What a Difference a Place Makes: The Reflexive (Mis) management of a City’s Pasts

Abstract

In this article the authors use the concept of “place memory” to contemplate how the temporal qualities of places inflect the activities carried out in them by considering how one group, the Haifa chapter of Women in Black (WiB) in Israel, makes conscious and unconscious use of the possible readings of an “ordinary” place and its history. The authors demonstrate the argument by analyzing the group’s peregrinations over the past twenty years. After pointing to some scholarly insights regarding the use of place by protest movements and a brief introduction to the city of Haifa and WiB and its members, the authors move through the various sites where the movement held its vigils; they close by considering how the pasts of a place permeate the present and, in so doing, disrupt any possible unilinear reading of a place and open it up to multilinear and nonlinear readings.