Cultural memory of social protest: Mnemonic literature about Gezi Park protests

Abstract

This article problematizes the relation between the cultural memory and the Gezi Park protests which took place in 2013 in İstanbul. With this aim, a sample of the literature as the source for the analysis were selected. The selection of the literary productions were made purposively in order to analyze the memory of the Gezi Park protests in connection with the general understanding of the cultural memory. The relevance of the literature to the role of memory in social protest was analyzed on the basis of the three dimensional model of the relation between memory and literature by considering the working of three aspects of mnemonic mimesis: prefiguration, configuration, and reconfiguration. Consequently, literature as the mimesis of memory was connected to the analysis of the cultural memory of social protest. It was argued that the cultural memory of the Gezi Park protests contributes to the repertoire of the memory of the social protests in novel ways. © 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.