Memory dispositifs and national identities: The case of Ned Kelly

Abstract

Enduring cultural memories are never made by politicians, monuments or individual media representations alone, although both media and politics (or power relations) are essential to their existence; they are formed and develop through a tangle of relations that reaches back and forth across time. Although questions of media, temporality and power have all been crucial to the field of memory studies, little work has been done on exactly how these elements interact to form memories that shift over time and what work they do in terms of identity formation and negotiation. Using the case of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and the idea of a memory dispositif, this article will explore some of these types of relations and how they function to assemble complex and contradictory group identities.