Transcultural Memory

Rick Crownshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415824484
• eBook ISBN: 9781134917792
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Memories are not static or frozen, remaining in particular sites or places, within and belonging to particular groups, cultures or nations; rather, memory travels. Broadly speaking, memory has travelled because of the demographic displacements brought about by modernity's extremes – slavery, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide – and also because of the trade, travel and migration made possible by globalisation. Whether social movement is violent, exilic, migratory, emancipatory or oppressive, it is accompanied by memory. With the movement of people, memories of modernity's histories and postmodern legacies meet, correspond and often become mutually constitutive. Even where memories compete with each other for cultural dominance, mutual dialogue and recognition is implicit if not explicit. Memories travel through and across cultures and national boundaries, a process increasingly facilitated by mass media technologies.

This collection explores a range of case studies of transcultural memory as well as theorising the mobility of memory as it travels. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal parallax.

Travelling Memory

Astrid Erll

Whither Memory Studies?

Es wurde schon alles gesagt, nur noch nicht von jedem – ‘everything has already been said, just not yet by everyone’. It is in the spirit of this famous saying by the comedian Karl Valentin that observers and critics of memory studies nowadays tend to sum up the state of the field.

And indeed, after a two-decade frenzy of research, we have charted the sites of memory not only of France, but also of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States and – most recently, that is, in publications of2009 and 2010 – of Okinawa, Cape Town and Latin America. We have been given insight into forms of remembrance in ancient Egypt, medieval Europe and into the ‘memory of the modern’. We know how the invention of tradition leads to the creation of identities and to political legitimation. And we have certainly gained deeper insight into issues of war, genocide, trauma, and reconciliation with a specific focus on memory.

With the methodology at hand, memory studies will easily be able to keep generations of scholars busy, charting the mnemomic practices of all ages and places. However, the question arises whether ‘memory’ is thus turning into a mere ‘stencil’, and memory studies into an additive project: we add yet another site of memory, we address yet another historical injustice. While such memory work is for many historical, political and ethical reasons an important activity, memory research finds itself faced with the decisive question of how it envisages its future. Since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, memory studies has developed into a vital and vigorous interdisciplinary and international research field, which stretches across the humanities and the social sciences all the way to the natural sciences.¹ As a long-standing academic polylogue, and with the degree of exchange and synergy already gained between different disciplines and across methodological and linguistic borders, memory studies seems ideally suited to address new questions emerging from new developments and challenges – questions, for example, about the relation of nature and culture, about globalization and its discontents, and about the futures that we envision.

In short, after a first phase of research on cultural memory, which took place in the early twentieth century (with Maurice Halbwachs, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and Frederic Bartlett as some key protagonists), and a second phase roughly starting with Pierre Nora’s publication of Les lieux de mémoire² – will there be a third phase of memory studies? Or will the field continue in the mode established since the mid-1980s?

The question now seems to be ‘whither memory studies?’ In a recent article entitled ‘A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing?’, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld articulates one now rather common idea among memory studies’ critics about the future prospects of the field, namely that after more than two decades’ intensive work done on the Holocaust and the unearthing of historical injustices all across the globe from the Aboriginals’ ‘stolen generation’ to apartheid – we have now arrived at a point of saturation with ‘memory’. Instead of continuing to deal with the past, such critics argue, we should start looking at the present and future. Rosenfeld considers ‘9/11’ as the tipping point and beginning of the demise of memory studies and sums up: ‘In such a world, the study of memory […] may increasingly appear to be a luxury that a new era of crisis can ill afford’.³

I would rather claim the opposite: today (and whether this is more an era of crisis than any other age is also open to debate) we cannot afford the luxury of not studying memory. If we want to understand ‘9/11’, the actions of Islamic terrorists, or the re-actions of the West, we must naturally look at certain mental, discursive, and habitual paradigms that were formed in long historical processes – via cultural memory, as it were. We must try to understand the different ways in which people handle time, and this refers not only to their ‘working through the past’, but also includes their understanding of the present and visions for the future. If we want to get our heads around current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and on the African continent, the rise of China and India, global warming⁴ – and especially around the ways that people make sense of these experiences and from there begin to deal with them (or fail to do so) – then we have to acknowledge that many of the ‘hard facts’ of what we encounter as ‘economy’, ‘power politics’ or ‘environmental issues’ are at least partly the result of ‘soft factors’, of cultural processes grounded in cultural memory.

However, I would also claim that it is rather difficult to address these issues with the methodological tools that memory studies has at hand now. One reason for this lies in a choice that scholars of the ‘second phase’ made, namely, conceiving of the field essentially as ‘cultural memory studies’.⁵

In using the term ‘cultural memory studies’, we need to be aware of the fact that there are conspicuous national and disciplinary differences in the current debate: in Germany, for example, there is a rather rigorous definition of the term (das kulturelle Gedächtnis, which was introduced by Aleida and Jan Assmann and in which concepts of anthropology and media history play a significant role).⁶ In the United States, there seems to be no unified theory, but a trend towards looking at aesthetic media, popular and mass culture, when the adjective ‘cultural’ is applied to ‘memory’ (as testified, for example, by Marita Sturken’s definition in Tangled Memories).⁷ In Britain, memory studies emerged out of, and is institutionally still part of, British ‘cultural studies’ in the tradition of the Birmingham school. Its scholarship is characterized by Marxist and psychoanalytical approaches.⁸

Rather than address such specific, and conceptually often quite elaborate, notions of cultural memory, I will, in the following, challenge some of the implicit ideas of ‘culture’ that have slipped into the now virtually worldwide preoccupation with memory, especially in the wake of Pierre Nora’s influential model of lieux de mémoire.

From ‘Memory in Culture’ to the ‘Memories of Cultures’

What, then, is the problem with ‘culture?’ While ever since the inception of memory studies in the 1920s, culture in the singular has proved a leading, and in many different ways illuminating, concept for the field, more recently an over-simplifying notion of cultures in the plural has crept into the discourse on memory and acted as an often misleading and obfuscating category.

The emergence of the ‘new’ memory studies in the 1980s and 1990s can be seen as part of the larger movement of refashioning the humanities as the study of culture. ‘Culture’ was then understood in a broad sense. Symbolic anthropology described it as a way of life which is based on shared knowledge and beliefs that become manifest in social organisation, habits, and in the material world.⁹ Even more fundamentally, in the early twentieth century, cultural philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer had defined the human being as an animal symbolicum, whose universal symbol-making capacity and activity finds expression in a range of ‘symbolic forms’, such as art, religion, law, politics and economy.¹⁰ In such a perspective, ‘culture’ exists in the singular; its opposite term is ‘nature’. Culture thus defined constitutes the principal research object of the humanities and social sciences.

Studying ‘memory in culture’ may therefore simply mean looking at remembering and forgetting through the lens of the humanities and social sciences, rather than the natural sciences. More specifically, it means turning our attention to the fact that all forms of human remembering (from neuronal processes to media representations) take place within sociocultural contexts, within frameworks made by the animal symbolicum. This definition is the one I want to adhere to, because it avoids tying culture – and by extension cultural memory – to clear-cut territories and social formations.

But what happened then? In much of culture studies in general, and in particular in the field of memory studies, ‘culture’ became slowly but persistently reified. What was studied was the culture, and the memory, of a social formation: a religious group, a social class, an ethnicity. The focus thus shifted from the dynamics of memory in culture to the specific memories of (allegedly stable and clearly demarcated) cultures – the most popular social unit being the nation-state, which was then swiftly seen as isomorphic with national culture and a national cultural memory. Memory studies thus entered the stage of ‘national memory studies’, which characterized much of the work done in the 1990s.

Pierre Nora’s admittedly groundbreaking French Lieux de mémoire were the catalyst for this phase of national memory studies. In the wake of Nora’s project, which was quickly adopted virtually across the globe, cultural memory was reincarnated as, and became synonymous with, ‘national remembrance’. The sites-of-memory approach was used as a tool to reconstruct – and at the same time, wittingly or unwittingly: to actively construct – national memory.

There is of course nothing wrong with looking at the nation-state as a social framework of remembrance. In fact, even in today’s age of accelerated globalization it is the nation-state that plays a major role in the creation of memory culture: initiating rituals of public commemoration, setting up memorials, financing museums, conceiving of educational agendas. Also within unifying Europe, it is still the nation-states which provide the occasions and structures for public remembrance. Work done by sociologists and oral historians has shown that these national frameworks impinge on personal memories, even if they are further refracted according to additional frames, such as familial, generational, or religious ones.¹¹

However, it is also clear that Pierre Nora bequeathed a whole chain of conceptual flaws to the study of memory and the nation. His declared aim to represent an ‘inventory of the house of France’ reveals an antiquated idea of French culture.¹² It is imagined as a formation situated within the boundaries of the hexagone and carried by an ethnically homogeneous society. Nora’s approach binds memory, ethnicity, territory, and the nation-state together, in the sense of ‘a (mnemonic) space for each race’. His old-fashioned concept of national culture and its puristic memory drew criticism from many quarters. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, for example, professor of Vietnamese history, pointed out that Nora’s Lieux neglected the history of colonialism, la France d’outre mer, and the large immigrant communities of today’s France, which is, after all, a multiethnic and multicultural formation.¹³

This short, and no doubt over-simplified, history of memory studies and its shifting focus ‘from memory in culture to the memories of (national) cultures’ did not take into account various attempts to break away from a strict nation-focus, for example in the comparative work done by Jay Winter on European memories of the First World War or by Jan Assmann on memory in ancient civilizations.¹⁴ However, cultures here, too, remain relatively clear-cut social formations, usually coinciding with the contours of regions, kingdoms and nation-states. Even sophisticated approaches, which allow for difference and exchange between mnemonic communities, therefore, tend to operate with distinct ‘containers’. And this is what cultures constructed upon the assumption of an isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities, and memories are called in transcultural studies: ‘container-culture’.¹⁵

Transcultural Studies – Transcultural Memory Studies

In his writings on transculturality, the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch has sharply criticized notions of container-culture, the origin of which he traces back to Johann Gottfried Herder.¹⁶ He identifies three determinants of the ‘traditional concept of single cultures’. First, ‘social homogenization’, the idea that culture ‘moulds the whole way of life’, so that ‘every act and every object is an unmistakable instance of precisely this culture’. This does not take into account the inner complexity of cultural formations, their vertical and horizontal divisions. The second false credo, according to Welsch, is that of ‘ethnic consolidation’, the idea that culture is always folkbound. This incorrect assumption is a legacy of the nineteenth-century racialization of culture. Thirdly, ‘intercultural delimitation’ means that concepts of single cultures tend to be ‘separatory’. Cultures are seen as monads, as remaining distinguished from one another. It is such delimiting thinking that generates racism and other forms of tension between local, ethnic, and religious groups. As an alternative way of thinking about culture, Welsch proposes the concept of transculturality. The ‘transcultural’ h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Introduction: Transcultural Memory
• 1. Travelling Memory
• 2. Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn
• 3. Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany
• 4. From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy
• 5. Transcultural Memory in Conflict: Israeli-Palestinian Truth and Reconciliation
• 6. Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory
• 7. Genocide and the Terror of History
• 8. What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies
• Index