Abstract
In my first year as a doctoral intern, I worked at an African American social service agency in Portland, Oregon, and it was there that I came to understand that cultural memory is anything but private—it is something we live into together. Simply put, “Memory is relational” (Ullman, 2011, p. 269) and “everything but static and past tense” (Stern, 2011). I also learned that cultural memory and collective identity are political in ways we do not understand.
On the other hand, if it is to live up to its subversive promise—if memory is to give creative voice to the unruly imagination without giving play to the darker side immanent in its politics—it has to be reunited, as subjective consciousness, with history as an account of the collective production of the present. Not with history a reified, always- already authoritative chronicle, but as itself subversive, itself capable of critique from within; this by re-remembering what has been divided, by questioning what is certain, by vexing the taken for granted.
—Comaroff and Comaroff (2012, p. 152)
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Macdonald, H. (2016). The Inner City Intern, Part I: Culture and Memory. In: Cultural and Critical Explorations in Community Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95038-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95038-6_2
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