clear analogy between the act of keeping this wartime relic free from dust and the act of keeping Gordon’s memory alive and untarnished. As its curator, Denning was charged not only with preserving a personal family history ‘but also a collective sense of past, a remembrance that is simultaneously both private and communal’. 91 Emotional ‘voices’ of remembrance Sometimes men wanted to arouse an emotional reaction through their memorialisation of soldier-brothers. Kennard Bliss was killed at the Somme on 28 September 1916. His death created a double loss for his
of Vichy and Nazi collaboration.6 The editors of immigrant magazine Sans Frontière (founded in 1979) created a regular feature, ‘Mémoire Immigré,’ dedicated to narratives of working-class immigrant lives, personal testimonies, and family histories.7 Labour historians drew on oral histories of factory workers to write ‘history from below.’ Memoirs of rural and peasant life became national bestsellers, and in some cases their authors became television celebrities.8 The proliferation and consumption of memory work responded to the imminent disappearance or radical
contention that there was a considerable level of ‘background’ poverty. 33 See R. M. Smith, ‘Charity, self-interest and welfare: reflections from demography and family history’, in M. Daunton (ed.), Charity, Self Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, UCL Press, 1996) and P. Laslett, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the nuclear hardship hypothesis’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988). 34 LRO DDX 386/3, ‘Garstang vestry minutes’, June 1816. 35 Ibid., August 1816. 36 Ibid., September 1820. By July
of Llanrwst’, Wynn found that ‘most of them are descended lineally from Ednyfed Fychan’. The professional genealogist (achwr) who knew genealogies on a regional basis also appears in Wynn’s family history. In an enlightening anecdote, Wynn described how his great-grandfather asked Robin Achwr (‘the greatest antiquary of our country’) to present a nosegay to the best-descended gentlemen at a country assembly. To Wynn’s ancestor’s chagrin the nosegay was delivered to another, the obscure Llywelyn ap Dafydd, before the assembled gentlefolk. Other sources confirm that
object can be thought of as a material link between personal histories of loss and displacement and the political history of Chile. Still very much part of their memories and family histories, it shaped the childhood of many Mapuche children, passing through different generations. Even if it is not worn any more, the maid’s apron can still be the layer covering one’s body. 12 It marks one’s biography and even genealogy, as shown in Chapter 1 where the tuwün was situated in the ambivalent spatialities
.’ Throughout the entire project, the complex, painful and even violent relationship between the city and the bodies inhabiting it had constantly surfaced through collective reflections, memories, and personal or family histories. In the context of the diaspora, especially for the generations arriving in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but also well into the present day, ‘racialised work’ had marked indigenous emplacement within the metropolitan area, in the reproduction of an urban geography of inequality
to emphasise the continuity of the story line. While it would obviously be misleading to say that such continuity is wholly absent from the Conte du Graal, Chrétien’s fabula plainly does not unravel as perspicuously as Percyvell’s, either in terms of presentation (witness the temporal distortions) or content. Specifically, compared with Percyvell’s mother, Perceval’s has been strikingly more successful in erasing the boy’s family history. The hero has no name apart from her appellation ‘fair son’, and no heirloom materialises the affinity between father and son
us that she would continue working on this theme, digging even deeper into the family history, going further back in time, beyond her own upbringing and childhood. She became silent for a moment. We, the other participants, listened carefully to this silence. Then she continued talking, telling us that she and her 166 166 Vulnerability and cultural policy two brothers underwent constant abuse growing up. In her home, domestic violence was a standard procedure –her mom hit her and her brothers, and her father hit her mom. But despite this abuse, or because of
proceedings. The word incest comes originally from Latin and consists of two parts, in-castus , which means ‘un-clean’. Incest as a concept was primarily used in its original Latin form by lawyers when different degrees of closeness were to be calculated, but sometimes the word was also used synonymously with blodskam . Research on incest A study focusing on incest in a longer perspective cannot avoid touching on several different fields of historical research, such as jurisprudence, sexuality, religion, medicine, and family
person could read this in 1603 and not think, upon reading of the “happy bed” of Mary and Lord Darnley, of Lord Darnley’s eventual murder, less than two years after his ill-fortuned wedding? Did Drayton have reservations about the new king (such reservations as McCabe thinks motivated Spenser’s portrait of Mary in The Faerie Queene) and thus wanted to remind readers of James’s embarrassing family history? Did he describe his pen as “forward” not because it was too early, but because it was too “forward” in the sense of aggressive (i.e., the opposite of “froward”) when