Class and Memory Activism

Abstract

In this chapter, I call on memory scholars and activists to revisit the relationship between class and memory. Class, operating through the unequal distribution of both material and symbolic resources, has an inconspicuous, hidden, and tacit quality to it. Thinking through the contradictions posed by class, memory activists fighting for economic and racial justice can give voice to lived experiences of dispossession and bring structures of exploitation to light. The concept of moral economy, I suggest, provides a particularly rich theoretical and empirical repertoire to do so. The chapter identifies potential avenues for research on class and memory activism in four areas in which class is variously institutionalized in society: Generation, milieu, ethnicity and gender.