Remediating transcultural memories of postpunk Manchester: homosocial nostalgia and contemporary city brandingThis paper offers a memory studies perspective on the remediation of cultural memories around Joy Division and their legacy. Drawing on my research which situates itself at the interface of memory studies and film studies, I will introduce the notion of 'transcultural memory' (Erll 2011) into the study of postpunk memories and their adaptations. In the former industrial cities of the Northwest of England, especially in Liverpool and Manchester, the heritage of popular music has contributed to relaunching the cities as creative clusters. This paper critically examines the highly gendered remediation of popular music heritage and the appropriation and reworking of postpunk memories into an official narrative. I argue that remediation creates certain nodal points around which a number of narratives of the past are constructed. Alongside with, for example, Factory Records and The Hacienda, Joy Division is one of the nodal points of the current memory boom around postpunk Manchester. These nodal points (or chronotopes in the Bakhtinian sense) are perpetuated by the ongoing remediation. At the same time remediation both opens and closes discursive spaces for different subject positions. This process in turns has repercussions on canon formation: it highlights some bands (especially Joy Division), while side-lining others (for instance The Fall or The Durutti Column). Moreover, remediation constructs mnemonic spaces which are predominantly heteronormative and male-oriented – all the more surprising since Manchester has been a traditional stronghold for LGBT-culture for decades. Therefore, the formation of Manchester's cultural memory is a highly gendered process. In most of the ’memory works’ around 1980s Manchester the dominant narrative is defined by a homosocial (Sedgwick) and patriarchal perspective, which is white and heteronormative and in which feminist, queer or Black voices are excluded.
Ej belagd, 160317