Abstract
It is an incredible time to be a memory studies scholar. Enormous energy, diverse voices, global questions, full to bursting seminars, conferences, and happenings spring up all over the place and contribute a welcome flurry of new ideas about how, if, when, and whether to remember, to commemorate, or to topple. In addition to escalating attendance at conferences, such the Memory Studies Association Annual Conference, and interest in smaller annual events, including the Mnemonics summer school, Routledge has a series entitled Memory Studies: Global Constellations, Palgrave Macmillan publishes a Memory Studies series, the Stanford series, Cultural Memory in the Present, continues to produce stellar work, and a new memory studies journal in addition to Memory Studies, the Memory Studies Review, has just launched. On top of all of this, 2023 witnesses a blossoming of memory studies volumes: Ann Rigney and Thomas Smits (eds.), The Visual Memory of Protest (Amsterdam University Press), Irene Kacandes (ed.), On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter), my edited collection Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches (Bloomsbury), and of course, the wonderful Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg (and this is hardly an exhaustive list!).
I was first introduced to the idea of memory activism at the 2019 Mnemonics conference that took place in Utrecht and brought together a wide-ranging group of graduate students and memory scholars to think together about how activism and memory interplay. The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism highlights and expands so many aspects of this broad topic and updates it to the present. This is the first time that the field of memory activism has been presented in a sprawling collection like this one. Gutman and Wüstenberg are to be heartily commended for curating an incredibly rich and thought-provoking volume with broad appeal that includes scholars and activists from around the world. The wide geographic range spans from Egypt to Kosovo to Mexico to the Arctic and so many other places. The volume is structured democratically with different editors offering introductions to the various parts. It is far from a traditionally organized text—and this is a very good thing as the structure around spaces such as queer spaces, mediated spaces, and sacred, Indigenous, spaces allows the text to flow through an enormous range. The book covers topics from religion, slavery, museums, neoliberalism, law, toppling monuments, ghosts, and on and on. It is also diverse in terms of types of writing from interviews to manifestos to scholarly articles to first person narrations, and indeed the whole chunky text ends with an interview which offers a sort of open-ended and dialogic feel to the whole.
Gutman and Wüstenberg define memory activism as the “strategic commemoration of a contested past to achieve mnemonic or political change by working outside of state channels” (p. 5, italics in original). The volume approaches the topic from scholarly and activist lenses (and sometimes those lenses align) and continues to define the field by exploring single ideas such as “slavery” or “states” (Damani Partridge) or “Migrant Spaces” (Yasemin Yildez). This explanatory approach means this text will be very useful in the classroom.
Ana Lucia Araujo (2020), who has written extensively about memory activism and slavery in books such as Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past, contributes a chapter, “Slavery,” which delves into memory activism in Europe, West Africa, and the Americas. In a rich and densely packed essay, she finds the seeds of later memory activism in “parades and festivals to commemorate the end of slavery” (p. 196). Throughout her analysis it becomes clear that major metropoles such as London and Paris were not the central scenes of memory activism: in England, Bristol and Liverpool took the lead and in France, “Nantes became the only French former slave-trading port to unveil a huge Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery” (p. 199). These efforts to both topple the white supremacist monuments and celebrate and memorialize the end of slavery came late. Araujo finds that “bolder recognition of Britain’s slave past in the public space was only achieved on the eve of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade in 2007” (p. 198). Indeed, she also dryly notes that the National Museum of African American History and Culture that (finally!) stands on the Mall in Washington, DC, “took nearly one century to be completed” (p. 201). This work, and no doubt her many books as well, offer important history and context to how memory activism in favor of unburying traumatic pasts has been ongoing and takes multiple forms from parades to monuments.
Anna Reading’s “Activist Voices: What is at Stake—A Short Manifesto for Activist Memory Studies” asks us to think beyond borders—indeed to cut fences, overwrite the manifesto, think beyond the human, and sing out memory work! She divides the manifesto into actionable categories: “Remember your Value,” “Shake and Stir,” and finally, destroy this manifesto! Write your own! It is a wonderful and playful way of getting us out of our armchair philosophizing—or memory studies-izing—and into action without being didactic, while allowing—encouraging, our own takes on the stakes. Reading’s contribution exemplifies the writerly range of this collection and highlights its invitation to think creatively about multitudinous aspects of memory activism.
A contribution to the volume with an elegiac, deeply moving register, Nora Amin’s, “Activist Voices: Post Heroes,” tells Amin’s story as a grieving memory activist performer: “I,” Amin says,
consider the different versions of “Life for Remembrance,” . . . as political forms of memory activism that rely on memory and performance, or rather on performing memory in a certain large sense that encompasses personal and collective memory, as well as intimate and political traces, and fuses them with a performativity that meets the passion and togetherness of the public protests and demonstrations while de-colonizing the stage from the esthetics and discourse of oppression and corruption. (p. 129)
The descriptions of how Amin and a group of theater people, in southern Egypt, in opposition to the absence of fire protections in aging theaters that caused a fire which claimed her husband, began to act are so poignant. The opposition and the performances she created, she says, “functioned as a political statement against the regime” (p. 129). This emotional example forms one among many of how memories can be activated into activism, how writing can address multiple registers to deepen our understanding of the intersection of memory and activism.
Ann Rigney, in “Decommissioning Monuments,” examines what happens when monuments topple and finds that “in statues, meaning ceases to be merely abstract, having become materialized in aesthetically formed objects” (p. 22). This accretion of meaning in the object helps explain the huge emotional cathexis around monuments that can especially be unleashed when they decommission. Rigney points out the long history of the toppling of monuments and notes that “in becoming magnets for demonstrators, monuments help to make tangible and highly visible the power asymmetries that have shaped the past and continue into the present” (p. 24). She concludes by noting that “memory activism is inevitably entangled with the old memory it seeks both to displace and to disqualify” (p. 27).
Alison Landsberg’s chapter, “Memory vs. History: The Politics of Temporality” looks at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and picks up on the “Museum’s fundamental and provocative claim” which is that “Slavery didn’t end. It evolved” (p. 44). This is a thread which travels throughout the volume and resonates powerfully with how memory studies scholars have always understood that the past is not really past. At the Legacy Museum, as Landsberg explores, this persistence of the past appears in the form of “holographs of enslaved people. . . . The ghost, appearing in the present, is meant to collapse the distance between then and now—to render the past alive, animate in the present” (p. 45, italics in original). Landsberg goes on to argue that this eschewal of breaks and ruptures showcases how the Legacy Museum finds the past fully “animate in the present” (p. 46) and how it asks “the visitor to take responsibility for the contemporary atrocity” (p. 47).
In their contribution, “Implicated Subjects,” Jennifer Noji and Michael Rothberg draw on Rothberg’s idea of implicated subjects from his 2019 book by the same name to look at Japanese–American activists’ mobilization of the memory of Japanese–American incarceration during the Second World War. They explain that implicated subjects “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; implicated subjects continue to inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes” (p. 81). In concert with Debarati Sanyal’s (2015) idea of complicity, and other theories about perpetration and its often complex relationship with victimization, the implicated subject allows us to see how one can take responsibility even while not being a direct agent of harm. They conclude this chapter by inviting further reflection: “The powerful impetus offered by complex implication in the Jewish-Israeli, Japanese-American, and Jewish-American cases indicates the conceptual richness and political potential of the terrain of implicated memory activism—a terrain that will repay further investigation” (p. 85).
This is not the only co-written essay in this anthology and the many examples of co-writing deepens the sense of democratic work here. The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism will be crucial in crystalizing the sub-field of “memory activism” within memory studies. It offers an exceptionally broad and readable text which could be used in classes such as Introduction to Memory Studies, Activism in the Past and Present, and Global Memory Studies. It can be read forwards to backwards, dipped into for particular definitions or ideas, or turned to for inspiration in constructing democratic, collective, and deeply thought work in memory studies.
