The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice

by Emily Keightley, M. Pickering

An exploration of some of the key theoretical challenges and conceptual issues facing the emergent field of memory studies, from the relationship between experience and memory to the commercial exploitation of nostalgia, using the key concept of the mnemonic imagination.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology

247 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2012

Reviews

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Up until the final five pages of the closing chapter, The Mnemonic Imagination was an engaging, and only slightly problematic, read. The Mnemonic Imagination offers a concise summation of the “emerging” field of memory studies and traces the tension between memory and the imagination. While reading the book, I was puzzled (but not surprised) by the lack of inclusion of Indigenous studies and Black studies which are the pioneers of memory studies and the imaginative memory (what Fanon argued for as a liquid temporality in The Wretched of Earth). As the book was more of a summary of “imaginative memory” in theory, in addition to the book being eloquently written, I did not mind this omission too much. Yes, it was frustrating as Keightley and Pickering discussed this field of study as “emerging” ground as it does a great disservice to the two hundred plus years of scholarship on this “emerging” field by individuals marginalized by the academe. But again, I was enjoying the narrative so I overlooked my initial criticisms, until the end. The authors make a telling and patronizing analysis of a bizarre and second hand anecdote regarding Black students in the United States.

In the anecdote, they recount Black American students who were made to watch Schindler’s List (1994) on Martin Luther King’s Day shortly after its release. Now, Keightley and Pickering do admit that a forced screening of a Hollywood movie that features non-Black individuals on a national holiday dedicated to the liberation struggles of Black individuals might have made the students feel alienated (2013, 190). The anecdote states that several of the students were asked to leave the screening due to laughter. The authors then take this as an opportunity to assert that these students “failed to engage with the film” and that they lacked a mnemonic imagination to see how relating to the pain of other individuals would have helped them understand their own pain (191), on a national holiday devoted to their continued struggles no less! This logic is not only patronizing but ignorant of Black spectatorship. Now, the authors do not conduct an analysis on spectatorship nor one that would consider the viewing conditions that would produce a response (they stick firmly to their discipline of sociology). So, it’s rather curious that they feel they could make such an accusatory claim without the analysis to support such claim. They instead suggest that the students who engaged in laughter (because the anecdote is so poorly presented we do not know if they were laughing at the film or at something else entirely) as a failure to engage with memory and imagination.

I want to stick with this anecdote for a bit as I do not view laughter as a sign of failure to engage with painful material. Had the authors read ANY text on Black spectatorship (or even spectatorship in general) they would have encountered a frequent theory of “talking back” to the screen, which includes laughter as bell hooks notes in Reel to Reel: Race, Class, and Sex at the Movies. Laughter does not signify a “failure to engage with the text,” if anything it signifies an over engagement with the text as it becomes a playful interrogation of the images and content onscreen. Additionally, laughter connotes an active participation in the expansion of the content onscreen. Laughter can also signify a way of participating with images that may be difficult to engage with and instead presents the viewer an opportunity to participate without dismissing the images all together. Laughter can also signify a “bad” viewing experience and act as a way to mediate that experience without walking out. I want to stress here that the students were asked to leave the theater and did not walked out of the screening. Laughter for Black spectators has long been a way of processing the cinematic image and has been used to mock difficult content onscreen, especially Slavery.

The inclusion of this anecdote is hastily tacked on at the end and is given no detailed set-up. I argue that they wanted to make an example out of this event (which apparently they are still pressed about nine years later). The patronizing element is the follow-up explanation of how these students failed to see how engaging with this film would enlighten them to understand their own struggles for liberation. Their failure to engage with the conditions of the Black experience, including cinema watching which is a scholarly field of studies mind you, is very telling of their lack of imagination about who and which texts gets to participate in the “emerging” field of memory studies.

Moreover, the film scholar in me must ask, was this anecdote worth it for Schindler’s List? In the years following its release, many film theorists have criticized this film for its formulaic representation of suffering and for its manipulative structuring of feeling with regards to the Holocaust. The decision to place the “heroics” onto a non-Jewish individual about the tragedy affected Jewish individuals is disturbing and popularize off the suffering of another culture. I want to be very clear here that I am not dismissing films about the Holocaust nor films on difficult painful subject matters but rather I am questioning the logic behind the inclusion and purpose that this anecdote was supposed to serve. The authors firmly state that these students’ laughter signifies “a failure to engage” with the film without the awareness of what laughter means in not only a Black spectatorship context, but in cinema studies overall. It serves a very telling point about what the authors think and prioritize some methods and histories dealing with memory over others.

[Adriana C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Ésta nota es para quienes quieran usar el texto para análisis o investigación). Las bases de la imaginación mnemónica me parecen interesantes y fundamentales para entender cómo nos relacionamos con y reaccionamos al pasado. Dicho eso, todo lo que involucra el concepto de trauma en este libro me parece una visión híper-individualista, que trata de criticar el individualismo aislante de “otros acercamientos”, pero tiene un claro problema para entender conceptos como traumas colectivos o generacionales y reconciliar que el término trauma tiene que extenderse más allá de lo individual y de lo verbal para poder mediarse y trabajarse en su amplia variedad de orígenes y consecuencias. Asimismo, se niega a considerar a la historia como una narrativa en vez de un archivo inamovible y de acceso total. Si se quiere mantener la noción de que el trauma requiere falta de acceso al evento pasado, ello implicaría que, para todo efecto práctico, la narrativa colonial y la deliberada eliminación y reescritura histórica que dejaron fuera de escena la historia de lxs colonizadxs en palabras propias son acciones perpetradoras de un trauma colectivo. Es muy evidente que el eje decolonial falta en este análisis (incluso en la falta de mención de aportes similares al área de autorxs como Fanon o Césaire) y entra en detrimento de lo que se busca proponer.

[Yuthea Sum · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books that make me know the things I never know I know. Recommend this book along with The Power of Habit and Understand Psychology.

[Josue Rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible subject filled with very interesting ideas.
It feels like the start of something new, and this is a subject that still needs so much more looking into.
It gets a little repetitive at times and I understand that explaining abstract ideas and terms can get complicated fast. The Mnemonic Imagination still carries with it a different lens to view the world and I hope the subject gets an update soon! Hopefully this time with the imagination of non-western peoples, ideas, and theories.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to steal this one from the library.