Susannah Radstone

Contested pasts : the politics of memory

Introduction: Contested Pasts Transforming Pasts Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History Patterning the National Past And Then Silence

Memory : Histories, Theories, Debates

Memory has never been closer to us, yet never more difficult to understand. In the more than thirty specially commissioned essays that make up this book, leading scholars survey the histories, the theories, and the faultlines that compose the field of memory research.The volume reconstructs the work of the great philosophical and literary figures of the last two centuries who recast the concept of memory and brought it into the forefront of the modernist and postmodernist imagination-among them, Bergson, Halbwachs, Freud, Proust, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. Drawing on recent advances in the sciences and in the humanities, the contributors address thequestion of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.The public, political life of memory is an increasingly urgent issue in the societies we now inhabit, while the category of memory itself seems to become ever more capacious.Asking how we might think about the politics of memory, the closing chapters explore anumber of defining instances in which the troubled phenomenon of memory has entered and reshaped our very conception of what makes and drives the domain of politics. These include issues of slavery, the Soviet experience, the Holocaust, feminism and recovered memory, and memory in post-apartheid South Africa.

What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies

We all know how it feels – that experience of finding ourselves, or perhaps better put, losing ourselves, in an uncanny or excessive space. On leaving the cinema, our surroundings, even when familiar, may take on a strangeness lent to them by the continuing presence of the cinema’s imaginary spaces and places. Far from a loved one, we find ourselves neither where we, or they, are. These disorientating experiences demonstrate the competing material and psychical realisms of location. Where we are, and where we feel we are, may not coincide. These apprehensions of spatial dislocation and disjuncture can be triggered, asmyfirst example shows, by the cinema, aswell as by other immersive media. But they can be generated, too, by actual uprootings and relocations – by experiences of exiledom, refugeedomandmigration,when theactuality of our locationmay jarparticularly harshlywithwherewe feelwe are andwherewe long to be. The contemporary ubiquity of these distressing, unwelcome and forced disand re-locations, as well as the pervasiveness ofmore privileged and plannedmodes of global transit can appear to render long-term attachments to, and locatedness in place anachronistic. Along with these actual mobilities, the virtual mobilities of the digital realm can seem to render our place of home and its location, with all of its historical and affective dimensions, merely contingent and on the whole, irrelevant. That locatedness remains nevertheless utterly – though complexly – significant can be gleaned not only from the uneasy as well as pleasureable aspects of individual experiences of dislocation but from, for instance, the ever-expanding literature on nostalgia. Though a strong trend in this literature seeks to avoid associating migrancy and exiledom with an understandingof nostalgia as sufferingvictimhood, stressing, rather, nostalgia’s capacity to aid in the construction of newhomes in new lands, this literature points, nevertheless, to the continuing significance of location, and, particularly, memories of ‘home’, for the meaning-making and affective dimensions of life in the present.

Social bonds and psychical order: Testimonies

Abstract This essay places the recent academic fascination with trauma and victimhood in a psycho‐social context within which identifications with pure victimhood hold sway. The essay takes as its starting point Freuds description, in Civilisation and its Discontents, of the formation of the super‐ego via the small childs negotiation of ambivalence towards its first authority figure. It is argued that this process lacks secondary re‐inforcement in western urban postmodernity, where authority has become diffuse, all‐pervasive and unavailable as a point of identification. In this context, aggression becomes harder to acknowledge and manage resulting in a tendency towards Manicheanism and the attenuation of ambivalence. Taking as its case‐study Marianne Hirschs writings on the ethical aesthetics of postmemorial photography, the essay concludes that recent work on trauma and testimony fails to acknowledge that identifications may straddle victimhood and perpetration. This acknowledgement is only possible where some containment of aggression feels possible.

Afterword: Bringing Memory Home: Location, Theory, Hybridity

When, in 2010, I was invited to speak at the London symposium at which many of the papers here were presented, I felt more than a little uneasy. As I said at the time, although I have written about theories of cultural memory, my knowledge of Latin America was, and remains, minimal and on that basis, I felt strongly that there was nothing I could usefully contribute to the event. Persuaded to come along and respond from the perspective of memory studies I heard papers, some now published here, that provoked me to return to and think more about my discomfort. For the disquiet roused in me by the thought of speaking in a context in which I felt my knowledge to be irrelevant and my ignorance to be acute points beyond personal affect towards a series of questions lying at the heart of and extending beyond memory research today. What possible contribution could I make, I asked myself, given that I knew so little about the region that was the subject of the symposium? And, more worryingly, was the memory studies that I had been asked to represent being conceived of as somehow located ‘nowhere’ and yet able to speak of ‘everywhere’? These are questions that turn on location, place and identity: the places from which, and of which we write, the provenance of the theories we mobilize and the work that they do in diverse locations. This issue’s focus on the beyond of narratives of victimization in Latin America puts the local – though a relatively expansive local – into dialogue with a set of theories, concepts and questions that have been animating the interdisciplinary fields of trauma and memory studies for some while. As the quotation with which I’ve opened this essay demonstrates, there is nothing new about the question of the local. Writing from within the discipline of history, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty has distanced himself from what he sees as Marxist theorists’ dismissal of location’s significance: ‘Common to their thinking’, argues Chakrabarty,

Memory up close: Memory studies in Australia

This special issue was first conceived of over dinner in a New Zealand cafe in London, on a warm summer night in July 2010. During that evening, it emerged that we’d both already been thinking about the issues we raise here for some time. Rosanne, a US citizen, and now Australian citizen, who has lived and worked in Australia since the 1990s, had co-edited a book on World Memory (Bennett and Kennedy, 2003). Susannah, at that point a UK citizen working in the United Kingdom and with a fellowship in Australia, was in the midst of running a project on memory in national contexts and had recently spoken on what she sees as the thorny politics driving both memory’s mobility and theories of transnational memory (Radstone, 2011). Later that evening, we were joined by another contributor to this issue, Felicity Collins, who arrived hot foot from a symposium in Dublin on disputed memory in Australia and Ireland (Holmes and Ward, 2011). Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how our coming together – even in the choice of a New Zealand cafe in London – condensed many of the issues that pulse through this special issue. We knew that our connections were through memory research and through Australia. But knowing that didn’t reveal what, if anything, might be denoted by the coupling of Australia with both memory and memory studies. There in London, in the context of theories of the transnational as they were bearing in on memory studies and as they were present – embodied, even – around our table, this special issue had its genesis. That evening, we began to make plans for a symposium,1 bringing together leading memory researchers from across Australia, and it was during that event that we made plans for this volume. The title of our special issue – Memory Studies in Australia – describes its contents more or less accurately, but aims to provoke, too. Our starting point – self-evidently – is our belief that there’s something significant to be learnt from bringing together this carefully commissioned collection of memory studies research in Australia. But what might that be? After all, general questions of the pertinence of the national notwithstanding, isn’t Australia generally regarded – as one of our contributors pithily put it – as just a ‘small’ country, situated beyond anywhere that matters? And isn’t it just plain retrograde, anachronistic or even overly nationalistic to talk about memory studies in

The GDR and the Memory Debate

This chapter will consider what it might mean to ‘remember’ the GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, setting out the theoretical concepts which have underpinned the discussions of the research network ‘After the Wall: Reconstructing and Representing the GDR’. We will contex-tualise those theoretical concepts in a changing global landscape of remembrance in which understandings of what constitutes knowledge of the past and what it means to relate to the past in a meaningful way have shifted radically.

‘The place where we live’: Memory, mirrors and The Secret River:

For the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, living takes place at the intersection of inner and outer worlds, in a space riven by destructiveness and enlivened by love, play and repair. Working with Winnicott’s understandings of empathy and play, this essay explores creative writing’s prompting of a recognition of the not-yet-past, as it suffuses the place where we live. This essay focuses on the rancorous debates among historians and critics that followed the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, a novel about Australia’s settler-colonial past. After pointing to the centrality of empathy within these debates, the essay examines Winnicott’s exploration of destructiveness as the precursor to empathy and reparation. The essay continues by examining the different modes of acknowledged and disavowed empathy associated with historiography and fiction, exploring, in particular, The Secret River’s engagement of empathy. The essay concludes by suggesting that Grenville’s work of ‘historical’ fiction ‘contributes’ (in Winnicott’s terms) by provoking an awareness that the violence that was part of Australia’s settler-colonialist history cannot be simply consigned to the past but lives on – and requires recognition – in the place that is Australia today.

Caché: Or what the past hides

Michael Hanekes film Caché (Hidden) (2005) has provoked a good deal of criticism and debate, much of it focusing on the question of the ‘hidden’ to which the films title refers. Responses to the film have tended to focus on Cachés relations with colonial history as trauma, aligning the films ‘hidden’ with the dissociated memory of Frances ‘dirty war’ against Algeria. The psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche offers the Humanities an approach to culture that diverges from the version of trauma theory drawn on by many of Cachés commentators. This essay takes up Laplanches ideas in the context of a critique of trauma theory and aims to demonstrate their potential to shed light not only on Caché but also on cultures relations with temporality, violence, and the enigmatic.

Top of the Lake’s Emotional Landscape: Reparation at the Edge of the World

Abstract This essay discusses the TV series Top of the Lake (Campion 2013) within the frameworks of theories of trauma and psychoanalytic object relations. The essay’s focus falls on the prominence given to the New Zealand landscape in the series and in reviews, and on Top of the Lake’s apparently paradoxical combining of a narrative concern with extreme violence and performances that evoke childlike playfulness. Having examined the possibility of categorising the series as a trauma text, the essay concludes by proposing that its formal and narrative elements combine to produce a spectatorial experience that evokes potential space while triggering reparative impulses.