"Memory, Amnesia, Commemoration"

“Memory, Amnesia, Commemoration”

ELN (English Language Notes) Fall 2019 (Duke University Press)

Editors: Ramesh Mallipeddi, University of Colorado Boulder and Cristobal Silva, Columbia University

This special issue takes as its focus the topic of memory and its cognates, amnesia and commemoration. Memory has witnessed a remarkable efflorescence in the past few years, both in scholarly work in the humanities and in popular efforts to address the collective forgetting of traumatic pasts. While the interrelationship between history (the study of past events) and memory (the ways in which the past is remembered and accessed), and the role of institutions such as museums and monuments in memorialization have been staple topics of academic historiography, scholars in recent years have turned their attention to how catastrophes— colonization, slavery, war, genocide, and disease pandemics—impact memory, and how traumatic events are remembered by victims, survivors, and descendants. Indeed, as Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman have recently argued, in modern societies, trauma—in its twin senses as a physical scar and metaphorical trace—is synonymous with the “tragic” insofar as the term marks a “new relationship to time and memory, to mourning and obligation, to misfortune and the misfortunate” (The Empire of Trauma, 277). No longer a diagnostic category confined to psychiatry and psychopathology, the language of trauma is being increasingly mobilized to speak of “the wounds of the past” in ongoing demands for recognition, reparations, and justice.