as commonsensical. The visual communities that revolve around magazines like THE FACE further enhance this legitimising process. This framing requires a literacy of THE FACE discourse, one that melds the knowledge of fashion with the familiarity of lifestyle, consumption and pleasure. Fashion, then, is a language embedded with the signs and syntax of the everyday. Fashion is not a free-standing construct: it is socially defined within the sphere of a community ideology. The illustration of THE FACE community could concentrate on many facets of the magazine, but in this investigation it is these vogue registers that demand a specialised understanding of THE FACE and its mobilisation of a verbal and visual fashion language, or indeed a fashionable FACE language.
Key terms: magazines, fashion, hyperreal, imagined (virtual) communities, semiotics.
One of the most understated debates within contemporary cultural studies is popular memory. Requiring radical interdisciplinary work, and a diverse array of textual sites, it remains a challenge for the theorist. This piece takes a cultural text - the wall encircling Abbey Road studios in London - and explores how fans inscribe their memories and meanings on its surface.
Key terms: Beatles, popular memory, London, popular music, fandom, Abbey Road
This essay focuses on a discourse of contestation about the present which has emerged in Italian cinema since the end of the 1980s. This discourse is narrated in cinematic images of past films inserted in fictional stories. Through cinema self-reflectivity, the past is depicted as more authentic and signifies the loss of innocence of the Italian society of the 1990s, buried under scandals of political corruption and deconstruction of its traditional party system.<
Films such as Cinema Paradiso, Splendor, The Icicle Thief and La vera storia di Antonio H., but also many other films produced in recent years, emphasise a common heritage in a period of individual and collective internal and external chaos.
A common term of reference in these films is the relationship between cinema and television. This relationship is portrayed in these films in a problematic way, as the pervasive presence of television in Italian everyday life is held as responsible for the crisis in the cinema industry. With its omnipresent images, re-runs, programme clones, anthologies and stock programmes, television seems to have taken over the function as archive of the country's historical memory.
The pivotal work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory is used here as a tool of analysis of the role of memory as an instrument of reconfiguration of the past for specific groups of the Italian audience. The argument that stems from this analysis is that the films produced in Italy in the last decade that focus on history and memory reconstruct identity in the group of the baby-boomer generation, ensuring thus continuity with the past.
Key terms: cinema and television self-reflexivity, history and collective memory, identity, Italian politics, Italian cinema, Italian television.
The star phenomenon is highly visual; among the many texts that conglomerate into what is experienced as a "star," visual artefacts have a privileged position. Visual memory, then, is an important but little considered factor in the construction of the star persona. In order to investigate the role played by visual memory in star personae, Australian women's magazine coverage of the Nicole Kidman/Tom Cruise breakup is examined. This exploration shows how magazines create interpretive contexts for images-contexts that can change, exposing the instability of the meanings of the images. The media's use of star images is frequently influenced by powerful and highly paid publicists, whose job it is to attempt to control the possible interpretations of the images, and therefore to shape and reshape visual memory.
Key terms: visual memory, star, spectacle, narrative, women's magazines, Kidman/Cruise.
The resistive potential of the marginal collective has framed cultural studies interrogation of popular culture. It has often mobilised an ethic of play and inversion that sits comfortably with cultural studies politics. The capacity for official versions of history to mask these local and fragmented experiences has silenced the range of alternative identities that circulate through the fringes of culture. The X-Files episode The "Postmodern Prometheus" creates a visibility for unofficial and popular versions of the past. This paper tracks the metamorphosis of the carnival moment from official inversionary practice through the deviancy of American B-grade horror and science fiction films to its reanimation via a celebration of radical difference mobilised through the popular media. The X-Files' rewriting of Frankenstein dislodges social meanings from their original context and articulates a distinctly visual memory of a popular past to rewrite the collective experiences of the present.
Key terms: The X-Files, Carnivalesque, Popular Memory, Unofficial Discourses, Mediated Memories, Grotesque.
Memories are called up by many different methods. Jewish family life is so tightly wound up with mothers and chicken soup that these memories are best accessed via the kitchen. This fragment of culinary memoir attempts to convey the way in which certain foods conjure competing images of brown-eyed Jewish mothers and desolation in the desert. Enjoy already!
Key terms: collective memory, foodways, ritual, cultural superfood, Seder.