School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe politics of memory and transitional justice in Morocco( 2017)This thesis examines the process of history and collective memory formation in Morocco by contrasting the narratives of its violent past from two ‘truth-telling’ projects: the official truth and reconciliation commission Instance Equité et Réconciliation (IER), and the unofficial public audiences of human rights victims ‘Testimonies without Chains for the Truth’ organized by a Moroccan non-governmental organization. The research first presents official accounts by the Moroccan regime of its nation’s post-colonial history, with a special focus on victims’ testimonies in IER public audiences in 2004 and 2005. In so doing, the research seeks to understand and measure the implication of the regime in elaborating and framing the official discourse about decades of repression as relayed through the publication of IER final report, historical accounts and through what the state has termed ‘positive preservation of memory’ exemplified in cinema, educational programs, historical publications and memorial sites. Thanks to alternative truth-telling initiatives, including unofficial public hearings, victims’ memoirs and oral histories, the modern history of Morocco is leavened by additions from opposition groups, victims and their families that contest the hegemony exercised by the regime’s master narrative about the past. The thesis concludes that, although the transitional justice experience in Morocco helped shed light on a dark period in its history, the regime, which consolidated itself thanks to transitional justice, controls this truth-telling and history-making, by either imposing its own version of the past, hijacking some independent and alternative stories, or by simply labeling other alternatives as radical and extreme and not in favor of reconciliation and moving forward. Morocco thus presents a unique case of transitional justice whereby two truth-telling projects occurred in parallel and at the same time to provide two narratives about the violent past and whereby the regime implemented transitional justice mechanisms to avoid actual transition, unlike in most historical cases where truth commissions were part of a transition.
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ItemConstructing public history, framing collective memories: Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre( 2014)Bonegilla was Australia’s largest post-war migrant reception and training centre. Its history and the histories of the approximately 320,000 ex-residents began to re-emerge in Australian public life from the 1980s. In this thesis, I analyse cultural or collective memories as located and publicly mediated in the materiality of public history forms, in the shared resources of individuals. Accordingly, this thesis is structured around those separate public history forms that have coalesced around Bonegilla since the 1980s: anniversary reunions; museum exhibitions; heritage discourses, listings and heritage tourist ventures; and popular culture such as journalism, film and television. I argue that Bonegilla’s collective memories have become increasingly multi-vocal, contrary to the predictions of some scholars analysing commemorative practice in Australia. Further, I maintain that public histories create spaces for the vernacular exchange of collective memories, and my study of Bonegilla strongly supports this contention. While state involvement in some public history practices promotes a positivist, revisionist version of multiculturalism and Bonegilla’s role in it, there are still participants in and receivers of these narratives, many of whom draw on available frameworks to attribute wider meaning to their histories. I agree that representational analyses are useful in uncovering the power plays that function in public histories, but the use-value of these public histories to receivers and respondents also requires scholarly attention. Ex-residents and ex-residents’ associations, their families and the second-generation, connected ethnic organisations, local councils, and multicultural lobby groups have all been involved in Bonegilla’s public history. They have been implicated in the memory-making process and in the formation and function of Bonegilla’s collective memories since the 1980s. They have proven capable of appropriating and adding to Bonegilla’s multi-vocality, even as some of its public history is framed by the official. This framing involves a collaborative, ongoing and active negotiation of collective memories.
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.