Commemoration from a Distance: <em>On Metamemorial Fiction</em>

Abstract

Exploring two works of contemporary American and South African fiction, this essay meditates on memorials created at a distance from original sites of violence. These two metamemorial fictions both make concerns with comparative suffering and outsider participation an integral part of the commemorative process they address. They create an ambivalent space for the outsider to participate in the commemoration of atrocity: both by honoring the dead and, provocatively, by investing such empathetic acts with signs of fraudulence. These fictions envision new kinds of public memorials that foreground the significance of sacrilegious as well as sacral impulses to commemorate the dead. Who owns the memory of atrocity? While the ethics and politics of representing the past have always provoked passionate debate, the question of how to commemorate human catastrophe has gained a new intensity in the age of globalization. As the twentieth century bequeaths its survivors a legacy of violence on an unprecedented scale, these conflicts and their aftermaths are more than ever shaped by forces beyond the local. Transnational actors frequently spur on political violence; peacemaking and mediation increasingly involve the international community; and media representations of atrocity disseminate ever more rapidly in ways that invite comparison among catastrophes from different places. As these diverse connections grow in strength and number, they invite us to inquire what role there may be for those concerned with atrocity, but not directly affected by it, to shape its legacy. In short, what does it mean to memorialize violence across borders?