Introduction: Mnemonic Solidarity—Global Interventions

Abstract

Lim and Rosenhaft introduce “mnemonic solidarity” as a scholarly and political program, situating it in the context of the wider project and publication series “Entangled Memories in the Global South.” Their programmatic approach arises from the observation that a global memory formation has emerged since the late twentieth century, involving interchanges of various kinds between national memory cultures and structured by the terms of Holocaust memory. This development and its political implications have been addressed in various ways by scholars under the rubrics of “cosmopolitan,” “multidirectional,” “traveling,” “prosthetic,” “transnational,” and “agonistic” memory, but the new field of memory studies remains Eurocentric and relatively insensitive to the double-edged character of globalized memory—the interplay between de-territorialization and re-territorialization. This volume aims to reset the agenda.

New constellations of mnemonic wars: An introduction

“…A few years later, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (2010) wrote that ‘memory and the global have to be studied together, as it has become impossible to understand the trajectories of memory without a global frame of reference’ (p. 2). This linkage is now generally recognized (Bond et al, 2018; De Cesari and Rigney, 2014b; Jarausch and Lindenberger, 2011; Kończal and Moses, 2022; Lewis et al, 2022; Lim and Rosenhaft, 2021; Phillips and Reyes, 2011; Rothberg, 2009; Wüstenberg and Sierp, 2020).…”

Mnemonic reciprocity: Activating Sydney’s Comfort Women statue for decolonial memory

“…While the mnemonic reciprocity fostered by the activation of the Peace Statue has a localised, small-scale effect, the implications of our findings for the field of memory studies are nevertheless significant. They highlight the need both to critically evaluate the effectiveness of fixed memory tropes in promoting reconciliation (see also David, 2020;Hirsch, 2019;Lim and Rosenhaft, 2021) and to explore how alternative forms of local connectivity emerge in places where universally endorsed, normative approaches to remembrance seem to have failed. Diasporic memory activists lobbied Western countries' governments to erect Peace Statues in public places specifically to exert pressure on Japan to face up to its wartime abuses (Song, 2013).…”

“…To that end, we discuss selected events in Sydney that centred on the statue, arguing that they constitute examples of what we call mnemonic reciprocity. While informed by affiliated concepts such as ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg, 2009: 3) and ‘mnemonic solidarity’ (Lim and Rosenhaft, 2021: 2), our concept of mnemonic reciprocity emerges from the dynamics of exchanges between memory actors and community members, including members of the Korean-Australian diaspora and Indigenous Australians in Sydney, where the Statue of Peace is re-territorialised on unceded Aboriginal land. We explore the specific ways in which mnemonic reciprocity is activated in commemorative events at which Korean-Australians and Chinese-Australians come together with First Nations Australians involving protocols of welcome, acknowledgement and shared remembrance.…”

‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

“…race, gender) and violence, then for memory studies the preoccupation has been with the entity and violence of state (and nation), which has largely ignored economic violence (capital) and different logics of oppression and class exploitation. If Marxist theory long remained embedded in the sphere of the economy and structural violence of capital, then memory studies – and a giant part of Western memory culture – has been shaped by a vague analytic of totalitarian violence and victimhood (for a critique of the universalism of antitotalitarian memory, see Lim, 2021). Juxtaposed to vague analytics, one can find Michael Rothberg’s approach that lucidly demonstrates how conventional approaches in memory studies can come to terms with heterogeneous forms of violence and their histories (Rothberg, 2009).…”

“…Juxtaposed to vague analytics, one can find Michael Rothberg’s approach that lucidly demonstrates how conventional approaches in memory studies can come to terms with heterogeneous forms of violence and their histories (Rothberg, 2009). Furthermore, for critical memory studies to account for the complexities of time, violence and the field’s interdisciplinarity, the plea for memory activism and solidarity with the oppressed should necessarily extend beyond the national frame and the centrality of the state and its apparatuses (Feindt et al, 2014; Lim, 2021; Rigney, 2018).…”