If one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism.
Michael Foucault, 'Film and Popular Memory'
This will be a short one today and I apologise for missing yesterday, I did not work and thus had no quote to use (the aim is always to use something I have read that day, so requires one to do some actual reading!).
For my dissertation I hope to write on the idea and power of memory, and of the role of forgetting in the practice of conflict transformation. My undergraduate studies in English ingrained in me a deep understanding of the vital importance of memory in shaping who we are, but also of the potential for memory to be manipulated both in ourselves and in others to shape a particular world view. What matters is not just what we choose to remember, but also how we choose to remember it and why.
Our memories and understanding are so shaped by our political culture, dangerously so at times. For one of my undergraduate coursework's I wrote on how the linguistic framing of Tony Blair's statements after 9/11 and 7/7 set the limits of the debate, preventing various lines of questioning, and shaping how we as a nation, and certainly I as a 9 and 13 year old viewed the world. 9/11 is, and will remain one of the defining moments of my childhood, in a way that the siege of Sarajevo, the Rwandan genocide or the Darfur crisis will not, simply because of how their cultural memories were shaped in me, through speeches such as Blair's, through news reports, through continued remembrance and framing of them.
What my coursework taught me to begin to do, more than I had ever acknowledge before, was to question my understandings and assumptions, to think critically about how things are presented to me and what they are encouraging me to think. To attempt to retain, to an extent, control of my own memory.
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