Remembering Complicity and Resistance: A Review of Mihaela Mihai’s <em>Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance</em> (2022)

Abstract

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds for the present and future. And third, she proposes a strategy for challenging reductive narratives of the past and fostering more nuanced models of remembrance. The review analyses each of these steps with the aim of sketching out Mihai’s contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on complicity and implication in violence.