Rethinking collective memory in a colonial present

Introduction

According to Zubrzycki and Woźny (2020), the literature on collective memory has focused on three main areas: the role collective memories play in creating national identity, its influence on establishing collective trauma, and its ability to move across nation-state borders. However, while memory studies has grown beyond Sociology, becoming an interdisciplinary field of study with influential work from scholars in History and Anthropology (Connerton, 2008; Hobsbawn and Ranger, 1983) and Comparative Literature (Erll, 2011; Rothberg, 2009), there has also been a breadth of scholarship that has been critical of the way we have theorized the evolution of those areas. Though we often point to modernity, mnemonic practices, globalization, and digitalization, as some of the major determinants of how we understand collective memory and its transformative nature, we have simultaneously ignored the violence, erasures, and contradictions that have helped shape those very determinants. As we watch the uptake in violence from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Northern part of the world, and the ongoing contentious dispute between Venezuela and Guyana on the true owners of the Essequibo territory in the Global South, we are reminded of three things: 1. That debates over collective memories can be deeply polarizing and can lead to lethal consequences, 2. That territorial debates severely complicate how we understand the nation-state and its borders, and 3. The people who endure in the conflict of the present are often collateral damage in the ongoing debate over collective memories from a past that has been riddled with imperial and colonial conquest.

While countries have mostly removed their titles as either a colonizer or a colony, the consequences of those positions continue to live beyond the end of that political period. For example, former colonial possessions of Europe and their ongoing relationships with them have played an integral role in the consolidation of Europe’s economic and geopolitical power. Yet, the rights of the individuals who live in what is now called “European overseas territories” often are restricted (Boatcă, 2021). According to the U.K. Government, while living in a British territory grants you a British passport it does not grant you the right to live or work in the United Kingdom; a privilege that is granted to British citizens that live on the mainland. We see evidence of this also within the United States where while Puerto Rico is officially a territory of the U.S. and Puerto Ricans are considered U.S. citizens, they cannot vote in presidential elections unless they, likewise, live on the mainland. Despite these countries no longer holding the title of colonies and colonizers, citizens having different rights based on where they are located is indicative of a reality that we continue to live under ideologies that were created during a past colonial era. Therefore, we cannot ignore the colonial past, but we must engage with it as we theorize about the present and ultimate future.

Engaging with colonial legacies and its enduring power allows us the opportunity to flip our understanding of the breadth and depth of collective memory on its head; challenging us to recognize that collective memory is not only dynamic but is truly what Olick and Robbins (1998) said, a reflection of our social statuses and processes. Olick and Robbins (1998) argue that what we remember and how we remember is a manifestation of who we are as individuals and the social context in which we exist. However, our social statuses and processes have a temporality that extends well beyond the boundaries of our present circumstances. Quijano’s (2000) theory on the coloniality of power tells us that our identities have been produced around global hegemonic ideas about race, distributing “the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power” (535). Therefore, we all inherit and are products of an established global world order that directly influences our current statuses. From this perspective, who we are and what we experience is not just a reflection of our social status but also a reflection of remnant ideologies and principles from colonialism. Therefore, we cannot ignore the way that colonialism shapes what and who we remember if it shapes what and who we are. Taken together, this paper offers illustrations for why we need to rethink how we theorize collective memory if we understand colonialism as an enduring presence.

Though nonexhaustive, this paper will offer a variety of postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on the three main centralizers of the collective memory field: transcultural memory, cultural trauma, and collective and national identity. This paper is also divided into four sections. The first section will be geared toward providing a brief overview of the collective memory literature as it stands regarding the importance of cultural and transcultural memory to the discipline. From there, I will turn to the importance of postcolonial and decolonial sociology and provide insights to why it is also important for memory studies. Within this section, I will also draw attention to memory scholarship that has considered colonialism and decolonial approaches in their conceptualizations. I will spend my third section outlining the critiques to collective memory using the cases of the Amazonia region, the Haitian Revolution, the tirailleurs sénégalais in Senegal, the Grenadian Revolution, France, and the Netherlands. I conclude with some final thoughts on postcolonial and decolonial theory in collective memory and provide a potential path forward for the discipline.

Understanding communities through cultural memory

The first wave of memory studies is often marked by the emergence of historical theorists like Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Karl Mannheim. One of the key markers of this wave is the central task of trying to distinguish the difference between memory and history. Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) and Nora (1989) both in their analysis of “objectivized culture” and “sites of memory” argue that memory is transformed into history once memory becomes crystallized or preserved. As memories become more distant, the movement to document the memory creates what we know as history. When memories are no longer accessible, history then becomes a tool to access the past. However, once memories become history, the traditions, environment, and the emotional connection that people once had toward the memory have little impact on the present. In other words, one of the key distinctions between memory and history is the evocation of emotions. Mannheim’s (1952) theory on generations supports this perspective with his argument that generations experience the past but from new positions or “fresh contact.” This fresh contact creates an emotional and temporal distance from the memory that in return, will change the feelings and values associated with a certain event over time. This leads to a diminishing of not only the emotion toward the memory in question but the importance of the memory in the present day.

The belief that memories lose their emotional significance over time, especially with the birth of new generations, was a normalized understanding of collective memory until Assmann’s (1995) theory of cultural memory. Assmann (1995) argues that what Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) defines as collective memory is actually a type of collective memory called communicative memory. Communicative memory speaks to everyday relations and communications and relies heavily on the proximity to the everyday. Cultural memory is another form of collective memory that embodies the institutionalized practices of festivals, rituals, images, text, and gatherings. These cultural practices help in retaining the meaning associated with memories even when culture becomes objectivized (Assmann, 1995, 2011). While communicative memory relies on proximity, cultural memory relies on the distance from the everyday because the memory is maintained despite the passing of time (Assmann, 1995). This shift in how collective memory was understood marked a turn in memory studies. Now, we understood collective memory to not only be a tool used to understand community in the past but how it can also be used as a tool to understand and maintain community in the present and in the future. The transition to a more cultural understanding of memory gave birth to a plethora of new theoretical possibilities, including how memory can create and sustain collective identities.

The theory of cultural memory served as the basis for understanding how memories, even traumatic memories, can reinforce a sense of community among groups well beyond the time of event. Alexander (2004) describes this form of remembering and group consciousness around egregious and indelible marks on communities as cultural trauma. Cultural trauma can become the epicenter of a group’s identity and “the lens through which group members understand their social environment” (Hirschberger, 2018: 2). Eyerman’s (2004) work is evident of this as he traces the roots of the creation of the African American identity to the communal desire to connect with the American past of enslavement to create a racialized solidarity. He argues that those who aimed to create this collective African American identity were far removed from the trauma and direct memory associated with the enslavement period. Eyerman (2004) claims that “If slavery was traumatic for this generation, it was so in retrospect, mediated through recollection and reflection, and, for some black leaders and intellectuals, tinged with a bit of strategic, practical, and political interest (61).” Nevertheless, despite the distance from the enslavement period, the African American identity became a widely used and institutionalized way to describe the descendants of enslaved Africans. The practice of remembering slavery among the descendants of enslaved Africans not only showed how meaning is maintained throughout generations but also showed us how a shared trauma can be used to create a shared identity.

Cultural memory has also been significant for exploring how memory can shape collective identity on a macro-level, specifically how it helps in creating and sustaining national identities. According to Fortunati and Lamberti (2008), the histories of nations are often founded on what we understand to be cultural memories. These memories became central not only because they were used to create a story for the nation, but also because they mobilized people to care about the nation in the aftermath of a traumatic event or in the genesis of an independent nation. The rituals and commemorative practices that followed became the mechanisms for concretizing and reaffirming the national identity (Boer, 2008; Zubrzycki and Woźny, 2020). These practices were used as a way to “foster allegiance to the newly created nation-states and their elites at a moment of social and political unrest” (Hobsbawn and Ranger, 1983; Zubrzycki and Woźny, 2020: 177). Therefore, similar to how cultural memories brought communities together, cultural memories also brought nations together.

But while cultural memories became a core component to the establishment of a national narrative, so did the forgetting and erasure of memories (Zubrzycki and Woźny, 2020). According to Connerton (2008), forgetting is not unitarian; it is diverse in the ways it is executed, and it is diverse in the reasons why it has happened. If a past identity or memory is contradictory to the new vision of the nation, it is seen as most practical, often by the administrators of the new government, to discard the memory of older events. Connerton (2008) refers to this type of forgetting as “forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity” (62). Therefore, at the same time that there have been memories that have played fundamental roles in the shaping of a nation, nations have also removed or “forgotten” memories of emotional burden and trauma in their national identity and histories (Fortunati and Lamberti, 2008). The process of carefully selecting which and whose cultural memories to include in the national narrative is important for learning how national identities are created. However, this process also speaks to why we must engage with other memories and contextualize the environment of our own experiences. When we think about identity creation, we must consider what shapes our perspectives and what memories are excluded to sustain these perspectives. According to Zubrzycki and Woźny (2020), “if a shared memory is essential to national identity, so is collective amnesia” (178).

Taken together, the shift toward a more cultural understanding of memory has been an effective and generative theory for the advancement of memory studies. While I limited my analysis to how cultural memory (or lack thereof) has shaped our understanding of collective identity and cultural trauma on micro and macro levels, its utility has been much more expansive. Cultural memory has also served as a conduit for understanding the gendered structures of memory (Hirsch and Smith, 2002), the importance of location and social contexts (Gokmenoglu, 2022; Wang, 2008), the development of social movements (Fleming and Morris, 2015; Polletta and Jasper, 2001), and its transcultural possibilities (Erll, 2011; Levy and Sznaider, 2002; Messina et al., 2023). But as globalization became a growing force, thinking about collective memory outside of local and national boundaries became the focus of a new trajectory for memory studies. Going beyond a nationalistic understanding of cultural memory entailed embracing the transcultural possibilities for cultural memory work.

Looking toward transcultural memory and beyond

The creation of the theory on traveling memory represents what Erll (2011) describes as the third wave of memory studies. This wave is defined by the profound shift toward the transcultural and transnational nature of collective memories (Lewis and Wawrzyniak, 2022). In Erll’s (2011) theory on traveling memory, we see a literal and theoretical expansion of our conceptualization of cultural memory, moving cultural memory from a small localized scale to a large cross-national scale. While we initially thought of memories as being able to create meaning only within the confines of the community they occurred in, we have seen its ability to also shape meaning and commemoration thousands of miles away from the place in which an event occurred. Transcultural memory aimed to illustrate how cultural memory can move beyond national borders given the ever-present influence of globalization.

Levy and Sznaider (2002) first brought forth the idea of memory crossing borders with their theory on cosmopolitan memory. Through their analysis of the Holocaust, they argue against the notion that collective memories only generate meaning within its localized context. While we traditionally understood collective memories to only be valuable to the groups and communities that had direct connection to the memory, either through direct contact or through a shared identity or practice, the memory of the Holocaust shifted this understanding. The Holocaust became a global symbol for human tragedy and suffering rather than a memory that was only valuable to the local community who experienced the violence. In remembering the violence subjected unto the Jewish population in Germany, the Holocaust became a past to remember by all to prevent catastrophes and ethnic genocidal projects in the future. In many ways, the memory of the Holocaust inspired the world to pay attention to the persecution of others who may be far-away, both physically and culturally, and protect their well-being. As opposed to centering the memory on the victims of the Holocaust, cosmopolitan memory showed us how a local memory came to be an anchor for universal standards and norms.

Despite this transformative theory, Erll (2011) describes their understanding of memories traveling as only being partially true. According to Erll (2011), “all cultural memory must travel, be kept in motion, in order to stay alive, to have an impact both on individual minds and social formation” (12). Movement consists of moving beyond territorial and social boundaries and also the exchanging of information between minds and media (Erll, 2011). However, not all memories will become global memories as Levy and Sznaider (2002) suggest with cosmopolitan memory. Not only does memory have to move to stay alive, but what makes memory travel is contingent on the routes they take, the context of the memory, and the people who use them (Erll, 2011). Erll (2011) alternatively argues that while memories may travel, not all memories will ignite the same visceral feelings that memories like the Holocaust did or create massive trans-ethnic solidarity. Rather, while memories may travel, they can also “travel without effect” (15).

Although transcultural and transnational forms of memory have been the focus of the most recent turn in memory studies, we are faced with the possibility of moving beyond just thinking of collective memory as a transcultural process. There has been a recent push to move the future of memory studies to include the Anthropocene (Crownshaw, 2016). For Crownshaw (2016), “a reconfigured cultural memory studies is needed in the face of radical changes in atmospheric, hydrospheric, lithospheric, and biospheric conditions brought about by climate change that reveal the interconnectedness of human and more-than human worlds through their mutual devastation” (330). This new direction for collective memory would incorporate our dominance over and our relationship to the geological age and the environment in our memory conceptualizations, recognizing that memory is not bound to just a human experience. Though this is a vital move given our current reality, I believe that we also cannot speak about the Anthropocene and moving into a fourth wave without deep and critical engagement with the legacies of colonialism and conquest, which throughout all versions of its existence, both Western and non-Western versions, has utilized the conquering of land, natural resources, the extraction of and from them, and in some cases the exploitation of them, in their technique for control. The environmental consequences that we are witnessing today are only another outcome of a long legacy of colonial domination (Wynter, 2003). Therefore, this turn, though a necessary one, needs to also engage with the “seething present” (Gordon, 2008: 8) of colonialism if we truly aim to understand the scope of collective memories in the age of the Anthropocene.

The relevance of engaging with the colonial present

While I am urging for more intentional engagement with the colonial present in how we conceptualize collective memory, especially in this new wave, the field of Memory Studies is not unique in its limited consideration with the legacies of colonialism. Itzigsohn (2023) argues that Sociology also remains reluctant to address the colonial present. While the purpose of Sociology was to provide explanations to understand Western modernity, Sociology has traditionally only viewed the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution as significant moments in Western modernity (Boatcă and Costa, 2010). However, when we view only the experiences on mainland Europe as events worth considering, we neglect the “Western European colonial politics” and the “accumulation of capital through the Atlantic slave trade and the overseas plantation economy” (16). Ultimately, we ignore the raw materials that were and continue to be used to fuel the Europe that we see today. Julian Go, Gurminder Bhambra, and José Itzigsohn have been some of the pioneers within Sociology to advocate for the applicability of using a postcolonial and decolonial lens for this very reason.

Traditionally, postcolonial thought has sought to provide a critical lens to understand how Eurocentrism, chattel slavery, the development of a racial hierarchy and colonialism, fundamentally impacts any attempt to understand our contemporary global world. Bhambra (2013) and Go (2016) argue that postcolonial theory “recognizes the constitutive character of empire upon modernity” and “is a sustained critique of empire and in particular, a critique of the ways of knowing, seeing, and being attendant with empire” (19). Decolonial thought, not to be used interchangeably with postcolonial thought, centers the role of coloniality as well but offers it as a tool for restorative justice and liberation rather than as just a different way to theorize on social experiences (Itzigsohn, 2023). While decolonial and postcolonial theory offer different goals for what recognizing colonialism can do, where they both overlap is on the necessity to acknowledge colonialism as a force that continues to pervade our present. Theories on collective memory can benefit significantly from a postcolonial and decolonial framework.

Engaging with postcolonial and decolonial thought however is about more than just including that body of literature into our epistemological practices. It is about understanding that how we have defined our world thus far is incomplete without recognizing the structuring structure of colonialism. Bhambra (2016) argues that rectifying an omission through inclusion is not enough to encapsulate the power that omission structures and distorts our accounts of situations. Thus, the process of “adding in” does not address the coloniality of power, which has created the rationale and perspective of our view of knowledge that is globally hegemonic, Eurocentric, and racialized in nature (Quijano, 2000). Because of this, many of our assumptions used in our collective memory theories, including the assumptions of continuity, linearity, modernity, and even the idea that there could be a collective memory, have been heavily critiqued by postcolonial and decolonial scholars. For example, in his review of postcolonial, India, Chakrabarty (2008) argues that to speak of modernity in a postcolonial context requires attending to “the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies. . . the repression and violence that are instrumental in the victory of the modern as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies” (43). Quijano (2007) has also argued that coloniality and its Eurocentrism were the decisive weight used in creating our view of modernity. What this means is that we cannot think of concepts like modernity and its role in directing a path for our future, without recognizing that modernity has happened on the back of continued violence, exclusion, chaos, and subjugation toward postcolonial nations, current colonial territories, and their people.

We can immediately see some of the issues with not engaging with colonialism within our earliest conceptualization of collective memory theory; Emile Durkheim’s (1912) Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Through the observations of Australian Aboriginal and Native American communities, Durkheim argues that religious practices are created and sustained through collective identity and social cohesion. However, Magubane (2005) points out that Durkheim bases his claim off of the belief that those societies were untouched and uninfluenced by the imperial and colonial power of Europe. But to make the assumption that these were “primitive religions” is to also omit the reality that these practices existed because “their practitioners were continually being dragooned into one colonial imbroglio after another” (Magubane, 2005: 96). These communities were not siloed and protected societies but rather they were continuously interacting with the external forces of colonialism and created practices out of a means for survival. Zine Magubane also argues that Durkheim’s ability to access the documents used in his analysis was a result of colonial rule and his position as a European white man (Magubane, 2005). While we have moved well beyond Durkheim’s conceptualization of memory and continuity as a discipline, providing a postcolonial critique of his work that remains in the canon of collective memory and Sociology as a whole, provides us with some insight into how far back we have been disregarding the effects of the power of colonialism and how engaging with it can change our perspectives on reality.

One can argue that while an analysis of colonialism and the constant presence of empire on modernity could be useful, this would be limited in that it can only be applied to Western Europe and countries once colonized by Western Europe. However, Táíwò (2023)’s essay on “precolonial” Africa problematizes this view. Táíwò (2023) argues that the belief in a “precolonial” Africa creates an idea that colonialism as a political governance system only began on the continent in 1885. However, the myth of a “precolonial” Africa only reinforces the idea that the continent of Africa is a homogeneous place and allows for the continued marginalization of the ideas, knowledge, and theoretical contributions of Africans prior to European colonialism (Táíwò, 2023). But what this idea of “precolonial” Africa also suggests is that colonialism is solely a Western European phenomenon that only impacted non-Western states. According to Táíwò (2023), seeing colonialism as a European phenomenon then understands pre-colonial Morocco as before French colonialism, which then ignores the 800-year Moorish colonialism in the Iberian Peninsula, much of present-day France, and Northern Africa. Acknowledging that iteration of colonial rule decenters any belief that bringing in the ongoing impact colonialism will only be useful for the parts of the globe touched by European colonialism. While this is just one example of the vast temporal and geographical scope of colonialism, there are many other examples that also decenter the idea that colonialism is a European phenomenon, including the colonization of Korea by Japan beginning in the early 1900s. What these various legacies of colonialism mean for collective memory is that it would be injudicious to disregard its impact and influence on the way memories are created and the ways that they move since broadening our understanding of colonialism shows that it has been a staple throughout history across all territories.

While I believe our understanding of collective memory can be enriched by an engagement with colonialism and coloniality, we already have some examples of transformative research that has benefited from this which we can use as a foundation. One example is Rothberg’s (2009) theory of multidirectional memory, which is one of the first attempts at engaging postcolonial thought with memory studies. Rothberg (2009) argues through his analysis of the memories of the Holocaust and the Algerian War that memories interact, are intercultural, and share biopolitical space. Memories utilize each other in their creations and in their meaning making and are often reflections of issues that stretch across space and time. Therefore, even when memories seem unrelated to each other, they always emerge in relationship to others across a series of overlapping spaces (Rothberg, 2009). Rothberg says, “many people assume that the public sphere in which collective memories are articulated is a scarce resource and that the interaction of different collective memories within that sphere takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence” (3). However, memories do not compete with each other but rather, they are multidirectional.

Multidirectional memory is an important theory in that it illustrates to us that memories are more interconnected than we often think. But most importantly, this work illustrates to us that acts of genocide, racism, and violence on individuals are co-implicated with the experience of colonialism and imperialism. The genocide that we witnessed during the Holocaust is connected to and product of a normalization of colonial violence, which Rothberg shows through the exploration of memories between the Holocaust and the Algerian War. We need to not only analyze moments based on the immediate circumstances around them but also consider what came before it and what continues to unravel beside it and after it. According to Rothberg (2009), “Historical influence consists not only of mechanical, transitive causality but also of repetitions, reverse shocks, and returns of the repressed” (107).

Trying to unravel the complexities and emotions that often come with collective memory against the backdrop of colonialism can sound like a massive, laborious, and potentially impossible task. However, an important first step to addressing what may in fact be a difficult task is to engage with and consider critiques to memory studies that already exist. These scholars are urging us to pay attention to how colonialism has shaped and continues to shape our realities. One of the first things we must consider if we are to engage with the colonial present is to explore the nature of borders and what a border may really mean when we understand borders as movable and arbitrary colonial boundaries. While borders may move, people do not necessarily move with them. This brings to the forefront the issue of how we understand the nature of memories traveling. Where do they travel to and what makes them travel when we see it through a colonial lens?

Imaginary borders and the question of traveling memories

Attending to colonialism requires us to not only think about it as a continuous historical relationship, but it also forces us to rethink how we have defined a term that we have made an important element of our understanding of collective memory and the movement of memory—the nation-state and its borders. We have traditionally understood nation-states to be sovereign states with borders that distinguish one nation-state from another. Subsequently, these political borders are what we have used to measure where and how people and memories move from one place to another. Though we have generally moved away from the binding of collective memories to a specific place, we have not considered how the concept of borders and the nation-state in itself has forced the movement of memories. Campion (2018) argues that to center the colonial requires us to look at the establishment of borders through the lens of a place and place-territory perspective, which means moving away from understanding borders from a migration/movement approach and seeing it from a cross-border territorial one.

One place that significantly complicates our understanding of the nation-state and memories traveling across borders is the Amazonia. The Amazon region, which spans nine countries in South America, is home to more than 30 million people. But before the region was divided up through borders and the creation of the nation-state, the Amazonia was one territory composed of thousands of indigenous groups. As European colonization began to take root in the region, we started to see the reconfiguring and capturing of indigenous territory within the Amazonia. The colonial conquest of the region produced mass dispossession, unresolvable territory conflict between the heterogeneous indigenous groups who lived in the Amazonia, and genocide (Campion, 2018; Messina et al., 2023). These micro-level group conflicts were only exacerbated through the contentious macro-level relationships between the political leaders that ended up governing the nine countries that make up the Amazon region. Campion (2018) shows this through the example of the long-standing border dispute between Ecuador and Peru and what those disputes have meant for the stability and wellness of those groups that live on the border.

Because borders are important for how we understand how and where memories travel, Messina et al. (2023) advocate for a decolonial approach to Erll’s (2011) transcultural memory which they call Amazon-centered memory. According to Messina et al. (2023), the Amazonia is a transnational space. Conflicting memories about borders among indigenous groups, that have bled into national commemorations and memory, has led Messina et al. (2023) to see borders as a source of symbolic conflict. An example of this is Bento Da Silva et al.’s (2017) review of the stark differences in how the conflict over the Rio Acre area is commemorated between Brazil and Bolivia. While Brazil has a monument that depicts the 1903 Acre War as victorious and triumphant for the Brazilian revolutionary forces against the Bolivian army, you can find a monument that depicts the same war as “El holocaust de la Guerra del Acre” which is translated as the Holocaust of the Acre War, in Bolivia (133). As nation-state boundaries have been redrawn and moved around because of colonial and imperial conquest, so has the memories associated with the territory and the content of those memories. The ongoing border conflict between Brazil and Bolivia is why Messina et al. (2023) argues that we need to think of borders not specifically within these rigid nation-state boundaries but as “loci of productions of narratives and memories that exist in the multiple tensions” (1412).

The traveling of memory across these “boundary lines” are difficult to conceptualize when considering the history of borders because the nation-state boundaries that we are speaking of when we think of transcultural memory, are not in alignment with the territorial boundaries that have become a part of these group’s collective memories. According to Campion (2018) although indigenous groups were not involved in drawing the nation-state boundary lines, they contributed to the borderisation processes, especially through defining “cultural regimes and meanings of the border” (12). Their collective memories are thus embodied within the movement of border lines and not bound to a specific nation-state. While these collective memories are in fact moving, they are moving because of the redrawing of boundary lines. These memories are associated with a territory, not a nation-state. But because of the constant redrawing of lines, boundary disputes have created more oppositional and contentious memories making it difficult to create a collective memory. Though memories may move across and exceed our definitions of nation-state borders, a decolonial perspective sees this movement of memory as one that is caused by dispossession and allows us to see the changing of borders itself as a part of collective memory. Through the decolonial approach of Campion (2018) and Messina et al. (2023), we are urged to reconsider the questions of how memories are moving, where they are moving to, and how do we reconcile memories that are bound up with border debates? What all of this means is that boundaries and nation-state borders are highly subjective and are colonial constructs that hold within them, collective memories.

In continuing to think on the applicability of traveling memory in the postcolonial and decolonial context, we should not only should consider dispossession as a barrier to understanding how memories move, but we should also consider the act of the dehumanization, the trivializing of memories, and the persistence of white supremacy as barriers to movement. How can we discuss the mechanisms in which memories and histories move across boundaries or territories if certain memories and histories are silenced? How do we deal with memories that are not acknowledged due to them being deemed as unthinkable or even dangerous? The legacy of the Haitian Revolution and its dismissal as a nonevent offers a unique challenge to the notion of traveling or transcultural memories.

In Trouillot’s (2015 [1995]) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, he argues that the denial and silence of the Haitian Revolution was due to it being inconceivable. To view the Haitian Revolution as an “unthinkable event” or a “nonevent” was to believe that it was simply impossible for blacks to have rebelled on their own will and desire (Trouillot, 2015 [1995]). Therefore, what occurred in Haiti was defined as a spurious event that served no social or historical significance. The Haitian Revolution was subsequently excluded from the “Age of Revolutions” and this was followed by an active effort to rewrite the memory of the revolution in order for it to make sense to the West (Trouillot, 2015 [1995]). Scholars often discussed the Haitian Revolution as the result of the spread of the French Revolution despite the writings of early social theorists like Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R James that described the development and execution of the Haitian Revolution from the point of view of the enslaved (Bhambra, 2016; Eddins, 2022). However, the designation of nonhuman to blacks made the idea of them revolting impossible to conceive; not only was it something that they could not do but also should not do (Trouillot, 2015 [1995]).

The idea of the Haitian Revolution being unthinkable is significant for our conceptualization of traveling memory because it speaks to a bias surrounding what kind of memories travel and how we will then understand the influence of those memories. Despite the influence that the memory of the Haitian Revolution had on the creation of the Pan-African movement and Black Internationalism, its importance was largely disregarded up until recently (Alexander, 2023; West and Martin, 2009). In Erll’s (2011) discussion on how memories travel, she points to “the consequences of the French Revolution in Haiti” as evidence of movement as opposed to the consequences of the Haitian Revolution in other parts of the world (13). Erll’s (2011) statement about Haiti is a telling declaration of how the hegemonic views about certain groups of people dictate the way we discuss (or not discuss) the memories associated with them. We will utilize narratives that better fit our understanding of how processes should work even if they are untrue or are more complex and nuanced situations. According to Trouillot (2015 [1995]), “if some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later?” (73). How can we assess the memory of the Haitian Revolution and its impact if we will not even acknowledge its existence or its significance? The Haitian Revolution, while “the largest, bloodiest, and most successful rebellion of enslaved people in history” that gave birth to the first black Republic, was written off as unthinkable and as a nonevent (Alexander, 2023: 3). The memory and significance of the Haitian Revolution was not recognized as transcultural not because it was not influential, but because it was seen as unthinkable. Haiti mattered, but only as a way to talk about something else (Trouillot, 2015 (1995)).

Nevertheless, the movement of memory across national boundaries continues to serve as an important direction for the future of collective memory, especially in an academic climate that argues that the world is getting closer and more interconnected due to globalization. However, we see from the Amazonia that how we define borders and who we relegate to which side of the border tells us a very specific story which subsequently has a very specific memory attached to it. We also see from the treatment of the Haitian Revolution that we cannot truly understand transcultural memory and its influence on different groups of people if we neglect and trivialize the gravity of memories that don’t match our worldviews. Considering postcolonial and decolonial thought challenges us to see that how we currently understand the movement of memory does not consider the colonial contexts that have shaped our knowledge and beliefs. Although it does not only challenge how we view transcultural memory. It also challenges how we understand the influence of cultural trauma in creating group identity and supposed social cohesion.

Cultural trauma beyond the end of colonialism

While our traditional theories of collective memory are often predicated on the idea of a shared experience or a shared identity, Antweiler (2023) argues that this is “epistemologically bound to the ideal of purity” and collective memories are always “infused with contradiction” (1530, 1535). What this means is that memories are rarely if ever collective and there are many versions of an imagined reality that often time contradict each other yet, they all coexist together. Instead of looking at memories as collective, we need to instead take on the vision of Arturo Escobar and “pluriversify” our memories (Antweiler, 2023: 1530). To pluriversify our memories is to deconstruct the notion that there ever could be a collective memory and to embrace the fact that how we understand memories are based on biases we already have, thus limiting the possibility for there to be other memories, other truths, and alternative visions for the future. This is especially important for communities that have been directly influenced by colonial violence because their collective memories are often high stakes and more nuanced than we see on face value. Their collective memories are consistently embellished with tension and contradiction that makes for increasingly unstable and unresolvable differences. These differences often prevent a sense of a “collective” memory altogether (Antweiler, 2023).

Antweiler (2023) uses the example of migrant populations as a group that can struggle to share the same sentiments about a nation’s history. In the case of Syrian, North African, and Middle Eastern migrants in Germany, she argues that while programs were created to teach the refugees about the history of the Holocaust in hope that it would stimulate deep appreciation and value for German democracy, these initiatives were “oblivious to the potential range of reactions the refugees might have to Germany’s Nazi-history” (1537). The memory of the Holocaust did not automatically generate respect for German democracy among this group but rather, served as a reminder to those who were currently enduring racist attacks in contemporary German society to not believe they were exempt from that unfortunate fate. The difference in how the memory of the Holocaust is internalized between groups in the same nation shows how groups who can be argued to be a collective, can be separated from this sense of collectiveness (Antweiler, 2023).

According to Antweiler (2023) collective memory helps to “structure and harmonize the chaos of times, stories, and anticipations” (1533). But trying to structure collective memory has prevented us from truly being inclusive because the concept of collective inherently excludes individuals and communities that are separated from the institutionalized collective memory of an event. From this perspective, a collective memory does not exist when we consider the ongoing imposition of colonialism on our realities. While I do not aim to provide support or opposition to this abolitionist approach to decolonizing collective memory studies, I do think that this perspective is helpful in that it allows us to reflect on the nuances of cultural trauma and the difficulty that it can cause within groups when attempting to establish and institutionalize a collective memory. These nuances should urge us to rethink how we view collective identity and its relationship to trauma.

An example of how different perceptions of an event can create conflicting memories and feelings within a group is the killing of the tirailleurs sénégalais. The remembering and commemoration of the tirailleurs sénégalais in Senegal, according to Ginio (2006), is one that is riddled with contestation and complexities. Senegal has had an extensive relationship with colonialism with France, beginning in the mid-1600s and then at different points in time until a more extensive and expansive colonial rule beginning in 1850s, which is the colonial period when the tirailleurs sénégalais where recruited. These soldiers were drafted by France to fight in World War I and were subsequently used to fight in World War II and other conquest and colonial counterinsurgency operations under the belief that they should fight to defend “their motherland.” It is also important to note that France was the only country to utilize their “subjects” in the war and they recruited thousands of them overtime (Ginio, 2006). After the 1940 Battle of France, the tirailleurs sénégalais were sent back to West Africa after being prisoners of war in Europe. However, due to poor conditions at the Thiayore military camp in Senegal including acts of racism and shortages of food and shelter, members of the tirailleurs sénégalais decided to protest at the military camp. This act of protest resulted in the massacre of between 35 and 300 soldiers and the imprisonment of many more on December 1, 1944, an event that has been infamously named the Thiaroye Massacre. Members of the tirailleurs sénégalais were killed despite their allegiance to France and being promised equal citizenship and pay after their service.

Though a tragic and traumatic event, the memory of the Thiayore Massacre is far from being collective. In Ginio’s (2006) analysis of three commemoration sites for the tirailleurs sénégalais in Senegal, the Demba and Dupont monument, the military museum, and the military cemetery of Thiaroye where the tirailleurs sénégalais were massacred and buried, she finds that there is no consensus on how these soldiers should be commemorated. At each of these sites, the soldiers are portrayed as heroes, victims, or traitors. The very different interpretations or memories of the tirailleurs sénégalais exemplify the difficulty in establishing a collective memory not only under colonialism but in the aftermath of its violence. Ginio (2006) argues that these very different perspectives of who the tirailleurs sénégalais were a clear indication of the ambivalence that Senegal has toward French colonialism as a whole. Not only are they towing the line between how they describe their relationship with the French under colonialism, but also how their ultimate description will impact their ongoing relationship with France. Colonialism in its formal nature also often worked to turn communities against each other and relied on manipulation and indoctrination methods to convince individuals to abide with what they wanted.

Sèbe (2018) articulates this very problem as he aims to understand the resurrection of French and British imperial heroes on the African continent in the years after Independence. While there were some formerly colonized countries that institutionalized memories that rejected the European figures that represented the colonial past, you had other countries seek to rebrand those same figures because of the belief that they represented a part of their history. It was not as simple as the act of active forgetting, but rather a rebuilding process that required learning how to disown the figures who brought on great violence to them, figures whose images they had to manage and protect while under colonial rule, but figures that ultimately became a part of their symbolic and historical heritage (Sèbe, 2018). These imperial heroes are also to credit for some of the practices that some Africans still hold dear to their identity and culture like Christianity. This tension ends up creating what Sèbe (2018) describes as a Eurafrican hybrid hero; ultimately serving as a blend of both histories and contradictions.

What Ginio (2006) and Sèbe (2018) both share in their analysis is the understanding that cultural trauma does not necessarily create unity and sometimes creates more division among groups. Colonialism was such a complex system that even in its ending, individuals struggled to reckon with what happened and how to commemorate it. We see this same trend when we navigate west to the Caribbean region with the remembering of the Grenadian Revolution. The beginning of the Grenadian Revolution “became etched in the collective memory of Grenadians for the rationalizing and legitimizing of freedom from tyranny, mass illiteracy, unemployment and poor working conditions” for the predominantly black and rural poor locals (Mitchell-Hall, 2021: 86). It began in March of 1979 after the overthrow of the government of Eric Gairy and followed with the people’s installment of Maurice Bishop. It ended in October of 1983 with the assassination of Maurice Bishop and 17 other political leaders and an invasion by the United States. The Grenadian Revolution has often been described as an event riddled with unreconcilable differences and a national memory saturated with contentious and conflicting perspectives.

One of the telling signs of the difficulty to agree on the memory of the revolution has been in later commemorations of the event. While some people view what happened with the United States as an invasion, others view what happened as an intervention. An example of this is that despite large scholarship about the Grenadian Revolution, marking the United States’ participation as an invasion, Grenada simultaneously has a public holiday called Thanksgiving Day where according to the Grenadian Consulate in Miami website, is a holiday “commemorating the anniversary of the 1983 Caribbean and American military intervention in Grenada” (Consulate General of Grenada, n.d.). In addition to this, there exists a US-donated monument that currently stands in Grenada that aims to express gratitude to the United States military for sacrificing their lives to save the Grenadian people from its political instability (Puri, 2014; Scott, 2010). This monument is the largest on the island commemorating this time, but it stands in a secluded area while the local people continue to be at odds on how to appropriately interpret, remember, and commemorate what actually happened (Mitchell-Hall, 2021). This monument and public holiday are significant in that it also exemplifies the influence that colonial and imperial powers have in deciding which memories to commemorate and how to remember them even in independent countries.

The shift from feeling excited and empowered with the anticolonial leadership of Maurice Bishop to witnessing his killing by his own political party continues to be a point of deep pain and confusion for Grenadians. As the government and people of Grenada continue to grapple with how to commemorate what happened, it has also led to an increase in divisiveness on the topic that has resulted in people not talking about it all together (Mitchell-Hall, 2021). Shalini Puri poses a question that Grenadians must ask themselves to figure out how to publicly remember what occurred. But I believe that the question also provides value for thinking more generally about collective memory. She says, “how do we publicly commemorate the revolution without being recorded as the villains of history in relation to Bishop” (Mitchell-Hall, 2021: 100). I think that when we consider cultural trauma with the context of colonialism, an experience that was saturated with coerciveness, exploitation, and manipulation, that often-put communities against each other, we must consider the difficulty that comes when it is time to establish a collective and national memory about occurred. Can we establish a collective memory rooted in trauma without also implicating ourselves? How do we navigate this tension in the retelling of our stories when it is also bound up in the attempt to break free of colonial domination? To Scott (2010), commemorations or lack thereof are never innocent of power. “They serve to authorize a certain way of remembering the past, and therefore to deliberately displace or preclude other ways of remembering– and in doing so they help to propagate the illusion of a common memory” (Scott, 2010: 80).

While these cases represent examples of how engaging with colonialism challenges the way we understand how memories travel, shape communities, and create collective identities within spaces that were once colonized, these are not difficulties unique to postcolonial states. Rather, both colonizer and colony experience the same nuances and challenges with collective memory and memory work, further expanding the need to engage with the colonial present. While the challenges may look different, they all share in their struggles to narrate their past.

Creating a national identity without the colonial past

In the formal ending of colonialism as a political governing structure, newly found sovereign states were now given the opportunity and had the expectation to form the story for their nation—establishing a past, present, and a vision for their future. As mentioned earlier, collective memory has had a significant role in negotiating and establishing a history and identity both for a state and for individual communities. Therefore, it is expected that all postcolonial states have had to undergo a process of national self-creation and identity formation that involved altering a history to produce a past that is usable for them (Brereton, 2007). This process of national self-creation also meant engaging in efforts to build a sense of unity among people after living under a political regime that perpetuated and encouraged division, elitism, and racism. Therefore, the other role of postcolonial states in its national identity creation process has been to “give representation to the traumatic past experiences” (McEwan, 2003: 744) as a step toward national repair.

However, Brereton (2007) also finds through her study of Trinidad and Tobago history that “generally the kind of narrative produced before and after independence by former colonies centers on heroic anticolonial struggles, culminating in the attainment of formal nationhood, and usually ignoring or obfuscating internal divisions whether of ethnicity, region, class, or gender” (170). Therefore, while the priority of newly sovereign states was to establish themselves as a credible, stable, and equal competitor on a global stage, this came at the cost of the continued erasure and silencing of the experiences of the groups who were the most marginalized under colonialism. This trend of erasure and silencing is not a practice that is unique to postcolonial states, however. Failure to address the colonial past has been evident both in postcolonial states and the states that once were the colonizers.

While a significant portion of the collective memory literature has been dedicated to the experiences, events, and people associated with mainland Europe, the generation of these theories is void of their crucial role in imperialism, colonialism, racism and as such, does little to acknowledge that history’s role in their own national memory (Sierp, 2020). Fleming (2017) highlights the case of France and their relationship with collective memory specifically as it relates to their history with enslavement and colonialism. In a process she describes as blackwashing, France underwent a recreation of its history to establish a dominant narrative that erased the impact that whiteness and white supremacist ideals had on the justification of the chattel slavery of black people. While those who were enslaved were racialized, the people doing the enslavement, that is, white men, were not. In creating a more favorable narrative, France acknowledged their role in the enslavement of Africans while ensuring not to name White Supremacy as a motivator for this injustice or to recognize that White people were who committed the atrocity (Fleming, 2017). In this revision of history, France is selective about what elements of history they are willing to embrace and reckon with.

Bijl (2012) discusses a similar phenomenon in the Netherlands regarding the discussion of Dutch colonialism. According to Bijl (2012), colonial forgetting from previous colonizers is underestimated and complex; it is not a binary position that says that once a history is known, it will be accepted. But instead, he claims that this history often is perceived to be forgotten because “the victims of colonialism are not memorable within a national context and there is no language available to discuss them as a part of Dutch history” (458). What this means is that colonial history and the violence ensued during it do not “fit” into a nationalist framework, and therefore are as seen as separate to the Dutch history and identity. Dutch colonialism and the violence associated with it that Bijl (2012) argues are not absent from public knowledge but are actually widely represented in Dutch society. Instead, what we witness he argues is a cultural aphasia. This would mean that instead of forgetting, what happens is that there is an inability to express or understand the colonial history within the present-day understanding of their nation-state.

Bruyneel (2013) however argues against the idea of a collective amnesia and the idea that there is an inability to make sense of the colonial history. Instead, he urges us to think of the continuation of colonial and racial injustices as a function of a collective disavowal rather than a collective forgetting, or a collective amnesia. Much of the time, it is not a matter of being unaware of the colonial injustices because at times there is an excess of memory, which is in alignment with Bijl (2012)’s description of the Netherlands. Instead, it is a very specific production of memories that is contingent on structures of political hegemony and dominance. Therefore, erasures and silences are purposely and specifically created.

According to Trouillot (2015 [1995]), there are structural similarities in global silences, which is evident in how erasures around the Holocaust and American slavery are discussed. But erasures are organized through the lens of the coloniality of power. Viewing these erasures and silences as a form of amnesia gives the impression that once one becomes aware of historic injustices, that it will be enough to resolve them or better yet, set us up to better address them (Bruyneel, 2013). However, according to Bruyneel (2013),

“the amnesia approach does not offer a direct political critique about how the collective memory of the story of dominant nationhood is critical for the production and iteration of racial and colonialist state authority regardless of what other historical knowledge is brought into the conversation” (5).

Therefore, it is not enough to see erasures as just something that happens in the building of a national identity. But instead, we need to view our erasures of identities and injustices through the lens of a continuation of colonial domination. A postcolonial and decolonial perspective allows us to see that erasure is intertwined with much larger and complex structures. If collective memory aids in the building of nation-states and the establishment of national identities, then we must also consider the ways that colonialism has filtered our memories of the state, and how we have related to the state.

Conclusion

Living with and within the consequences of collective memory debates that originated from the days of colonial conquest forces us to face the reality that we are in a colonial present and not a colonial past. However, this new wave offers us a chance to reshape our thinking to reconsider the ways that our theories have operated from a place of disregard of the influence of colonialism to uplift narratives that fit what we have “seen.” What this should remind us of is that we cannot continue to deny the role of colonialism if we wish to truly answer the questions and concerns of the contemporary and the future.

If we are to think about how the collective memories of events travel across the world and are commemorated in different times and spaces, then we must also think about our definition of movement and the mechanisms in which they are moved. The Amazonia shows us that the concept of borders and movement in itself is contentious. It also tells us that borders are subjective and a source of symbolic conflict that produce a particular set of collective memories. The Haitian Revolution and the active disregard toward it, even today, shows us that to move, collective memories must be seen as legitimate and realistic. The lens in which we determine what is possible, what is legitimate, and what is laughable is one that is rooted in the continued existence of colonial ideologies. Thus, the movement of collective memories across nation-state borders needs to be a concept that makes spaces for contradiction and makes space for the role of hegemony and colonial practices in its conceptualization.

To think about the collective memories of cultural trauma and their role in creating collective identities and mobilizing groups together, is to also think about the ways that it has also caused more confusion, more division, and sometimes silence among groups. The cases of the tirailleurs sénégalais and the Grenadian Revolution in its aftermath lets us know that to understand violence under colonialism, is to understand events as being both traumatic and difficult to explain, commemorate, or interpret. It also shows us the added layers of complexity to reckon with when colonial and imperial powers continue to be a surveilling source of how memories are documented when they are referenced.

If we are to utilize collective memories to show the way that nation-states are created and identities about states are maintained, then we also need to acknowledge that collective memories around colonial domination and the subjugation under creates significant barriers to achieve our definitions of what is a national identity and has also determined how we filter and interpret colonial memories. Erasures of racial and gender differences continue to happen, despite the ongoing realities of divisions caused by colonialism, and the experiences of those who suffered the most under these systems are expected to remain silenced in the name of trying to prevent division under the new state. When thinking about forgetting and erasures in these narratives, we need to shift from the belief that these practices are a function of collective amnesia but rather, as a function of collective disavowal because these stories are not really forgotten. Taken together, the lens in which we remember events are rooted in colonial principles and ideologies.

Ultimately, the frames that we are using to track collective memories and its power have done a lot to explain what we have “seen” but it has done little to acknowledge what happens when we pay attention to the haunting. As we look around and take in the uproars and tensions around the world, we are reminded of the connection that collective memories have to colonial history and that debates over collective memories are remnants of those ruptures. This turn in memory studies is an opportunity for us to think beyond what we have already done and look toward redefining our terms of collective memory creation, navigation, and negotiation alongside the colonial present.