From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory

Abstract

What happens when different histories of extreme violence confront each other in the public sphere? Does the remembrance of one event erase others from view? When memories of colonialism, occupation, slavery, and the Holocaust bump up against one another in contemporary multi cultural societies, must a competition of victims ensue? Such questions of remembrance, justice, and comparison lie at the heart of any attempt to think through the topic of this special issue: transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory. These questions have also oriented my attempt to construct a theory of multidirectional that focuses on exemplary sites of tension involving remembrance of the Nazi genocide of European Jews in order to offer an alternative framework for thinking about and confronting the recent and ongoing memory wars.1 In Multidirectional Memory (2009), I make three moves toward a new account of transcultural remembrance. First, I argue against a logic of competitive based on the zero-sum game, which has dominated many popular and scholarly approaches to public remembrance. Accord ing to this understanding, memories crowd each other out of the pub lic sphere—for example, too much emphasis on the Holocaust is said to marginalize other traumas, or, inversely, adoption of Holocaust rhetoric to speak of those other traumas is said to relativize or even deny the Holo caust's uniqueness. To be sure, political, economic, and cultural forms of power contour the circulation of memories in the public sphere, but a pre Foucauldian understanding of power as repressive cannot capture mem ory's relative autonomy from such forces. In contrast, I suggest, works productively: the result of conflict is not less memory, but more—even of subordinated traditions. For instance, I would argue that the result of the rise to prominence of Holocaust is not