Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Introduction: Contested Pasts
Physical and ritual memorials are in a sense another means of trying to ensure the preservation of meaning in memory, to prolong an existence in the present, where history is seen to allow it to escape—letting the past bury its dead.
One way of seeing this desire that memory should continue beyond the lifespan of the rememberer would be as a decentring of the subject, perhaps, and a reminder that memory is also social. Detached from the self who remembers, memory can become a property to be inherited and passed on, continuing to function in the minds of others after the ‘original’ rememberer has gone.
The establishment of memorial sites, places where the past is not only preserved as fetish but also transmitted as signification, is inevitably a focus for struggle over meaning: whose monument is permitted, and what meanings may it convey? And since these sites are also often publicly established, or at least sanctioned, they are inescapably implicated in the construction of narratives—or perhaps maps—of national identity.
So for a new regime, the act of renaming attempts to rewrite the past by changing the place that is the present: St Petersburg and its avatars; Cambodia/Kampuchea; or Palestine again. For nationalism, naming and renaming—the continuing transformation of the supposedly eternal physical environment—is one of its most powerful and contentious tools, as well as one of power’s most explicit attempts to rewrite the past, literally reinscribing the surface of the world, and changing the name on the map—often while laying claim to something more ancient and authentic than the ‘old’ one.
Memory here may act subversively in refusing to ‘remember’ the new name, as one may refuse to ‘remember’ new coinage, or new vocabulary, in a gesture of resistance against unwanted change.
Memorials and museums represent public statements about what the past has been, and how the present should acknowledge it; who should be remembered, who should be forgotten; which acts or events are foundational, which marginal; what gets respected, what neglected.
The single consciousness that can narrate itself as a continuity over time is replicated and reinvented in diaries, novels, witness statements, confessions—a flood of self-narrative now perhaps at its height.
In particular, the question of the relation between memory’s narrative and metaphorical aspects—what we might think of, again, as its vertical and horizontal lines—is one which may perhaps be most successfully explored or engaged with in non-traditional narrative forms.