Abstract
In the last decade, there have been repeated calls for cultural memory studies to move beyond the apparent self-evidence of the nation-state as an analytic framework. These calls resonated with the general critique of methodological nationalism in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Within the field of cultural memory studies, they were also specifically linked to the role of cultural expressions carried by media and practices, often aesthetic ones, in shaping and extending the social frameworks within which people remember (Assmann and Conrad, 2010; Bond et al., 2017; Bond and Rapson, 2014; De Cesari and Rigney, 2014; Erll, 2011). This has led to studies of the transnational and transcultural dynamics of memory that concentrate on the interplay between the familial and the national, the local and the global, the regional and the transregional that occurs when memories circulate and interact ‘multidirectionally’ (Rothberg, 2009).
This Special Issue builds on these discussions but also aims to take them forward in specific ways. While so much of memory studies has concentrated on the memory of 20th-century atrocities, specifically within Europe, the present issue seeks to extend the empirical purview on which theorizations are based. It does so by looking to regions and countries that are less often treated, to periods before the two World Wars, to the impact of memory on civic life in peacetime and on ways of understanding the present. In this way, the transnational turn becomes more than a matter of doing the same thing within a broader framework. It also entails new lines of inquiry that will help put our theoretical understanding on a firmer footing. Four such lines of inquiry are represented here.
The first line involves expanding the temporal horizons of memory studies by paying more attention to long-term developments. Astrid Erll thus uses the long-term reception of Homer in order to show how what is often taken for granted as ‘European heritage’ is actually the result of complex relational mnemohistories. The second line involves rethinking the geographies and entangled spaces of memory. Aleida Assmann redefines the concepts of ‘space/place’ through the lens of memory studies and, using the example of Palestine/Israel, she shows how incompatible histories are constructed in the same landscape. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa researches a Polish shtetl from a multiscalar perspective and shows how urban memories are constituted in an interplay between the local, the national, and the transnational. The third line involves going beyond Europe as a frame of reference. Frank Schulze-Engler demonstrates how the engagement with indigenous perspectives in novels about World War II can contribute to the project of ‘provincializing Europe’, and he discusses the ways in which memory studies can address postcolonial literature beyond the ‘writing back’-paradigm. John Njenga Karugia addresses the Indian Ocean as a transregion that has not yet come within the horizon of memory studies and focuses on the dynamics of ‘connective memory’ between Asia and East Africa. Rosanne Kennedy studies memory in Sierra Leone and shows how ‘productive frictions’ can emerge from the travels of cosmopolitan memory across national, cultural, and medial borders.
The fourth line involves highlighting the role of memory in civic life and in shaping ideas of the future: Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg think about the current return of memories of European fascism in the present-day United States in order to delineate the outlines of a ‘memory studies in a moment of danger’. Through a study of the transnational remembrance of the Paris Commune, Ann Rigney challenges the primacy of the traumatic in memory studies and calls for more attention to be paid to the cultural transmission of hope and to the connection between activism and memory.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This Special Issue has emerged from the Network in Transnational Memory Studies (NITMES, 2013–2016, led by Ann Rigney and funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the participant universities). In a series of conferences, the NITMES group delineated the core concerns of transnational memory studies: ‘Memory with(out) borders’ (Utrecht University, June 2013), ‘Diasporic memory’ (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, November 2013), ‘Memory transfers and transformations’ (University of Constance, June 2014), ‘Scales of memory’ (Australian National University, December 2014), ‘Memory practices and the making of Europe’ (Lund University, June 2015), ‘Provincializing European memory’ (Goethe University Frankfurt, September 2015), and ‘Topographies of memory in an uneven world’ (ACLA, Utrecht University, 2017). Other related projects have joined forces for this special issue: In the BMBF-funded AFRASO-programme (‘Africa’s Asian Options’), Astrid Erll, John Njenga Karugia and Frank Schulze-Engler work together on ‘Indian Ocean imaginaries and memories’. A resonant background to our work was also the EU-funded COST-Network ‘In search of transcultural memory in Europe’ (2012–2017, led by Barbara Törnquist-Plewa). The editors are happy to acknowledge the contribution of all these funding agencies and institutions. They would also like to thank Magdalena de Gasperi and Maria Elisabeth Dorr for their expert editorial assistance as well as the anonymous peer reviewers for their generous feedback.
Author biographies
Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt. Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Earlier collaborations between Erll and Rigney include Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (2009), and Audiovisual Memory and the (Re)Making of Europe (2017).