Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Introduction: Contested Pasts
In all the debates over the relationship between memory and history, one constantly recurring theme is that although history is about the present, so too is memory, and much more directly. Memory is still live and active, still charged with the weight of these contests, and it is to memory that one should turn in order to reveal ‘what really happened’.
To privilege memory as a tool of truth, through which the statements of authority may be subverted or contradicted, we must assume a direct correspondence between the experience and how it is remembered.
It (oral history) solicited the voices of those who have been silent and ignored throughout the centuries: the poor and powerless, workers and women, who seldom have speaking parts in the historical drama. It attended to the private, the domestic, the details of daily life, rather than to great events. And it found in the memories evoked a counter-narrative, a corrective to the simplifying and patronising assumptions of the traditional makers of history.
If at times people claim memories of what evidently never happened, or happened other than how they remember it, this does not mean their memories are invalid or irrelevant, but that different questions need to be asked.
The focus of historical analysis shifts from the notion of memory as either ‘true’ or ‘mistaken’, to an emphasis on memory as process, and how to understand its motivation and meaning. How do people recollect events they were involved in or witnesses to, and what can be learned from their narratives?
The idea of memory as a tool with which to contest ‘official’ versions of the past, too, shifts from an opposition between the subordinate truth versus the dominant lie, to a concern with the ways in which particular versions of an event may be at various times and for various reasons promoted, reformulated, or silenced. This is not to deny that the dominant versions of the past are inextricably entangled with relations of power in society, but rather to refocus the question around the many ways in which conflict and contest can emerge.
…memory is not only individual but cultural: memory, though we may experience it as private and internal, draws on countless scraps and bits of knowledge and information from the surrounding culture, and is inserted into larger cultural narratives.
If individual memories are constructed within culture, and are part of cultural systems of representation, so cultural memories are constituted by the cumulative weight of dispersed and fragmented individual memories, among other things.
For history and memory are not abstract forces: they are located in specific contexts, instances, and narratives, and decisions have always to be taken about what story is to be told.