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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Collective memory: theory and politics
Chris Weedona* and Glenn Jordanb,c
a
Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK; bUniversity of
Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, Cardiff, UK; cButetown History
& Arts Centre, Cardiff, UK
(Received April 2010; final version received November 2011)
This essay outlines key issues in current approaches to cultural and collective
memory. It reflects on memorys relation to history and its social, cultural and
political roles, drawing on theoretical insights from Halbwachs, Ricoeur, Nora and
Hirsch. It addresses the issues of affect, postmemory and counter-memory, locating
the articles in the special section within this broader cultural political field.
Keywords: cultural memory; collective memory; postmemory; history; countermemory; affect
Introduction
The memorial presence of the past takes many forms and serves many purposes, ranging
from conscious recall to unreflected reemergence, from nostalgic longing for what is
lost to polemical uses of the past to reshape the present. The interaction between
present and past that is the stuff of cultural memory is, however, the product of
collective agency rather than the result of psychic or historical accident. (Bal, Crewe,
and Spitzer 1999, vii)
Recent years have seen the rise of widespread interest in cultural and collective memory
and their relation to questions of power, voice, representation and identity. Interest in
collective memory has been fuelled by developments both within and outside the
academy. These include those forms of social and cultural history that have produced
not only oral history but also a focus on testimonies, popular memory and forms of
memorialisation and the related focus within cultural studies on questions of history,
memory and identity. Outside the university, pressure from marginalised groups,
reinforced by state concerns over social inclusion, have produced moves within the
museum and heritage sectors towards more inclusive narratives of the past. Important
in this process has been the increased accessibility via media and digitisation of source
materials and of the resources needed to collect and produce new materials.
Collective memory, as we conceive it here, signifies narratives of past experience
constituted by and on behalf of specific groups within which they find meaningful
forms of identification that may empower.1 Collective memory and the institutions
and practices that support it help to create, sustain and reproduce the imagined
communities with which individuals identify and that give them a sense of history,
place and belonging (Anderson 1981). The groups connected with particular
*Corresponding author. Email: WeedonCM@cf.ac.uk
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.664969
http://www.tandfonline.com
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memorabila.4 The potential for the articulation of new and marginalised formations
of collective memory has been radically enhanced by the spread of new media. Both
the Internet and the expansion of digital technology have worked to democratise
the means of cultural production in ways that facilitate the articulation of marginalised formations of collective memory. New media have made the articulation of
marginalised collective memory both relatively affordable and accessible to interested
people way beyond the physical borders of specific communities. With the growth of
the Internet, the individuals and groups represented by and contributing to
constructions of collective memory can easily transcend geographical location,
finding their coherence as imagined communities and documenting and sharing their
memory in cyberspace.
Memory and history
A central issue in recent debate has been collective memorys relation to history.
While some academic history rejects memory-based sources as unreliable, we would
not want to place history in opposition to collective memory. History is often
concerned with placing memory-based work within more general narratives of the
past, a process that inevitably implies a large measure of selection and forgetting that
represents interests in the present. These interests also inform articulations of
collective memory. The turn to issues of collective memory has been driven in part by
the need to remember the traumatic events that marked the twentieth century in
particular, wars and the Holocaust as the number of people able to offer first-hand
individual testimonies diminishes. In his seminal work On Collective Memory, first
published in 1925, Maurice Halbwachs locates individual memory as a part of or an
aspect of group memory formed in relation to a societys various (group)
articulations of collective memory (1992, 53). It is groups within society that are
responsible for both collective memory and the social frameworks for memory that
facilitate it. Thus, whereas memory might appear to be a personal matter, born out of
ones own individual experience, it is located in the ways the society as a whole
remembers, and makes sense of things. These change over time and with them not
only how we, as individuals, make sense of the world but also how we remember our
experiences in the world. Halbwachs insists on the importance of the group in the
articulation of both recent and older individual and collective memory, a point borne
out by Oteles article on the Bristol Slave Trade Gallery and Linkes article on lifewriting in Scotland. The latter clearly shows how inexplicit narratives of national
identity shape both the individual stories collected in oral history projects and how
they are edited. In this context it is broader discourses of nation that produce
frameworks of social and collective memory. As Halbwachs describes it: [T]he
framework of collective memory confines and binds our most intimate remembrances to each other. It is not necessary that the group be familiar with them
(1992, 53).
Halbwachs suggests in The Collective Memory (first published in 1950) that
General history starts only when tradition ends and social memory is fading
or breaking up (1980, 139). This idea is taken up and developed in the work of
French historian Pierre Nora via his influential concept of sites of memory (lieux
de me moire).5 In the introduction to his major project on the national memory of
France, Between Memory and History, first published in English in 1989, Nora
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argues that modernity brings with it the demise of organic forms of memory and
their replacement by the cultivation of sites of memory (1989, 7).6 For Nora, sites
of memory are where memory crystallizes rather than the real environments
of memory (milieux de memoire) that you find in societies with strong oral traditions
(1989, 7). This is an effect of what he calls the acceleration of history,
an increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for
good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear:
Our interests in lieux de me moire, sites of memory, where memory crystallizes and
secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where
consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been
torn but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in
certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de me moire,
sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de me moire, real environments of
memory. (Nora 1989, 7)
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Postmemory
Many aspects of recent debate on the mechanisms and cultural politics of memory
have found their focus in Holocaust Studies. These include the status of survivors
testimonies, the social role of public forms of memorialisation, the motives informing
strategies of remembering and forgetting, the therapeutic importance of transforming traumatic memories into narratives that are socially recognised, and the concepts
of trauma, postmemory and cultural memory. In his article Before Holocaust
Memory: Making Sense of Trauma between Postmemory and Cultural Memory,
Jon Stratton (2005, 54) argues that the Holocaust was a discursive construction of
the 1960s that allowed the trauma caused by the Third Reich to be voiced.
It created, in Ernst van Alphens words, the terms to transform living through the
event into an experience of the event (Alphen 1999, 27). The discourse of the
Holocaust, Stratton suggests, becomes the vehicle for the articulation of both
individual and cultural trauma and the idea of western culture as posttraumatic:
The discourse of the Holocaust not only gives us a way of understanding certain past
events, it is a means of remembering those events and, more, a way of understanding
individual trauma that is removed from those events trauma, we might say, as
transgenerational haunting. (Stratton 2005, 57)
In her work on the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch uses the term postmemory:
to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to
the experience of their parents, experiences that they remember only as stories and
images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to
constitute memories in their own right. (Hirsch 1999, 8)
Hirsch argues that this is memory of a different qualitative and temporal order from
the memories of survivors, since it is marked by its secondary or second generation
memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness (1999, 8).
Writing of his own mothers trauma in witnessing at a mediated remove what
had happened to others, a trauma that continued to affect her day-to-day response to
German people and to media reports about Germany or Germans, Jon Stratton
comments that it was:
not strictly postmemory in that it was a reaction that was passed on, a reaction,
expressing an emotional complex made up of fear, anger, perhaps sadness and other
emotions. All these passed on without realisation, a legacy composed of affect. (Stratton
2005, 61)
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The concepts of postmemory and the legacy of affect are useful beyond
Holocaust studies for understanding the power of collective memory for other
groups who are the descendants of and identify with the victims of traumatic past
events. Writing of her emotional relation to slavery in the New World in the foreword
to Unheard Voices, an edited collection of writings published to coincide with the
200th anniversary of the abolition of British involvement in the slave trade, Malorie
Blackman writes:
From my own point of view, although the voyage through my past may make me weep, I
can still draw strength from the fact that my ancestors were slaves in the West Indies.
Why? Because they survived the inhuman, barbaric transportation from Africa. They
survived the inhuman regime they encountered once they reached the West Indies. They
survived. I am descended from survivors and that thought makes me strong. (2007, no
page)
This signals a shift from individual to a broader cultural, collective memory in which
it is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the
same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other
proximate or distant cultures and subcultures (Hirsch 1999, 9). Hirsch argues
that this can bring the question of ethics to the fore since it signals an ethical
relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a
model: as I can remember my parents memories, I can also remember the
suffering of others (1999, 89). Raychaudhuris article on why there is no national
museum of partition in India points to nationalist frames of interpretation in official
narrative of partition and the impossibility of doing justice to the memory and
postmemory of Partition.
Affect
Collective memory embraces the social, cultural and affective dimensions of
memory, which always exceed what is actually incorporated in specific articulations
of collective memory. Memory exists in multiple forms of text, embodied practice
and affect (see Connerton 1989). Individual memory-related and memory-constituting texts and practices, which are at their most effective when they engage affect,
offer individual subjects ways of locating themselves in relation to the past. The
article by Otele offers a good example of this. As Otele shows, the feedback from
visitors to the Slave Trade Exhibition in Bristol highlighted how the specificity of the
individual or group encountering acts of memory in public museums shapes affective
responses. Writing of oral history, Della Pollock argues that Performance whether
we are talking about the everyday act of telling a story or the staged reiteration of
stories is an especially charged, contingent, reflexive space of encountering the
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complex web of our respective histories (2005, 1). This is arguably also true of
attempts to stage the past through film, which also promotes subjective engagement
in the production of the meaning of the past.9 Otele shows how the processes
whereby the Bristol Slave Trade Gallery came into existence offers an example of
strategic remembering and forgetting and of the problems of representing a
traumatic history that still speaks directly to black people and, like the more recent
trauma of partition in South Asia, cannot be adequately expressed in words.
An important common theme explored in the articles is what Ilan Gur-Zeev and
Ilan Pappe (n.d.) describe in their article Beyond the Destruction of the Others
Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue as the destruction of the collective memory of the Other, through the construction of ones own.
Otele shows how the history of the slave trade in Bristol was rendered invisible until
members of Bristols black community raised the issue. Raychaudhuri analyses how
strategies of memorialisation have shaped the partial collective memory of the Indian
partition in India, and Torres engages with the memory of the Japanese in the
Philippines before World War II. In each case study, the cultural political struggle
over voice and memory had effectively removed the memory on the non-dominant
group and given rise to forms of counter-memory that challenge hegemonic
constructions of collective memory and history. The degree of violence involved in
the suppression of the collective memory of the other does vary from the almost
polite silencing and forgetting that produced the absence of the history of the slave
trade in former British slaving ports to the active suppression of history and memory
in Spain in the immediate post civil war years. Gur-Zeev and Pappe (n.d.) link their
argument to the formation of national identities, arguing that Violence, direct as
well as symbolic, plays thereby a crucial part as collective memories are produced,
reproduced, disseminated and consumed within concrete historical power relations,
interests and conceptual possibilities and limitations. Writing of the case of
Palestine/Israel, where the issues involved relate to the present as much as to the past
and are directly grounded in ongoing struggles over land and sovereignty, they argue
that:
control of the collective memory is part of the internal and external violence each of the
rival collectives applies to secure its reconstruction. That is, the way the two sides to the
conflict construct their collective identity is a dialectical process whose impelling force is
the total negation of the Other. Within this dialectic each side sees itself as a sole victim
while totally negating the victimization of the Other . . . In the case of the Israeli/
Palestinian coexistence, the struggle over the control of the memory of victimization is a
matter of life and death, and suffering and death, as actuality and as memory, are
philosophical, political and existential issues. (Gur-Zeev and Pappe n.d.)
This was, for example, the case in Spain during Francos regime, when the mass
killings of Republicans were erased from collective memory. It is only recently, with
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the passing of the Law of Historical Memory put before parliament in 2006 the
Spanish governments Year of Historical Memory that this history has been placed
on the agenda for both public and collective memory. The Law of Historical Memory
was opposed as historical revisionism by right-wing conservative groups. As in other
cases such as New World slavery, the debate is also linked to questions of reparation.
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Notes
1. In addition to our academic interests in Collective Memory (see, for example, Jordan and
Weedon 2000, 2010), we have been working practically in the area of collective memory for
nearly 25 years. Glenn founded the organisation now known as Butetown History & Arts
Centre (www.bhac.org) in Cardiff Docklands in 1987 as Butetown Community History
Project, with weekly meetings in the local community centre. This collaborative,
community-based initiative developed with project funding and the work of dedicated
volunteers. The Centres unique peoples history archive includes some 7000 photographic
images of old Cardiff docklands and hundreds of portraits of people of ethnically-diverse
backgrounds in Wales; paintings and drawings; more than 500 hours of life-histories and
life-stories from local residents, many of whom are from immigrant and ethnic minority
groups; some videotaped interviews; television and radio programmes; various documents
and reports; and so forth. For an account of the development of the project, see Jordan
and Weedon (1995, 134173).
2. For many scholars working on memory, concepts of individual, social and collective
memory require another term, cultural memory, which is not so obviously allied to specific
social groups. As Mieke Bal argues in the introduction to the 1999 collection of essays
Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, cultural memory allows a way of thinking
outside the roles played by particular social institutions in the formation of memory.
Cultural memory recognises that cultures reproduce and reform themselves and that, in
this process, understandings of the past are transformed (Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer
1999, 57). In this special section we are concerned with the specificity of collective memory
as linked to social groups.
3. Activities were promoted throughout the United Kingdom, funded by the Heritage
Lottery Fund. For more on the politics of memorialising the anniversary, see Weedon
(2008).
4. For an example of this, see Jordan (2011).
5. Nora explores sites of memory in his seven-volume project on the national memory of
France, Les Lieux de me moire (19811992). A three-volume English edition, Rethinking
France, was published between 2001 and 2009 (Nora 2001/2006/2009).
6. He suggests that the demise of peasant culture and traditions (which he links to
organicism, immediacy and the sacred) gave rise to the need to create memory via
archives, anniversaries, celebrations, and so forth.
7. In this argument, real memory is seen as pre-modern, the province of so-called
primitive or archaic societies (Nora 1989, 8) that are seemingly timeless, and where it is
linked to ritual and the sacred and juxtaposed to history, which is seen as what comes to
replace collective memory in modern societies.
8. In a critique of Noras theory, John Frow suggests that Noras argument is both nostalgic
and idealist, since it sees memory as unstructured by social technologies of learning
or recall; it is incapable of reflexivity (it cannot take itself as an object), and its mode of
apprehension is thus rooted in the inherent self-knowledge and the unstudied reflexes
of the body; it is organically related to its community and partakes of the continuity of
tradition (Frow 1997, 151). Frow finds this no longer tenable because it cannot
account for the materiality of signs and of the representational forms by which memory is
structured (1997, 151). We would also want to take issue with the nostalgic view of real
environments of memory marked by a memorial consciousness that has barely survived
in a historical age. This has primitivist echoes, suggesting a timeless organicism that
disavows the constructed nature of rituals and other traditional practices and their place
in the reproduction of power relations within particular societies. At the same time we
would want to emphasise the effectivity in the present of Noras sites of memory that fulfil
a much more important role than that of a nostalgic counterpart to history.
9. For another example of this in relation to the Middle Passage, see Jordan (2008).
10. In autumn 2002, Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith edited a special issue of Signs on
Gender and Cultural Memory that focused attention on theoretical questions related to
memory and trauma from the perspective of gender. It included work on national countermemories, testimony and nostalgia, as well as a roundtable on Gender and September 11.
152
Notes on contributors
Glenn Jordan is Reader in Cultural Studies & Creative Practice at the University of
Glamorgan and Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre, a community-based archive,
gallery and educational resource in Cardiff, Wales. He has published widely on peoples
history, race, visual culture and immigrants and minorities in Wales. His books include
Cultural Politics (with Chris Weedon; Blackwell, 1995) and Somali Elders: Portraits from
Wales (Butetown History & Arts Centre, 2004). He is currently working on two projects
combining photography and oral history: Mothers and Daughters: Portraits from Multi-ethnic
Wales and Hineni, a project on elderly Jewish migrants in Wales, some of whom survived the
Holocaust. A Sikh Face in Ireland, an exhibition of his photographs accompanied by lifestories, ran from May to September 2010 at the prestigious Chester Beatty Library in Dublin
Castle.
Chris Weedon directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. She
has published widely on feminist theory, cultural politics, womens writing and minority
writing. Her books include Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987 and 1996),
Cultural Politics (with Glenn Jordan, 1994), Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference
(1999), Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging (2004), and Gender,
Feminism and Fiction in Germany 18401914 (2006).
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