Memory Studies

This article proposes to extend the prevalent short-term and presentist frameworks of research on transcultural memory and to consider its dynamics across long-term relational mnemohistories. After more than two and a half millennia, “Homer” and the Homeric epics still resonate in memory cultures across the world. But they are often erroneously cast as “European heritage” or “foundations of the West.” This is the result of what I call a tenacious “Homeric genea-logic.” Highlighting three moments in the relational mnemohistory of Homer, this article shows, first, that already during their emergence in the archaic age, the Homeric epics were relational objects; second, how during the Middle Ages Homer could arrive in Petrarch’s Italy only as a product of relational remembering between the Roman and the Byzantine empires; and third, how twentieth-century literature (Joyce, Walcott) developed conscious modes of mnemonic relationality connecting diverse cultural memories. Relationality thus emerges as a key term for a reflexive memory culture today, a tool to overcome exclusive memory logics (“Homer as the heritage of Europe”) while enabling the articulation of meaningful long-term transcultural memories (“Homer as relational heritage in Europe”).

The first part of the article invites a fresh look at the often defined concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’, connecting them to different subject positions, mental frames and projects. The second part addresses memory issues that underlie the political conflict between the state of Israel and Palestinians in the Near East. It will analyse two seemingly incompatible memories related to the same events and topography. The focus of the essay is not only on the divisive force with which two incompatible histories are constructed in the same landscape but also on recent memory practices and performances that raise awareness of this impasse and work towards a more complex and inclusive transnational memory of the entangled history of 1948.

This article presents an example of how the transnational production of memory is at work in a small Polish town that, prior to the Holocaust, was a “shtetl.” The author uses transnational optics to take an in-depth look at how local memories of Jews and the Holocaust are formed in this particular locality and discusses the effects of transnational mnemonic encounters. She highlights the multiscalarity of transnational processes as well as the continuing resilience of national frameworks.

While the participation of millions of non-European soldiers in global wars has often been neglected or told as a victimological tale of unwilling war participation, choice and agency play a major part in the complex mnemonic agenda that unfolds in two novels that have pioneered the literary re-imagination of World War II from a non-European perspective: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and Patricia Grace’s Tu. Both novels provide fascinating insights into ongoing processes of memory revision that contribute to an altered global memory of global war. Setting the historical record right by highlighting the achievements and sacrifice of non-European soldiers certainly constitutes one component of these processes, but to reduce these novels to instances of an allegedly “postcolonial” act of “remembering back” not only misses what these novels are substantially about, but also ironically re-centers Europe as the hub of global memory rather than de-centring Eurocentric memory routines.

This article focuses on memories of South Asian Kenyans and their claims to full citizenship as Kenyans through acknowledgment of their role in Kenya’s past. By focusing on memory claims and memory practices of the South Asian diaspora, it unravels complexities and tensions of scale (local, national, transregional, transnational). It adds new insights into complexities of national “belonging” in an entangled world by demonstrating how people operate as citizens within states and how memory politics are played out at nation-state level and how, simultaneously, the lived experience, affiliations, and shared memories of particular groups transcend the national scale or operate at a scale below it. This article’s seven sections focus on connected histories (a brief history of the Indian Ocean), connective memory research (explicating multi-sited methodology and using brief examples of Cape Malays and Siddis), and connective memory practice addressing memory practices in the South Asian diaspora in Kenya that consciously engage with entangled histories.

Analysis of the “productive frictions” that emerge when cosmopolitan paradigms are implemented in local contexts may nuance accounts of how and when memory travels, and when and why it stalls, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the cross-border travels of memory. I explore the frictions of truth-telling in Sierra Leone as articulated in ethnographic analyses of local engagement with the normative paradigm of public remembering and truth-telling promoted by the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and mediated in Aminatta Forna’s post-conflict novel, The Memory of Love. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission disappointed victims’ expectations for meaningful transnational relationships, the novel performs and models what I call reparative transnationalism. Through the intimate but public form of literature it imagines entangled transnational futures that work toward the promise of transnational belonging promoted in much writing on transnational memory.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “moment of danger,” this essay considers the contemporary return of the memory of fascism and Nazism among both far-right political movements and liberal and left critics of the right. We briefly sketch how memories and symbols derived from the fascist and National Socialist era, among other sources, help constitute new political subjects in our moment of danger, and we look extensively at responses to the election of Donald Trump and evaluate the way the invocation of the fascist era as memory and warning shapes versions of resistant remembrance. We argue that transnational memory studies needs to think more about the historical consciousness that buttresses contemporary far-right politics and about the potential memory politics that might oppose it.

This article argues for the need for memory studies to go beyond its present focus on traumatic memories and to develop analytical tools for capturing the cultural transmission of positivity and the commitment to particular values. Building on an emerging interest in the relationship between memory and activism, it puts its case for a re-orientation of memory studies through a close analysis of the commemoration of the Paris Commune which shows how the festive mode of commemoration itself turned the memory of defeat into a carrier of hope.