Memory Studies

The history of memory studies has usually been told through research perspectives advanced in France, Germany and the United States. This well-established cartography and, thus, chronology of the field can be challenged while taking into account other provinces of thought. The example of Polish sociology and history shows that the Western memory boom took off just at the time when the golden age of the biographical method reached its apex in Poland and most research on historical consciousness had already been carried out. Furthermore, the Polish case illustrates how since 1989 researchers have been abandoning key terms previously used in the social sciences and humanities in favour of terminology related to memory. On the whole, the article argues for the exploration of continuities, ruptures and transformations of categories developed in non-mainstream research traditions to question the beaten tracks of the history of ideas.

Threat perception is a key issue defining intergroup conflict dynamics. To date, it has been linked with power asymmetries and value similarities between groups. This article examines the role of victimization memory in threat construction. The results of an experiment converge to suggest that personal and institutional victimization memories are robust predictors of the levels of threat perception. They act as primary references in the assessment of threat and suppress framing effects. The findings have significant implications for the theory of threat perception.

Taking the Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus (Association of the Victims of Stalinism) as a case study, this article argues that civil society organisations which claim to represent the interests of victims of historical injustice must seek to construct and propagate notions of the political and social relevance of victimhood. They must do so in such a way that victimhood both offers a coherent point of identification for individual victims and speaks to the concerns of the political system on which victims rely for compensation and recognition. By examining the discourse of officials of this organisation over time, it is possible to demonstrate the extent to which victims’ representatives must adapt their conception of victimhood in order to respond to changing circumstances. The article also points to the challenges these organisations face in remaining relevant in the new political contexts.

This article examines post-colonial memory politics in contemporary Namibia. It analyzes the ways in which ethnic Nama and Herero genocide reparations activists struggle to include Germany’s colonial-era genocide of their communities in the national narrative of the contemporary Namibian state. In this article, we explore the extent to which the dominant political party, SWAPO, defines the state through the production of a hegemonic narrative about the Namibian past. We examine how this political context shapes the reparations movement’s strategies and tactics, with attention to how different activist groups position themselves and their historical narratives with respect to the state. We then consider the importance of memorialization for the reparations movement and the multiplicity of meanings associated with state monuments. By highlighting the importance of memory for reparations activists, the article examines the way in which reparations claims shape and are shaped by the politics of memory production in the post-apartheid memory state.

Studies on Chilean memory sites have focused on the spaces created to remember the human rights abuses carried out during the dictatorship. However, the ways in which people experience and appropriate these readings of the past have received scarce attention. In this article, we explore how individuals who were not victims of human rights abuses experience two memory sites in Santiago, Chile: Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38. Following the premise that memory emerges as a product of semiotic and material assembling materialized in the interaction between sites and visitors, we analyze the relationship between the memory sites’ suggested readings of the past and the experiences of the public. We argue that this experience allows visitors to connect past atrocities with broader social discourses circulating in Chile in the form of abstract knowledge. This requires visitors to assume a position in relation to different historical accounts, allowing specific reconfigurations of collective memory to emerge.

This article draws on the unique backdrop of Lebanese sociopolitical history to explore a lieu de mémoire that figures centrally in the rhetoric of Hezbollah around Ashura, the 10th night of the commemoration of Imam Hussein’s death at Karbala. Using an analysis of the speeches of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah on Ashura, this article examines the party’s rhetoric around the battle of Karbala, and the revered leader’s death, through the three dimensions of lieux de mémoire as identified by Pierre Nora, paying particular attention to the role of mediatization in the materiality of memory. It shows that lieux de mémoire can in fact emerge in the absence of a nation-state, despite Nora’s testament to the contrary.

This article addresses a gap in memory studies—memory of disasters—by asking what distinctive features of difficult disasters shape content and form of commemorations. I draw on textual and visual data to examine official and oppositional commemorations of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. I argue that tension between natural and unnatural interpretations of the earthquake shapes both the content and form of the commemorations. This tension is manifested in three focal issues in the content of commemorations: natural or unnatural causes of the suffering and death, political and moral reaction to the earthquake, and consequences of the earthquake. In form, the state carries out large-scale rituals, builds memorials, and creates a “topography of forgetting” so that the ruins with a possible “natural explanation” are preserved and the ones with unnatural explanations removed and covered. In contrast, the oppositional commemorations are small in scale and only survive at the margins.