Cultural Memories: An Introduction

Abstract

The revival of public and scholarly interest in collective cultural memories since the 1980s has been a genuinely global phenomenon and is somewhat paradoxical. Memory is a form of temporal awareness more readily associated with traditional, nonindustrialized societies rather than with the globalized, mobile, and deracinated world of today, which ostensibly floats free of all historical moorings, disconnected from earlier generations and periods. Yet the rise of a self-consciously postmodern, postcolonial, and multicultural society seems to have reanimated memory as a social, cultural, and political force with which to challenge, if not openly reject, the founding myths and historical narratives that have hitherto given shape and meaning to established national and imperial identities. This trend, initially accelerated by the lifting of the censorship and political constraints that had been imposed in both the “East” and the “West” during the Cold War, has been facilitated since the mid-1990s by the Internet, the default source of information in the global public sphere. Uncovering the historical experiences of marginalized communities, previously silenced because of their ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexuality, is now a primary objective of historical inquiry. It is inspired in part by an emerging “politics of regret” (Olick & Robbins, 1998, p. 107) but also by a desire to provide a sense of historical legitimacy and depth to newly established social, cultural, and political constituencies. This change has necessitated an increased level of systematic analysis of different kinds of nontextual evidence, from oral testimonies to the many other nonwritten ways in which intergenerational individual and collective memories have been articulated.