Provincializing memory studies: The insistence of the 'here-now'

Abstract

This essay responds to Astrid Erll’s question about what it might mean to do memory studies in different parts of the world. We offer a response from the perspective of three researchers based in Australia. Focused on a season-opening gala performance, a photographic series, a site-specific protest, and a film that takes a choir from Central Australia to Germany, the essay tracks the emergence, in culture, of something we term the ‘here-now’. The essay argues that this ‘here-now’ belongs neither to historical temporality’s linear time-line, nor to the cosmology of an unsullied Indigenous culture – and cannot easily be addressed in the language of memory studies. Taking our lead from four cas..