National and Transnational Memory

Abstract

In a gradual progression across the chapters we have built up from the individual to the social group, then to the nation and the transnational sphere, first introduced in Chapter 4 through the topic of textual memory. This chapter explores more explicitly the topics of national and transnational memory and identity. Memory is an important social phenomenon because of its functions with regard to collectivities. Within a sociocultural group, memory regarding certain events or people can take on symbolic force, which as well as a signifying function and a didactic or directive function also has a unifying function. Indeed, arguably the most important function of memory is to uphold the cohesion and identity of the group, since communities are constituted in large measure by a collective conception of their past. The past is viewed as both the breeding and testing ground by today’s collectivities, and the collective past confers durability on the social unit and its identity. The commemoration of traumatic events, memory of foundational events, traditions, emblems and symbolic sites of the past powerfully evoke and define communities to which they have given rise (Cubitt 2007). As ever we must recognize a processual dialectic: identity is sustained by remembering, and what is remembered is shaped by the assumed identity (Gillis 1994, 3).