Writing Individual Journalist's Memories into Collective Memory

Abstract

This article considers the ways that journalists' personal memories impact on the process of constructing collective memories, while analyzing how journalists mitigate the political, professional, and personal aspects of their lives. It compares the memories of local journalists with the memories of journalists working for national newspapers concerning the same international event, the arrival of the Amelie on Canadian shores in 1987, when 174 Indian refugees spontaneously landed in Charlesville, Nova Scotia (population 77). Personal memories and expressions of forgetting conflict with, or conversely, support, published representations, and allow for an exploration of the impact of personal memories in this specific realm. Power, identity, and emotions are all central to the production and circulation of social memories, as are relationships to places. This article unpacks journalists' personal comments related to forgetting and emotions in order to explore disjunctures which affect the social memories of communities through print media news reports.

KEYWORDS:

• collective versus individual memory
• emotion
• forgetting
• journalism

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Sharon Roseman for her valuable insights.

Notes

1. The importance of interactions between the two is also preferred in Nora's discussion of generationality where he explains that “generational memory grows out of social interaction,” which is originally “collected” and then later internalized in deep unconscious ways, making it effectively “collective” (Nora 1997, 526).

2. Also see Moffatt and Singer (1994) and Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000).

3. Nova Scotia's provincial slogan is “the land of 100,000 welcomes” and ideas about the hospitable nature of its inhabitants has a long history in tourism promotion. Ian McKay's (1994) seminal work, The Quest of the Folk, outlines the ways that the Canadian government and businesses promoted this region as unspoiled and anti-modern, and its residents as innocent and hospitable, in order to cultivate a vacation playground of sorts for the rest of Canada in the early twentieth century.

4. Mansouri and Leach (2004) explain that this is common in all reports of arrivals of refugees by boat on Australian shores. Other scholars have commented on this aspect as a common practice internationally (see Pugh 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through the Post-doctoral Fellowship Program.