Playing with ghosts – 

Internet memes as sites of playful decolonial protest and productive disavowal

Britta Timm Knudsen 

This paper is part of the research project Playing with ghosts – affective ambivalence in decolonial arts practices and it explores the transgressive power of humor and playfulness to destabilize existing power relations and established hierarchies. We argue that playful forms make worlds and open other futures in bypassing stereotypical positions of subjugation and supplication and in putting former power relations into play. We work analytically with artistic expressions from present and former Danish colonies; we establish arts-based workshops in which artists work together to produce their critical art in playful manners using digital tools and we try out what impact playful modalities have when displayed publicly. 

In this paper I will analyze memes produced by mainly five meme creators in Kalaallit Nunaat after 2020, Xoxo Lili F. Chemnitz, Inunnguaq Reimer, Jacob Larsen, Julie Edel Hardenberg and Aqqalu Berthelsen. They are meme producers who perform everyday politics on social media platforms, primarily Facebook. Their internet meme production and circulation targets primarily Danish colonialism – both as a historical phenomenon and as a present day condition – using humor and playfulness as key tactics. 
To add to the research on the decolonial politics of memes, the paper will analyze the memes in fundamentally three ways. Firstly, how do decolonial memes work critically in a deconstructive manner, to open and invert hegemonic and stable signs and subject positions – for example the symbol of the cross in Christianity and letting missionary Hans Egede say to the indigenous population: "Thank God you were there". I will focus on the specific inversions and alterations in the material from Kalaallit Nunaat. Secondly, how does something that has been hidden, but historically existed, re-emerge, allowing for the rewritten narratives and myths of origin to be told from the perspectives and speaker positions of the colonized peoples after several centuries of colonialism. How are the memes shaped by and how do they reshape memories and identified decolonial narratives? Said differently, how is "the people invented" in the memes? (Carlson and Frazer 2017:1). Thirdly, as the viral memes spread transnationally due to their capacity of forming affective publics, I will look closer into the formal characteristics of decolonial humor and playfulness being put into play in the meme material. 
Fundamentally, the paper discusses whether and how Web 2.0 media and the way it allows for interaction and co-production by a productive public act politically. Furthermore, it asks critically if and how the humorous and playful way of addressing present coloniality opens into an alternative future-making that instead of opposing power, disavows it through symbolic excess, affective ambivalence and detachment from what is. 

This paper is part of the research project Playing with ghosts – affective ambivalence in decolonial arts practices and it explores the transgressive power of humor and playfulness to destabilize existing power relations and established hierarchies. We argue that playful forms make worlds and open other futures in bypassing stereotypical positions of subjugation and supplication and in putting former power relations into play. We work analytically across medias with artistic expressions originating from present and former Danish colonies; we establish arts-based workshops in which participants are provided a platform to learn and explore digital tools such as Virtual Reality and Generative AI tools and work together to produce critical art in playful manners. We look at the impact playful modalities have when displayed publicly.


Taking the digital arts-based workshop, organized as part of the Playing with Ghosts project, in Aarhus Denmark from 3-7 June 2024, as its point of departure, this paper explores how the chosen medium of VR (virtual reality) and Generative AI (artificial intelligence) provide playful de-colonial tools to participants to create alternate realties and immersive environments that are humorous, satirical while providing an anti-colonial critique.


The paper presents all aspects of the workshop from the underlying concept of 'decolonizing the digital', the process of creating and releasing the Open Call of the workshop, the selection process of participants: individuals affected by Danish colonial oppression as well as the descendants of racialized migrants, programming the agenda of the workshop, and the reception of the newly created works at a local public arts festival. In particular, the paper will focus on how the group of selected participants use the digital tools of a. Virtual Reality, b. AI Generated Art to playfully subvert dominant narratives by creating playful immersive environments and how they reconstruct the archive of images/memories that exist online using Artificial Intelligence. 



VR is increasingly being used as a tool to create a sense of presence via immersion, triggering an emotional experience and memory. An AI Image Generator is known as the tool to "bring your ideas to life" by giving text prompts. It's a computer searching a large amount of data available on the internet to generate a new image.


The paper questions: How do digital tools allow for the creation of more playful forms of artistic critique? Can Generative AI help imagine and create playful digital works that challenge norms and birth refreshing narratives by reconstructing memories? Does it provide a renewed opportunity for a critical engagement with the existing database of online images by inserting a past that doesn't exist in trans-media spaces. Furthermore, do elements specific to VR such as immersion and embodiment allow for the creation of alternate perspectives challenging dominant narratives? Last, the paper questions whether the access to knowledge of new media such as the above digital tools add to the decolonising of the art field?

The purpose of this study is to analyze how Japan's colonial rule in Asia is forgotten in a historical drama program aired on Japan's public broadcaster NHK. Japan's colonial past is inadequately taught in history education and is seldom portrayed in Japanese popular culture, including television dramas, which can play an important role in shaping the cultural memory of historical wrongdoing. In historical dramas depicting modern Japan, there is a noticeable emphasis on detailed portrayals of its relationship with the West, while the colonial rule in Asia is frequently overlooked. This poses a significant challenge for Japanese people to foster better relationships with people in Asia. 
The "Taiga Drama," NHK's annual historical epic series, first aired in 1963 and has continued for 62 years to the present day. Each year, one Taiga Drama series is broadcast on every Sunday night, typically comprising around 40 to 50 episodes. This NHK flagship program is well-known for its substantial budget. About 40 percent of the drama series portray the Sengoku period (Warring States period) from the 16th to the 17th century, depicting a daimyo or samurai lord striving to unify Japan by battling other daimyos. However, Taiga Drama series covering the era of Japan's colonialization of Asia, spanning the late 19th century to the end of World War II, are quite rare: two in the 1980s, one in 2019, and one in 2021, making up only four out of the 63 Taiga Drama series (with two drama series produced in 1993).
While studies in cultural memory usually focus on investigating remembering, forgetting, especially active or intentional forgetting, characterized by the erasure, destruction, or suppression of particular memories (Assmann 2010), requires more specific attention (Plate, 2016). This study examines the two Taiga Drama series aired in 2019 and 2021, applying the concept of RIF (retrieval-induced forgetting), which has been employed in psychological memory research (Stone, Gkinopoulos, & Hirst 2017) to analyzing media texts. The analysis aims to explore how Japan's colonial rule in Asia is forgotten in these drama series by remembering certain historical events associated with it. 
References
Assmann, Aleida. (2010). Cannon and archive. In Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (Eds.), A companion to cultural memory studies (pp. 97-107). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Plate, Liedeke, (2016). Amnesiology: Towards the study of cultural oblivion. Memory Studies 9(2), 143-155. 
Stone, Charles B., Theofilos Gkinopoulos, and William Hirst. (2017). Forgetting history: The mnemonic consequences of listening to selective recounting of history. Memory Studies 10(3), 286-296.

With a focus on Indonesian food travel shows, this paper analyses how representations of a shared culinary history between Indonesia and the Netherlands construct 'gastronational memories'. In recent years, a remembrance culture has emerged in Indonesia that negotiates, contests, and appropriates a shared culinary history with the Netherlands through food media. An example is how the 'rijsttafel' ('rice table') has transformed from a preeminent colonial meal to a postcolonial marker of Indonesian national identity. Where the 'rijsttafel' has recently been recognised as Dutch-Indies culinary heritage, Indonesian food travel shows demonstrate how such a categorisation can be imagined differently through counter memories. Putting Fabio Parasecoli's concept of gastronativism into conversation with Michael Rothberg's concepts multidirectional memory and the implicated subject, this paper answers how Indonesia's disruptive colonial past becomes fertile ground for the formation of post-colonial national identity through contemporary food travel shows. As the narrator of one food travel show tells us: "Rijsttafel is a legacy of colonialism that has become a part of an Indonesian culinary odyssey".

Microhistory plays a significant role in the shaping of the memory of the Holocaust in 21st century Poland. Microhistories are used in temporary and permanent museum exhibitions (Polin in Warsaw, Brama Grodzka in Lublin), as well as in the modelling of cultural memory of the Holocaust. The first and second generation of Survivors have resorted to microhistories in essays (Matywiecki), poetry (Klepfisz), family necro- and bio-graphies (Sznajderman, Kurski), thus participating in the complex process of decolonization of memory. The complexity of this process results from the mutual colonization of memory and public space by Jewish and Polish memories alike. Investigation of micronarratives of Survivors and bystanders enables the delineation of the appropriation and the reconquest of the memory of the Jewish past. 


Bibliography:
Rothberg, M., The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: "Chronicle of a Summer," CinemaVerité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor
Michael, PMLA, Vol. 119, No. 5 (Oct., 2004), pp. 1231-1246.
Rothberg, M., Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford UP, Ca. 2009.
Zalc, C. & Bruttmann, T. (eds.), Microhistories of the Holocaust, berghahn, NY & Oxford, 2017.