Time, memory and historical justice: An introduction

Negotiating Cultural Rights

“…78 while the same historical revision for many settlers 'raises questions not only about their own identity as a group, but also about their ongoing rights.' 79 The silencing of traumatic memories may come from efforts by particular memorial entrepreneurs (and even professional historians) to shape a narrative aimed at fostering reconciliation. 80 In this regard, a political perspective relevant to post-conflict societies is somewhat under-communicated in History.…”

Burdens of Proof

“…Rather than historians mainly working to unearth and reproduce further visual evidence of atrocity and expect it to 'speak for itself' to contemporary audiences and their juridically inflected expectations of what extreme violence might look like, approaches to using photographs must be considered that will enable Indonesian as well as Dutch viewers to speak to and with such findings in advance of their being made. This would seem a pressing concern given the current demands already placed on Indonesians, and historians of Indonesia, to acknowledge, assess, and reconcile genealogies and legacies of extreme violence in the post-independence period, most notably during the mass killings of 1965-1966(McGregor 2012, 2013. The challenge, then, is for the colonial archive of Dutch soldiers' amateur photographs to be recast as a postcolonial archive that has a richer vein of meanings than 'proof' that both sides are tarnished with a history of violence.…”