Abstract
The concept of national memory can be interpreted in two ways, either as "memory about a nation" (or "a nation as a kind of memory") or as "a nation that remembers" (or "a nation's memory"). With a reference to nation which could be understood as country, native land, nation, and state, the national memory also unfolds as memory of China in geopolitical sense, memory of the native land in cultural and psychological sense, memory of nation in ethnographic sense, and memory of the state in political sense. The signification of the national memory changes in different contexts. There are two ways in which national memory is formed, the "top-down" approach and that of the "bottom- up." The former is marked by the compulsory "embedding" of memory and the latter by the poetic "conscious remembering." In the digital age, memory research focuses on the relationship between memory and forgetting, as well as the issues of privacy, cyber violence and justice. The crisis of the national memory is mainly manifested in "the ways in which memory is chosen" and "the transformation of the public space." The internet has subverted the ecology of memory originally driven by the state and society (or the folk), and created more possibilities for memory including national memory. Such subversion is embodied in the subject of memory ("the multitude"), the object of memory ("information"), the method of remembering ("electronic reading" and "cultural habits"), and the representation of memory ("the memory of multitude").
First Page
34
Last Page
43
Recommended Citation
Zhao, Jingrong. 2021. "The Crisis and Future of National Memory in the Digital Age." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 41, (3): pp.34-43. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol41/iss3/18
