The central challenge of globalization for democracy is to have the new forms of interconnectedness without increasing the possibilities for domination. (Bohman, 2004: 143) The political promise of cosmopolitan memoryIn this article, I seek to comment on a growing body of work within the field of memory studies that proposes an empirical shift in the nature of collective memory under the impact of the globalized 'second modernity'. Collective memory is seen as transcending the traditional container of the nation-state and entering into a transnational framework. This transformation is seen as deriving from global processes characterized by the 'deterritorialisation of politics and culture' (Tomlinson, 1999) and an increasing 'internal globalisation' or 'cosmopolitanisation' (Beck, 2006) where global concerns become part of the everyday local experiences and moral life-worlds of people around the world. While global interdependencies linked to migration, economies, ecological and terrorist threats are seen to be animating this shared consciousness, the primary site for the development and proliferation of this transnational memory is located firmly in the representational domain of mass media and electronically based communication.Broadly, this shift is rendered in a positive light with the imagination of a mnemonic community transcending the nation-state seen as providing the basis for post-nationalist political alliances and a more democratic and just global polity. This epochal transformation has been theorized most extensively by Levy and Sznaider, who label the new
This paper examines the politics of scale in the commemorative work undertaken by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), a coalition of social movement organisations seeking justice for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984. The argument traces how the ICJB attempted to contest the localisation of the disaster by the Indian state and the transnational corporations involved. I outline how the disaster, which had been scaled down from an extraordinary global event to a private non-issue, was re-scaled successfully across multiple scales of meaning and regulation through ICJB's mobilisation of the frame of 'second/ongoing poisoning'. This contestation over the scaling of the disaster crucially involved multiple processes of memory-work. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reveals how the remembrance of the disaster functioned as a key site of the discursive and performative re-framings required to reinstate multi-scalar accountability for the disaster. Overall, the paper establishes the utility of the politics of scale approach in mapping the dynamics of the transnational mobilisations of memory by social movement organisations in pursuit of justice.
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