Memory worlds: Reframing time and the past – An introduction

Abstract

This article, a prologue to the special issue ‘Memory Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past’, is a follow-up to the plenary session ‘Connecting Memory Traditions around the World’, organised by the authors in the Third Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association held in Madrid (2019). Elaborating on the work of critical physicists such as Rovelli and Barad, it calls into question hegemonic conceptions of linear time and the past in two ways. First, by bringing in crucial concepts elaborated in the field of memory studies that anticipate, support or may accommodate this claim. Secondly, by summoning social anthropology to the debate, as a field where subaltern epistemologies of time and the past have become a crucial area of research in the last decades. The article calls for the broadening of the Memory Studies agenda in order to move beyond implicit well-established conceptions of linear time that may obscure or obliterate alternate epistemologies, usually dwelling in the margins.