Memory in a Global Age

In an influential essay, Arjun Appadurai described the emergence of the present state of globalization as a shift from stability to motion. The globalized world, he argues, is a world in motion, a world with different speeds, a world of disjunctive flows. To a large extent, it is the heir to older historical developments such as empires, monotheistic religion, colonialism and capitalism, but in its present stage, it is energized by new forms of mobility. While global actors such as nation states and industrial corporations deploy the global infrastructures of information, traffic and commerce to extend their power and wealth in forms of ‘predatory mobility’, other movements have entered the global stage to counter globalization not only by protecting and reinforcing the local forms of subsistence, but also by organizing new forms of counter-globalization or alternative forms of globalization. In his essay, Appadurai focuses on the phenomenon of ‘grassroots globalization’. He uses this term to describe movements that propel globalization from below, endorsing an emancipatory politics of globalization that can back up the counter vision of an international civil society. This counter vision requires creative imagination. For this reason, Appadurai resurrects the discourse of the imagination, reclaiming it in the political struggle for the losers of globalization (Appadurai 2000, 1–19).

Collective memories of nations, for the most part, relate to events of either glory or victimhood. They depict the national self as triumphantly victorious or tragically defeated hero respectively – but nevertheless as hero. There are other kinds of memories, however, that undermine heroic narratives and the self-stylization of nations: painful memories of perpetration and guilt.

The transformation of global politics in the early 1990s marked the end of the ‘short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 1994) and its Cold War certainties. If the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of apartheid in South Africa and fall of Latin America dictators indicated the victorious extension of the international liberal order, the outbreak of genocidal ethnic conflict in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Caucasus also heralded the return of integral nationalism. These events marked a new temporality and resultant new type of politics (Olick 2007). Because socialist hopes of a post-nationalist horizon had been dashed, grievances were now framed in terms of ethnic and national histories, which some observers interpreted as a regressive political imaginary of identity politics that divided peoples and occluded the persistence of structural oppression and inequality (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 171–86; Torpey 2006). In particular, the plethora of official apologies, truth commissions and reparations payments for ‘historical injustice’ suggested a preoccupation with the past rather than the future.¹ Certainly, there is no doubting the transnational extent of apologies by governments, heads of state, professional and commercial groups, religious organizations and spiritual leaders to exploited individuals and abused communities, living and dead (Celermajer 2009; Nobles 2008; Torpey 2002; Cunningham 1999, 285–93). Consider the following sample.

State violence has left deep scars in various societies in Latin America, and continuing debates in the public sphere attest to the fact that the past is still very much present. In this chapter I present two related arguments, one pertaining to the temporal dimension of public memory and the other to the spatial contexts. Firstly, the chapter shows that time is not linear in histories of political confrontation and violence, and of repression and suffering. The passage of time does not imply closure or a societal sense of having settled accounts with the past. Looking at a con-flictual and painful past, and searching for its meaning, is a never-ending undertaking. It is also conflict-ridden and its representation is highly contested in each subsequent ‘present’. While political and social actors may attempt to attain closure, in the long run the outcome is usually failure.

The years 1945 and 1989 were crucial for the genesis of the social-scientific conceptualization of memory as we know it today. During these two periods of upheaval, the content and political meaning of ‘memory’ was shaped by specific social phenomena, particularly the experience of repression. In 1945, the victorious Allies began to understand the full extent of the Holocaust in the liberated concentration and extermination camps: the most systematic genocide in world history had been carried out in the very region that presented itself as the centre of civilization, progress and enlightenment. In the late 1940s, the first conclusions drawn from this experience, in the form of the statutes and judgements of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, became the basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Those agreements subsequently formed an ethical reference point for a new system of international relations.

The Holocaust is the name for a complex of events, actions and experiences that had a global impact historically and an emphatically transnational character. Due to its radical anti-human ideology, geographic scope and bureaucratic ‘perfection’, today it stands out as the paradigmatic genocide in world consciousness. From its very beginning, the social exclusion, contraction and extermination of European Jews was associated with spatial movements. Acts such as expulsion, flight and migration into exile, as well as deportation, the concentration of victims in transit camps and their transfer to sites of exploitation and extinction, implied crossings of many national borders. The Nazi administration was also eager to ‘outsource’ their crimes and to hide them in far-off places. The many languages in the concentration camps, as Primo Levi noted, rendered these places into a ‘perpetual Babel’ (Levi 1996, 38); people from many nations were drawn into the lethal orbit of the Holocaust, which was planned and organized by the Germans and enforced and supported by many other countries. Given the transnational nature of the crime, one that not only pulled together and concentrated millions of victims in the bureaucratic machinery of death, but also unleashed a centrifugal effect of scattering the families of victims across five continents, it is to be expected that this mega-event should find its resonance in transnational memory.

I would like to start this text with a definition of concepts. Without any claim to a general theory and simply for the restricted purposes of this chapter, I propose to distinguish between globalization and universal-ism. Under the term globalization, I understand a process of general dissemination (of merchandise, technologies, news, political influence, religious ideas) across political and cultural boundaries and of the ensuing integration of various, previously isolated zones into one system of interconnections and interdependencies, where all nations, empires, tribes and states cohere in some way or other through political, economic or cultural relations.

The most frequent misunderstanding of nationalism is that nationalism is national. Nationalism is one of the most peculiar transnational phenomena in that nationalist imagination can be fed only in transnational space. Victimhood nationalism is no exception since victims without perpetrators are unthinkable, and vice versa. The collective dichotomy of victimizers and victims in national terms articulates the transnationality of nationalism. Once inserted into the collective dichotomy of victim-izers and victims, however, victimhood becomes hereditary, in order to consolidate the national collective that binds generations together. The seemingly political production, consumption and distribution of ‘hereditary victimhood’ appears to be national rather than transnational.¹ This does not mean, however, that trajectories of victimhood memory are bound within national borders. Rather, contested memories of victim-hood cannot be understood outside a global frame of reference. Memories of victimhood have become more contested with the emergence of ‘new transnational memory communities that appeal to regional connections and shared pasts’ in terms by the editors of this book.

‘Asia’ has returned to Japan, and Japan to ‘Asia’. For about one-and-a-half decades, intellectuals and politicians have been trying to redefine Japan’s place in the global order. Until 1990, the country’s primary orientation had been towards America. Under the umbrella of the security treaties with the US, Japan had defined herself essentially as part of the ‘West’. Asia, on the other hand, was virtually absent from Japanese discourse. The situation has changed markedly with the end of the Cold War and with the dissolution of the bipolar world order. While the US continues to be an important point of reference, the Asian neighbours in recent years have assumed increasing relevance in Japan.

Commenting on the Bruce Lee statue in Mostar, in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Bosnian author and journalist Miljenko Jergović recounts an anecdote about a clerk at a currency exchange office in Zagreb, Croatia (Jergović 2003). During a transaction, a Bosnian couple experienced a peculiar discriminatory incident. While accepting one Bosnian banknote with the portrait of the Bosnian Muslim poet Mehmedalija ‘Mak’ Dizdar, the clerk refused to handle another banknote, which bore the face of Aleksa Šantić, a Bosnian Serb poet from Mostar.² It turned out that the clerk, who had single-handedly refused to handle currency marked by Serb ethno-nationality, was himself a Bosnian Croat who, as Jergović explains, forged his distinct identity around ‘bitter, belligerent, and distorted dispositions’. Jergović comments on this incident: ‘These same people, “our” people fervently believe that Bosnian currency cannot bear the portraits of both a Croat, even if his name were Muslim, Mehmedalija, and a Serb, even if he had a Christian name, Aleksa’.

During my stay at a German university as an exchange student, the music by the Franco-Spanish nomadic artist Manu Chao hit the radio waves, receiving a willing listenership throughout our international student residence. Manu Chao’s album Clandestino (1998) was a unique blend of musical styles (reggae, salsa, rumba and rap) and languages (Spanish, French, Brazilian-Portuguese and English) which suited our cosmopolitan atmosphere. It also featured samples from traditional Latin-American songs, Brazilian and Soviet radio, Spanish T V, Jamaican dub sessions and the Zapatista manifesto. Reminiscent of a frantic trip across a world in disarray, the mood of Clandestino was at once ironic and melancholic. The lyrics dealt with the experiences of illegal immigrants in Western Europe and North America, and they presented the singer himself as a restless wanderer unable to commit himself to one place. This medley of sounds and ideas provided the fitting soundtrack for my own transnational, polyglot and somewhat confused identity. Having grown up between post-colonial Angola, Yugoslavia and Portugal, I had the impression that I belonged everywhere and nowhere. Like Manu Chao’s song ‘Desaparecido’ (the vanished), I was ‘lost in the twentieth century, moving towards the twenty-first’. Listening to Clandestino helped me realize that my own placelessness was not so exceptional.

On 26 December 2009, the London Times chose Neda Agha-Soltan as ‘person of the year’. The article stated: ‘Neda Soltan […], a young beautiful woman who had studied philosophy, was now an aspiring singer, […] found herself abruptly catapulted from the crowds of Tehran to become the face of protest against Iran’s repressive rulers; a symbol of rebellion against the fraudulent election that had just returned Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to power’. Neda is included in a list of recent heroes and victims whose suffering became a beacon of protest against repressive injustice and brutal violations of human rights (Times 1 2009).