Memory and its politics

Tosh has argued that moments chosen as symbolic to the nation work to confirm both self-image and group aspirations.Footnote ⁷ Instrumental in this process of “choosing moments” are attempts to connect the past to the present by creating a milieu of shared historical consciousness through which representations of the past are deemed of importance to the collective present. Further, Osborne has argued that public monuments often act as “consensus builders”, thereby becoming “focal points for identifying with a visual condensation of an imagined national chronicle rendered in heroic symbolism”.Footnote ⁸ Such focal points are important sites from which national identities are scaffolded; they are not merely the material and everyday backdrop of the urban facade but are an integral part of a nation-building agenda. Ewa Nowicka-Rusek and Ayur Zhanaev provide a clear example of this in the form of contemporary nation-building by the Buryats (Siberia), who draw heavily on the figure of Genghis Khan in public monuments, films, TV series and songs to communicate a sense of strength and cultural maintenance.Footnote ⁹

Accordingly, memories of nation are stories of the past specifically chosen by the State to impart a certain version of a nation's past to the public. Because these State-led memory narratives are not experienced by all individuals in the same way, the State uses prompts to create, and then invoke, memory narratives of nation-based events; for example, specific dates and the form of commemoration for a historical event are chosen (such as Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom), and streets are named for significant people, places or events (such as those named for Martin Luther King in the United States). Decisions about such symbols are executed by people in power and, as they are often not made without a struggle, comprise a politics of memory.Footnote ¹⁰ Rusu has argued that a politics of memory involves the use of political strategies to come to terms with the past.Footnote ¹¹ The use of memory in national discourse also builds continuity: memory links past to present because, as MacDowell argues, “without memory, a sense of self, identity, culture and heritage is lost”.Footnote ¹² Moreover, as Graham Smith contends, “[c]ontinuity is the socially constructed sense that a group has a relatively consistent connection between its past and present”.Footnote ¹³ This sense of continuity, whether real or imagined, is a key component of the politics of memory.

Critically, processes of identifying or creating national memories invoke the senses. This aligns with approaches in memory studies that identify how important sensorial cues are for making memories stick with us. As Drozdzewski et al. have argued, “a smell, a familiar touch, an image, a sound once heard before can transport us not only to different times but also different places”.Footnote ¹⁴ At a routine level, then, memory is “a highly important element in the account of what it is to be a person, as it is the central medium through which identities are constituted”.Footnote ¹⁵ These intimate experiential memories become part of how we define not only ourselves, but where we have been and with whom. Via similar sensorial prompts, memory narratives championed by State authorities permeate public spaces and everyday lives to shape how national identity feels as much as how it is understood.Footnote ¹⁶ This experiential, sensory “everyday nationhood” is evidenced in the sight of national buildings or monuments, the sound of music such as national anthems or public broadcaster themes, and the flavours of cuisines identified as specifically national.Footnote ¹⁷ Conflicts over the latter in relation to their inscription on the Representative List of UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage are a case in point – fierce disputes over national ownership have ensued, for example, between Turkey and Armenia due to the inscription of the dish keşkek, prepared from meat and crushed wheat, on behalf of Turkey in 2011, despite opposition from Armenia, which also claims links to the dish's origins.Footnote ¹⁸

Remembering in place

Many types of memoryscapes can, and often are, captured within the rubric of “heritage”. These include burial sites, battlefields and memorials dedicated to wars, as well as other events such as those created at the perimeter of Ground Zero, Manhattan, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.Footnote ¹⁹ While numerous memoryscapes are created to commemorate or celebrate a sense of achievement, many are established to honour, remember or justify political acts, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, or the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. These places might be referred to as sites of “dissonant” or “difficult” heritage, as places that open up dark or painful histories and foreground the politics of the past in the present.Footnote ²⁰ Much has been written about such places and the connections they have with cultural memory and identity, particularly from post-structural perspectives.Footnote ²¹ Such scholarship has done important work in uncovering the relations of power implicated in any attempt to represent the past, and in revealing implicit political meanings and associated processes of marginalization. Relatedly, this literature has also explored the many instances in which memorials and heritage sites have been mobilized to invoke agitations against domination, such as in post-conflict struggles over recognition and reconciliation. Clear evidence of this can be seen in the flurry of active memorial-making in post-Soviet Mongolia, or the purging of Soviet monuments following the collapse of communist control in places like Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.Footnote ²² Other examples within this mix are official locations of remembrance such as national museums, memorials and monuments.

As Jay Winter has argued, these sorts of sites, often located in symbolic settings, are “places where groups of people engage in public activity through which they express ‘a collective shared knowledge’ … of the past, on which a group's sense of unity and individuality is based”.Footnote ²³ Moreover, such places of memory are key materialities in the wider processes of nation-building.Footnote ²⁴ Dealing as they do with collective memories, or “what remains of the past in the lived experience of groups”,Footnote ²⁵ such memorials and museums are necessarily imbued with messages and meanings that are social in origin and are embedded in a range of cultural, political and economic contexts. The memories they trigger and produce are thus also inflected with, and influenced by, language, rituals and commemorations, and perform in a variety of processes that make past events meaningful in the present.

Memorial landscapes such as Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Pearl Harbor memorial complex form a particular variant of this sort of “dissonant” or “difficult” heritage, in that they narrate the trauma of war in places that are built around the residual or material remains of conflict – memories literally etched into place. As reminders of pain and destruction, such sites, as Curti argues, are “always performed and felt between, in and through bodies and thus always work through entangled forces of emotion, affect and memory”.Footnote ²⁶ As such, they hold particular sway in the imagination. Their evocative power lies in the links they are able to make between the physical spaces in which visitors stand and what is known to have happened there. The way such sites are officially framed and represented plays a significant part in the overall memorialization process, signalling at least part of the range of responses one might have when reflecting on the horrors of conflict and war.

However, as Curti claims, there are other responses at work too, and these are often more personal. Such responses are not immediately expressible but are deeply felt, physical and visceral, and emerge as visitors react to atmosphere and a sense of haunting in situ. The physicality of many heritage sites thus acts as an anchor between “now” and “then”, and is perhaps best understood as a vector for feelings of identity and belonging, through which historical events come to have an enduring impact on our emotions and understanding. Such processes may be referred to as “embodied remembering” and point to the “experiential dimensions of memory”. At the same time, it is important to be mindful of the risks of presentism in prioritizing the immediacy of the “here and now”, which can, if left unchecked, diminish the importance of past experiences.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, as Bergson has so powerfully argued, “[t]here is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.”Footnote ²⁸

Commemorative events

Given that heritage sites such as those associated with Pearl Harbor play a vital role in how the relationship between memory and collective identity is understood, the regular use and animation of such places through commemorative events is crucial. In this section, the authors consider memory and identity by way of regular commemorative events, and the collective and experiential analytical orientations that investigating them affords. These are rituals on a predictable, often annual schedule, of which many people have foreknowledge and previous experience, and that are intended to reinforce particular narratives of group memory and renew the connection of individuals to those narratives and to each other. Moreover, these events often carry particular sensorial and material aspects that are central to how they are experienced and what meanings they carry. Memorial or heritage sites, as discussed above, are spaces redolent with representative symbols, which also often invite or compel us to engage with them bodily in particular ways, such as tilting our heads to look up at their statues or displays or walking quietly through their hushed, reflective spaces.Footnote ³⁸ When these sites are activated by a commemorative ritual, elements such as music, artificial and natural light, weather, gatherings and the recitation of well-known texts temporarily transform them into significant and atmospheric places which do particular forms of work in terms of memory and identity. Accordingly, in this section the authors will focus on commemorative events’ regular nature, which builds accreted foreknowledge and anticipation for individuals whilst also reinforcing the events’ importance in the public imagination. Next, the opportunities such events provide for widespread reflection, conversation and debate about group identity, as well as their inherently collective character, will be explored.

Wagner-Pacifici speaks of a reimagined version of the event in which commemoration can be thought of as a “provisionally congealed moment” of the occasion that it seeks to reinforce in collective memory.Footnote ³⁹ In her example, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States must be understood as having subsequently moved “beyond the initial stage of incoherence, rupture, and surprise” to be sedimented in official forms that include memorials and that have become “part of the event itself as it lives on in intermittently tamped down and restless modes”.Footnote ⁴⁰ What is important about the relationship between memory, identity and how they are taken up and understood by way of experience is her point that in remembering events, we must grapple with their restless and mutable nature – the fact that they come to take on new meanings and change in significance over time.Footnote ⁴¹ This point is pragmatic because, as will be discussed below, a focus on commemorative events demands that not only their regular rhythms and familiar discursive elements are attended to, but also their contingency, their particularity and the diversity of engagement that participants have when participating in them. Moreover, attending to the specific detail of memory events and sites helps to see not only how they work, but also the extent of their reach and the fixity (or not) of who they might be able to include. Such attentiveness to place and event becomes important politically when we consider who is rendered as “other” in memory narratives and what may be the implications of this “othering”, for example in questions of social justice, post-conflict reconciliation, multicultural inclusion or the political transformation of the State. For example, in Australian military commemorative events, the formal recognition of Indigenous service people has only recently begun to occur, demonstrating how narratives can be transformed, but also how hard-fought and delayed such recognition can be.Footnote ⁴² Accordingly, four aspects of commemorative events and the way they are related to the politics of memory and identity will be further explored, with an emphasis on the importance of empirical approaches that attend to the specificities of place and event.

First, as part of annual calendars of national events, commemorations reinforce specific narratives through regularity and the repetition of particular elements from which they are comprised. The opening notes of familiar music, for example, or sounds that punctuate the rhythm of events, such as gunshots or murmured speech, signal when the visitors are engaged in a ritual and lead them forward from moment to moment. These rituals are enacted by way of bodily gestures – gathering, standing, bowing, placing hands over hearts – that layer their meanings into physical memory.Footnote ⁴³ Particular days may be looked forward to or dreaded, because the same day on previous years could have conditioned the understanding of the event in general. Anticipation is one way to understand how commemorative events are articulated and interpreted. For example, in the case of Anzac Day, the annual day of national remembrance in Australia, and its ceremony of Dawn Service, “anticipation is built publicly in the days leading up to [the event] with an increased intensity of media coverage, and at a personal level by the preparations and bodily experiences of collective movement to memorial sites immediately before the commemorative ritual”.Footnote ⁴⁴ The emotional terms in which the event is remembered in previous years – perhaps as moving, sad, boring or annoying – coalesce to form part of how it is understood in general, and are often imbricated in visitors’ stances towards the narratives it promulgates. These regular, bodily performed rituals act to connect participants together in commemorative moments, and provide a sense of connection to people they imagine have performed or will perform the same ritual in the past or future. Those points of connection are crucial in the formation and maintenance of (imagined) national communities.Footnote ⁴⁵

The peculiar temporal effect of these events’ repetitive nature, however, is not limited to how they build foreknowledge and anticipation each year. It also shows how commemorative events are as much about the future as they are about the past. They are a way for the State and participants to speak forward to other people who will come in the future and experience what is thought to be significant in the present. Middleton and Brown suggest that this focus is akin to thinking about “imaginary futures in the past”.Footnote ⁴⁶ The necessity for forward thinking helps us to understand why governments invest in memorials, museums, repeated rituals, education and many other forms of national historical representation and experience in order to reinforce and protect particular memories and particular ways of remembering. Linking the past to the present and having the populace connect with that narrative reinforces the collective adhesiveness of national identity narratives – the so-called “stickiness” mentioned previously. Official remembering is a way to reach into the future, to try to legitimate certain perceptions by making them difficult to forget and by leaving material and immaterial remains to shape the understandings of others. This organized remembering includes the rhythms and material and sensory elements of regular commemorative events.

The second notable aspect of commemorative events is that they provide an opportunity for public reflection on matters of shared identity. To that end, they are usually accompanied by widespread media coverage. These are moments in which chosen memory narratives are certainly used to buttress national identity, but there might also be openings for challenge, contestation or transformation. For example, journalist Paul Daley treated Anzac Day 2016 as an opportunity to point out what was not remembered during the “carnival of commemoration”.Footnote ⁴⁷ Daley emphasized the silence on many aspects of conflict, such as the death or disfigurement suffered by combatants and others and the large sums spent reinforcing commemorative narratives. Most notably, Daley and others have pinpointed the politics of memory of Anzac narratives and how they obscure national recognition of the frontier wars and violence against Indigenous people that was and is at the heart of the Australian colonial project. Historian Mark McKenna, for instance, has argued that Anzac Day is a form of political displacement which salves public unease and distracts from the unresolved and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land.Footnote ⁴⁸ Relatedly, Drozdzewski and Waterton have questioned how and whether the Anzac narrative is elastic enough to stretch to encompass Australia's increasingly diverse population.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, they also point out that deviation from the accepted public narrative is scarce and that vilification ensues from such dissonance. Thus, the regular commemorative moment of Anzac Day enables an ongoing debate and shaping of public engagement with historical narrative in Australia.

A third aspect is the way in which commemorative events draw together and invite people to participate in a collective practice. This collaborative remembrance happens in two distinct ways. The first is the knowledge that many others are commemorating the same event. For example, Anzac Day in Australia occurs every year on 25 April, when Dawn Service events are held around Australia and the world. The coming together of citizens is demonstrated and made visible by rolling coverage on the national public Australian Broadcasting Corporation network, which begins with the local metropolitan Dawn Service and the official national ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in the capital city of Canberra. Coverage continues throughout the day, following the rising sun at Australian memorial sites in Gallipoli (Turkey) and Villers-Bretonneux (France), and various locations in Southeast Asia. This span of coverage means that Anzac ceremonies are on television from 5.30 a.m. to around 3 p.m., contributing to a sense of collectivity made manifest through collective participation and/or spectating of the ceremonies.

A final aspect of collectivity that requires attention takes place at the ceremonies themselves. The experience of gathering in the pre-dawn light, standing in a large group waiting for the ceremony to begin, and murmuring the same words or singing the same songs with a crowd that can number into the tens of thousands is powerful for many people.Footnote ⁵⁰ At these moments, the imagined national community is immediately evident and visceral, with groups of people around the country sharing experiences that are made more significant through their collective nature. Scenes of this connection are beamed nationally via media broadcasts. However, at the same time, the bodies of others can diminish or complicate the rhetorical impact of the event, for example as their umbrellas block the view or the rustling of their coats or their murmured conversations make it difficult to hear the speeches. The point here is that because State-sponsored commemoration is so often experienced collectively, the particular affordances of being in a group must become a part of the understanding of conflict and trauma and how commemoration matters to people and influences particular configurations of perception.

Commemorative narratives are often understood in the abstract in relation to feelings of pride or grief, narratives about individuals that come to symbolize whole groups, or exemplars for so-called national characteristics. Cumulatively, however, they are always experienced as a particular set of material, sensory and discursive conditions. Commemorative events blur State-sponsored memory and narrative with the particular, lived conditions of which they are comprised. Mitchell identifies an implication for the politics of memory and identity related to this when she remarks:

When visitors attune to the bodily and sensory experience of memory sites and events, certain meanings can be parsed in terms of individual experience, an approach that opens up potential for them to be reimagined. This experience then “shows how both the representational and the more-than-representational are important elements in the creation and maintenance of national identities, and recognises this as related to the interaction between people and their built environments”.Footnote ⁵² For example, while Anzac Day might be presented in terms of its invocation of a particular historical discourse, the experience of actually attending a ceremony can be chilly, uncomfortable and tiring. As the experiences of such events have shown, there might be moments of reflection and of engagement with collective memory, but there are also cold feet, tired eyes and sore backs from waking early and standing for an hour in the pre-dawn autumnal weather.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, the connection between memory and identity might not be as determined and monolithic as the State would sometimes have us believe, but instead is conditioned and intertwined with the fleshy, affective and individual engagement of the people through whom it is meant to do its work. This engagement becomes even clearer if one looks beyond official and State-sponsored memory sites to those of the everyday.

Remembering and the everyday

In scrutinizing the relationship between memory and identity, the authors have thus far focused on official locations and events of memory. In both cases, the spatiality of memory, or the “a-where-ness” of memory, is paramount.Footnote ⁵⁴ The place of memory, its physical locale linking memory to territory, and the metaphoric and atmospheric places of memory created through the performance and practice of commemorative events rely on the bounding of memory to specific geographic places.Footnote ⁵⁵ Routine commemoration and official designation imbue these places with significance to the nation through things like monuments, memorials and historical plaques.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such places often rely on official and State-led designation to coordinate large-scale and ongoing acts of remembrance, testifying to the importance of what is being remembered about the nation, as much as where it is being remembered. In this final section, the authors shift their focus to the everyday, which encompasses the places, landscapes and spaces of our daily routines, and can include streets, commercial areas, parks, public squares and playgrounds. These are locations where we work, live and recreate; we also move between, in and through them, sometimes at speed while we are hurrying from one daily task to the next. They are also the types of spaces and places that we innately and intimately know − we can navigate them (almost) without thinking because we rely on our memory of them. Memory resides in such spaces and places, often without us realizing the extent of our vernacular expertise. Because movements and thoughts in these spaces and places are often directed not towards commemoration or remembrance but towards our daily routines and tasks, the operation of a politics of memory may not be necessarily apparent or overt. Yet, the streetscapes, parks and public spaces that we traverse daily nonetheless portray the nation's memories.Footnote ⁵⁷

Overlaying a consideration of the everyday as a location where memory and identity share a symbiotic and intricate relationship is a focus on small-scale acts of commemoration. Small-scale commemorations may include, but are not limited to, street names, plaques affixed to buildings or into the pavement, remnants of war and conflict such as bullet holes or shrapnel, and candles and flowers. Thus, our everyday focus permeates not only the type of space but also the implicitness of the form of commemoration and remembrance in those spaces. Indeed, the representation of the nation's past in the everyday matters, a point vividly evidenced by the recent eruption of violence in response to attempts to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, memory intersects into our everyday lives; it has longevity and adhesion. The politics of identity prompt further questions, such as how the use of memory in everyday spaces and places may express political hegemony, and whether there are spaces of/for resistance. In addition to considering these provocations, examples of material commemoration “need” to be visited and/or actively remembered to maintain their impact. In theorizing sites of war-related memory, for example, Jay Winter has argued that such activities and performances are “crucial” for maintaining the force and meaning of such sites, along with the related impulses to present and conserve them.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, James Young contends that without processes of socialization, “monuments are of little value, mere stones in the landscape”.Footnote ⁶⁰ As an example, it is useful to consider whether passing a memorial on a daily basis qualifies as activity, particularly if one does not stop to look at the memorial, but nevertheless knows that it is there.

In investigating small-scale memorialization in the everyday streetscapes of Warsaw and Berlin, for example, it was found that residents of those cities would not necessarily stop at the memorials, but they did note an “a-where-ness” of their location and what was memorialized there.Footnote ⁶¹ In arguing that “memory is always ‘available’ but only made ‘accessible’ when faced with sensual cues”, Muzaini suggests that active remembrance may take many forms, and that these can be unspoken, affective and internal.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, he contends that “everyday practices [of remembrance] often take place at the confluences of multiple subjectivities, multiple affects, multiple temporalities”.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, in his examination of how memories of war intersect with the identities of young Falkland Islanders, Benwell has argued that an assemblage of memory mediums (post-war landscapes, school curricula, dialogues with adults and formal commemorative events) work together to transmit national identity.Footnote ⁶⁴ At Victoria Dock, a residential development in Hull, United Kingdom, Atkinson has also shown how a focus on everyday markers of memory, in the form of maritime street names, ship anchors and pavement mosaics, enabled a “rethinking of memory as a less bounded and continually reconstituted process”.Footnote ⁶⁵ Taken together, these scholars show that engagement and experience matters in how we interact and continue to interact in everyday spaces and places.

What these studies contribute is their consideration of memory beyond representation, which is precisely what we, and other authors, argue for in our orientation towards experience.Footnote ⁶⁶ Atkinson has conceptualized this more-than-representational leaning as a movement towards a “topology of memories … [that is] continually reconfigured by new eruptions of memory”.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thinking about the (re)production and transmission of memory through an everyday lens decentres a more orthodox tendency to fix memory to particular events and days, encompassing certain activities of remembering. Rather, remembrance and commemorative practice in the everyday streetscape may be simultaneously discreet, contested, multiple and exemplified through multi-level performances. For example, speaking about the Tchorek Tablets (commemorative plaques embedded in the walls of buildings in Warsaw) that commemorate Polish victims of Nazi aggression in Warsaw during the Second World War, one study participant noted that the Tablets “are more connected to the reality/everyday life. It isn't a place where we go to visit a certain monument, but we pass next to it every day, it's slightly different feeling.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Key to the argument here is that an apparent lack of activities to signify remembrance does not and should not necessarily equate with the devaluation or forgetting of memory, since remembrance and its performance(s) may differ depending on place. If, then, memories of war in the everyday landscape can be experienced, (re)produced and maintained with and without coordinated collective ritual, what are the implications for a politics of memory and identity in this context? Markers of a nation's past selectively represented in everyday streetscapes can be “ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious”.Footnote ⁶⁹ In their recent book The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes, Reuben Rose-Redwood et al. comment that “a site of everyday routines and fleeting encounters, the ‘street’ can also become a place of memory”.Footnote ⁷⁰ Think, for instance, how many streets in Italy are named Via Garibaldi; in Poland, Aleja Armii Krajowej; or in Australia, after the Anzacs. The naming of these streets after important battles, armies and wartime heroes is no coincidence. Further, the placement of these street names, often as large thoroughfares in and out of the city centre, testifies to the overt use of a politics of memory.

In the post-war renaming of streets in Kraków, Poland, most of the inner city's street names reverted from their wartime German names to their pre-war Polish names. However, the newly installed Soviet regime chose to rename seven streets within the Krakow Old Town and its ring roads.Footnote ⁷¹ The common intention of these new names was to explicate fascist failure and German's subjugation of the Poles, but the choice of location of these renamed streets, in the Old Town, expounds the usefulness of both name and location. For example, a large section of the ring road around the perimeter of the Old Town, along which trams and buses traverse, was renamed May Day (Święto Pierwszego Maja) – an important date in the Soviet calendar instituted to reinforce the collective experience and identity of workers in the socialist-controlled Soviet territories. This example shows how “decision-making procedures and the wider re-planning of the political geography and semiotic order of the city” influences the likely level of exposure to certain street names through their spatial positioning.Footnote ⁷² When city inhabitants think about the transportation route they will use daily, they recall that street name, understand the significance of that name to the nation's history and repeat it (verbally or mentally). This repetition is part of a process of naming as norming, of what Azaryahu describes as the “ability [of street naming] to make a version of history an inseparable element of reality as it is constantly constructed, experienced and perceived on a daily basis”.Footnote ⁷³ The astuteness of the spatial positioning of a certain street name can amplify how often that name is repeated, so one must also look past the discursive and structural in the everyday streetscape (that is, the production of naming the streetscape) and towards the (re)production and performative capacity of the everyday to implicitly reinforce certain political agendas and how they shore up consensus for a particular version of the nation's past.

Yet, strategic placement of a street name does not necessarily guarantee repetitive performance of that name. Part of the process of attuning to the experiential includes considering how people in those spaces receive and possibly also resist attempts to inculcate memory into the streetscape.Footnote ⁷⁴ An often-cited example of resistance to naming is Meyers’ study of Zanzibar, in which he outlines how “under colonialism, many sardonic [place] nicknames became official” because few colonial officials spoke Swahili.Footnote ⁷⁵ He points out that the names must be vocalized and heard in order to understand their full cultural meaning.Footnote ⁷⁶ This experiential component, not deducible from map reading or archival research alone, allows for the detection of derision and apathy in audible cues. Kearns and Berg also explore speaking as a form of resistance in the pronunciation of the names of Maori places in New Zealand. They contend that “pronunciation can potentially be a form of resistance” because “speaking, in almost all circumstances, is a social act”.Footnote ⁷⁷ The oral repetition of Maori place names, encompassing a diversity of “politically correct versions of pronunciation”, may therefore have the cumulative effect of bolstering support for Maori identity politics in New Zealand. Duminy's Durban-based study provides a further example of resistance to the (re)inscription of street names after colonial subjugation. Interrogating the concept of symbolic resistance, Duminy summates that activities of resistance to street name changes in Durban, which included removing new street signs, the continued use of original street names and the generation of media discourse concerning the location of new names, were limited and thus demonstrated acceptance of the State's right to change names.Footnote ⁷⁸

At this point in the discussion it is useful to think through the acceptance of the right of the State to mark public space with markers of the nation's past. The power of the everyday setting, unlike specific commemorative locations and events that very obviously demarcate a specific narrative line, is that in linking national identity to cultural memory, the parks, streets and place names of local neighbourhoods have greater potential to slip under the radar as spaces and places of political purpose. For example, in the major Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne, where the authors reside, numerous street and place names commemorate colonial history. Elizabeth, William, George and Victoria are all popular toponymic markers of colonization. For the most part, these names remain unquestioned because they appear largely unequivocal. Likewise, statues of James Cook, Lachlan Macquarie and Arthur Philip are common; yet, there is a nascent discourse among non-Indigenous Australians about these men's role in the decimation of the Indigenous population's post-European arrival in Australia.Footnote ⁷⁹ The resonance of such voices remains minimal in a political landscape where discussions on republicanism have failed to gain political currency, and where Australia's largest symbolic wartime commemorative event still narrates the heroic birth of a nation on the foreign battlefield of Gallipoli, while failing to narrate as loudly the tactical British decision to send Anzac troops to a doomed battlefront. Significantly, the democratic birth of the nation took place thirteen years prior to that battle at Federation.

Marking physical public space, combined with the domination of certain political agendas in everyday discourse, provides political elites with access to the populace in seemingly mundane and ordinary spaces and places. In these settings it would seem that dissenting voices occupy very small corners of the discussion, which is otherwise dominated by an unwitting or indifferent acceptance of the instituted norm.