Colonial Memory Research Articles

‘Listen        to the People Who Know’: Nuclear Colonial Memory in the Work of Natalie Harkin and Yhonnie Scarce

‘Listen        to the People Who Know’: Nuclear Colonial Memory in the Work of Natalie Harkin and Yhonnie Scarce

Mnemonic ‘Boundary Objects’ and Postcolonial Restitution

AbstractDrawing on new materialist and object-centered historical criticism, this article analyses colonial and post-colonial discourses of the Greenlandic figurines of the mythical being of ill-wishing and revenge, tupilak (plural form: tupilait). It focuses on three tupilak figures, made in 1905/1906 by a shaman Mitsivarniannga on a request of a Danish ethnographer William Thalbitzer, which today are part of the Danish National Museum collections. In the early 20th century, Greenlandic tupilait (and Inuit cultural production in general) were an object of fascination among European collectors, artists, and the general public. Asking what these objects had come to mean in (and for) Europe, this article points to marginalized Greenlandic narratives of Mitsivarniannga’s tupilat, and builds a critical narrative of these objects as material effects of the disruptions of indigenous community and sustenance by Western colonialism. Drawing on critical insights from the current post-colonial restitution debates, it problematizes the differential political-economic conditions and relations of power, under which the colonial acquisitions and procurements took place. The article argues that cultural heritage items, such as the three tupilat, are mnemonic ‘boundary objects’ that can potentially forge links between disparate memories of colonialism in Denmark and Greenland.

Colonial Memories and the French Partisan Right: Preserving National Identity Through or Against Diversity (2002-2022)

Memorial issues have been one of the most important themes of the French presidential campaign of 2022. Éric Zemmour’s demand to abolish the memorial laws and Marine Le Pen’s and Valérie Pécresse’s criticism of the commemorations of the end of the Algerian War have made the relationship with the colonial past a polarising electoral issue. While the extreme right has exploited this theme since the 1960s, it is surprising that Valérie Précresse, a loyal supporter of Jacques Chirac, the great promoter of memorial reconciliation, has made anti-repentance one of her campaign themes. This article proposes to question this apparent rupture. It shows that it is the result of a process that began with the 2002 presidential elections. These elections led to a reopening of the debate on French identity thanks to a conflictualisation of the questions linked to colonial memories, leading the partisan right to fracture on cultural questions.

The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence. By Itay Lotem

Since the mid-1990s, an ever-growing number of publications have now made it commonplace to identify France as an example of a poorly managed colonial hangover. By contrast, whilst many signs tended to indicate that there was possibly also in Britain a ‘passé qui ne passe pas’, discussions of the imperial past and colonial memory were never framed as a meaningful tool for making sense of what was happening, despite all the racial, historical, and socio-political ramifications of the situation. It is therefore highly satisfying to see a book implicitly (at least in terms of its structure and chronological articulation) using the French trajectory to examine what has remained for a long time an unspoken aspect of British cultural and political life: the memory of the Empire, and how it emerged gradually as a meaningful discussion. Such an intervention is deeply needed at a time when British politicians can often exploit the benefits of uncritical engagement with the Empire, as exemplified by Boris Johnson arguing in 2014 that ‘The UK has bonds of history, language, law, family and customs across the world and we would be foolish not to make more of these at this time of profound global economic revival’ (Foreword to Tim Hewish, How to Solve a Problem like a Visa: The Unhappy State of Commonwealth Migration in the UK (Commonwealth Exchange)). How does this compare with the French context, where Itay Lotem rightly notes that both devoir de mémoire (Chapter 3) and the use of ‘memory as Republican critique’ (Chapter 4) have prevailed, opening spaces for debates which have been unheard of in the UK, notably under the convenient cover of a ‘convivial multiculturalism’ (Chapter 7)? Lotem’s book offers a fascinating overview of the profoundly different trajectories followed by the countries that built and ran the two largest colonial empires of the contemporary period when it came to engaging with, and reflecting upon, the cultural, political, and socio-cultural legacies of their attempt to create what they often called ‘Greater Britain’ or ‘la plus grande France’. At the heart of the book is the fundamental difference between what ‘silence’ means on each side of the English Channel. This is a matter of tradition as much as political circumstances, and is associated with the socio-cultural perception of what the imperial experience achieved, itself linked to how decolonization is remembered. Lotem articulates convincingly how each country has placed a different emphasis on the weight and significance of their colonial past, with memory appearing much more closely associated to political affiliation in the French case, as opposed to Britain where empire was first de-prioritized (Chapter 6), before the ‘tale of the imperial balance sheet’ (Chapter 10) took precedence. The book encompasses a wide range of sources to engage with this Protean, and exceptionally complex, question: interviews and engagement with media sources are a useful complement to the wide range of secondary material that appears in the bibliography. The careful charting of the processes through which empire came back to the fore in public discourse — and under different terms — represents a major contribution to our understanding of how French and British societies have grappled with their imperial past, now that they can no longer rely on their colonies to claim great power status.

"Youth speaking truth to power": intersectional decolonial activism in Namibia.

This article portrays a recent movement towards intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Since 2020, young Namibian activists have come together in campaigns to decolonize public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets. These have been linked to enduring structural violence and issues of gender and sexuality, especially queer and women's reproductive rights politics, which have been expressly framed as perpetuated by coloniality. I argue that the Namibian protests amount to new political forms of intersectional decoloniality that challenge the notion of decolonial activism as identity politics. The Namibian case demonstrates that decolonial movements may not only emphatically not be steeped in essentialist politics but also that activists may oppose an identity-based politics which postcolonial ruling elites have promoted. I show that, for the Namibian movements' ideology and practice, a fully intersectional approach has become central. They consciously juxtapose colonial memory with a living vision for the future to confront and situate colonial and apartheid history. Young Namibian activists challenge the intersectional inequalities and injustices, which, they argue, postcolonial Namibia inherited from its colonial-apartheid past: class inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender-based violence.

Matthew Stanard, The Leopard, the Lion, and the Cock. Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium. Leuven, Leuven University Press 2019

Article Matthew Stanard, The Leopard, the Lion, and the Cock. Colonial Memories and Monuments in Belgium. Leuven, Leuven University Press 2019 was published on December 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 315, issue 3).

Lumumba in the Arts

Lumumba in the Arts

Colonial Monuments, Portuguese Commemorations and the Writing of the History of the Colony of Cabo Verde

Taking as a case study the commemorations and the monuments erected in the colony of Cabo Verde to memorialise the Portuguese ‘discoverers’ of the fifteenth century, this article scrutinises how those mnemonic schemes acted in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands. It analyses the management of those schemes in the fixation of the narrative established as official history of ‘discovery’, in a context featured by controversies, uncertainties, omissions and historical lack about that very ‘discovery’. It also critically examines the contradictions, the concoction of facts and the distortions created by the promoters of the commemorations and monuments, as well as the role they played in that process. This article proves how, through the commemorations held and the monuments erected, the promoters of colonial memory distorted the protocols of interpretation of the information on the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde present in the Portuguese official documents and how they shaped the global understanding of that fact.

Material forms of memorialisation in pre- and post-independent India

ABSTRACT For those who study war memorialisation, there are concerns that perspectives from the West appear predominantly in the literature. Initially, memorials were constructed for glorifying the sacrifices of the war dead followed by architectural designs that emerged to counter the memories of the Holocaust. Interpretations from India offer a differential analysis. The styles of memorials from the pre-independent era served to impose colonial memories. This began to change after independence culminating into structures that reaffirmed respect for freedom and security. Critically, a comparative analysis highlights the intricate relations between memorial styles and social sentiments that are unique to societies.

Silent memorylands: City branding and the coloniality of cultural memory in the Hamburg HafenCity

This article illustrates the predicaments of self-acclaimed global cities that come under pressure to decolonise heritage practices. Examining the politics of public memory in post-imperial Hamburg through the inner-city redevelopment project Hamburg HafenCity, it shows how commemorative landscapes are co-produced by market rationalities. Through document analysis and interviews with city planners, artists and campaigners, the article explores urban toponymies and heritage sites as relational and contested configurations of post-colonial memory and culture. It finds that the HafenCity’s colonial heritage premediates the area’s contemporary symbolic programme which celebrates European expansion, cosmopolitanism and Hamburg’s maritime tradition. The article engages with the multiple modes of encounter and performative responses that (neo-)colonial memory landscapes elicit. It redraws the affective geographies of (un-)belonging in a post-imperial city and charts decolonial propositions of civil society actors.

Decolonising Museum Practice in a Postcolonial Nation: Museum’s Visual Order as the Work of Representation in Constructing Colonial Memory

AbstractThe study of colonialism and its legacies have mostly left the category of memory studies. However, for the colonised subject, what they experienced in the past inevitably forms their present and future discourse. This study focuses on how the museum’s visual order articulates colonial memory. By looking at the work of representation, in this context museum’s visual order, this study investigates how memory lives on through the circulation of colonial memory that the museum simulates. Museum’s visual order translates how colonial memory should be remembered and celebrated as public knowledge. Although research on how museums affect society knowledge have been part of both memory and museum studies, those two studies barely touch upon museums’ role in translating colonial memory in the postcolonial nation. Memory lives on through its circulation in media forms. However, premeditation and mediation are made possible through articulating social and cultural sites, in this case, museums practice. In order to achieve its purposes, this research investigates public museums in different parts of Java, Indonesia which have colonial memory objects. The combination of field observation, document review, and visual method followed by focus group discussion between stakeholders and researchers are conducted to propose the research conclusion. This research argues that the museum’s visual order translates interrelated colonial memories to be accepted as a part of the history that forms the “existence” of the nation and to be appreciated as public knowledge that is shared and forms the national identity. In doing so, museum practice roams into the area of political visibility which decides the legibility of the narrative related to colonial memory. In addition, as museum practice is basically a colonial legacy, this research concludes that it is essential to deconstruct the practice from the perspective of the colonised.

SERUPA TAPI TAK PERNAH SAMA: GENEOLOGI IDENTITAS HIBRID ARTIS BLESTERAN INDO-EROPA DI INDUSTRI PENYIARAN (SEBUAH TINJAUAN POSKOLONIAL)

This article explains how the origin (genealogy) of the hybrid identity of Indo-European artists has a special place on the stage of the Indonesian broadcasting industry beyond the existing Indonesian artists and actually has traces of the history of the Dutch colonial occupation era. The purpose of the article to analyze the traces of Dutch colonial memory is related to the strengthening of the existence of Indo-European Artists. Through the theory of postcolonial theory, the author uses it to examine colonialism discourses that can still be traced in the broadcasting industry in Indonesia post-New Order period. This article explains that the interest of some people in the appearance of Indo artists, can be traced in trace from the history of colonialism occupation in the Dutch East Indies, that the existence of Indo-European people is a bad history of mountainous practices in former colonies. So the status as "nyai" is the ancestor of the Indo-European people who were criminalized. Ironically, currently, Indo descendants as celebrities influence the perspective of the concept of Indonesian beauty following their ideal standards, including the impersonation of beautiful meanings by the Indonesian cosmetic industry referring to the typical European / Western charm.

Cultural transformation of university social work curricula: Black Lives Matter and the Spanish colonial past

The Spanish colonial past permeates the institutions of higher education, configuring the contents and forms of disciplinary knowledge production that constitute it, as is the case of social work. In this article, we visit different scenarios where colonial memories are disputed in the context of the commemorations of 12 October (also called ‘Hispanic Day’ or ‘Race Day’) in Barcelona. Although multiple articulations of anti-racist movements, such as those related to Black Lives Matter, question the material and semiotics that sustain structural racism, colonial cultural layers are still predominant in the Spanish state. Analysis shows how colonial logics nest in social work practice by: first, contributing to the definition of subject positions – such as ‘migrant’ – as problematic and needy of integration policies and intervention; and, second, making structural racism invisible through the avoidance of radical analysis and action regarding the cultural layers that sustain and perpetuate institutional racism.

Walking the stories of colonial ghosts: A method of/against the geographically mundane

The worlds we inhabit tell stories, stitched into the material and symbolic representations of the past that comes to define the features of our places. These stories are never neutral, anchored as they are in the intentional (re)presentation of a racialized white, masculine, and settler story as “our” story. Indeed, space, as an ostensibly neutral platform for storytelling, is called into service of settler-state anxieties to write itself into every (spatial) corner of our lives. This paper takes up this issue by theorizing how the street naming practices of settler communities write into everyday life a settler collective memory that, as a consequence, both shapes space into (settler) place and powerfully intervenes in individual (student) geographic consciousness. By way of vignettes woven throughout theoretical considerations as examples of everyday encounters, I unpack what it means to think of the language of invaded place with greater critical intention as an example of how walking through space can become a pedagogical method, with a focus on detailing what it might mean to support learner engagement with the names that make their communities coherent and media of normalized colonial memory.

Political Messianism in Portugal, the Case of André Ventura

The article aims to discuss Populist Radical Right (“PRR”) through the case of the Portuguese party, Chega (“enough”), presenting its leader, André Ventura, as a political Messiah. Confronting the literature, this article emphasises that, until Ventura came into the scene and contrary to the idea of Portuguese exceptionalism, populism was historically evident in Portuguese politics long before the advent of Chega. Although much has been written about the PRR party, this article presents its leader, André Ventura, in the frame of political messianism. Supporting the argument with tweets from Ventura, this article shows that the leader of Chega navigates the waters of Portuguese colonial memory, with its narrative of a country without racism and of political messianism with roots in Sebastianism in case of Portugal, a poetic-prophetic aspiration for the return of the political saviour. To acquire a religious aura, Ventura uses elements of popular Portuguese religiosity, such as the Miracle of Fatima.

The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence by Itay Lotem

The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence by Itay Lotem

‘How can you feel guilty for colonialism? it is a folly’: colonial memory in the Italian populist radical right

ABSTRACT This paper draws attention to the role of colonial memory in the Italian populist radical right. Italy’s colonial past has been long confined on the fringes of memory in Italian politics and in the Italian public debate. While recent academic attention has been devoted to the selective colonial memory transpiring from Italian cultural products, scarce attention has been paid to colonial memory in contemporary Italian political parties’ discourse. Therefore, by applying Critical Discourse Analysis to semi-structured interviews with Italian populist radical right representatives from the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), this paper aims at investigating which role colonial memory plays in these parties’ discourse. This paper argues that the Lega and FdI reproduce colonial discourse in constructing the image of the contemporary immigrant Other. At the same time, they forge a selective memory of Italy’s colonial past, cleansed from its most controversial aspects.

“A ghost in the system”: French nuclear colonialism and the haunting of republicanism

While France claims to be the nation of universal human rights, its historical intimacy with imperialism would suggest otherwise. The discourse of Republicanism is therefore what allows France to erase and smooth out rhetorical and material incongruities, allowing it to retain its national integrity. This article thus examines the discursive continuities between two constitutive realms of French power: colonialism and nuclearism. I argue that, rather than being separate, these two matrices must be understood as one continuum traversed by the same questions. I analyze their conjoined structure through two historical speeches which both rely on universal Republicanism as justification: Jules Ferry’s 1885 intervention at the National Assembly defending his imperial legacy; and Charles de Gaulle's speeches in Papeete, in 1966, promising a radiant future to Tahiti in the postcolonial era. Republican universalism as a discursive tool, however, is not impervious to porousness: it is always haunted by the violence it inflicts and the peoples it affects. An attention to the ghosts that live inside the social fabric produced by this discourse, thus, helps us critically engage Republican universalism and reorganize the hidden, paradoxical aspects of French (post)colonial memory. Haunting, in other words, becomes a decolonial praxis for recovering what has been negated and interrupting the appearance of narrative cohesion that France relies upon.

Altérité lexicale dans les parlers francophones : figure de l’étranger

Relationships with others raise issues of identity and characterize individuals in their behavior with others. These identity issues, which are specific to each society, are sources of the discourse of otherness. In the French-speaking space which, by its essence and in the light of historical facts, reflects otherness, this discourse is reflected in the terms and lexies of topolectal varieties of French. Based on an onomasiological approach, going from definition to words to discover how otherness is presented, this research aims to identify and present the lexical aspect of the discourse of others in a lexicographical corpus from all over the French-speaking world. In other words, this article studies the topolectal speaking of French to find terms used to evoke otherness. Terms such as “French”, “European”, “foreign”, “white” were the object of a first observation given that they constitute the reverses of a discourse of domination in the dichotomy colonizer-colonized against with “aboriginal” “negro” and “black”. Through illustrated examples, we demonstrate that different aspects such as physical, geographic, and identity traits are vehicles of this discourse which, axiologically, mainly present the pejorative values attributed to the other. Also, it would seem that colonial memory helps to nourish this vision of the other who stands out from the speakers, whose speech is studied, by his foreign origin.

Representing Trauma: Minotaurs, Myths and l’Indicible in Qui se souvient de la mer

For over 132 years, the Algerian population endured harsh treatment, directly and indirectly, at the hands of the French colonial regime, resulting in intense suffering and trauma. The memories of colonialism and the events leading to the decolonization of Algeria became part of l’indicible. The troubling and violent war affected Algerian collective memory, imposing psychological suffering just as the long years of colonialism had done. Ways of coping with and sharing these traumatic events varied: repression, realist representations, or the use of symbols and surrealist imagery. Mohammed Dib, a Francophone Algerian author who published his first works during the colonial period leading up to the Algerian war, chose to use symbolism and surrealist images. Qui se souvient de la mer, the fifth novel by Dib, written during the armed conflict in Algeria and completed before the result of the struggle was certain, is a symbolic representation of the Algerian war told through the lens of an unnamed narrator. The novel overflows with surrealist imagery, science fiction neologisms, symbols and classical mythology to portray the indescribable trauma of war, l’indicible, on the memory of the colonized. These shared symbols seek to move beyond individual perception to capture the totality of the experience. Joseph Ford argues that ‘literature is very rarely produced in the immediate moment of conflict, but part of a process of reflection that occurs after the putative end of conflicts’.1 Mohammed Dib’s work, therefore, provides a rare insight into the psyche of an author writing in a time of conflict and the implications of this on the literature produced. His decision to portray this revolution through abstract means reflects his unique view of the world at this moment in time. This article analyses the modalities used by Mohammed Dib in Qui se souvient de la mer and the difficulty of representing trauma in literature during times of conflict.