After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory. An Introduction to Volume II
Bryoni Trezise
In a recent article in the Weekend Australian, historian Jeffrey Grey worries about the slippage into ‘carnival’ that the nation’s Anzac Day memorial services now seem to strike (Grey in Matchett, 2009: 24). No longer solemn affairs that enable remembrance through studied silence, the annual assemblages of youthful pilgrims on Anzac Cove in Gallipoli each April 25 instead engage a heady phantasmagoria of signifiers exceeding even what Frederic Jameson might interpret as the ’nostalgia mode’, in which ‘we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past’ (1983: 10).
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