Rethinking Remediation and Reworking the Archive : Transcultural Reappropriations of Documentary Images of Migration

Arguing that the relation between documentary images and the dynamics of cultural memory needs to be theorized more fully, the article readdresses the concepts of the ‘archive’ and ‘remediation’. The article examines how archival newsreel footage from the now iconic arrival of the Windrush in Britain in 1948 is remediated on YouTube. It suggests that remediations of documentary images can be used to acknowledge the cultural memory of migration, and, more specifically, the legacy of Black immigration and its impact on contemporary Britain. In order to understand the remediation of cultural memory and its inherent power structures, the article argues, we need to analyse its media specificity, its genre, the politics of representation at work, its discursive as well as its industrial context (production, distribution and exhibition). The article also discusses the remediation of archival footage as a possible way to rework a colonial and Eurocentric perspective. Critical interrogations into the archive can create alternative and vernacular memories which might offer emancipatory potential instead of stabilizing essentialist notions of belonging. This perspective could allow cultural memory studies to get away from essentializing concepts of cultural or transcultural memory as based on the notions of container cultures.Working paperWorkshop of the COST Action “In search of transcultural memory in Europe (ISTME)”, Krakow, Jagiellonian University, Collegium Maius, 16-17 september 2013