Memory is the Weapon
Memory is the Weapon

Author: Don Mattera

Publisher: African Perspectives Publishing

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0992187575

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Donato Francesco Mattera has been celebrated as a journalist, editor, writer and poet. He is also acknowledged as one of the foremost activists in the struggle for a democratic South Africa, and helped to found both the Union of Black Journalists, the African Writers Association and the Congress of South African Writers. Born in 1935 in Western Native Township (now Westbury) across the road from Sophiatown, Mattera can lay claim to an intriguingly diverse lineage: his paternal grandfather was Italian, and he has Tswana, Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa blood in his veins. Yet diversity was hardly being celebrated at that time. In one of apartheids most infamous actions, the vibrant multicultural Sophiatown was destroyed in 1955 and replaced with the white suburb of Triomf, and the wrenching displacement, can be felt in Matteras writing. The story of his life in Sophiatown as told in this essay is intricate. Covering Matteras teenage years from 1948 to 1962 when Sophiatown was bulldozed out of existence, it weaves together both his personal experience and political development. In telling the story of his life as a coloured teenager, Mattera takes on the ambitious goal of making us recapture the crucial events of the 1950s in Sophiatown, one of the most important decades in the history of black political struggles in South Africa.

Memory is the Weapon
Memory is the Weapon

Author: Don Mattera

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13:

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The story of Sophiatown has been told before but never with the eloquence that Don Mattera brings to Memory is the Weapon. Many faces make up the whole that was Sophiatown: teeming with political campaigns, bristling with the knives of the underworld and vigorous with the enterprise of ordinary people eking out a living for themselves, all this contributing to a burgeoining culture. Mattera captures it all in colourful and often heart-rending vignettes. These are the memories of a man who has touched the cloaks of the holy and the unholy, broken bread with the rich and the poor, crossed swords with the law and the lawless. The death of Sophiatown will remain an indictment of callousness and cruelty. That it is able to live on in the hearts and minds of generations to come is a proud tribute to the culture and artists it produced.

The Memory Code
The Memory Code

Author: Lynne Kelly

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-02-07

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1681773821

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In ancient, pre-literate cultures across the globe, tribal elders had encyclopedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across a landscape, identify the stars in the sky, and recite the history of their people. Yet today, most of us struggle to memorize more than a short poem. Using traditional Aboriginal Australian song lines as a starting point, Dr. Lynne Kelly has since identified the powerful memory technique used by our ancestors and indigenous people around the world. In turn, she has then discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret purpose behind the great prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge, which have puzzled archaeologists for so long.The henges across northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, huge animal shapes in Peru, the statues of Easter Island—these all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorize the vast amounts of information they needed to survive. But how?For the first time, Dr. Kelly unlocks the secret of these monuments and their uses as "memory places" in her fascinating book. Additionally, The Memory Code also explains how we can use this ancient mnemonic technique to train our minds in the tradition of our forbearers.

After Gun Violence
After Gun Violence

Author: Craig Rood

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-05-20

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0271085452

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Mass shootings have become the “new normal” in American life. The same can be said for the public debate that follows a shooting: blame is cast, political postures are assumed, but no meaningful policy changes are enacted. In After Gun Violence, Craig Rood argues that this cycle is the result of a communication problem. Without advocating for specific policies, Rood examines how Americans talk about gun violence and suggests how we might discuss the issues more productively and move beyond our current, tragic impasse. Exploring the ways advocacy groups, community leaders, politicians, and everyday citizens talk about gun violence, Rood reveals how the gun debate is about far more than just guns. He details the role of public memory in shaping the discourse, showing how memories of the victims of gun violence, the Second Amendment, and race relations influence how gun policy is discussed. In doing so, Rood argues that forgetting and misremembering this history leads interest groups and public officials to entrenched positions and political failure and drives the public further apart. Timely and innovative, After Gun Violence advances our understanding of public discourse in an age of gridlock by illustrating how public deliberation and public memory shape and misshape one another. It is a search to understand why public discourse fails and how we can do better.

Music as Mao's Weapon
Music as Mao's Weapon

Author: Lei X. Ouyang

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0252053117

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A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) produced propaganda music that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. Lei X. Ouyang uses selections from revolutionary songbooks to untangle the complex interactions between memory, trauma, and generational imprinting among those who survived the period of extremes. Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork and surveys to explore both the Cultural Revolution's effect on those who lived through it as children and contemporary remembrance of the music created to serve the Maoist regime. As Ouyang shows, the weaponization of music served an ideological revolution but also revolutionized the senses. She examines essential questions raised by this phenomenon, including: What did the revolutionization look, sound, and feel like? What does it take for individuals and groups to engage with such music? And what is the impact of such an experience over time? Perceptive and provocative, Music as Mao's Weapon is an insightful look at the exploitation and manipulation of the arts under authoritarianism.

The Memory Police
The Memory Police

Author: Yoko Ogawa

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1101870613

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Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner

Human Memory
Human Memory

Author: Gabriel A. Radvansky

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2015-08-20

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1317350782

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Provides students with a guide to human memory, its properties, theories about how it works, and how studying it can help us understand who we are and why we do the things that we do. For undergraduate and graduate courses in Human Memory. This book provides a very broad range of topics covering more territory than most books. In addition to some coverage of basic issues of human memory and cognition that are of interest to researchers in the field, the chapters also cover issues that will be relevant to students with a range of interests including those students interested in clinical, social, and developmental psychology, as well as those planning on going on to medical and law schools. The writing is aimed at talking directly to students (as opposed to talking down to them) in a clear and effective manner. Not too dense, but also not too conversational as well. This 2nd edition includes a series of exercises that allow the student to try out the concepts and principles conveyed in the chapters, or to use as the basis for exploring their own ideas.

The Stone of Farewell
The Stone of Farewell

Author: Tad Williams

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2005-04-05

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 0756402972

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Simon, a young kitchen boy and magician's apprentice, finds his dreams of great deeds and heroic wars becoming an all too shocking reality in a terrifying civil war.