Art, Film, and Narrative: Exploring Memory Activism, Migration, and Nostalgia

In instances where memories of violence undergo systematic erasure, modification, or intentional suppression, they take multiple new transformative process, including material forms in complex circumstances. The 30-year civil war in Sri Lanka, involving the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan security forces, significantly impacted minority populations in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. The prolonged conflict resulted in widespread violence across the island, including bombings, enforced disappearances, abductions, torture, and arbitrary killings that left deep physical and psychological wounds on the population. Despite these profound effects, the state's response to the Tamil minority people's expression of grief and suffering urged the "past to be forgotten for the sake of economic development" and restricted their commemorations, thereby negating the acknowledgment of the state's violence, and injustice on its citizens. Given this context, this study delves into the process of how memories of violence 'transit and transmit' from individual or community memories to global or collective memories in the complex political scenario of post-war Sri Lanka. To explore this phenomenon, I conducted an in-depth case study of a specific art exhibition held in Batticaloa by Nirmalavasan, who is an artist as well as a survivor of the war in Sri Lanka. The study was conducted over two months of fieldwork and semi-structural interviews conducted between November and January 2020. In my analysis, I explore how memories of violence are articulated and transit through paintings. The findings reveal that community paintings and exhibitions facilitate the transition of memories of violence into tangible community archives against injustice, establishing a safe space for remembrance, and facilitating the transfer of memories from the community to the global context in the post-war Sri Lanka.
Keywords: Memories of violence, Post war Sri Lanka, Artistic Archives, Aesthetic remembrance, Social justice.

Celebrating the state/Christian millennium in many Central and Eastern European countries was a pivotal collective memory event in the 20th century for the region. These celebrations were formative for new social formations and occurred at national turning points, as seen in Ukraine during Gorbachev's perestroika as part of the Soviet Union. Within the framework of the invented tradition, the paper explores the creation of a conceptual starting point for the state/religion in each country, accomplished through various types and mediums of cultural memory. Such celebrations often gave rise to severe social and political conflicts, exemplified by the clash between church celebrations in Poland in 1966 and state celebrations dominated by the communist party and propaganda apparatus.

The paper focuses on memory in transit – anniversary celebrations in émigré communities. These celebrations differed significantly from their domestic counterparts, free from local politics but laden with their own tensions and unique characteristics. While the Czechoslovak celebrations of 1929 aimed at the unity of a multinational state (Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, or Jews), émigré celebrations were primarily ethnically Czech. In contrast, the polarized Polish celebrations of 1966, torn between the communist camp's progressive history and the church's focus on tradition and social integration, manifested differently in émigré communities with a more pronounced religious dimension. Furthermore, the unspoken tension between Kyiv and Moscow in the Soviet Union, evident in exile, underscored Ukrainian national and independence aspirations. Thus, the memory of the origins of the state/Christianity within the framework of memory in transit, the shift from the country of anniversary celebrations to emigration, reveals significant cracks and shifts in the memory cultures of Central and Eastern Europe.

In January 2020, a group of residents of Ditró, a rural Hungarian-majority municipality in Romania, mobilized themselves to expel two Sri Lankan bakers from their town. The Romanian mainstream media rapidly disseminated news of this demonstration, calling it racist and xenophobic, claiming it was a collective refusal to buy and eat the 'white bread' now kneaded by 'black hands,' and popularising the image of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority as a people against migration and development. Later, the distinguished filmmaker Cristian Mungiu based his film R.M.N. (2022) on this interpretation, which was perceived as accurate and impervious to contestation, precisely because of the reproduction of class, ethnic, racial, and meta-geographical hierarchies, ultimately crystalizing a prejudicial collective memory, principally among the ethnic Romanian majority, and within this group especially among large segments of the urban middle class. Our study assesses the way in which film representation weaponizes collective memory to reproduce social hierarchies with the purpose of perpetuating a utilitarian developmentalist approach to migration. First, it compares R.M.N. to the results of our media content analysis to examine how it has reproduced the media story, thus perpetuating epistemic injustice - the wrong committed to individuals in their condition as 'knowers' (Fricker, 2007) - and elite and core group developmental perspectives on immigration. Second, it compares R.M.N. to other films to explore the motif of the internal enemy against migration. According to Attila Melegh (2023), in the polarized migration debate, Romania supports market transformation and open borders, while countries like Hungary and Poland favour strict border measures and state control. Thus, Holland's Zielona Granica (2023), based on the 'Belarus-European Union border crisis,' and Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), addressing the role of refugees amid a fictional yet catastrophic demographic problem, can add to a balanced comparison. Focusing on internal diversity, films such as Peele's Get Out (2017), and Pasikowski's Pokłosie (2012), both build an important relation between racial domination and epistemic injustice through tropes such as 'the sunken place,' or tombstones, making them suitable for comparison. Finally, it analyses R.M.N.'s paratexts, art direction, and sound design, as proposed by Radmila Mladenova (2023), to question the conflict between producing fiction to claim truth and implement authentication strategies, and fiction-claiming as a way for the creator to exonerate themselves of any responsibility for the potential harm caused by the film's dissemination.

Nostalgia is often approached critically and even skeptically in scholarly and activist circles. Situated within the larger ambit of memory studies, however, it is crucial as a concept that begs careful and critical engagement in how it may be mobilised meaningfully in contexts of justice. An issue in Memory Studies published in 2010, and texts by scholars such as Svetlana Boym (2001), and recently Tobias Becker (2023) advance a deeper and even radical reading of the concept that moves beyond a narrow reading of nostalgia as a romanticised vision of the past. These theoretical interventions begin from a common premise: while nostalgia is described as a longing for what is past, what does it speak to the future? This study poses this a question to a situation in the global south. Locating itself in Sri Lanka's postwar setting, it presents a reading of how nostalgia (Boym, 2001; Hoffman, 2010, Becker, 2023) shapes articulations of a particular community's wartime past, a postwar present, and its anticipated future(s). In a civil war, also referred to as an ethnic conflict, in which two of the country's largest majorities fought for 'sovereignty', Muslims became forgotten war victims. This study draws on a particular community of such Muslims: those who claimed the Northern Province of the island as their home, were evicted from the North in October 1990 by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and have been living in long-term displacement (Thiranagama, 2007; 2011) in the Northwestern Province. The study draws on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with members of these Northern Muslim communities. It centres on memories of pre-expulsion relations in the North narrated by Northern Muslims, and reads the framing of two main actors in these narratives: the LTTE, and 'the Tamils' who take the form of neighbours, friends, and members of a 'northern community', tracing how memories of a pre-expulsion North contour possible return for Muslims who were evicted. Using the metaphor of a spectre, the paper argues that memories of the past contour and project themselves onto the present, whereby memories of those from the past re-emerge in the new Tamil neighbour of the present who confronts returning Muslims, and mirrors tensions of complex lived experiences of a 'northern community'. The study also presents the transformative potential of nostalgia and the social conditions that support its possibilities. In doing so it reads narratives shared by Northern Muslims as a narrations not only of the past and present, but of imagined futures.

Flee is an animated documentary film directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. The film delves into the intricate interplay between personal and collective memory, mobility, and migration. The narrative unfolds through the compelling real-life story of Amin Nawabi, the main character, who has made the journey from Kabul, Afghanistan, to Denmark in search of a safer future in spite of all life-threatening challenges. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collective memory and incorporating Jan and Aleida Assmann's idea of cultural memory within the framework of memory studies, I will critically examine the ways in which the film Flee portrays the negotiation and transmission of memories across generations and how the protagonist's recollections are interwoven with broader socio-political contexts, addressing themes such as migration, refugee issues, and the collection of memories. In this paper, I aim to offer critical insights into the understanding of memory, migration, belonging, identity, and refugee, focusing on the complex relationship between personal stories as memories and broader societal forces through contextual analysis.