Animating the subjugated past: digital greeting cards as a form of counter-memory

Abstract

This article discusses how popular culture products – digital greeting cards – interact with hegemonic historical narratives in the context of war remembrance. It employs the Foucauldian concept of counter-memory to analyse how user-generated mnemonic content interacts with historical power relations. Using content analysis to examine a sample of amateur greeting cards, the authors investigate how these cultural products engage with official and counter-official memory practices in Russia related to the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Specifically, the article explores how different visual elements are employed to (de)construct specific narratives about the Soviet victory and it discusses how the use of computer graphics, in particular animation, influences the potential role of greeting cards as a means of resurrecting the subjugated past.

Shall the robots remember? Conceptualising the role of non-human agents in digital memory communication

“…These practices are embedded in the architecture of the platforms hosting them and range from collaborative history-writing via online encyclopaedias (Luyt 2015;Pentzold 2009) to spreading history-related Internet memes (González-Aguilar and Makhortykh 2022;Khoruzhenko 2020). Other examples include making (audio)visual tributes to the past in the form of videos (Gibson and Jones 2012) or E-cards (Makhortykh and Sydorova 2022), establishing interactive digital memorials (de Bruyn 2010; Maciel et al 2017), or emotionally engaging with the traumatic past via digital self-representation at atrocity memorials (Bareither 2021).…”

“…One of them is the built-in platform affordances, which encourage user engagement such as discussion pages on Wikipedia used to facilitate collaborative history-writing (Makhortykh 2017; Pentzold 2009) or review sections on TripAdvisor allowing users to share their opinions on memorial sites (Moskwa 2021; Wight 2020). Another factor is the general ease of making such content in digital formats that facilitates the process of constructing (counter)narratives and then sharing them with the public in different formats (Brown and Tucker 2017; Makhortykh and Sydorova 2022).…”

Memory, counter-memory and denialism: How search engines circulate information about the Holodomor-related memory wars

“…linking or sharing the piece of content), individuals have more possibilities to partake in memory wars. Besides their less top-down nature, these online memory wars—or ‘web wars’ (Rutten et al, 2013)—enable new forms of contestation varying from hashtag protest campaigns (Bosch, 2017) to cyberattacks against heritage institutions (Shanapinda, 2018) to animations challenging the hegemonic nature of memory-related festivities (Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2022).…”

Laughing to forget or to remember? Anne Frank memes and mediatization of Holocaust memory

“…Important part of this transformation – sometimes referred to as the digital (Garde-Hansen et al, 2009) or connective (Hoskins, 2011) memory turn – is the growing role of user-generated content (UGC) that provides individuals with the new means of formulating, reinforcing and challenging interpretations of the past. Examples of how UGC can be used for these purposes vary from animated E-cards challenging memory hegemonies (Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2019) to Reddit threads debating celebrities’ biographies (Esteve Del Valle and Smit, 2021) to YouTube videos commemorating armed conflicts (Drinot, 2011).…”