Abstract
Before his political allegiances and activities in the 1950s became the subject of debate, Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, famously wrote that “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Where the party-state can purge from the historical record whatever it deems antithetical to its interests, the pathways to self-development and social cohesion are radically narrowed. For Kundera’s admirers, this aphorism encapsulated his credentials as both a lay philosopher and intellectual dissident.
Today, Kundera’s maxim only partially illuminates our dilemma. While the problem of authoritarian power has not abated, the overall scenario has become more complicated. Alongside the struggle of memory against forgetting, we now also contend with an accelerating confrontation between remembering (memory) and remembering otherwise (counter-memory). The difficulty is no longer only the silencing impact of government censors and their memory holes; it is compounded by the appearance and proliferation of memory trolls. These are non-state or quasi-official actors whose raison d’être is pitting competing memories against each other to sow political division and mobilize collective action. Far from being helpless in the face the state, the trolls have amassed extraordinary mnemonic influence by removing the barriers between history and desire. For this clique, the past is whatever can be embraced by groups looking to bolster their image and accumulate power.
In the crowded information ecosystems where memory trolls thrive, erasure of historical truth is less consequential and less practical than deploying a barrage of “alternative facts” and counter-narratives to create an atmosphere of uncertainty, discouragement, and epistemic instability. Even more vexing, the peddlers of doubt and disinformation have learned to wrap their work in the seductive language of democratic choice. Simo Drljača, after he was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, put this succinctly: “You have your facts. We have our facts. You have the complete right to choose between the two versions” (Ingrao and Emmet, 2009).
While not a direct response to Drljača, The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (hereafter, HMA), edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg, nevertheless speaks to the fragmented scenario he described, in which contravening versions of the past are no longer assessed for their historical validity, but by what emotional responses they produce in their target audience and how these can be leveraged for political advantage. The rise of memory activism analyzed in this collection remains connected to the struggle for power which Kundera articulated, but it also arises from the post-truth environment (McIntyre, 2018), where memory trolls weaponize the past, muddy the intellectual waters, and claim an absolute right to history and memory, irrespective of any professional or empirical standards.
The HMA is a theoretically sophisticated field guide and a cogent overview of the “activist turn” in memory studies. At the same time, it is a collective meditation on the possibilities for persuasion and social transformation that exist wherever the struggle over memory creates a rift in the body politic. This volume will be an essential resource for scholars and students who wish to engage with memory activism, as the editors say, both as a category of practice and as a category of analysis (p. 6). It will also provide useful instruction to activists, who want to know what tactics and strategies have succeeded (or failed) in the past, and to those seeking to understand how local contexts have informed previous activism and determined outcomes.
The breadth of this volume—80 chapters and 91 contributors—makes it difficult to offer a comprehensive review. We can start by saying that the HMA is divided into six parts: Debates; Actors and Agency; Institutions and Institutionalization; Spaces; Sites and Practices; and Normative Dilemmas. These section headings are already an important achievement, as they help both to conceptualize the field and suggest avenues for future research. Aleida Assmann’s “Foreward” distills the project’s key themes, overarching questions, and organizational scheme. Especially important are her observations regarding the “precarity” (p. 4) and risks of memory activism, reflected in cases where activists have failed to achieve the changes they desire, as well as cases where their activism has been met with deadly force and violence. Gutman and Wüstenberg have also contributed an introductory essay where they pin down key terms and delineate major concepts. They define memory activism as “strategic commemoration of a contested past to achieve mnemonic or political change by working outside of state channels” (p. 5). Differentiating between the politics of history (state) and memory-activism (non-state) ensures that readers get consistency in the case studies and comparative analyses which are compiled here.
One of the editors’ crucial insights relates to the flexible quality of memory activism. It is not only utilized by progressive underdogs and subalterns who seek to challenge hegemonic narratives imposed from above. While some groups use it to promote “reconciliation and democratic values,” others employ it “to build nationalistic and exclusionary spaces” (p. 6). If democratic politics privilege pluralism and multi-vocality, the HMA reminds readers that these principles, by themselves, do not fully guarantee the rights or safety of vulnerable groups. Multi-vocality and the proliferation of perspectives can also be employed to frustrate reform, block transformation, and roll back democratic commitments. In the United States, for example, the 1619 Project, which centers chattel slavery in order to “tell [America’s] story truthfully,” 1 now runs up against “Moms for Liberty,” which pressures schools to remove books from their libraries which its members consider “Anti-American.” The point is not that these two groups are equivalent. The former draws from published academic scholarship, while M4L favor what they call “firsthand knowledge and experience.” 2 Yet, some may see these initiatives as presenting different sides of the same coin, insofar as both groups believe they are enhancing historical understanding by reworking the memory discourse to recover what has been silenced. As the editors of the HMA make clear, getting to grips with memory activism means taking up cases “from across the political spectrum” (p. 15) and investigating both its liberal and illiberal forms.
Joanna Wawrzyniak’s “Memory Activism in History” (Chapter 6) provides important context. As she observes, memory activism is not new. Ancient Greeks wrangled over the history and meaning of the Persian Wars. In feudal Europe, peasant revolts erupted in response to perceived injustices, and these events, in turn, became objects of commemoration and debate. The nineteenth-century also provides salient examples. Wawrzyniak examines the composer Frédéric Chopin as a memory activist working to instantiate Polish nationalism through music. Others have used memory activism to stymie nationalism, for example, in Japan among defenders of the Tokugawa shogunate or in the case of Russia’s Pan-Slavists. Veterans of the two world wars also receive attention, recalling Michel Foucault’s (2003 [1980]) observation that “politics is a continuation of war by other means.”
Chapter 11 (“Extreme Right”) by Sophie Schmalenberger, Christoffer Kølvraa, and Bernhard Forchtner feels especially urgent, particularly where the authors probe the differences between progressive and reactionary activism. If all memory activism, in practice, is political, and if memory activism, categorically speaking, is value-neutral, then all activist forays, whether launched from the left or right, are formally equivalent (i.e. your facts versus our facts). But when these programs are scrutinized for their moral content, key differences emerge. While progressives have tried to harness memory activism to ensure that historically marginalized groups have a “seat at the table,” on the right, the chief characteristic of memory activism now appears to be its attempt to reassert the social hierarchies and cultural predilections which, historically speaking, have been the most corrosive to democracy and the most deleterious to marginalized minorities.
In Austria and Germany, Generation Identity (GI) pushes a “Great Replacement” narrative, according to which White Europeans are digging their own graves, so to speak, by extending full rights of citizenship to Muslim immigrants and by accommodating, or even celebrating, their cultural differences rather than demanding strict assimilation. Members of GI staged a mock funeral, complete with coffin and gravesite, in front of the Reichstag in 2018 to bring attention to what they regard as Europe’s suicidal policies. GI’s “theater of victimhood,” the authors contend, “borrows from signifiers and gestures of mainstream commemorative practice” (p. 86), such that some may see it as a legitimate counterpoint to the left’s activism. For example, the German art collective Center for Political Beauty (CTB) attracted attention in 2017 by constructing a replica of Berlin’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe outside the home of a prominent far right politician. On its website, CTB even says that its members practice political resistance by “weaponizing the power of history.” 3 This can make the contest between GI and CTB seem like routine political skirmishing (your funereal symbolism vs ours). But, again, their outward resemblance should not obscure what differences exist at the level of moral aspiration and pragmatic impact. CTB, with its replica monument, wrangles memory to underscore what the Bundesrepublik has maintained as a core value throughout most of its existence (i.e. Holocaust commemoration and repentance). GI, while it uses similar tactics, seeks to sever Germany from the long-standing commitments its leaders have given to minorities seeking safety in turbulent times. Beyond “normal” party politics, the contest between GI and CTB is, in fact, a clash over the state’s fundamental ideological premises.
Part IV of the HMA examines “the spatially and socially constructed spheres in which memory activists operate” (p. 221). Kate Davison’s essay on “Queer Spaces” (Chapter 37) explores what LGBTQ+ movements have done to assert queer identity and bring attention to historically queer social spaces, for example, via painted rainbow crossings on roadways, the installation of commemorative plaques and monuments, murals and art projects (like the “Silence = Death” posters created in response to the AIDS crisis), and historical walking tours. Queer archives, libraries, and museums also receive attention here. Tricia Logan (Chapter 38) looks at “(De)Colonial Spaces,” including the work of Indigenous artists and activists in Canada to confront official narratives which minimize or deny histories of genocide and disparage First Nations as impediments to civilizational advancement.
In “Deindustrialized Spaces” (Chapter 40), Stefan Berger examines what labor activists have done to preserve the material remnants of the industrial past (e.g. at British and German mining works) and resist the co-option of working-class identities and culture by political parties who, otherwise, show little interest in supporting un(der)employed workers. Berger’s contribution reminds us of the political stakes of heritage preservation. His work shows how quickly and easily derelict sites can be re-inscribed and mythologized in the absence of responsible stewardship. Even if they are no longer active, in terms of material production, decommissioned industrial works are still important sites of mnemonic (and, therefore, political) opportunism. What labor cedes or has wrested away by market forces, capital is only too happy to acquire and rebrand.
If there is a single theme running through the HMA, it is this double-edged aspect of memory activism. Many readers, will come to the HMA with the “progressive bias” that the editors highlight in their introduction (i.e. a desire to study what they also find laudable). The principal appeal of memory activism for these readers will be its liberatory potential and the openings it creates to “speak to truth to power.” But the politics of memory have never been one-sided, and, increasingly, memory activism is practiced by individuals and groups who see official narratives and the state’s commemorative posture, not as instruments of domination, but as overly generous and too accommodating for the Social Darwinian programs they espouse.
Going forward, scholars will need to attend more closely to what we might call the dialectic of memory activism, which is no longer only the struggle of memory against forgetting, but now also the chaos of remembering versus remembering otherwise. Particularly in conflict settings (Yifat Gutman’s topic in Chapter 39), there appears to be an almost irresistible temptation for rival groups to “run back the tape” and delve into the past so that the history of the conflict begins with a violation that justifies their next act of reprisal. These partisan narratives of the past, and how they collide through alternating bursts of memory activism, are part of what keeps the cycle of violence spinning. Expanding participation in memory debates does not automatically ensure liberal democratic outcomes. In his introduction to the final section of the HMA (“Normative Dilemmas”), Benjamin Nienass makes clear that democratic processes of memory sometimes threaten the democratic content of memory (p. 435). Without tools to mediate memory and broadly accepted standards for adjudication, it will be difficult to distinguish between “agonistic pluralism” and memory trolling.
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