The anatomy of memory politics: a formalist analysis of Tate Britain’s ‘Artist and Empire’ and the struggle over Britain’s imperial past

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a new approach for understanding the meaning of memory politics, which draws upon the archetypal literary criticism of Northrop Frye. I suggest that the four archetypes elaborated by Frye-comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire-can be used as a heuristic device for interpreting the contested historical narratives that are associated with the politics of memory. I illustrate this approach through a case-study of 'Artists and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past', an exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2016, amidst increasing contestation over the meaning of the British Empire. In sum, I find that the exhibit narrated Britain's imperial past as a comedy, in which a key theme was the progressive cultural mixing of the British and the people they colonized. To conclude, I discuss the implications of such a narrative for constructing an inclusive, postcolonial British identity. As an alternative, I draw on Aristotle to suggest that a tragic narrative would have been more propitious.

Cultural Pragmatics and the Re-Fusing of Collective Memory: A Study of Trade Union and Community and Voluntary Representatives' Collective Memory of Neoliberalisation in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…While theories of structural narrative analysis (Labov & Waletzky, 1967) inform the identification, isolation, and analysis of discrete forms of story-telling by individual research participants, most notably in the analysis of anecdote and what this study refers to as mnemonic postcards (Chapter 8), a more expansive and collectivist approach is needed in the study of social memory. As Woods (2021) writes, the first step to uncovering the meanings that inhere in the form of collective memory is to recognize that it is a type of storytelling. If narratives of collective memory are a type of storytelling, then it follows that they also must conform to basic conventions of plot that are found in all stories (p. 324).…”

“…Woods builds upon the work of cultural sociologists who have applied this structural, archetypal approach to the study of social life, and further develops this approach in the study of memory politics. The application of Frye's literary formalist schema, Woods (2021) argues, acknowledges the contested nature of collective memory, while providing a renewed focus on the relevance of memory form over content. Beyond identifying the underlying forms of narratives which constitute collective memory, Woods concludes that the application of literary formalism in the study of collective memory provides a means of understanding the affective and emotional impact of certain narratives of the past, while creating space for normative discussions of both present and future.…”

“…Here, the mnemonic postcard provided by Karen serves to encapsulate a shared understanding expressed by interviewees of Lange as an outlier in his own Party, in direct contrast to both the popularity he enjoyed as Leader of the Opposition in the runup to the 1984 election, and the hope invested in him by the Labour-voting New Zealand public and Party members. The image evoked by Karen of Lange as a literal man alone serves in the collective memory of participants in this study as symbolic of New Zealand's irreparably fractured Labour Party, of a loss of faith placed in Lange by New Zealand's political left, and as symbolic of collective anagnorisis(Woods, 2021), or the dramatic, shared realisation of circumstances, in this case, that Lange had lost control of the Party and the direction of the nation 24 . The symbolic significance of Lange alone in the memory of this participant was one which resonated with several interviewees; not in the detail of this autobiographical memory, but in the shared significance of his being alone as a symbol of a lack of confidence in Lange, his 'symbolic deflation', the takeoverof the Labour Party by right-wing reformers, the deep divisions within the Party itself, and divisions within the liberal-left more generally.…”