Provincializing memory studies (again): Cosmopolitan,multidirectional,transcultural,and fugitive memories

Introduction

At the beginning of my academic career, I perceived memory studies and postcolonial studies not only as contemporary, but also as closely related disciplines. ¹ Due to my mentors, the composition of the university departments, and continuing institutional as well as intellectual exchanges, it appeared to me that the two thriving and expanding fields were deeply entangled with one another. From this perspective, it seemed that the field of memory studies had been confronted with and permeated by postcolonial inquiry, and consequently I assumed that the former had stood the test of the latter’s fundamental epistemological as well as ethical interrogations.

Only later did it occur to me that the two fields were not only not coextensive, but could even be considered to be in opposition. At a postcolonial studies conference in England in 2017, a renowned critic enquired what I was currently working on. When I explained that I was researching cultural memories in the Caribbean, he asked whether I was German. Surprised, I wondered whether my accent had betrayed me, but he explained that it was my interest in cultural memories. If memory studies were indeed European or even particularly German, as the scholar suggested, then they also came into the purview of postcolonial theories that criticize Eurocentric concepts. ² Europe itself is of course postcolonial and thus the two are not mutually exclusive (Erll, 2018: 278; Schulze-Engler, 2013). The comment nonetheless revealed the danger of universalizing specifically European theories. It became urgent therefore that I question the epistemological and ethical grounds of those cultural memory concepts I sought to employ for my research into Caribbean carnivals.

In his seminal study Provincializing Europe, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights this concern as he argues that European colonization led to a disruption and disappearance of South Asian intellectual traditions. These traditions, Chakrabarty (2008) writes, are now treated “as truly dead, as history,” whereas “past European thinkers and their categories are never quite dead for us in the same way” (p. 6). Even in South Asian sociological debates, European, often German, thinkers such as Karl Marx or Max Weber and their theories are treated as contemporary, readily applicable sources.

Chakrabarty is astonished that discussions concerning these theories see the challenge in their appropriate application, rather than in questioning the validity of the concepts for historically and culturally different contexts. Recalling debates in his native Calcutta, he asserts that “there was no sense of academic practices as part of living, disputed intellectual traditions in Europe. No idea that a living intellectual tradition never furnished final solutions to questions that arose within it” (Chakrabarty, 2008: xi). For this reason, Chakrabarty articulates a more fundamental postcolonial critique in order to provincialize such supposedly universal concepts.

In short, rather than assuming that concepts in memory studies are universally applicable, it appears necessary, in the words of Chakrabarty, to provincialize these concepts, in order to understand the historical conditions within which these emerged, their conceptual specificity, and their limitations. ³ In the following, I will therefore first describe the relation of postcolonial and memory studies to each other, then the relevance of the former for the latter, as exemplified in the concept of provincializing. Here I will focus on cultural memory concepts from the third phase of memory studies. ⁴ Finally, I will discuss the aforementioned concepts in relation to a Trinidad and Tobago Carnival performance by Tracey Sankar-Charleau and Jude Charleau entitled Lady Solanaceae Ligahoo, which exhibits these concepts’ attributes but also their limitations. The performance thus highlights that it is necessary to move beyond essentializing, naturalizing, and universalizing concepts in order to understand the diversity, historicity, and challenges of cultural memories.

Postcolonial and memory studies

The historical growth of postcolonial studies coincides to a considerable degree with that of memory studies, as both fields expanded substantially throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Although initial critiques of this kind can be found in earlier decades (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 5; Watson, 2000), the publication of Edward W. Said’s critically acclaimed study Orientalism in the year 1978 is often considered the decisive moment for the increasing recognition and expansion of postcolonial studies (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 15; Scott, 1999: 11; Williams and Chrisman, 1993: 5). Since then, the field has grown steadily.

It was also during these decades that memory studies began its unprecedented expansion. Although the decisive methodological shift from an investigation of individual to collective memories took place much earlier in the twentieth century (Olick et al., 2011: 16), the study of cultural memories experienced a remarkable boom during the 1980s and 1990s (Erll, 2011b: 6). Around this time, the field expanded theoretically and thematically, for instance, in France with Pierre Nora, in Germany with Aleida and Jan Assmann, as well as in the United States with Barry Schwartz. Undeniably, postcolonial theory and memory studies spread simultaneously across the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Both postcolonial and memory studies are moreover fundamentally heterogeneous and interdisciplinary. Postcolonial studies, just like memory studies, describes an interdisciplinary endeavor with contributions from diverse fields which together do not offer a coherent approach, theory, or method, but on the contrary has been and continues as a site of contestation. Considering this heterogeneity, one of the outstanding characteristics of renowned early contributions to postcolonial theory by Homi K. Bhabha, Edward W. Said, and Gayatri C. Spivak was their interdisciplinary versatility, combining literature and cultural theory with historiography and philosophy (Gandhi, 2019: 3; Williams and Chrisman, 1993: 128). Similarly, the field of memory studies has roots in art history with Aby Warburg, psychology with Frederic Bartlett, sociology with Maurice Halbwachs, as well as philosophy with Walter Benjamin. Even more decidedly since the 1980s, this area of research operates as “a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise” (Olick et al., 2011: 38; see also Olick, 2008: 21; Olick and Robbins, 1998: 105). While postcolonial studies emerged from the humanities and memory studies from the social sciences, both fields continue to expand through dissemination, circulation, and adaptation across disciplines.

Considering these substantial historical and interdisciplinary parallels (together with the shared thematic interest in the location of knowledge production, discussed below), it is surprising that for almost three decades the two disciplines remained largely apart and only gradually exchanged theoretical insights. Important early contributions bridging the divide between the two fields were Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire in 2003 studying the confrontation of performatic and textual memories across the Americas, demonstrating the important role of performance and its fraught engagement with script cultures. Astrid Erll’s Prämediation–Remediation in 2007 showed that cultural remembrance of the “Indian Mutiny” from 1857 to 1858 traveled across cultures and media by remediating aspects of preceding representations, describing how content and form were remembered across cultures. Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory in 2009 analyzed how the Jewish Holocaust and European decolonization inspired forms of remembrance that did not seem in competition but mutually inspired each other. These publications made significant contributions and many others have followed. ⁵ Nonetheless, an even greater potential for more extensive exchange between and conjunction of these two fields still lies ahead.

Potential of postcolonial theory for memory studies

From the perspective of memory studies, there are countless discussions of remembrance, trauma, and forgetting in postcolonial literatures, cultures, and theories that deserve close attention. Toni Morrison’s (2004: 36) description of “rememory,” Édouard Glissant’s (1997: 7) reference to “fugitive memories,” and Achille Mbembe’s (2017: 104) notion of “Black memory” are only three of the most prominent examples. ⁶ It can also be assumed that the long, widely scattered, and diverse histories of (post-)colonial literatures, cultures, and theories will—notwithstanding their contestation—continue to expand. ⁷ The task of establishing connections and productive exchanges therefore necessarily extends across languages, continents, and centuries. While for more than two decades, local memory, post-migrant and post-colonial memory initiatives have begun this work, the present essay aims at provincializing European and US American memory concepts introduced as ‘universally valid’—a task that is significant in its own right, as the mere addition of “non-Western” memory concepts does not necessarily question the former’s supposed universality.

Further exchanges between postcolonial and memory studies not only promise to contribute additional elements to each field of research, but they also bear the potential to fundamentally challenge and transform each other. Prominent representatives from early on considered the field of cultural memory studies as “the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies” (Assmann, 2011: vii–viii). Conversely, Leela Gandhi (2019) argues that postcolonial theory “has supplied the academic world with an ethical paradigm for a systematic critique of institutional suffering” (p. 176). Memory studies and postcolonial theory promise fundamental implications and changes to each other.

These potential mutual transformations generate crucial questions: What constitutes a paradigm? What are its implications? In the field of postcolonial studies, Said’s (1979 [1978]) Orientalism offers a critique of how European discourses represent “the Orient” and thus not only scrutinizes the ethical and political implications of representation, but by explicitly addressing academic discourse also interrogates the specific historical location of epistemic paradigms. Spivak’s (1988) equally renowned essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” highlights the discursive struggles of so-called “Third World women” to be heard and understood, leading to the question of who is entitled to speak and set frameworks of knowledge. Finally, Bhabha’s (2004 [1994]) extensive discussions of moments, conditions, and ambiguities of articulation offer a continued exploration of the challenges to justice in the face of epistemic paradigms’ historical biases. Questions of when, where, and how a paradigm is established are thus central to the field of postcolonial theory.

One of the fundamental contributions of memory studies is precisely its move away from an abstract, time-, and placeless idea of knowledge toward a historically, geographically, and socially embedded understanding of knowledge production. Aleida Assmann (2016b), for instance, begins her discussion of basic concepts and themes of cultural memories with the question of who remembers, as she explains that it is necessary “to examine how different perspectives influence different constructions of memory” (p. 46). In this regard, a subfield of memory studies analyzes and theorizes the “ethical implications of remembering and forgetting” (Erll, 2011a: 59). The field focusses increasingly on the ethics of remembrance (Margalit, 2003 [2002]), silences (Ben-Ze’ev et al., 2010), and amnesia (Huyssen, 1995; Plate, 2016), or processes of forgetting more generally (Assmann, 2016a; Connerton, 2008, 2009). Finally, in 2011, Susannah Radstone (2011) highlighted that memory studies, “the practices and perspectives through which it is undertaken, are themselves ineluctably located and formed out of diverse histories and intellectual traditions” (p. 111). Postcolonial theory’s sensibility toward the sources, exclusions, and ethics of knowledge thus finds nuanced and elaborate methodologies in the field of memory studies. As indicated above, the spatial, temporal, and social location of knowledge production constitutes one of the two fields’ most significant common foci.

These diverse methods concerning the production of knowledge have not prevented the field of memory studies itself from becoming suspect of establishing centers, margins, and exclusions. As has frequently been pointed out, memory studies developed substantially in relation to the Jewish Holocaust in World War II (Olick et al., 2011: 29–36) and thus with a strong focus on Europe and more specifically Germany. ⁸ Many well-known memory studies experts are from Europe or focus on this region in their research. The field’s most important institution, the Memory Studies Association (MSA), developed from a group of Europeanists. At the opening discussion of the first official MSA annual meeting in Amsterdam in 2016, an artist and academic in the audience highlighted this when he asked everyone to look around and acknowledge that the participants of this event were overwhelmingly white. This may have been one reason why, in their joint statement regarding their ambitions, the MSA’s co-founders and co-presidents explained first and foremost their desire “[t]o move beyond the Euro/Anglo centrism that has underwritten [. . .] the development of the field” (Olick et al., 2017: 492). The rapidly expanding field of memory studies thus became a concern of postcolonial critique. ⁹

Provincializing memory studies

The tension in the field of memory studies between offering “the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies” on the one hand and its “Euro/Anglo centrism” on the other hand highlights the importance of investigating the field’s marginalizations and exclusions. One way to do so is to question claims of universality as suggested by the historian and postcolonial critic Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe, first published in 2000. Chakrabarty (2008) does not suggest to altogether dismiss paradigms, concepts, and methods developed in Europe, but to highlight instead the ways in which these are “both indispensable and inadequate” (p. 6). The strategy of provincializing is thus simultaneously appreciative and critical (Chakrabarty, 2008: 255).

At the center of Chakrabarty’s approach is the critical historicization of supposedly universal concepts. To “‘provincialize’ Europe,” he writes, means to reveal the ways in which “European ideas that were universal were also, at the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity” (Chakrabarty, 2008: xiii). For memory studies, this means returning to some of the most current concepts to analyze the historical context of their creation and identify the ways in which these conditions also define their margins and exclusions, that is, their limitations. The third phase of memory studies has been defined by cosmopolitan, multidirectional, and transcultural memory approaches (Sierp, 2021: 9). A critical investigation of universalisms consequently needs to turn to these concepts.

The aim of provincializing hegemonic concepts in cultural memory studies is not to dismiss their significant interventions and continuing contributions. As Chakrabarty points out, the strategy of provincializing acknowledges the significant work these approaches enable, while simultaneously identifying their specific historical limitations. These concepts thus present a “problem of translation” (Chakrabarty, 2008: 17), and in order for these to have greater currency outside of the historical context from which they emerged, they may have to be reconsidered.

Provincializing cosmopolitan memory

One of the first concepts to usher in a new phase of memory studies in the twenty-first century was cosmopolitan memory which suggested to offer a productive and universalizable model of cultural memory. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2002, 2006) argue that memories of the Jewish Holocaust have become an abstract model of “good and evil” that travel globally and, in the process, include the historical suffering of other cultures, nations, and ethnicities. In this way, they write, the Holocaust has become a memory model even for people with no direct memories of the historical events. The Holocaust, Levy and Sznaider (2002) continue, offers “a paradigmatic case” for globally circulating cosmopolitan memories as “the product of a reflexive choice to incorporate the suffering of the ‘Other’” (pp. 88, 103). Levy and Sznaider document in detail how cosmopolitan memories circulate in popular culture, for instance, in films like Steven Spielberg’s 1993 international blockbuster Schindler’s List. Such cosmopolitan memories indeed present new and promising forms of remembrance that play a foundational role for identities in countries like Germany, Israel, and the United States.

The idea that the Jewish Holocaust functions as a universal paradigm for ethical remembrance has been criticized, however. Dirk A. Moses, for instance, writes that memories of the Holocaust are used not only for ethically laudable, but also for highly destructive purposes. Moses (2011) argues that “[i]nstead of tending only in a liberal direction of transcultural understanding, this usage contributes towards terroristic political action in the form of pre-emptive strikes and anticipatory self-defence to forestall feared destruction” (p. 91). Stef Craps furthermore criticizes Levy and Sznaider for universalizing specific historical forms of remembrance. Craps (2013) writes that the two authors “only look at the cases of Germany, the United States, and Israel, extrapolating their conclusions from this narrow and anything but random sample to the entire world” (p. 79). Critics question the idea that specific memories originating from and located in “the West” exhibit universal validity.

Finally, while there is no doubt about the terrible suffering and historical importance of the Holocaust, turning it into a global paradigm effectively subordinates other, immense, and ongoing forms of suffering across cultures and centuries. This implicit hierarchization, Craps and Moses argue, reinforces “hegemonic Eurocentrism” (Craps, 2013: 80; Moses, 2002: 9; cf). Just like the idea of cosmopolitanism (Honig, 2006), the concept of cosmopolitan memory, too, faces substantial critiques from postcolonial perspectives, and its universal claim is provincialized by outlining its specifically European history and limitations, such as the implicit subordination of other cruel and continuing forms of violence around the world. Collaborating from the United States and Israel at the end of the twentieth century, Levy and Sznaider undoubtedly witnessed the emergence of important new forms of cultural remembrance that transformed subject identities, cultural representations, and national politics. Their conjunction of Germany, Israel, and the United States is far from arbitrary, however, but instead constitutes a historical memory constellation. ¹⁰

Provincializing multidirectional memory

A few years later in 2009, Michael Rothberg (2009: 265) introduced the concept of multidirectional memory to transcend hegemonic cosmopolitan memories by considering the remembrance of the Holocaust in relation to that of European colonization. More specifically, Rothberg criticizes the assumption of memory competitions and insists instead that memory functions productively, establishing connections across communities. He writes,

[f]undamental to the concept of competitive memory is a notion of the public sphere as a pregiven, limited space in which already-established groups engage in a life-and-death struggle. In contrast, pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others. (Rothberg, 2009: 5)

In this initial discussion, multidirectional memory is introduced as a shift of perspective. Instead of one form of memory, Rothberg suggests pursuing another and encourages readers to look at the public sphere differently. He urged the debate to move beyond a focus on competitive memories in order to take into account forms of remembrance that connect, inspire, and support one another.

In 2019, the shift was not a question of perspective anymore but one of nature. In The Implicated Subject, which builds on the concept of multidirectional memory, Rothberg (2019) argues that in the preceding book,

I pursued mnemonic links between the Nazi genocide and European colonialism that usually involved experiences of victimization perceived as shared or shareable across contexts. Engaging with this archive, I made a more general argument about the productive and dialogic nature of cultural memory (italics added). (p. 212, fn48)

Within 10 years, a new and not uncontroversial concept became defined as natural. The opposite form, competitive remembrance, this suggests, is instead “unnatural.”

Yet, if productive dialogical remembrance were indeed the nature of cultural memory, would it not seem appropriate to reveal the actual form of remembrance everywhere and leave the inappropriate one behind? In a subsequent essay, however, it seems that the less productive competitive elements are part of multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2011: 535). Considering the essay’s central example, moreover, Alan Schechner’s artwork The Legacy of Abused Children: From Poland to Palestine, I have difficulties distinguishing between competitive and productive remembrance. The artwork presents an infinite loop between two photographs, of which a zoom into each reveals the other. It presents “perhaps the most famous image from the Holocaust,” a Jewish boy raising his arms in the Warsaw Ghetto, enhanced in the artwork to hold a photograph between his fingers (Rothberg, 2011: 536). The zoom reveals that it is a photograph of a Palestinian boy, carried away by soldiers, who subsequently turns out to hold a photograph of the Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto. The loop relates the two images to one another, but it also reinforces stereotypical positions in its endless reiteration, without reshaping or widening the discursive space. It remains unclear, whether these positions are productive or rather reinforcing a competition for victim-roles.

More importantly, the descriptions of multidirectional remembrance reveal not so much a productive dialogue as a process of reflective association. Schechner’s The Legacy of Abused Children is a case in point, as the artist explains that “I am using the theory that abused children, unless treated, often become abusive themselves” (Schechner cit. from Rothberg, 2011: 536). The artist’s statement does not suggest a dialogue but instead an individual theoretical and aesthetic engagement with a specific problem. Such associative self-reflections are described throughout the study of multidirectional memory, including both, proponents of competitive and productive memories (Rothberg, 2009: 1, 116). Yet, it is one of postcolonial theory’s central concerns to highlight that self-reflection, however important, does not equal or render unnecessary actual dialogues. On the contrary, postcolonial critics repeatedly emphasize the epistemological and ethical necessity of actual dialogues (Alcoff, 1991–1992; Gandhi, 2019: 39; Mohanty, 1984).

Associative processes, by contrast, are not as open and undetermined as suggested by the description of a discursive space in which positions “come into being.” In 2005, the expert on Freudian memory Richard Terdiman, on whose writings the concept of multidirectional memory builds (Rothberg, 2009, 3), argued that

[n]othing comes from nowhere, the slate is never “previously” clean. Wherever we look, culture has already recorded its inscription and imposed its servitudes. Even the chanciest leaps, the most apparently incomprehensible hiccups of history, occur upon the basis of a substrate laid down and retained somewhere in a memory register. Every cultural element that enters circulation and consciousness pushes against contents already present in the field. So the contention never stops[.] (Terdiman, 2005: 193)

According to Terdiman, the public sphere is malleable, but only through contention. This process of contention takes place because of the scarcity of time, space, and memory. Scarcity also implies that remembering itself induces forgetting (Plate, 2016: 147). As Jacques Derrida (1995) points out with characteristic flourish, “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others” (p. 68). Put differently, even if remembrance attempts to include another, it does not escape “finitude” (Derrida, 1995: 68), thus leading to marginalization, suppression, and exclusion. The postcolonial anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995: 26) highlights that processes of recollection produce at least four inevitable silences, that is, forms of exclusion: in the moment of fact creation, assembly, retrieval, and retrospective significance. Multidirectional remembrance itself thus becomes a source of excluding “the other others”; it does not escape the logic of competition (Wegner, 2021).

More historically oriented studies of memory cultures identify dialogical forms of remembrance as a specifically located effort emerging from the painful experiences and self-critical conclusions of a destructive century (Assmann, 2013: 197). Rothberg (2009: 1–7) introduced the concept of multidirectional memory in order to move beyond accusations that Holocaust remembrance in the United States served only as a screen memory to displace colonization as well as racial oppression and eventually came to regret that he did not sufficiently address power inequalities across different memory communities (Rothberg, 2014: 655). Trouillot (1995) emphasizes that “the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production” (p. xix). Accordingly, it becomes important not only to focus on productive multidirectional forms of remembrance, but also to identify and analyze its exclusions across media, societies, and cultures (Karugia and Erll, 2020; Wegner, 2016). Rothberg’s interest in both, the Holocaust and European colonization, revealed historical connections, yet these are nonetheless specific historical instances, competing with other forms of remembrance.

Provincializing transcultural memory

The current phase of memory studies is frequently described as transcultural (Bond and Rapson, 2014 [2013]; Dorr et al., 2019: 4 fn1; Rothberg, 2019: 124), attributing paradigmatic significance to transcultural forms of remembrance. In “Travelling Memory” published in 2011, Astrid Erll offers one of the concept’s most detailed and influential discussions. Erll (2011b) distinguishes between national and transcultural memory studies:

For memory studies, the old-fashioned container-culture approach is not only somewhat ideologically suspect. It is also epistemologically flawed, because there are too many mnemonic phenomena that do not come into our field of vision with the “default” combination of territorial, ethnic and national collectivity as the main framework of cultural memory—but which may be seen with the transcultural lens (p. 8).

Like multidirectional memory, the concept of transcultural memory is introduced as a shift of perspective. A different viewpoint reveals other kinds of cultural memories. The focus on transculturality indeed revealed numerous forms of remembrance overlooked by the national framework dominant in the 1980s and 1990s.

A few years later, however, in an essay that continues the initial outline, the concept is introduced more assertively. Erll (2017) writes,

while it may be true that members of a family, residents of a city, or citizens of a nation can establish a memory culture and will usually conceive of it as pure, holistic, and discrete (this is the actors’ perspective), an analytical observer’s point of view on the people, contents, media, forms and practices of such memory cultures will always reveal their inherent transcultural nature. All memories produced in culture are transcultural (italics added) (p. 6).

Once again, what was first presented as a shift of perspective soon after became naturalized. As before, it seems odd to describe something that is explicitly cultural as natural.

In both discussions of transcultural memory, the argument presents national and transcultural memory studies not only in opposition, but the former as inferior to the latter (Erll, 2011: 16, 2017: 6), suggesting that transculturality not only offers a new perspective, but a better paradigm. It would not seem impossible, however, that a form of remembrance is produced purely in one historical moment and location, while it reveals similarities or even historical connections to other forms of remembrance, especially since “even in today’s age of accelerated globalization it is the nation-state that plays a major role in the creation of memory culture” (Erll, 2011b: 7; see also Erll, 2017: 10). In other words, it does not appear immediately compelling that transcultural aspects exhibit more fundamentally embedded elements in cultural memories than, say, family, regional, or national elements. In this regard it would appear more appropriate to consider transcultural dynamics in addition and next to, rather than instead of other forms of cultural remembrance.

Describing transculturality as the inherent nature of memory by contrast also harbors the risk of an epistemological shortcoming, that of imposing an observer perspective. Wolfgang Welsch’s theoretical outline, which supplies the foundation for the concept (Erll, 2011b: 7), exemplifies this risk. When explaining transculturality from the observer’s perspective, Welsch describes Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and its surrounding buildings at Harvard University. He writes that

Le Corbusier has in no way adapted to Harvard University’s standard architecture, but has done only his own thing [. . .]. Cultural mixing here is created only in the ensemble, such as in the contrast to Emerson Hall and the other surrounding buildings. ¹¹

Le Corbusier’s building appears not to engage in transcultural exchanges but to present its own particularity against that of the other buildings. Yet if this is the case, then it becomes impossible to distinguish the old concepts of separate cultures from the new concept of mutually entangled transculturality (Welsch, 1999: 196–199). ¹² Welsch’s observation of transculturality in architecture reveals a paradox. The observer establishes a transcultural identity disregarding actual historical contact, influences, or exchanges. But if the observer establishes connections regardless of the objects’ similarities, relations, or histories, then anything may become transcultural through observation. The mode of observation ignores the object of observation and thus transculturality defines the observational mode, but not the object. This epistemology subsumes difference under a supposed identity through the label of transculturality. ¹³ In this regard, the epistemology of transculturality appears flawed.

Erll presents a similar observer’s perspective in the discussion of Adela Peeva’s documentary film Chia e tazi pesen? [Whose Is This Song? 2003]. The documentary traces an identical melody popular in Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, but in each country performed with different languages, lyrics, and meanings, be it a love song, a religious hymn, a revolutionary anthem, or a military march. In each context, the “musicians interviewed by Peeva claim passionately that theirs is the original version—that the song is their own” (italics in the original; Erll, 2017: 11). Eventually, Erll (2017) concludes, the film “exposes the false rationalisations underlying nationalist memories in what actually is a transcultural mnemonic space” (p. 15). The song does not belong to any of these cultures, so the argument, because it is fundamentally even if unreflexively transcultural. While the actors believe it is their own, the observer knows that in each case it is the identical traveling melody (Tappert, 1889).

While the conflict surrounding the melody is regrettable, before rendering judgment I think it necessary to acknowledge the possibility that the melody developed in several regions and several groups are right, or that it emerged in one specific region and that one group of musicians is right. Another possibility is that the melody originated from a completely different region and none of the musicians is informed correctly. It is even possible, though unlikely, that each musician is telling the truth because the melody may have developed in each region independently. In other words, it cannot be ruled out that all, some, a few or none of the musicians are right. Without historical verification, it would be premature to dismiss the claims simply because the melody can presently be found in each region. In fact, the observer’s perspective does not offer deeper insights than the actors’, because the conflict emerges from the latter’s realization that all claim ownership to the same melody. Transculturality, in this case, defines the mode of observation, but this mode neglects these memories’ functions, histories, and societies. Chakrabarty (2008) criticizes academic discourse that “obliterates the plural ways of being human that are contained in the very different orientations to the world” (p. 241). From the viewpoint of postcolonial critique, dismissing the actors’ perspective and imposing a solution from an outside observer’s perspective appears problematic, as it effectively devalues local histories and memories.

The epistemology of transculturality is also ideologically suspect. Like the concept of cosmopolitan memory described above, transcultural memory is seen as establishing connections across cultures in order to overcome artificial separation and conflicts (Welsch, 1999: 200). While this may be true in some cases, the subsumption of difference under a supposed identity also harbors ethical dangers. “Rather than being the harbinger of a universal human-rights culture,” writes Moses (2011), “transcultural memories—actually interpretations—of the Holocaust often lead to the ‘calamitization’ of politics” (p. 91). The comparison of specific conflicts to the Jewish Holocaust may elide historical differences and aggravate conflicts. The transcultural circulation and appropriation of Holocaust memories, in such cases, does not lead to harmonious, inclusive, and supportive, but to oppressive, destructive, and genocidal politics. Familial, regional, and national memories similarly produce inclusion as well as exclusion, making them simultaneously productive and destructive. Each of these epistemologies is, to some extent, suspect.

The claim that all cultural memories are transcultural furthermore makes the search for transcultural memory appear tautological. In the 2017 essay, Erll (2017: 6, 8) argued that “[a]ll memories produced in culture are transcultural” and later on wrote that “travels in search of roots tend to turn into encounters with transcultural memory” as well as that “fictional films and documentaries about refugees address memories that are carried to Europe and then enter a transcultural dynamic.” Yet if all cultural memories are invariably transcultural, it is impossible to encounter anything but transcultural memories, or enter into something other than a transcultural dynamic. The naturalization of transcultural memory, in other words, threatens to turn the endeavor to identify such memories into a tautological exercise. Already in 2011, Erll (2011b) stated that “I am fully aware of the fact that there are other ways of looking at memory, and that by absolutizing one approach our findings will become predictable” (p. 15). Yet, whereas in 2011 the idea that memories are “always transcultural” (Erll, 2011b: 15) was presented skeptically, ironically, or disavowingly in inverted commas, in 2017 it appeared to be stated affirmatively.

The historian Paul Christopher Johnson explains this paradox. He writes, “to signify anything, hybridity requires nonhybrids. These exist nowhere. The proper task is to interrogate the politics of purification, the ‘special effect’ of purity as it is caused to appear in relation to the hybrid Other” (Johnson cit. from Palmié, 2013: 477). In order to signify transculturality, it is necessary to reference cultural difference. The observation of transculturality itself reproduces this paradox by inscribing difference and then transcending it (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 4). This play of signification becomes meaningful, Johnson suggests, in social situations in which claims of purity are made. The anthropologist Stephan Palmié (2013: 472) argued that it is necessary to reframe the question from what to when in order to analyze the conditions of emergence, contestation, normalization, suppression, and transformation. To move beyond a play of signification, Palmié shifts the focus to socio-historical developments revealing and suppressing transculturality. To move beyond tautology, he suggests historicizing the concept.

To be sure, it is possible that the “transcultural nature” of memory is not meant to present a new grand narrative. But such claims undeniably suggest this interpretation. Similarly, Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson (2014 [2013]: 20, 19) somewhat paradoxically argued against “a standardised paradigm of transcultural memory,” then observed that “[t]ransculturalism is in its infancy as both a theory and practice of memory” and proclaim “the transcultural turn.” Transcultural memory studies here vacillate between natural condition, normative practice, and observer’s category. Historically, the concept of transculturality represents a deliberate departure from cultural nationalism in post-World War II Germany and in contrast to 1980s US identity politics (Welsch, 1999: 194–195, 201). Like cosmopolitan and multidirectional memory, transcultural memory describes a specific historical observation. And while it is legitimate to analyze existing transcultural relations, it becomes problematic when these are normatively superimposed on any memory observation, be they family, region, or nation-state, which continue to shape memories even among subjects that could be expected to have transcended these (Hirsch, 2019). To have greater analytical validity, it is thus necessary to provincialize transcultural memory studies, that is, to reevaluate the actor category, to historicize its occurrence, to further diversify transculturality, and to consider it in relation as well as in contrast to other memory forms.

Fugitive memories in Tracey Sankar-Charleau and Jude Charleau’s performance Lady Solanaceae Ligahoo

By analyzing a specific cultural memory, I will illustrate some of the limitations of concepts currently described as essential, natural, or universal. I do not aim to show that these concepts cannot be applied, but that their application conceals central socio-historical aspects. The point here is not to reduce analyses to specificity but to pay attention to cultural memories’ historical characteristics and challenges. On 22 February 2017, the Traditional Individual Competition of the annual national Carnival of Trinidad and Tobago took place on Ariapita Avenue, in the capital city Port of Spain. In front of about 50 judges, thousands of national citizens, international visitors, as well as invited dignitaries, individual artists perform characters from a repertoire of traditional masquerade officially recognized by the National Carnival Commission of Trinidad and Tobago (NCCTT). The Traditional Individual Competition thus presents an exemplary case in which cultural memories are annually recalled, actualized, and transformed.

Before the competition started, the Chief Judge of the NCCTT, Nigel Eastman, confided in me that we were to witness an unusual Carnival masquerade this evening. When registering for the contest, one performer had presented evidence that documented two forgotten folklore characters sighted in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival during the nineteenth century (Hill, 1972: 86). After a consultation, the NCCTT permitted the performers to present these two characters—a lagahoo and a douen—during the Traditional Individual Competition. Considering the way in which Eastman described the details to me as a foreign researcher observing the procedures of the evening’s competition, it was clear that the performance would be unusual and was anticipated with some excitement among the Carnival judges, while the general public was in for a surprise.

The return of forgotten folklore characters to the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival in Tracey Sankar-Charleau and Jude Charleau’s performance Lady Solanaceae Ligahoo presented a veritable intervention. After a long evening with a variety of performances of pierrot grenades, midnight robbers, baby dolls, minstrels, dame lorraines, fancy sailors, dragons, authentic Indians, clowns, and others, late at night Ariapita Avenue suddenly turned silent. ¹⁴ Daubed pitch black and sprinkled in gold, a thin figure in a golden vest and a tulle skirt shimmering in white, silver, and gold half danced and half stalked down the avenue on black, high, and hairy hooves. Above their head they balanced a black coffin painted with white crosses and carrying huge, burning candles. The lagahoo was followed by a small, wiry child, also pitch black and sprinkled with gold. Apart from a black Asian conical hat and a mask showing golden glitter where one would have expected to see a face, the child appeared almost naked, with legs bent sideways, crouching, and creeping behind the lagahoo, alternating between gestures of attraction and repulsion. The performance created a tension throughout the avenue, gripping the audience, bystanders, and even the judges who, according to the regulations, are not allowed to show emotions. While the performance won the competition, its intervention remained elusive, inciting heated discussions among intellectuals, in national newspapers, and across social media.

Initially, it was difficult for me and others to understand what had actually happened on this crowded avenue close to midnight, when everyone appeared to hold their breath. First, I investigated how this performance had disrupted the casual narrative of cultural memories, interviewing witnesses, judges, as well as the performer, and then I browsed historical documents, libraries, and archives, bringing into play what Diana Taylor (2003) describes as the archive and the repertoire, revealing their relations, frictions and contradictions. In Trinidadian folklore, the lagahoo is a shapeshifter and magician traveling through the night, at whose approach people must turn off the lights, lock the doors, and cover their eyes, in order not to be burnt and blinded. The douen is a creature seducing innocent suspects to follow it deep into the woods, where the victims are left to die (Inniss, 1923: 15; Wegner and McIntyre, 2021: 15, 22). In the early twentieth century, the lagahoo and the douen were considered to be anti-social, to engage in criminal activities, and, if identified, were to be punished by death (Herskovits and Herskovits, 1947: 176, 252).

The performance can be viewed through a variety of cultural memory approaches. The renowned folklorists of Trinidad and Tobago Al Ramsawack and Gérard Besson suggest that in the colonial era the lagahoo plundered cocoa plantations and illegally traded rum, goods originally produced for sale in Europe (Besson, 2007: 35; Wegner and McIntyre, 2021: 22). To engage in these illicit nocturnal practices, lagahoos relied on knowledge from the families and established secret support networks (Herskovits and Herskovits, 1947: 252). In this way, they continued the traditions of pirating defections in the colonial era. Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1996) argues that

under the common interest of its contraband trading and separated from the centers of colonial power by distance and by mountain ranges, the people properly called creoles (criollos) and also, significantly, people of the land (gente de la tierra) started to emerge (p. 46).

Consisting of people from different nations, religions, and ethnicities, these “heretical pirates” (Benítez-Rojo, 1996: 46) established cosmopolitan networks offering mutual support during hardships. Yet, at the same time, a nationalism developed among these diverse communities, which led them to demand the departure of imperial forces (Curtis, 2011: 155). The performance evoked both elements by combining two distinct folklore characters in an uncommon community, which was introduced by the announcer as “characters of the folklore of Trinidad and Tobago.” ¹⁵ The performance thus evoked both cosmopolitan and nationalist memories.

The lagahoo’s stealthy, defective, and disruptive interventions in the Caribbean night lend themselves to further analytical readings. Considering their mutual support across nations, religions, and ethnicities more closely, it becomes apparent that lagahoos must have established multidirectional mnemonic links of differentiated solidarity. Yet, more importantly, their contraband practices subverted European imperial economies, whose agents in turn criminalized these activities and pursued their punishment with death, establishing competing narratives, laws, and memories that dominated the public sphere. In the past, both contrabandists and colonial authorities had vested interests in labeling lagahoos as anti-social beings and consigning them to oblivion. In the present day, the multiple relations between the lagahoos, defective pirates, and colonial authorities have been largely forgotten. The characters have appeared across Caribbean islands: apart from Trinidad lagahoos were sighted in French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, while douens were spotted in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, for instance. Although it is possible to establish multidirectional connections, local witnesses were not aware of these, as they had heard about lagahoos but were only able to describe them as frightening, threatening, and engaging in magical practices. The performance thus reveals both mnemonic connections and forgetting.

It is also possible to consider the lagahoo through a transcultural lens. Tracing the term’s etymology, the German term Werwolf—in English werewolf—was adapted to French as loup garou and through colonial voyages introduced to the Caribbean islands mentioned above. This history reveals, in the words of Astrid Erll (2007) a process of remediation, an intermittent adaptation and transformation from premodern to modern societies, from heathen to religious and, in the Caribbean, eventually to secular contexts (McCone, 1987). Yet, a focus on these relations, similarities, and identities elides the transformations, interruptions, and differences. The lagahoo in Trinidad and Tobago is not a wolf, but a human magician who transforms himself into a bull, cow, cock, dog, donkey, fire, and water (Alladin, 1968: 20; Ramsawack, 1980: 14), that is, into local entities. The description of the lagahoo as a headless, naked man carrying a wooden coffin with three candles, and with a heavy iron chain around his waist characterizes a specifically Trinidadian folklore figure. And the performance described above, in turn, differed substantially from historical documents, resembling neither European werewolves nor the common Trinidadian folklore character. The transcultural lens thus highlights cultural exchange and continuity, but marginalizes specificity, disruption, and forgetting. The focus on transcultural similarities neglects memory cultures’ specific characteristics and challenges. Second, the etymologies of the lagahoo and the douen reveal an irritating tendency. Since archives are deeply entangled with power (Trouillot, 1995: 52–53), extracting transcultural connections from colonial archives tends to privilege imperial viewpoints and trajectories over subaltern ones (Hartman, 2008; Spivak, 1988). Finally, the naturalization of a specific memory form inhibits the potential of cultural memories themselves to become sources for theories. More generally then, universalist concepts inhibit identifying cultural memories according to their socio-historical characteristics. A closer look at the performance reveals not only cosmopolitan, multidirectional, and transcultural elements, but also those characteristics these concepts oppose. Provoking these contradictions, the performance reveals the conceptual insufficiencies of these supposedly universal concepts. Such universalist approaches threaten to continually reproduce conclusions by disregarding cultural specificity and historical challenges.

Considering Tracey Sankar-Charleau and Jude Charleau’s Lady Solanaceae Ligahoo instead as a memory constellation (Wegner, 2022) by analyzing the performance according to its historical precedents and contemporary social dynamics highlights, to speak with Édouard Glissant (1997: 7), fugitive memories. These memories are fugitive both in content and in form. Enslaved people illegally escaping from the plantation system were described as “fugitive slaves” (Craton, 2003: 230). Such fugitives had to hide from the slave economy, but they also had to shirk the established maroon societies ¹⁶ opposing slave economies, because many maroon societies had signed contracts with colonial forces to return fugitives to their former plantations (Knight, 1990: 96). Having to escape both the colonial and the maroon societies, the fugitive, like the lagahoo, was not only criminalized but also deemed decidedly anti-social and thus subject to social forgetting. Fugitive memories, thus, refer to subjects evading both dominant and countermemories (Wegner, 2020), threatening their memories with forgetting. Fugitive memories do not offer another universal memory concept, but like the lagahoo and the douen, they metonymically gesture toward countless forgotten memories on the margins of societies, cultures, and histories, which demand a reconsideration as well as transformation of existing paradigms, concepts, and methods in memory studies.

Toward dynamic, diverse, and open futures

The essay title “Provincializing Memory Studies (Again)” is not intended to sound portentous or polemic. As mentioned above, the strategy of provincializing is both appreciative and critical.

The concepts of cosmopolitan, multidirectional, and transcultural memory have doubtlessly enabled important insights in memory studies. A focus on cosmopolitan memory revealed the emergence of a new memory constellation in the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust which spread internationally and changed practices of remembrance (Levy and Sznaider, 2006). In Germany, the concept of multidirectional memory facilitated a reconsideration of the 1980s debate concerning the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, a public debate that is still unfolding (Rothberg, 2022). Finally, transcultural memory analyses have demonstrated the ways in which narratives considered foundational to European heritage are undeniably related to cultures outside of Europe (Erll, 2018). Each of these concepts, in other words, has offered significant insights and continues to do so.

These interventions, however, do not in themselves suggest or necessitate viewing these concepts as essential, natural, or universal. A closer look reveals instead the specific geographical, temporal, and social contexts in which they emerged as well as their historical limitations. In several publications, Jeffrey K. Olick emphasized memory studies’ non-paradigmatic character (Olick, 2008: 21; Olick et al., 2011: 38; Olick and Robbins, 1998: 106). Olick does not refer to the contents and forms of memories, but instead to memory studies’ paradigms, concepts, and methods. This means that the cosmopolitan, multidirectional, and transcultural, too, are paradigms that will eventually be surpassed.

This essay title’s bracketed addendum “again” similarly is not intended to sound polemical. The authors listed have written significant critiques of memory studies and engaged variously in postcolonial debates (Erll, 2006, 2007, 2018; Rothberg, 2009, 2013, 2019; Sznaider, 2022). The concept of transcultural memory was in fact introduced as a means to “provincialize cultural memory” (Erll, 2011b: 16). This coincidence is not surprising, but highlights instead, as Chakrabarty (2008) points out, “that critical thought fights prejudice and yet carries prejudice at the same time” (p. xvi), and this essay is certainly no exception. The title’s “again” therefore means more than just a second time, as it suggests repeating over and over; it describes the demand of provincializing to historicize as an ongoing challenge.

Provincializing memory studies only initially appears to limit the transferability and applicability of the field’s concepts. On closer inspection, highlighting limitations in memory studies serves to diversify and improve the discipline’s approaches, concepts, and methods in the long run. In describing memory studies as a non-paradigmatic, transdisciplinary and centerless field of inquiry, Olick was not so much articulating a critique as emphasizing one of the field’s crucial sources of productivity. ¹⁷ Paradigms, the philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn (2012: 92ff) famously argued, also create margins and exclusions. As the field of memory studies expands and its relevance increases, it will become even more important—epistemologically and ethically—to move beyond “essentials,” “naturals,” as well as “universals” to become perceptive of the margins of societies, cultures, and histories which reveal, as Édouard Glissant reminds us, countless fugitive memories.