Étienne FRANÇOIS

WRITING A GERMAN HISTORY OF MEMORY

This text is published in Russian, translated by Vera Milchina from: Étienne François. Ecrire une histoire des lieux de mémoire allemands // Bulletin de la Société des Amis de l’ Institut Historique Allemand. 1999. Vol. 5. P. 34-43.

SUMMARY

Étienne François explores the way in which the French project of creating “symbolic history” through studies of memory initiated by Pierre Nora’s work can be continued in a different national context. For François, it is the question of whether history of memory can be pursued in the German case. François notes that despite Nora’s insistence on the exclusivity of the French case, Germans have not less a “neurotic” attitude to their past.
At the same time, François admits that in Germany attitude to the national past memorial projects is profoundly different from the French case. Among such points of difference François notes that if in France national history is usually perceived as a long-term development rooted in the Middle Ages, in Germany looking at the past usually implies focusing on such topics as Nazism or “the second German dictatorship” in GDR. History of memory is problematic in Germany partly because most well known “places of memory” are concentration camps. It is also that in Germany perceptions of national identity are questioned to a greater extent than in France, which is a result of German history divided for the most part of the second half of the 20th century.
Despite these profound differences, François insists that France and Germany entered the “memorial period” simultaneously about 20 years ago. The Franco-German rapprochement and the development of mass cultural tourism greatly contributed to that process. This “memorial boom” is reflected in three major developments: the growth of and greater attention to memorial events, such as the celebration of “Luther’s year” in 1983; the public fascination with historical exhibitions; and the rise in popularity of historical museums. A development parallel to the growth of “memory” in Germany can be noticed in professional historical studies: in Germany, at the roots of the study of memory were Thomas Nipperdey and Reinhart Koselleck, while today the leading scholars in the field are Jan and Alaida Assman. The unification of Germany and the disappearance of the “German question” combined with dramatic improvements in the relationships between Germany and its neighbors created most favorable conditions for German memorial projects.
François touches upon the work of the conferences on “Nation and Emotion” held in Berlin in October 1993 and May 1995. At these events researchers agreed that the paradigm of “places of memory” that allows to create a symbolic history of a nation can be successfully implemented not only in France but elsewhere. The second conclusion of researchers was that it was impossible to replicate the French case in other national traditions. François notes four major principles that emerged out of the French-German cooperation in the studies of memory: the first is the preservation of a critical attitude to one’s own work and resistance to temptations to legitimate the existing political situation; second, the specifics of German history required more attention to conflicts, ruptures, and breaks in the past; third, such research should be open and pluralistic with respect to chronology and geography, without limiting one’s project to XIX and XX centuries or to the national level; finally, the pan-European context should be always taken into account, for varieties of national memory are often shaped by or in contact with “foreigners”.
In the last paragraphs of his contribution François informs the reader about the seminar on cultural memory that he and Hagen Schulze conducted in Berlin, as well as touches upon the structure and methodology of the project of German “places of memory” study. François explains the decision to structure the project around the list of key memorial terms, such as “Reich”, “Leistung”, “Schuld”, etc. François ends his article by pointing out the importance of German cultural memory in European context and in German national history.

Tony JUDT

A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

Published in Russian, translated by Marina Loskutova. The text is based on the article: Tony Judt. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu // The New York Review of Books. 1998. Vol. 45. No. 19, December 3.
© 1998 Tony Judt.

SUMMARY

Tony Judt explores the emergence of Pierre Nora’s project of describing the French places of memory by locating it in the context of transformations that France was undergoing in the post-World War II period. As Judt argues, in 1956 France still reminded one the France of 1856 in terms of the social composition of its population, the structure of its economy defined by late industrialization and the importance of agriculture, and the authoritarian political regime. In the 1960s, fundamental changes in the economy led to the growth of urbanization. Rising prosperity undermined the position of the French Communist party and the departure of Charles de Gaulle combined with Mitterand’s reluctance to pursue radically socialist policies left behind most divisive political distinctions between the conservative France and the left France. At the same time, the decline in importance of the French language combined with the revival of interest in regional identities and the loss of the French dominant position in world and European affairs contributed to the French perception that by 1980s their country was simultaneously undergoing several transformations: France was shrinking, breaking apart, and loosing its traditional identity. Pierre Nora’s project was initiated during this period of flux and uncertainty. Thus, Nora’s project was a response to the sense of loss of traditional France in public consciousness and an attempt to fixate in historical categories elements of public memory.
Judt notes the contradiction of Nora’s project: designed as an attempt to fixate, explore, and repudiate various historical myths, the project itself finally turned into the celebration of the past. Judt sees several reasons for this transformation. First, Pierre Nora is an important figure on the French intellectual landscape, and he attracted best specialists to write articles in the collection. Second, there is no more consensus on the canon of the past and people disagree profoundly on what can or should be included in such a project. Taking possession of past events and places brought together accidentally underscores the break of the historical tradition. Third, despite many genius insights in the articles of the collection, it turned into a text that displays emotional attraction of researchers to the object of their study. The fact that the collection curiously omitted any references to the legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte or his nephew Louis Napoleon underscores how the project reflects French ambiguities about France’s past. Judt also critically surveys Nora’s claims of the specificity and exclusivity of the French historical experiences, which, allegedly, make France into a “nation of memory” like no any other nation.
Judt also analyses particular contributions to the volume, focusing on such topics as Catholicism and other religions in French memory. He notes that in the collection those studies that are dedicated to Protestants and Jews are characterized by more methodological innovation then the more traditional explorations of the role of Catholicism in French history and serve as a reminder to the editor of the collection, which avoided the memory of St. Bartholomew’s Night. Judt also explores the ambiguity of perceptions of the countryside always characterized positively and of the province and the provincial always characterized negatively in the French history. Judt explores the role played in French history by memory of wars.
From Judt’s point of view, Nora’s project is informed by the fact that today (unlike earlier in French history) French public memory shaped by official representation differs from history as told by historians. As Judt argues, public memory without a foundation in narrative history looses coherence and turns into “places of forgetting”.
According to Judt, Nora’s project of describing “places of memory” was a response to the loss of the sense of eternal identity experienced by the French society at the juncture when two leading historical schools – the Annales and the (neo)Marxist historiography of the French revolution – lost their predominant position. Nora’s story is about that meaning that the French ascribe to France and its identity, and those aspects of French history, such as Bonaparte’s legacy of national minorities, were either omitted or pushed to the periphery of the narrative. In that sense, Nora’s collection represents an example of a modern mythology and cannot be called a historical study properly, despite high quality contributions by professional historians.
Concerning the applicability of the French project to the Soviet context, Judt argues that it has little to offer to an understanding of a multinational state. In France, history is an established and respected discipline and Nora can offer an alternative approach to the past, while in post-Soviet societies the task is to return to scholarly writing of history. Finally, Nora’s project is the product of the Parisian intelligentsia, self-assured and well versed in all details of French history. It has not been repeated elsewhere in Europe. It is a jeu d’esprit that can hardly be replicated elsewhere.

Marina LOSKUTOVA

ON MEMORY, VISUAL IMAGES, ORAL HISTORY, AND BEYOND

This text is published in Russian.

SUMMARY

Marina Loskutova points out that “memory” is an imported methodology in Russia. At the same time, as most researchers of memory explain, the studies of memory are related to profound changes in Western societies in the post-war period. Correspondingly, the importation of memory studies will depend on similarity of experiences. In particular, the sense of the local landscape permeated by memorials of the past, the omnipresence of places of memory in Russia is not a given fact. Despite agricultural and peasant roots of most post-Soviet citizens, very few people will seek to uncover their village roots, and if they do, not industry of memorabilia exists for them. The study of memory in Western societies is also related to the communications revolution and to the new generation of mass-media, which brings forth the problem of the visual image as a sign of the past. It is the prevalence of visual culture, according to the author, that informs the upsurge in memory studies.
Loskutova then focuses on the contents of the concept of “memory”. According to the author, it implies 1) social cadres that allow an autobiographical memory to take shape; 2) oral memories circulating in society; 3) collective commemorations; 4) information devices, from newspaper to CD, delivering information about the past to an audience larger than professional historians’ community; 5) habits of the body. As the author argues, these aspects are hardly related, and their combination within one research framework obscures rather then helps to solve the problem. At the same time, none of them is specifically related to the nation-state (with the exception of commemorations). It is traditional narrative history that provides the basis for national identity, even if we consider the explosive “memory” of ethnic minorities, which is often based on semi-professional historical accounts popularized by mass media.
Loskutova agrees with Judt’s argument concerning the importance of a historical narrative taught at school; at the same time, she takes issue with him concerning the presence of such a narrative in Eastern Europe. She notes that in post-Soviet Russia there is little doubt about historians’ right to talk about the past authoritatively and there is little criticism of traditional narrative historical modes.
For Loskutova, the experience of importing oral history methods into the Russian context is telling. On the one hand, the community of professional historians is skeptical about the use of oral histories interviews, pointing to the need to verify data using traditional methods anyway. Historians are also reluctant to accept the possibility that contemporary perceptions of the past should be in their sphere of competence. With respect to the Soviet past seen through oral history two drastically different positions are prevalent: “Soviet history is only possible on the basis of oral data for historians have always lied to us” and “People don’t remember much and they do they won’t tell”. Loskutova notes that many memories of the Siege of Leningrad in World War II are told according to one scenario, which implies likely following prescribed expectations of such a memory. At the same time, research into what was told in families demonstrated significant variations in memories, thus undermining the interview method. Finally, Loskutova argues that it is possible to study “imperial memory” as informal knowledge of imperial social and political mechanisms. Nevertheless, such studies of memory cannot be an alternative to a meta-narrative of imperial history.

Igor NARSKII

MEMORY AS SOCIAL PHENOMENON

This text is published in Russian.

SUMMARY

Igor Narskii points out that historiography knows works on functions of collective memory in imperial and Soviet Russia (Lotman, Wortman, Plaggenborg). Narskii criticizes approaches to memory in the editorial introduction as too narrow. For Narskii, memory is cultural context and includes not only images of the past but also mechanisms of their formation, circulation, manipulation, etc. Imperial memory is heterogeneous as much as the national memory. Narskii also focuses on varieties of imperial memory that support/maintain supranational unit without being totalitarian. The author refers to particular junctures in history when addressing the past becomes an important societal aspect. He also argues that the Russian scholarly community focuses on such issues as memory belatedly, when the problem has already been discussed in the West and triggers idiosyncratic reactions from Western colleagues.
For Narskii, historical memory is the field for research in the framework of new social and cultural history and it can become a key in interpreting the subjective world of people in the past. Narskii reminds that it is not just the concept itself but the hard work of adapting it to the needs of historical scholarship that matters.

Andreas LANGENOHL

In my comments on the questions raised by the editors, I would like to concentrate on a categorical decision underlying this set of questions that seems to be of crucial importance: the distinction between “national” and “imperial” memory. In particular, I intend to critique the assumption that imperial memory or historiography can really be an alternative to national modes of representing the past. Also I shall include into these considerations some remarks on the important question concerning the relationship between post-imperial historiography and collective memory.
Thinking about empire and its relation to representing the past or as being represented as past, one must not neglect postcolonial literary and historical criticism that formed in reaction to attempts in the former colonies turned nation-states to come up with national histories as legitimating narratives for the new national-collective subject and its political elites.^[1] As I shall argue, postcolonial criticism, although its principles cannot be fully applied to the successor states of the Soviet Union, highlights some fundamental issues in connection with memory in post-imperial spaces. With India and other former colonies of the British Empire becoming independent states since the 1940’s, the education and research institutions of these new nation-states attempted to develop national histories that would fulfil the function historiography has played in the European nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries: to represent the past as a teleological development toward a final product, the nation-state.^[2] This project was set out to serve the former colonies in achieving full sovereignty also on a cultural level; and it is this attempt at formation of a homogenous national-collective identity via representations of the past that postcolonial criticism is aiming at, which is why it cannot be neglected in the present discussion.
Some examples of this debate must suffice here. Since the late 1970’s, the so-called “Subaltern Studies Group” which consisted of Indian and British historians has been arguing that post-independence Indian history-writing, in its attempt to set itself off from imperial British historiography, none the less reproduces on a categorical level the same fallacies that had characterised the latter. In particular, this concerned the methodical focus on the history of elites and the attempt to reconstruct Indian history as history of the Indian nation. Ranajit Guha, who can be regarded as the spokesman of this group at that time, holds that Indian history instead challenges the notion of the nation: “It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution – it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India.”^[3] The task that Indian society and history confronts social scientists with is to “recognize the contradictions within indigenous reality rather than merely deploying that reality against Western categories”.^[4]
From a postcolonialist point of view, therefore, it appears as utterly misleading to contrast national with imperial representations of the past. Due to this critique, the imperial impact on the colonies perpetuates itself into the postcolonial period precisely through categories like “national idea” or “national independence” that were set out to delineate the final emancipation from imperial tutelage in the first place. National framings of the past, be it in historiography, symbolic policy or public debate, cannot simply be regarded as expressions of the will to emancipate oneself from imperial domination but have to be reread as discursive devices that may serve the prolongation of the hegemony of the imperial centre’s interpretive patterns. Scholars in literature like, for instance, Homi Bhabha try to “rescue” from postcolonial literature those representations of the past that might be used to elaborate an alternative focus of collective identity – a “hybrid” identity that refuses to be subsumed either to the dichotomy of imperial vs. colonial or to that of imperial vs. national.^[5] One of the historical consequences of colonial empires, namely the emergence of diaspora populations among the former colonial subjects (Indians in Africa and Britain, Moroccans in France, Africans in the Caribbean, the U.S., and Britain, and so on), can thus be elevated onto a heuristic level in that it allows to conceptualise the formulation of a “diaspora space” that allows for such hybrid identification and escapes chauvinist self-identification.^[6]
Although the argument has been made that Bhabha ignores the power differentials between colonisers and colonised,^[7] his elaborations make it clear that postcolonial as well as post-imperial memory cannot naively seek refuge to a national mode of belonging since this mode is always-already intermingled with the imperial project of colonisation. This holds true for both sides of the colonial relationship. Neither can, on the one hand, the former colonies turned states simply claim for themselves nation-ness that they had been denied by the imperial centres because adopting ideas about a national past and identity that are historically rooted in the colonising project of the imperial metropolises would reproduce the subjugating narratives and policies of the latter. On the other hand, the former centre is confronted with rampant nationalism and xenophobia when subscribing to a purely national mode of collective identification and memory as it turns out that this had historically rested on images of the colonial Other who has now, in the course of colonial and postcolonial migration, moved to that very centre.
What can be learned from postcolonial criticism is a questioning of the opposition national vs. imperial. All Western empires had a national encoding of cultural belonging (and representations of the past) in their centre, and of course they did not concede such representations to their colonies. This is the main reason why postcolonial theory is right in conceptualising criticism of the colonial and postcolonial condition as a critique of representations. After the end of those empires, national modes of representing the past cannot play the role of providing an alternative to “imperial” memories; on the contrary, they tend to prolong imperial domination in the former colonies and to reinforce xenophobic sentiments in the former centres.
In regard to the successor states of the former Soviet Union, however, some important qualifications must be made. First, history. The leadership of the USSR had not promoted an explicit nationalism of the Russian centre that would have been set into contrast with the lacking nation-ness of the other peoples. The Marxist-Leninist ideology that Soviet leaders adhered to from Lenin himself to Gorbachev had no room for nationalist-exclusivist narratives but was, on the contrary, quite hostile against them. The ominous allusions to Tsarist imperialism and militarism and the notion that the Russian people had first achieved the Socialist phase that characterised some symbolic policies of the Stalin era could be based neither on a political socio-culture nor on an elite agreement. The ideology of the Soviet state was by definition outer-national, political legitimacy was not to come from some people’s national past but from the Communist party’s future – the promise to lead the country to Communism. In this context, non-Russian peoples were not only not denied national symbols such as regional languages as long as these were not given an exclusivist stance; additionally, they were actively encouraged to develop a national consciousness as part of a Communist one. Loyalty toward the centre was to be achieved via loyalty toward the ethnically defined Socialist republics. Yuri Slezkine has put it the following way: “There is no doubt that a lot of people were learning how to speak Tajik and Bolshevik at the same time.”^[8] Francine Hirsch has termed this an “empire of nations”,^[9] while Terry Martin has proposed the more vivid notion of an “affirmative action empire”.^[10]
Whatever term one prefers, what follows from this is that in the Soviet Union nationalism was not in the same way as in the West part and parcel of the imperial project since it did not differentiate between the “centre” and the “periphery” – Russians were denied nationalist-exclusivist symbolic just as well as non-Russians, while both were encouraged to identify with a Socialist nation – although the Russians, as a rule, less than the other peoples because, as the party saw it, they already were Socialist. In view of this missing differential in discursive power between centre and periphery, one might very well put into question whether the USSR was a colonial empire at all.^[11] Surely, it had greater similarities with the Habsburg Empire of the 19th century than with the overseas empires of Britain, France, Portugal, or Germany.
Secondly, a methodological qualification, concerning the appropriateness of a representationalist mode of criticism. Russia did not emerge from the USSR as a strong and self-sufficient nation-state with an unquestioned collective identity. Rather the non-Russian republics did. Given the fact that the former Soviet Union might be considered the only modern empire that succeeded a previous one, it appears all the more surprising and in the light of developments in Western colonial empires highly untypical that the Soviet leadership deliberately decided not to re-establish a political structure that was based on a relationship between centre and periphery (centre vs. colonies, “heartland” vs. dominion etc.) but to adopt (at least formally) a federal structure that turned the newly acquired (and indeed sometimes conquered) regions into republics. (After all, the main reason for doing so was not exploitation like in the Western colonial empires but modernization and domination.) This included the education of regional elites as well as – in some cases, for instance in the Baltic republics or in Kazakhstan – the settlement of ethnic Russians in the areas. The historical consequence of this strategy that had been aimed at economic development just as well as at political domination was that with the breakdown of the Soviet Union many ethnic or linguistic Russians found themselves suddenly living in the “diaspora”, that is, outside of the state that had been ascribed to them in 1991.
This situation turns the notion of postcolonialism that Homi Bhabha and others employ upside down. While the decline of the British and French empires produced more or less stable national entities in the former centres on the one hand and diasporas from the former colonies with “hybrid” and instable identities on the other hand (like, for instance, descendants of Indians having been moved to West Africa through indentured labour), in the case of the USSR in produced diasporas of the alleged “titular nationality” of the Soviet Union (the Russians) and, on top of that, a Russia that keeps questing for her identity, a problem that most of the surrounding republics do not seem to have. In other words, the unquestionably existing factual domination by Russia of the smaller republics is not at all resembled by domination in discourse as is the case in the successor states of colonial empires. Therefore, in order to criticise nationalist modes of representing the past in the post-Soviet space it is not very helpful to capitalise on a critique of representation.
These two important differences that set the post-USSR off against the social and cultural experiences in former colonial empires make it necessary to qualify the nature and the social consequences of the use of national modes of memory and historiography in the territory of the former Soviet Union. The peripheries of the Tsarist / Soviet empire, not unlike the former colonies of the Western empires, did develop national movements directed against the centre, which among other things brought about an invocation of images of a national past. Meanwhile the “centre” was at no time subject to attempts at nationalist mass mobilization and is not so now (not even by its diasporas).^[12] That is, the “return” to or “invention” of national traditions is an enterprise less Janus-faced in the former republics of the USSR than it is in the former colonies of Britain or France precisely because it is not hooked up with imperial strategies of domination and subjugation and cannot be confronted with the reproach of prolonging imperial dominance in reproducing the discursive strategies of the latter. Former republics of the Soviet Union turned independent states did at no time have to demand to be “treated like Russia” or to be allowed the same process of nation-building like the imperial centre. The result is that they can continue a political project already begun in the USSR. A critique of representation of the postcolonialist type is pointless here because the social meaning of collective memory, symbolic politics with the past and historiography lies not so much in their qualities as discursive devices operating behind people’s backs but rather as instruments at their political disposal.
From these qualifications of a postcolonialist glance at the former Soviet Union, one can reformulate the relationship between national and imperial modes of memory (or, for that matter, historiography). There is no such thing as an “imperial” memory or historiography since there is no empire any more. Even “post-imperial memories” would be a questionable term because, as outlined above, the Soviet Union hardly qualifies as an empire in the sense of the European colonial empires. It is already at this stage that the opposition between national and imperial modes of representing the past turns out to be an artificial one.
As to the undeniably existing moves toward the nationalisation of historiography in the former republics (and in some of the federal subjects of the present Russian Federation), these may indeed turn out to be problematic in the case of exclusivism or, worse, chauvinism; however, “imperial” memory or history, because of the reasons just outlined, is no viable model for an alternative to national history. In seeking escape lanes from the decline to nationalist-chauvinist encodings of collective identity, researchers should, instead of turning backwards to some imagined “imperial past” and its representations, take into account more present-oriented experiences with the diversification and pluralization of history-writing. In the course of the 20th century, most national histories in Western countries have been questioned and demystified, and this holds true not only for minority histories but as well for gender-sensitive history-writing – “her-story” instead of “his-story”. What is at stake here, though, is not so much the question of “how to represent” but rather of “who has the right to represent” and whose interests in representation are legitimate.
Some will remember that the question of the “demise of empires” – закат империй – has been posed just before the demise of the Soviet Union, in two round-table-discussions in the journal Vostok: Afro-aziatskie obshchestva. What struck me about this discussion was that the question of what becomes of empires was treated as a completely scholarly endeavour that did not have anything to do with the social reality. Instead, orientalists mused about what could have or have not become of the Roman or the Ottoman Empire if…, while outside the ivory tower, the USSR was falling apart. However, the last remark by S. D. Serebryannyi to that academic discussion was remarkable:

“In the 1970’s Bangladeshi diplomats in Moscow confessed to me that hardly anybody really wanted independence from Pakistan, and later they appreciated Pakistan as “a fairly civilised state”. Additionally they told me a story about how two women, one from Vietnam and one from Madagascar, met in Moscow and with tears in their eyes began to read to each other texts from a French primer that they both had used in school. […] We should learn from the experience of other “empires” and try to transform ours into a Commonwealth [sodruzhestvo] like that of Western Europe, only coming from the “other side”.”^[13]

Dealing with the politics of memory and history in the post-Soviet space, researchers and students must not forget to treat it just as such, politics. Nevertheless, on the level of everyday life, people may dispose of memories of the Soviet Union that a little benevolent observer might describe as “nostalgia” for the lost empire. In many cases, however, a closer look will reveal that these people do not so much recall the Soviet superpower status or some colonial subjugation (which never existed in the Soviet Union), but instead refer to a lost feeling of belonging that they felt was closer to a desirable universalistic identification than the compartmentalisation of people along ethnic lines.^[14] It is this mode of belonging and remembering that one should conceptualise and elaborate on as an answer to the urging problems of nationalist symbolic politics and historiography – and not so much an invented “imperial” memory.

Matt Matsuda

DOES EMPIRE HAVE MEMORY?

Does Empire have memory? Such an interrogation is composed of elements richly allusive and deeply uncertain: the extensive nature of imperial authority, and the contested mnemonics accompanying such a dominion. One point of entry into these realms would be to work with inflections and variations on Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory. Here, a more appropriate rendering might be that of “collected” memory, in the sense not so much of shared and socially transmitted frameworks of the past, but a recognition that what constitutes memory are fragments and artifacts, more mosaic pieces and involuntary significance than common purposeful construction.
It is the ability to leave such pieces in suspension that constitutes their mnemonic qualities, the admission that complete narrative is impossible. This need not mean that memory and history are opposed – it means, rather, the imagining of a different species of history, one that maintains stories by focusing on resonant and heavily invested places and moments of meaning rather than developmental chronicles. Advocates such as Pierre Nora are not opponents of historians in taking on mnemonic orientations, and projects such as Les Lieux de mйmore are anything but antihistorical or even antinational – they are still quite profoundly markers of national history, even bordering on the self-mythologizing – they are simply national histories with collected and multiplied subjects rather than assimilated narratives. They are, if anything, in extremis self-conscious statements of national histories: they appear odd only in being reconfigured away from tales of histoire universelle and advancement, whether through progress, revolution, liberation, or post-modernism, post-Communism, or post-colonialism.
The nature of memory-history is given over to multiple locations, yet the whole is still bounded by a historiographical imperative. The point in such historical memory is an act of displacement – not what happened in the past, but what has survived from it, by what mechanisms and testimonies. The primary focus is less the uncovering of the forgotten or the opening of windows into the traces of archives to uncover the forgotten, than pointed interrogations of the means by which such pasts are maintained – and in the process transformed. Memory scholarship, though claiming an interest in the primacy of local stories, experiences, and the immediate in recording histories, are in this way no more truly intimate than any nationalist narrative, with the latter’s registers of drama, tragedy, patriotic affinity, and tensions of public and private. What memory rather does is highlight the logic of commemoration, the moral dimensions of witness and testimony, and the conscious selections of remembrance and forgetting so as to make the processes of temporal distancing themselves part of the narrative.
Testimony is not about seeing and hearing – it is about having heard and seen. In this sense, memory approaches actually draw their temporal logic from historiographical distance – the ability to recount and distinguish between the past and the present. The great ideals of memory scholarship – liberation for repressed or forgotten voices, historical sovereignty, temporal autonomy – depend upon a present that can speak a past whose legacies it carries, yet from which it is chronologically distinct: memory is, in this sense, not a mechanism for recounting the past, but for constantly generating a present and future.
This matters critically for questions of memory and empire. Empires appear to create domains through territorial mastery or political hegemony, yet their lasting legacy is the way they impose a specific temporality over their subjects. If the postwar of the 1950s and 1960s was an age of declining European empires in Africa and Asia through geopolitical decolonization, revisited again after 1989 in Central Europe and the Soviet Union, then the struggles of the early twenty-first century still remain in chronopolitical decolonization. What are so often lauded and abhorred as new nationalisms, identity politics, and sectarian challenges emanate from such unresolved struggles over the power to narrate.
Under empire, possessors of local practice and authority are transformed into provinces, colonies, resources bases, laboratories, peripheries: their pasts and presents are re-determined to obey an almost nineteenth-century anthropological sense of time. Colonized by purposeful narratives (development, civilization, socialism), such subjects of empire are yet not autonomous in pursuing their own narratives. That is why the idea of a sort of timelessness settles over empires: such territories are places of the savage, retrograde, the imaginary backwater of the nineteenth century and underdeveloped world of the twentieth. These call for the need of enlightened autocrats (bearing civilization, revolutionary consciousness, freedom and democracy) to impose security and implement History. Times and places are enclosed by violence – schematized by Marcus Rediker as expropriation, imprisonment, labor exploitation, and repression – such that imperial subjects, whether in Central Europe and Asia, or Africa and the Pacific, exist in subordinate temporalities. No wonder then that “underdevelopment,” and a certain melancholy and unrequited rage, a cynical frustration are attached to imperial histories: they have no temporal sovereignty – they are places to ponder, visit, exploit, “improve” or liberate, yet history does not take place there. As Milan Kundera has had it, Life is elsewhere.
But, indeed, “where” is an empire? Presumably it has territorial boundaries containing subject lands and peoples, yet what if, following the mnemonic notions of the “collected” or the lieux, we think of an empire as less of a closed geographical space of mastery and authority, and more as a series of contingent locations, each important to the degree that these locations are sites of contestation obeying shifting strategic, commercial, and ideological imperatives. About nationalist narratives, Jeffrey Olick has maintained, following Rogers Brubaker, “nations are not entities that develop; they are practices that occur, institutional arrangements that are continually enacted and reenacted.” The same approach should be taken with empire. This complicates the editors’ question about whether a point of departure for memory and empire is necessarily “multiple and competing memories exist(ing) in opposition to the imperial state-centered historical narrative.” Memories do not oppose histories if empires themselves are not presumed to be centralized, historiographical hegemons.
Where do we find empire – in an ideology? A state apparatus? In “memory” terms, one might more usefully think of “empire” as a narration of rule and domain held together by institutions of enclosure and possession, yet one in effect composed of an uneven articulation of rules and proposals, daily lives, habits, negotiations, and administrative claims of control. These are alternately violent and resonant, subtly intrusive and invisible, yet at times more fiction than fact. The notion of the editors that “Memory is a concept that emerged in the context of the modern European nation state,” is useful in this context, yet as “local memory” historians like Stйphane Gerson have shown, it was always a heterogeneous and multi-linguistic, political, and contested-heritage space. The question remains – where is empire? If we understand how empires have been imagined as bounded territorial identities on the nineteenth-century national model, we can move away from such reliance on “the nation” while recognizing its ferocious persistence. In this we can appreciate that “empire” must also be transformed to reveal its circuits and applications of power.
This allows us to see a calculus of power disguised by antedated notions of how we recognize empires. If we take empires as multi-local spaces defined and to contingent degrees dominated by political, economic, and cultural force, then memory is not a “modern” concept to be opposed to “archaic” empire. We can rather logically link Lenin’s theory of global bourgeois capitalism to expanded speculations like Hart and Negri’s postmodernist notion of empire as a deterritorialized multinational space. This space can be still maintained by military force in defense of “markets” and ideologies of “freedom.” Twenty-first century global empires like the United States are rather an inversion of the above modern-archaic dyad: they are “modern” empires of economic sanctions, military intervention, and international media, protected from seeing their own imperial activities by “archaic” memories of what “empires” supposedly are: retrograde institutions of British, French, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and Portugese rule.
One of the salient qualities of the memory of empires is their ability to forget themselves. Or better, to reverse what once was a declaration of nationalist pride and authority (“The Empire!”), by displacing imperial attributions into other temporal contexts – especially the past. Whether empires have memories is then only slightly more arresting than how memory-histories necessarily redefine the very understanding of what empires are to themselves, and how they are constituted and maintained. Memory for and within empires is a continuous process of mis-recognition.
If institutions and practices of domination, exploitation, and cultural “pacification” are the tools and weapons of administrators and agents, “empires” are themselves largely fictions, defended by violence. So, do memory interrogations of such fictions then result in disintegration of a once single political and cultural space? Perhaps the usefulness of this question is to reframe it to understand how one of the most successful fictions of empires is the way they shape the category of departure in the first place. Memory is more than simply a counter-narrative that allows the gradual demolition of an imperial space, a place of metanarratives; it is also a locus, as the editors here suggest by evoking microhistories, regional studies, and agitations of national minorities. It is possible to read these historiographical movements as exemplary of new scholarship, liberated political consciousness, and cutting-edge research. Yet it is also feasible to take such categories as de facto demonstrations of the ways in which imperial spaces are always heterogeneous, unevenly mastered, contingently bounded, and constantly negotiated. If read in memory-fashion, it becomes clear that imperial and national histories are themselves constantly in tension, and that the “collective” past is a screen for the uneasy, and often ill-fitting “collection” of peoples, heritage-claims, and cultures imagined to inhabit the space of an empire.
Rewriting histories developed around “newly independent states” and competing legacies for historical recognition resituates the logic of “custom” and “tradition” as not necessarily recaptured from the past, but emergent and re-invented as political voices. The current relationship of empire to memory is that of history to decolonization. This often manifests itself politically in the register of valorizing the national: the desire and claim of former imperial subjects for nations – at exactly the moment that the harrowing record of nations in the constitution of empires is being so critically implicated.
To rescue the claim of national autonomy, “new nationalists” organize their energies around struggles over indigenous cultural production and sovereignty – distinguishing their own national models from strictly-conceived liberal-democratic civic cultures (the famous democratic transition models) or socialist worker’s states. Rather, they emphasize the reintegration of “custom” and “tradition,” – regional languages, ritual practices, “community” values and stories. These are the supposedly superseded materials of memory and transmission – by grounding historical legitimacy in previous pasts, localized, historically specific counter-narratives suspicious of universal histories of positive knowledge, revolutionary liberation, and dialectical transformation.
Interrogations of Pamiat and Memorial by the editors and the search for “truth” in politics and research focus precisely on such questions, by dividing a conservative, even reactionary ideal of a purified society before corruption from a democratic, liberal imaginary, while demonstrating the confluences and limits of both: the danger of nostalgia as a historical principle, yet equally the moral bankruptcy of reliance on narratives of progressive change to resolve political injustice.
The “truth” literature that becomes most resonant through these questions is organized around debates of an almost juridical nature: the creation of Truth and Reconciliation commissions to interrogate historical “crimes,” and questions of the possibilities of apologies and reparations. These movements are notable largely for the ways their partisans and claimants ask not only for visibility – a sound, yet merely historical principle – but, by seeking truth, the ways they also ask whether one can receive justice from the past. Hence, certain kinds of “memory” in imperial contexts demand not only “heritage” or “commemorative” models, but also “universal human rights” advocacy, delineations of categories of victims, proposals for compensation and, where imaginable, reconciliation to the past.
These claims are very particular and defining, (though not exclusive) in regards to the nature of imperial histories, for they bring into play, as Elazar Barkan has suggested, not only grievances against particular crimes and events, but against entire epochs. Can justice be had from “imperialism” as a phenomenon across centuries? Can memory, in effect, demand compensation from history? These inquiries are first dependent upon recognition – a memorial point of judgment that collapses the past and present in the name of a possible future. The complexity of dealing with the multiple temporalities and claims embedded in such recognition is something that neither reactionary nostalgia nor liberal progressivism – bound as they are to the past and future – can engage without great unease.
Such questions of empire are not necessarily inextricable conundrums. Juridical responsibilities can indict state systems and the nature of their power and practices, whether by rational implementation, organized violence, or willful racial and cultural extermination. Whether one selects examples from state totalitarianism and terror in Germany or the Soviet Union, South African Apartheid, from the experience of Native American Indians, from ethnic massacres in the former Yugoslavia, or among Chechens, Ukranians, or Nanjing Chinese, the meanings of reparation and restoration rest fundamentally on the first-instance principle of recognition: the admission of memory.
This is a challenge ruefully at odds with empires whose primary mnemonic work has been to forget. Though occluded, empire has all too much memory, for it has in itself always been a fractured enterprise. Through demanding judgments and constantly trying to reconfigure the possibilities of the past, memory’s major purpose has been to remind of those fractures, of the possibilities and not just self-determined inevitabilities, in this way always resolving to make a claim upon the present.