Memorializing the unspectacular: Toward a minor remembrance

Abstract

This essay explores the difficulties faced by the field of memory studies to adequately address unspectacular violence. While a majority of mnemonic strategies focus on events of spectacular disasters, outrageous atrocities, extreme occurrences, and massive sufferings contained in time and space, the damages generated by unspectacular operations of slow, latent, and silent violence remain difficult to recognize within the memorial landscape. Building on the concept of slow violence, as well as on posthumanist approaches to violent legacies of colonialism, and in the context of the current shift within memory studies toward a planetary sensitivity, this essay interrogates the possibilities of doing justice to the invisibilized harm spreading across long periods of time in different parts of the world. Sketching a possible agenda for the future, the essay suggests that a critical engagement with theorizations of feminist geopoliticians, along with a turn to practices of minor remembrance, can enable a more effective linking of the unspectacular to the spectacular, ensuring the visibility of the former amid memorializing practices.