Memory Studies

Monuments—and the function and import of monumentality and practices of monumentalization—are currently under incredible scrutiny. Should historical statues of racist figures and pasts be left as they are or removed and destroyed? Should they be rehomed in statue parks intended as final resting places for disgraced statues? Or should they be left but with additional monuments and memorials added to their surroundings to provide further context? At the root of these debates is a fundamental inquiry about not just what monuments are but, more importantly, what monuments are intended to do for and within a body politic. In scholarly dialogue with Doss, Santino, Savage, Young, and others, I assert that we need to reorient and expand our thinking about monuments. I argue that monuments function as speech acts, and although they rarely speak for an entire body politic, monuments play a critical role in shaping historical narratives and cultural reckoning with racist, brutally violent pasts and their lived afterlives. Moreover, while in many respects backward-facing, monuments are also profoundly future-facing in the values and narratives they symbolize and articulate and the kinds of spaces and community practices they have the potential to cultivate. I analyze two different monument projects: Aida Šehović’s transnational nomadic monument to the Srebrenica genocide, ŠTO TE NEMA, and Landmarked, Ada Pinkston’s embodied replacement and reimagining of spaces where Confederate and slavery monuments used to be in the Eastern United States. These monument projects, I argue, challenge us to revisit the politics and practices of monumentality and monumentalization in relation to unworked-through racist pasts and, in this incredible moment of reckoning and crisis, suggest new possibilities for how we understand—and cultivate—monuments moving forward.

In the early morning hours of 31 May 2020 in Richmond, Virginia, along with graffiti to the monuments lining the city’s historic Monument Avenue, the nearby headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was covered in colorful graffiti and set aflame. This article explores the gendered and raced critiques of the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s memory work communicated by this protest action, using the “Karen meme” as its point of departure. Invocations of “Karen” on Twitter in response to the Richmond protest made pointed arguments about narrative, place, and aesthetics, critiquing not only the Daughters’ role in remembering the Confederacy but the “Southern lady” trope within American public memory. Rather than an oblique reference, the Karen meme, this article argues, underscored Twitter’s potential as a site of anti-racist resistance during times of crisis.

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and calls to remove Confederate statuary in Richmond, Virginia, during the summer of 2020, the History Is Illuminating project constructed public signs that replicated the traditional historical markers used throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. The signs were placed along Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue in conversation with the still-standing Confederate monuments. They challenged the monuments’ representation of public memory by re-introducing narratives about prominent Black Richmonders and informing readers of the Jim Crow legislation that enabled the monuments to be constructed and venerated. This edited and condensed interview with organizers from the project describes the multiple crises of collective memory that public historians confront in the American South, as well as the strategies the History Is Illuminating project used to counter dominant narratives about public memory. Finally, the interview highlights the importance of community action and a multiplicity of public memory projects in order to ensure a democratic approach to collective memory.

As a response to the debates around colonial statues and glorifying forms of memorialization, comics provide one with plurivocal possibilities to decolonize monuments and epistemologies. This article analyzes a number of recent comics/panels (Charles & Bihel, Stassen, Kannemeyer, Baruti, Lambé, a.o.) that de-center perspectives so as to visibilize the violence of the Belgian colonial system that public monuments invisibilize. This analysis focuses on the medium-specific features that depetrify (in)famous statues, draw back to iconic figures like the Leopard-Man, and redraw iconic sites with multilayered temporalities and geographies to enable viewers to move away from one-sided perspectives and consider present forms of discriminations as legacies of colonialism.

This article presents an analysis of the monumentalization of the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974) and explores the dynamics that sustain its growth recently, while other symbols and forms of public memorialization associated with the colonial past have increasingly been called into question and contested, nationally and internationally. Through the semiotic and epigraphic analysis of monuments, observational visits and interviews with some of the people who put them up, the main representational dynamics of the approximately 415 monuments in Portugal are identified. The article examines the (under)-representation in black troops of the Portuguese Army, the boom in monument construction (over 350) from the year 2000 onward and the maintenance (and reinforcement from 2010 onward) of messages and visual narratives projecting a sort of imperial imaginary. This work shows how the vernacular remembering and the public memory of the conflict and the colonial past are reflected on the monuments’ representations and images.

This article analyzes the interventions of monuments that occurred in conjunction with the mass 2019–2020 anti-neoliberal protests in Chile where almost 400 monuments representing Spanish conquerors and colonial and nineteenth-century national heroes were pulled down, contested, or transformed. The article illustrates how a social movement against social injustices and inequalities enacted and engaged with decolonial repertoires of action. It analyzes two performative cases of toppled monuments to Pedro de Valdivia, the leading Spanish conqueror, in the southern cities of Concepción and Valdivia. It then examines recent debate about the anti-racist and decolonial de-monumentalization trend seen around the world and discusses some particularities of the Latin American case. It concludes by arguing that, although the monument interventions involved spontaneous and effervescent ritualistic affects, they are expressive of decolonial challenges to intertwined and long-standing national memories, calling for reconsideration of our national identities.

The article discusses a conflict surrounding the removal of the Soviet Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev monument in Prague in 2020. The text begins by presenting different narratives associated with the statue and proceeds to demonstrate how the monument became entangled in a battle between opposing political factions, both in the Czech Republic and on an international scale. The aim of the article is to examine this example in the context of memory studies and to indicate that the situation in the Czech Republic arises from different cultural, social and historical contexts, especially the legacy of communism and the complex Czech Russian relations, but is in many ways similar to the situation in the United States and other places around the world lately experiencing monument struggles.

The grounding myth of American collective memory is built on the idea of America as a promise, what it shall be. Crises place futures in doubt. Against these two considerations, this article examines how the future can be used to shape the past. In the American context, the future as a general promise is invoked in times of crisis to reassure a nation by way of laundering difficult pasts so as to fit a narrative of progress in spite of the continued presence and recursive nature of these pasts. In the immediate wake of the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, another crisis (itself a harbinger of crises to come), the 2000 Bush v Gore decision, was rewritten as an exemplar of American exceptionalism rather than a stain on it. Beyond displaying the intricate relationship between future and past in collective memory, the case highlights how this operation only works to further neglect the racism and unresolved pasts entrenched in the myth of exceptionalism that motivated the Capitol Riot.

The article examines how the experiences of post-communist transitional justice policies could inform current controversies in the United States regarding its reckoning with the past. To lay the ground for this analysis, three facets of American exceptionalism—the dual state reality, the triumphalist myth, and the denialist myth—are identified as principal obstacles that have preempted any substantive reparations for the crimes against humanity perpetrated against enslaved Africans and their descendants. This is followed by a presentation of how the 1989 revolutions in East and Central Europe failed to promote an inclusive and pluralistic model of the past. Instead, current representations of the past rooted in essentialist and ethnocentric historical narratives are weaponized by non-democratic political actors. Finally, the authors caution against misguided representations of historical trauma and memory wars in the United States that could potentially reproduce White supremacist ideologies and escalate existent political and cultural divisions.

In this article, I examine the efforts of a group of anti-Confederate monument activists in Williamson County, Texas. The article begins with the history of the monument itself, 100 years before the activists initiated their efforts. The intransigence to removing the Confederate monument is symbolic of white resistance to struggles for racial equality more broadly. Second, I discuss how the local legal impasse has contributed to distinct anti-monument activist strategies that deploy counternarratives and memories, from performances, to challenging narrative claims regarding who is more patriotic. Finally, I explore the politics of self-reckoning—the process by which white people find that they have to answer for racism deep within themselves as well as in relation to violent white supremacy and the legal and institutional fortress that protects whiteness generally. Battling both racists and racist institutions is hard and lengthy, and monument activism persistently exposes what is at stake.

The crisis over Confederate memory in the United States has dominated international headlines since the tragic events of racist violence associated with the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy. Yet the scale of debate and attention paid to this crisis has been mostly limited to the United States, despite the globalized nature of Confederate memory politics. Little known is the fact that after the US Civil War, several thousand ex-Confederates migrated to Brazil where descendants still celebrate their heritage with a festival that draws thousands to a rural area of São Paulo state. A descendant-curated museum also narrates the Confederate migration. Drawing on work in critical settler colonial and comparative racial and ethnic studies, the “transcultural turn” in memory studies, and a year of fieldwork, this article traces the crisis of Confederate memory to the interior of São Paulo, Brazil, and explores the global impact the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy has had on Confederate commemoration.

A memory breach is an action, statement, or sociopolitical crisis that calls into dispute the mnemonic order, which is defined as an underlying orientation toward the past that serves to justify the political order and social order within a society. Following a memory breach, the society enters a “state of conception.” Related to the “state of exception” commonly associated with political crisis, the state of conception is a liminal space that follows a memory breach in which a society reexamines the mnemonic order. This article examines three recent memory breaches in Argentina, Germany, and the United States. By comparing three different breaches, each with different outcomes, it offers a framework for understanding memory breaches and the states of conception that they produce.

By voiding the previous social pact, including the predominant conception of racial integration, the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) created the conditions for a radical understanding of Black difference, which found its leading motif in the memory of the Quilombo of Palmares, a historical community of rebel slaves. A new Black movement understood its cultural and historical experience as containing a utopian legacy, an alternative for a Brazil marked by racism and inequality. To overcome its problems of legitimation, the regime set into motion a process of gradual democratization. The need to symbolically and culturally accomplish this transition created an institutional breach for the memory politics of the Black movement. In this context, the inclusion of the Serra da Barriga, a site of the war against Palmares, into national cultural heritage became the testing grounds for novel politics of culture that changed both the understanding of Brazilian nationhood and Black difference, as represented in the memory of Palmares.

This article provides an overview of the Digital Memory Studies Association (dMSA) online roundtable on “Memory, Crisis, Democracy and Africa” which took place on 21 May 2021. It also details how memory can be understood as a democratic phenomenon in postcolonial Africa and examines, at the same time, various crises of memory that emerge in regimes that undermine democracy on the continent. It ends with reflections on the state of memory studies in Africa and suggests various ways of approaching the study of memory and crisis on the continent.

Working at the intersection of political science, ethnographic sociology, and contemporary historiography, Sarah Gensburger specializes in the social dynamics of memory. In this interview, she talks about her book Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris 2015–2016, which traces the evolving memorialization processes following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, their impact on the local landscape, and the social appropriations of the past by visitors at memorials and commemorative sites. She also discusses her new project Vitrines en confinement—Vetrine in quarantena (“Windows in Lockdown”), which documents public responses to the coronavirus pandemic from different sites across Europe through the creation of a photographic archive of public space. The interview highlights issues around the immediacy of contemporary memorialization practices, the ways in which people engage with their local space during times of crisis, and how we are all actively involved in preserving memory for the future.

Since the first lockdown in March 2020, time seems to have slowed to a continuous present tense. The Greek language has three words to express different experiences of time: aion, chronos and kairos. If aion is the boundless and limbo-like time of eternity, chronos represents chronological, sequential, and linear time. Kairos, however, signifies the rupture of ordinary time with the opportune moment, epiphany and redemption, revolution, and most broadly, crisis and emergency. This paper argues that the pandemic is impacting how individuals perceive time in two ways: first, as a distortion of time in which individuals are caught between linear time (chronos) and rupture (kairos) invoking the state of emergency and second, as an extended present that blurs the passing of chronological time with its seeming eternity (aion). As a result of the perceived suspension of ordinary time, temporal understandings of the future are postponed, while the past hovers like a ghost over the present.

This article explores the narratives of the Covid-19 crisis in Italy, in the ways that they intersect with cultural memory processes. Moving from the hypothesis that the Covid-19 crisis, in Italy, has undergone two distinct narrative phases, we focus on the comparison between the forms taken, during the first lockdown, by an important (but also somehow divisive) memory ritual: the celebration of 25 April (the day that Italy was liberated from Nazi-Fascism) and the newly established commemorations of Covid-19 casualties. The aim is to observe the osmoses between two discursive domains (memory discourse vs emergency discourse). To do so, we propose the concept of “pre-emptive memory,” which can be defined as an act of—unwitting—anticipation, pre-figuration, and re-combination of the future cultural memory of an ongoing event in the present.

This article draws on the concept of the chronotope – spatiotemporal entanglements theorized in literary and anthropological studies – and extends the same to an engagement with and an understanding of the experiential and ontological defamiliarization, deceleration and suspension of space, time and security generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article, thus, offers a study of COVID-19 as a connective metaphor and a crisis chronotope – denoting the un-certain space–time marked and defamiliarized by changed orders and vocabularies of presence, distance, trust, tactility and memory – characterizing a world of alienation, insecurity and fear of infection. In arguing how the globality of COVID-19 has ironically informed isolation, incomplete identification and new fiction-formations, while also foregrounding the difference between human time and planetary time, the article will re-examine the crisis chronotope through a study of sudden death and the defamiliarized public space, exemplified in the city of New Delhi during the second wave of the pandemic in April–May 2021.

This article critically interrogates historical analogies made between the Covid-19 pandemic and HIV/AIDS epidemic in American public discourse, highlighting the role of cultural memory and normative frameworks of ‘crisis’ and its temporalities in shaping collective responses. It situates the Covid-19 pandemic in a multidirectional mnemonic frame by analysing borrowings from other usable pasts, particularly the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, which in turn drew upon memory of the Holocaust. A reading of Susan Sontag’s ‘The Way We Live Now’ affirms the value of multidirectional cultural borrowing while also revealing its limits. Notably, the ever-growing AIDS Memorial Quilt may serve as a model for memorializing victims of Covid-19. While analogies between pandemics may be comforting or mobilizing, their meaning must remain open to contestation and also preserve particularities and differences. The history of HIV/AIDS centres the question, ‘crisis for whom?’ and cautions against prematurely declaring the ‘end’ of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While the literature suggests that the Spanish Flu—despite the devastation it caused—suffers from social amnesia, this article begs to differ. Building on the multiplicity of manners in which the past maintains itself in the present and specifically focusing on Erll’s distinction between remembrance and knowledge as two poles of collective memory, we shed light on the collective memory of the Spanish Flu in its entirety. First, our analysis recognizes COVID-19 as a catalyst of the remembrance of the Spanish Flu. Second, it suggests that the perceived social amnesia attached to the Spanish Flu stems from overlooking the mark it left on the sphere of knowledge. The article addresses the need to recognize the uniqueness and importance of the knowledge pole in assessing collective memory, and exposes the dynamics and potential relationships shared by the poles.