Locations that resist telling: Making space for socioeconomic analysis in memory studies

Background

This special issue emerges from a 2018 workshop held at Saint Paul University, in Ottawa, Canada under the same title: Memory at the Intersection of Mass Violence and Socioeconomic Inequality. Gathering interdisciplinary scholars from a variety of regions and working on different contexts of mass violence, it asked how socioeconomic inequality plays into memories of atrocity and violence. In particular, it addressed questions such as: “In what ways do experiences of prolonged and ingrained forms of violence like poverty and economic instability intersect with memories of atrocity? How do people make meaning from lives shaped by economic precarity and mass violence?” Participants brought insights from work with diverse populations around the world—from Indigenous women in Canada and Peru, to “born free” South Africans, to working-class neighborhoods in Baltimore and Belfast. What united us was an interest in seeing a level of analysis that sometimes has gone unseen; that is, how class, poverty, and structural forms of violence perpetuate the physical violence that people have experienced, and complicate what it means to remember, work through, and recover from historical injustices (Alexander, 2012).

Both within and outside academia, debates about identity politics and their place in progressive causes persist. We try to create space for subaltern voices, to dislodge dominant narratives and world views, and to ensure that our analyses of our struggles and conflicts are complex and reflect diverse realities. We draw on Kimberle Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality, which is sometimes used as a sort of form of identification, that is, “I am intersectional.” However, it is first and foremost a methodology, a form of action, a way of seeing the issues, and thus the appropriate interventions better. As Crenshaw wrote,

The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges or domination—that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. . . . The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women [for example], this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. . . . And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. (Crenshaw, 1991: 1242)

Thus, according to Crenshaw (1991), this “elision of difference” that assumes that all people in a given identity group have the same experience, is the problem that intersectional approaches try to solve. They try to make visible these “locations that resist telling” by understanding the diverse experiences and positions that exist in any given community, and how these dynamics influence each other.

The need for a new lens

Memory Studies, as a field, has generally interested itself in “locations that resist telling.” The study of memory is fundamentally interested in identity, as how, what, and why we remember, is so fundamental to our identity formation. In other words, there has been a legitimate preoccupation with how collective and individual identities are formed and maintained through shared memories (e.g. Alexander et al., 2004; Eyerman, 2001). Memory Studies conceptualize memory as a dynamic social process, emphasizing that how we remember is deeply influenced by our group affiliations, the meanings we ascribe to that belonging, and the aspirations we hold for the significance of such belonging. Because so many scholars within this field are interested in violence that is linked to identity—such as genocide and other forms of violence in which one is targeted for one’s belonging to a particular identity group, identity is a central category of analysis in this work.

Judith Butler (2009) wrote about the notion of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives in the context of war, examining how societies determine which lives are seen as human and worthy of empathy. Scholars have since used this concept in diverse contexts to talk about discourses of grievability as they differ between the Global North and Global South (Auchter, 2019), in countries with histories of racial segregation and violence (Enwezor et al., 2020), and in the context of the climate crisis (Craps, 2023), always asking: whose lives matter? Who do we see as worthy of remembering, commemorating, and seeking justice? We would argue that the question of grievability does not just concern the status of one community over another, but that it also plays out within communities. In a post-conflict context, a question that continually arises is: whose pain and loss matters? The articles in this special issue demonstrate that often it is the poor, the working class, and the otherwise disenfranchised who are also not given the seeming luxury of grief, or the visibility to be grieved. Grief, repair, reconciliation, and reconstruction move on without them.

In addition to a preoccupation with identity, traditional Memory Studies have also been interested in understanding how societies remember and process traumatic events (e.g. Eyerman, 2019; Hashimoto, 2015) and the ethical dimensions of memory, such as the moral responsibilities of remembering and forgetting (e.g. Margalit, 2004; Meral, 2012; Nimac, 2014; Reiheld, 2006). However, one category of analysis that has received scant attention relative to identity, trauma, and ethics is examining how class and socioeconomic conditions shape memory. For example, we know that during the Holocaust, Jews of differing backgrounds organized differently and experienced things differently. We also know that almost everyone during the post-war period started from the same place again, having lost everything. Despite this, in the decades that followed the Holocaust, many survivors in Europe, Canada, Israel, and the United States successfully rebuilt their lives to the point where they are now regarded as “model immigrants” with all the baggage that this label entails. Yet a significant portion of survivors consistently lived and continue to live under the poverty line, highlighting ongoing depravation (Kahana et al., 2005). According to a survivors’ advocacy group, approximately one-third of Israel’s estimated 165,000 survivors live in poverty, with many still depending on food donations from Israeli charities (Ben et al., 2022). These stories do not “fit” dominant narratives—there is no happy ending or redemption that is often associated with post-Holocaust stories. Instead, many of survivors escaped the brutality of the physical violence of the Holocaust only to live in the enduring structural violence of poverty. In a recent article in Memory Studies, Tefera and Orjuela also point out the challenges of commemoration of violence that has socioeconomic origins in and of itself, such as the violence of famine in Ethiopia; such remembering does not easily fit into national politics and identity (2024). Such has been the preoccupation of the field of Memory Studies with identity, and to a lesser extent, trauma and ethics, that we have left little space for class and for the material conditions of remembering. Where the field does pay attention to class, the focus has been on individualistic definitions of class as socioeconomic status rather than examining class relations structured by economic systems and the impact it has on collective remembering. This then necessitates the addition of a new lens for examining how people and societies remember and forget, pushing the field forward and opening new avenues for understanding how the memories of violence are formed and sustained.

Rationale

Our special issue seeks to address a critical gap in the field by foregrounding the role of class and socioeconomic conditions in shaping memory. While traditional Memory Studies have been invaluable in exploring identity, collective trauma, and the ethics of memory, they have largely overlooked the ways in which socioeconomic structures influence memory practices and narratives. This gap is significant because memory is not discreet but is always mediated by material realities, including resource availability, economic inequality, and social relations. For example, survivors of traumatic events often experience not only the psychological impacts of those events but also structural violence in the form of poverty and social marginalization, which further shape their memory narratives (Alexander, 2012; Klein, 2000). Disregarding these aspects risks perpetuating a limited understanding of memory that favors symbolic and cultural elements while simultaneously overlooking tangible or material circumstances that shape the production, dissemination, and contestation of memory.

By integrating socioeconomic analysis into Memory Studies, this special issue will expand the field’s methodological and theoretical toolkit. It will highlight how class and economic disparities intersect with identity, power, and politics in memory work, offering a more holistic understanding of how societies remember, and the ethical responsibilities tied to these practices. In doing so, the issue aligns with calls by scholars such as Erll (2011) and Olick and Robbins (1998) for interdisciplinary approaches to memory and contributes to a more inclusive and equitable framework for studying collective memory.

Objectives

As mentioned previously, Memory Studies often situates itself within identity, trauma, and ethics discourses when examining how societies remember and process violent histories, and in the process, excluding from its analytical framework any consideration for the fact that the ability to remember violence is profoundly shaped by present socioeconomic conditions. However, when this latter issue is brought into the analytical fold, several questions emerge that underpin the objectives of this special issue. One is: What does it mean to remember an experience of violence when your present conditions continue to involve the suffering of inequality; how does our ability to put food on our table, care for our children, and live in stable circumstances influence our narratives of the past? These conditions may alter and even inhibit our ability to engage with memory of the violent past. Another question is: Why do we struggle so much to understand poverty and socioeconomic inequality as a key part of narratives of violent conflict? One of the themes that emerged from our workshop was the question of positionality—while we have become good at acknowledging our positions in terms of race, gender, and so on, we still rarely talk about class. Furthermore, while there is increased representation by scholars from the post-conflict countries, they are still often more likely from middle and upper-class backgrounds, which could potentially obscure their ability to understand class-based experiences.

There is also clearly a theoretical and ideological tension at play, as postmodernists have moved away from the dogmatism of materialist modes of inquiry, which saw everything in class analysis and in an understanding of economic conditions. As Crenshaw argues, postmodern approaches like intersectionality are meant to complicate our picture, show the diversity of intersecting oppressions and their experiences. However, in rejecting materialism, it seems that we have often rejected class analysis all together, which remains a salient factor in understanding conflict. It is also important for its persistence before, during, and after conflict. Physical violence ends more obviously than poverty. In her argument for slow memory studies, Jenny Wüstenberg (2023) has similarly argued that our field developed out of an interest in war, genocide and other very discrete events, while increasingly we are concerned with slower forms of violence, such as the climate crisis and increased inequality, drawing on Rob Nixon’s conception of “slow violence” (2011). These have not traditionally been themes that attracted the attention of memory scholars, although this is changing.

In this special issue, we are particularly interested not just in making space for the study of memory and slow violence, but also for understanding these different typologies of violence as intertwined in important ways. As we see in South Africa, the legacy of a brutally violent identity-based conflict manifests itself in extreme inequality, the kind of stuff not subject to truth and reconciliation commissions, and yet a very real barrier to the very same families that lost loved ones to the violence of Apartheid. Several contributors to the workshop and ensuing articles in this special issue of Memory Studies have pointed out that our responses to conflict—legal tribunals, truth commissions, and other forms of post-conflict “justice”—have not yet been equipped to deal with structural violence such as poverty.

This special issue also emerges from the co-editors’ own research and how it has demanded this lens that seeks these intersections. When Anna was doing her doctoral fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina, interested in how people’s memories of twentieth-century violence in the region mapped onto more official narratives and resisted them, she was surprised to encounter real resistance to the idea of a project focused on memory (Sheftel, 2013). In Bosnia, post-conflict ethnic enmity has transformed into anger and protest at worsening socioeconomic conditions, high unemployment, political corruption, and the difficulty of ordinary people to make ends meet (Kurtović, 2015). These very real concerns are not separate from war and violence; they are the conclusion of how war destroyed a society, who got rich from its (partial) reconstruction, and who gets to decide whose fate. Ethnicity is just one part of a complicated arithmetic of dominant and oppressed, violence and poverty, narrative and lived reality. Similarly, many Holocaust survivors whom she interviewed, and who have become public figures in their communities, have recounted that the wider community only started to listen to their stories of violence when they assimilated socio-economically; got good jobs, bought houses in the same suburbs, sent their kids to school with the Canadian Jews’ kids. While they were still poor immigrants, no one was interested, and in fact, regarded them with suspicion. Her article in this special issue speaks to this dynamic.

In the 94 calls to action of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, what was made explicit was the connection between reconciling the memory of residential schools and tangibly improving the living conditions of First nations, Metis and Inuit peoples in Canada. There is no “reconciling” the crimes of the past if the survivors of these institutions, and their families and communities, are still living without clean drinking water, are experiencing epidemic rates of suicide, or are watching their young girls and women disappear with little public or state reaction (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Indeed, scholars of reconciliation and post-conflict justice increasingly make links between the tangible and the psychological, and call for approaches that blend memory with restitution, and that tie reconstruction to reconciliation (Miller, 2008).

What is missing, however, is our ability to understand how memory of violence, how our narratives of that violence are impacted not just by genocide, or massacres, or prolonged abuses and state terrorism, but also by the ensuing and related poverty, dislocation, and inequality. It is not just about making space both for memory and poverty, but for understanding their intersection; what does it mean to remember a violence that is still very present, especially when it is now manifesting itself through everyday inequality rather than specific acts of cruelty? How does that impact what it means to “survive”? And what happens when people are then further marginalized through the institutionalization of their suffering; through hospitals and social workers and the control of their wellbeing in an attempt to “help”? In many ways this project has been about finding a methodology for including that kind of socioeconomic analysis in our study of memory of violence, trying to invoke the intersectional way of seeing and of intervening.

Cyril is a Black South African who grew up under the oppressive apartheid regime. He was a 24-year-old newly qualified high school teacher when the nation held its first democratic elections in 1994. He vividly recalls the shared aspirations of Black South Africans, who, inspired by Desmond Tutu’s vision of a Rainbow Nation, embraced the hope of a transformed society. These hopes were deeply rooted in the promises of the Freedom Charter, which envisioned a South Africa where the barriers of racial oppression would be dismantled, equality would prevail, and all citizens would enjoy dignity, justice, and opportunities to thrive.

As is now well known, post-apartheid South Africa instituted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to assist the country in dealing with its painful past. The Commission started its work in 1996, with the first victims’ hearings on gross human rights violations coincidentally in Cyril’s hometown of East London (now Buffalo City) from 15 to 18 April. He became a keen follower of the TRC’s victims’ hearings from when it started until it finished in 1997. He was intrigued and perplexed by the fact that, despite the trauma they had been subjected to and that they may have re-lived during testimony, many victims publicly expressed forgiveness toward perpetrators (Adonis, 2024).

Returning to graduate school in 1997, Cyril decided to do his Psychology Master’s degree thesis on the issue of forgiveness within the context of the TRC. This involved conducting in-depth interviews with individuals who had testified at the TRC victims’ hearings and publicly expressed forgiveness toward perpetrators. These engagements planted the seed for his doctoral degree that he would later pursue at Nova Southeastern University in the United States courtesy of a Fulbright Scholarship from the US Department of State. During his Masters fieldwork, he was struck by how those close to victims of gross human rights violations, particularly the children, were affected by the trauma of their parents and grandparents (Adonis, 2024). Thus, his doctoral research focused on transgenerational trauma and its implications for political forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa. His findings supported the views of those who warn about the legitimacy of forgiveness in politics, that to speak of political forgiveness is to risk an oxymoron (Shriver, 1996); or that its mere mentioning in the context of political crimes could be an affront, an anathema (Staub and Pearlman, 2001). This is especially the case in a context such as South Africa, with its history of historical injustices and where structural violence remains pervasive.

Thirty years since the first democratically held elections in South Africa, the promises of land redistribution, economic equity, and universal access to quality services—aspirations enshrined in the Freedom Charter—remain largely unfulfilled. This represents the continued structural legacies of apartheid and has profound implications for the collective consciousness of the nation. The hopes and expectations that accompanied the transition to democracy are overshadowed by a growing sense of despondency, especially among Black people who faced the worst brutality of apartheid. This unfinished vision complicates the freedom and reconciliation discourse and has cast an aspersive shadow over the collective remembrance of 1994 as a moment of radical change. Instead, the persisting realities of poverty, spatial segregation, and systemic inequality stand as an uncomfortable reminder of the ways in which the structural violence of apartheid continues to animate life realities. These disparities consistently undermine other arms of transitional justice, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had been conceived to create a collective memory of the nation in order to heal and unify it. Inequality reinforces this tendency, dissipating this collective memory of liberation and replacing it with versions marked by frustration, exclusion, and betrayal. This disruption in memory reveals not only the unsettled issues involving justice but also the need to discuss socioeconomic factors within all-inclusive conversations about memory, reconciliation, and nation-building. These issues also form the basis of Cyril’s contribution to this special issue.

Overview of contributions

As we argue for above, the articles in this special issue come from interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches. All are concerned with this question of who is left behind when it comes to memory, reconciliation, and justice, drawing on different regional and temporal perspectives. All discover just how much the material and the mnemonic intersect, and how our inability to see that these are intertwined issues, is part of the problem of actually meaningfully working to repair societies and communities that have experienced mass violence.

In her study of post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation in Belfast, Elham Atashi argues for spatial analysis as a way of seeing who has been excluded from the peace process; namely, working-class neighborhoods that are seen as obstructions to peace, rather than places that were left out of it. Amy Fung provides a historical examination of various approaches to redressing the violence experienced by Inuit during the High Arctic Exiles in Canada. She demonstrates how the continual colonial politics of memory have impacted the state’s ability to meaningfully address its violent past, and how that violence shows how deeply colonialism and economic development are intertwined. Audrey Rousseau examines the shortcomings of Canada’s Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, noting how the politics of recognition do not include any kind of material redress, and highlighting how families of these women and girls have been impacted and left out of any real justice in these intersecting ways. Cyril Adonis examines the post-Apartheid legacies in South Africa, wherein the “born free” generation has had to grapple with the unfinished job of reconciliation, wherein the transition to an egalitarian and democratic society has nevertheless resulted in increased socioeconomic inequality, and therefore worse socioeconomic conditions than during Apartheid. Finally, Anna Sheftel examines the early years of Holocaust survivors’ lives in Canada, trying to understand how class affected their social worlds and also their ability to remember and be publicly recognized as survivors, and people worthy of empathy and respect.

The special issue concludes with a roundtable discussion, which asks how diverse scholars deal with the intersection of memory of violence and socioeconomic inequality in their work, what analytical and theoretical tools can help us understand these themes better, how this discussion affects more concrete memory work such as transitional justice mechanisms, and what this all means for the field. Together, they make an argument for understanding memory as inherently political, and therefore understanding our own work as political as well.

Conclusion

Scholars of memory know that it does not exist in a vacuum; this is one of the foundational ideas of our field. This special issue argues, therefore, for continuing to contextualize our work as thoroughly as possible, and for making space for the ways in which different aspects of memory of violence intersect. This can only lead to a more complex and true understanding of how societies struggle to make sense of the past, and it can also show how high the stakes are. This involves giving attention to multidisciplinary ways of knowing, our epistemological and ethical limits, our own positions and those of the researchers who have come before us, and a care for whose voices are missing when even seemingly the most marginalized among us are speaking.