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1 Introduction: Memory, Trauma and World Politics Notes 1 Introduction: Memory, Trauma and World Politics 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ in Benjamin, One Way Street, and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1970), p. 314. 2. Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking Glass’ in The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll [1872] (London: Chancellor Press, 1982), p. 171. 3. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, 12 (2000), 26. 4. Winter, ‘Notes on the memory boom’, p. 54. See also Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24 (1998), 105–41; Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Introduction: The Power of Memory, the Memory of Power and the Power over Memory’ in Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-war Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–39; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Allan Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1998), 37–62. 5. Müller, ‘Introduction’, pp. 28–31; and Victor Roudometof, ‘Beyond Commemoration: The Politics of Collective Memory’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 32 (2004), 3–4. 6. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 14. Italics in original. 7. Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). See also Anne Norton, 95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method (London: Yale University Press, 2004), Thesis 11. 8. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 9. See also the discus- sion in Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory, trans. David Bellow (London: Atlantic, 2003), chs. 3, 4 and 5. 9. Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’. 10. This process is explored, in historical context, in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 11. Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘Collective Memory: The Two Cultures’, Sociological Theory, 17 (1999), 338. 12. See Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-war Europe; and Claudio Fogu, Richard Ned Lebow, and Wulf Kansteiner (eds), The Politics of Memory in 231 232 Notes Postwar Europe (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2005). For a set of regional cases, see Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria & the Macedonian Question (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 2002). For a less Euro-centric focus, see Jeffrey K. Olick (ed.), States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Perspective (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2003). 13. Olick and Demetriou, ‘From Theodicy to Ressentiment: Trauma and the Ages of Compensation’, p. 75. 14. For the use of the term ‘identification’ rather than the more multivalent ‘identity’ see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 1–47; and Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also his exchange with Craig Calhoun in Ethnicities, 3 (2003), 531–68. ‘Identity’ of course has a history: see Philip Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History, 69 (1983), 910–31. 15. Note, however, that the connection between memory and identity (both on an individual and collective level) may well be an invention of the modern age, a contingent rather than a necessary relation, as Bartelson argues in his chapter: Bartelson, ‘We Could Remember it for you Wholesale’, pp. 34–8. 16. Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 221. The relationship between memory and identity is, though, far from straightforward. See, for example, Mary Warncock, Memory (London: Faber & Faber, 1987); and Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack (eds), Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the gendered aspects of memory see the special edition (‘gender and cultural memory’) of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (2002). 17. For general accounts of social memory, see, Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1925]); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Shape of the Past (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Susannah Radstone (ed.), Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 18. The phrase is from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 19. Smith, ‘Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, 2 (1996), 383. 20 Winter, ‘Notes on the memory boom’, p. 55. 21. Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial’, History & Memory, 5 (1993), 147. 22. Megill, ‘History, Memory, Identity’, 40 and 42. 23. Taylor, Sources of the Self : The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). On how memory can be manipulated by ‘political entrepreneurs’ to generate conflict, see Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Notes 233 25. Larry Ray, ‘Mourning, Melancholia, and Violence’. See also Julie Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Ilana Bet-El, ‘Unimagined Communities: The Power of Memory and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia’ in Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-war Europe, pp. 206–23; Maria Todorova (ed.), Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst, 2004); and the special edition (‘Memory, Identity and War’) of Rethinking History, 6 (2002). 26. Oxford English Dictionary. 27. Olick, ‘Collective Memory’, 344. See also Piotr Sztompka, ‘Cultural Trauma’, European Journal of Social Theory, 3 (2000), 449–67; and Wolfgang Schivelbusch. See also Piotr The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003); and Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘Trauma and Suffering: A Forgotten Source of Western Historical Consciousness’ in Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 72–84. 28. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Caruth, ‘Introduction: Trauma and Experience’ in Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). For a powerful critique of Caruth, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ch. 8, and Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8 (2004), 193–221. 29. Alexander, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’ in Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 1, and the essays therein. Emphasis added. See also Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 30. Alexander, ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, pp. 8 and 10 (emphasis added); and Alexander, ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2002), 5–85. On the formation of ‘African American’ identity from the trauma drama of slavery, see also Ron Eyerman, ‘The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory’, Acta Sociologica, 47 (2004), 159–69. 31. Smelser, ‘Epilogue: September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma’ in Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, pp. 264 and 266. 32. Sztompka, ‘Cultural Trauma’, 450 and 457. 33. Améry, At the Minds Limits, quoted in Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 8. On Améry see also the discussion in Olick and Demetriou, ‘From Theodicy to Ressentiment’, pp. 84–7. 34. Sebald, ‘Against the Irreversible: On Jean Améry’ in his, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 154. 35. Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 36. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41 (2002), 187. For some 234 Notes other criticisms, many of them persuasive, see also Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake’. 37. Leys, Trauma, pp. 298–99 and 2. 38. Bourke, ‘When the Torture Becomes Humdrum’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, February 10 (2006), p. 19. 39. Edkins, ‘Remembering Relationality’.
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