pastification

It is very clear that the bushman myth was a product of its times, directly or indirectly coming out of workers’ movements and struggles over Australian nationalism. Kelly, other bushrangers, and convict stories from the (not-so-distant) past are taken up in the present because of these goings on, to help form the bushman identity. However, these identities are then projected back into the past, removed from their present context. This “pastification” of the bushman identity helps to obscure the current conditions out of which it arises, furthering its conservative functions. / This “pastification” took place at a time when Australia was exceedingly future-orientated, identifying itself with progress.

2012, Laura Basu, Ned Kelly as Memory Dispositif, page 86

For the Creoles, however, the past is always present (in the case of Aurora and Clotilde, literally so: Aurora’s daughter is also her grandmother), determining their identity as well as their actions, and it is precisely the Creoles’ presentification of their past that ultimately seals their pastification in the novel.

2020, Florian Freitag, Popular New Orleans

Let us look more closely: the present cannot pass except by becoming the “before” of a for-itself [pour-soi] that thereby constitutes itself as “after”. There is therefore just one phenomenon: the arising of a new present that “pastifies” [passéifiant] the present that it was and, in the wake of the pastification [passéification] of a present, the appearing of a for-itself for whom that present will become the past.

2021, Suffering Time, page 96

Together with her narrative investment in demonstrating the historical and causal continuit that connected antebellum and post-Reconstruction America, it is Hopkins’s use of intertextuality that enables her to challenge the harmful pastification of slavery so prominent in her day, effect both “therapeutically induced change” (3) and healing within her community, and prove to her readers that it was indeed “this cursed slavery that’s to blame.”

2022, JoAnn Pavletich, Yours for Humanity: New Essays on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, page 167