Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (2003)

Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Introduction: Contested Pasts

What makes a film a memory text, then, may be not so much a matter of its explicit content as of its form: it may enact mnemonic processes as well as, or instead of, being about memories. But this is perhaps equally true of every medium for memory. The form, the physical and conceptual structure, of the museum, it has already been suggested, is as significant in its representation of memory as the actual objects it contains; the choice and location of a war memorial is as revealing as its explicit injunction of remembrance. And the range of memorial materials and practices represented in this volume are a reminder of the complexity of defining a memory work. School projects, advertising campaigns, television, local traditions, graffiti, journalism; all these contribute to the formation of both individual and cultural memories.

If the past is contested, it is not for simple reasons. Institutions, governments, cultures, individuals, are all engaged in the work of making memory and in its repeated transformations. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record, are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. Memory itself covers up: it reshapes, attempts to comfort, addresses changing needs. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memory’s own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book; but that tension is precisely what gives memory the complex resonance it has in intellectual and political life.

Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (2003)

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.

Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (2003)

Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
Introduction: Contested Pasts

Founded on the notion of an originary traumatic event, however, trauma theory returns us to precisely the problems about the nature of the event that memory as it stands in relation to history helps us to rethink. Memory cannot be seen as a simple evasion of the problem of referentiality, since it is itself a referential system. But its relation to historical ‘events’ is complex and mediated, involving fantasy and wish rather than simply recording what happens. If memory slides uncertainly along a line with history and fantasy at either end, trauma theory has difficulty in acknowledging the place of fantasy.

To the extent that trauma theory is a memory discourse, it aims precisely to summon up the presentness of memory, to insist on unfinished business: guilt and reparation remain the dominant themes. So to emphasise memory over history, perversely enough, can mean to remain past rather than future-oriented.

But at the point where memory binds and limits the past into a purely subjective mode, and undoes the distinction between the individual and the collective, then its effects are perhaps more problematic.

For if memory, at least in common use, implies a person who is remembering, then with the rememberer, memory dies; and history traditionally might have been seen as that which replaces memory, as generations replace one another.