Our Haunted Present: Cultural Memory in Question

Abstract

If there is a commonplace in recent writings on cultural memory, it is that what Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) has called “the memory industry” is experiencing an unprecedented boom. Inspired by works such as Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Memoire (1984), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s Invention of Tradition (1983), cultural memory has been “investigated,” “interrogated” and “problematized” in the past two decades in countless academic books and articles whose titles contain variations of phrases like “Cultural Memory,” “Memory and Trauma” and “The Politics of Memory” (Klein 2000; Olick and Robbins 1998; Zelizer 1995). This academic fascination with memory has been both feeding off and is fed by the “memory wars” raging across the West. From the European debates on the Holocaust to the American debates on the Vietnam War to the Canadian debates on treaty-making, redress and reparation for the various victims of state violence, the past has become an object of political conflict.