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Two Forms of Multidirectional Memory: Um Passaporte Húngaro and El abrazo partido

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2014

Nadia Lie
Nadia Lie*
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article confronts two films about the request for a European passport by a Latin American citizen: Um Passaporte Húngaro (A Hungarian Passport, 2001) and El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace, 2003). Both films deal with memory of the Jewish-Latin American migration that took place within the context of the Holocaust, and both gear this problematic towards other, more contemporary, stories of displacement. It is argued that this multidirectional quality operates in two ways in relation to the concept of nationality: whereas one film puts it to work in order to critique and deconstruct the nation (centrifugal logic), the other uses it to opposite effect: to reaffirm and rebuild it (centripetal logic).

Type
Focus: Transnational Memory in the Hispanic World
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 575 - 584
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2014 

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References

References and Notes

1.‘Instead of memory competition, I have proposed the concept of multidirectional memory, which is meant to draw attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance. […] The model of multidirectional memory posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites’. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 11.Google Scholar
2.Erll, A. (2011) Travelling memory. Parallax, 17(4), p. 12.Google Scholar
3.The term ‘multi-layered’ was suggested by Aleida Assman during the workshop at Konstanz.Google Scholar
4.Bletz, M. (2010) Immigration and Acculturation in Brazil and Argentina (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), p. 10.Google Scholar
5.Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 9.Google Scholar
6.Assman, A. (2013) Transnational Memories. Opening lecture delivered at the TRANSIT-workshop ‘Transnational Memories. Subjects, Practices and Spaces in Transit’ at the University of Konstanz, 27–28 May 2013.Google Scholar
7.Rothberg, M. (2011) From Gaza to Warsaw: mapping multidirectional memory. Criticism, 53(4), p. 525.Google Scholar
8.It is striking in this context that human agency, rather than being situated at the level of nations or transnational actors, is located in Um Passaporte Húngaro at the micro-level of specific individuals.Google Scholar
9.Rothberg describes the ‘axis of comparison’ on which multidirectional memories can be located as ‘a continuum stretching from equation to differentiation’, see Rothberg, M. (2011) From Gaza to Warsaw: mapping multidirectional memory. Criticism, 53(4), p. 525.Google Scholar
10.See Rothberg’s definition of multidirectionality as ‘a convoluted, sometimes historically unjustified, back-and-forth movement of seemingly distant collective memories in and out of public consciousness’. M. Rothberg (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 17.Google Scholar
11.Andermann, J. (2012) New Argentine Cinema (London-New York: I.B. Tauris), p. 52.Google Scholar
12.At least, this was the impression of some of the participants who took part in the TRANSIT workshop on transnational memory at the University of Konstanz in May 2013.Google Scholar