Memory Entrepreneurs Research Articles

Law as a tool of collective memory formation: A study of Ukrainian “decommunisation laws”

Among several issues with Ukrainian collective memory of its Communist period, this study specifically addressed the one of lack of a coherent approach to the formation of such memory. The purpose of this study was to identify whether the “decommunisation laws”, adopted in 2015, provided Ukrainian memory entrepreneurs with sufficiently robust tools to build a politics of memory that would be equally applicable across the country. To this end, this study adopted the process tracing method, highlighting the case study of the drafting and adoption of the “decommunisation laws” by relevant stakeholders and the Ukrainian Parliament. Having investigated the preparatory works of these laws and their adoption, it was found that the question of centralisation played a significant role in the establishment of a coherent collective memory of Communism in Ukraine. More specifically, the fact that Members of Parliament pursued a decentralisation-driven agenda resulted in an impediment to the creation of a robust approach to Ukrainian memory of communism. It was also found that the decommunisation package granted Ukrainian memory policymakers several tools to shape the population’s memory of Communism, such as the renaming of toponyms related to Communism, opening access to the archives of the Communist regime, demolition of monuments praising Communist “heroes”, and institutionalisation of a Remembrance Day for victims of totalitarian regimes. Despite these findings, this study concluded that Ukrainian the “decommunisation laws” require a reform to achieve harmonisation considering the country’s aspirations for European integration. The findings of this study can serve as a basis for further recommendatory research on the matter of coherence in Ukrainian memory politics. Researchers might apply these findings to other events with domestically problematic memories or use them to suggest potential reforms to align Ukrainian collective memory of Communism with those of its European partners

The Political Legacies of Wartime Resistance: How Local Communities in Italy Keep Anti-fascist Sentiments Alive

Can past wartime experiences affect political behavior beyond those who lived through them? We argue that local experiences of armed resistance leave political legacies that “memory entrepreneurs” can translate into contemporary political action via a community-based process of intergenerational transmission consisting of three core activities – memorialization, localization, and mobilization. We empirically substantiate this argument in Italy, where an intense armed resistance movement against Nazi-Fascist forces took place in the 1940s. We combine statistical analysis of original data across Italian municipalities and within-case analysis of a purposively selected locality to show how the past impacts the present via the preservation and activation of collective memories. This study improves our understanding of the processes of long-term transmission, emphasizes armed resistance as a critical source of the long-term political legacies of war, and explores its political effects beyond electoral and party politics.

Settler memory and Indigenous counter-memories: narrative struggles over the history of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a long-running conflict between a Euro-centric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the ‘critical years’ of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation.

Sympathy for the Devil: General Vlasov in the Collective Memory of the Great Patriotic War in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract: Andrei Andreevich Vlasov, a Soviet general who sought to create a Russian Liberation Army under German auspices during World War II, has been the focal point of debates about wartime collaboration that reflect deep divides in memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Stalin era in post-Soviet Russia. Memory entrepreneurs in the literary world, the Orthodox Church and the historical profession have reappropriated Vlasov, inserting him in anti-Soviet historical narratives as a hero, symbol or martyr. Meanwhile, patriotic intellectuals in the Putin years have invoked Vlasov as a figure of national treachery and use him to discredit their political opponents. The debate over Vlasov points to the fractured and unproductive nature of national collective memory in Russia.

Nicolae Iorga as everybody’s political ally in post-communist Romania

This chapter discusses how the memory of an influential figure of modern Romania’s history like Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940), a foremost historian-politician and nationalist intellectual, became instrumental in the three decades following the end of communism by politicians. As he is considered the father of Romanian nationalism and a symbol of the nationalist struggle on the eve of WWI, Iorga’s memory in contemporary Romania allows us to examine nationalism in politics. In the research, a qualitative approach was adopted to the subject by dealing with discourses and initiatives produced by politicians as agents of memory in post-communist Romania. By looking at the various strategies of remembrance used after 1989 by these memory entrepreneurs, the research investigates the politicians who honoured Iorga, the purpose of their engagement in such politics of memory, and what this says about how post-communist politics, nationalism and memory mingled.

Amnesty in El Salvador: The Long and Winding Road to Justice, Truth, and Memory

Using the lens of memory and the figure of the memory entrepreneur, this article traces the struggle between Salvadoran actors who support amnesty and forgetting and so do not wish investigations into the human rights violations committed during the war to take place, and actors who oppose amnesty and promote memory, truth, and justice. I argue that, as this latter group (i.e., human rights memory entrepreneurs) chipped away at the 1993 unconditional Amnesty Law in Salvadoran courts and in the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS), creating a possibility for memory, state memory entrepreneurs worked to eliminate these possibilities.

Memory, the City, and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe: The Ghosts of Others

Memory, the City, and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe: The Ghosts of Others

Seeing the future through a rear-view mirror: On the politics of revitalizing secular bio-icons in the Middle East

ABSTRACT This paper investigates secular bio-icons’ political revitalization, illustrating their application as critical interventions into contemporary political struggles in the Middle East. To elucidate this phenomenon, we introduce the concept politics of revitalization to address how memory entrepreneurs can manage the past in ways that legitimize their involvement in particular visions of the future, thereby holding the potential to consolidate the position of political elites in power. Based on an analysis of three secular bio-icons: Jamila Bouhired, Leila Khaled and Hilarion Capucci, we argue that the mobilizing, resistive and aspirational potential of secular bio-icons can be utilized strategically by political actors to boost and legitimize existing (and widely contested) regimes or ideological beliefs by anchoring them in mediated renditions of historical narratives. We hold that secular bio-icons’ political application constitutes a distinct social technique applied by Iran, Syria and Hizbollah to (re)activate nostalgic collective memories, pointing towards particular futures in which they entrench their political status and undermine opposing actors.

Homelands and dictators: migration, memory, and belonging between Southeastern Europe and Chile

ABSTRACT In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’concerning past dictatorships and political violence emerged both in the Latin American Southern Cone and in Central and Eastern Europe. Both regions witnessed the creation and then consolidation of memory regimes related to remembering military dictatorships and state socialism, respectively. This article interrogates how transnational migration experiences between the two regions challenge nationally framed memory regimes, with a focus on Chile, Romania, and Croatia. By tracing individual migrants and exiles between Romania and Chile, as well as the Croatian Chilean diaspora, this article discusses the entanglements between Chile and Southeastern Europe in the remembrance of the Pinochet and Ceausescu dictatorships, as well as the Tito´s Yugoslavia. First, it shows how migrants who experienced dictatorships in both regions operate their own vernacular comparisons between the two experiences. These reframe the tropes existing in dominant memory narratives in each country and create hierarchies of suffering and oppression (i.e. in the case of the Romania–Chile comparison, with a more negative valuation of the Ceauşescu dictatorship). Second, by discussing intergenerational memory for those who did not experience dictatorship, as well as diasporic memory formations (e.g. Croat Chileans), it shows that, in these instances, comparisons are more under the influence of dominant national memory frames, but also of memory entrepreneurs who mobilize specific threads. Moreover, the article discusses how these various migrant experiences constitute and reframe senses of belonging, interrogating both the formulations of home and transnationality.

Lytis, karas ir atmintis: „atminties taškai“ Lietuvos partizaniniame kare (1944–1953) dalyvavusių moterų pasakojimuose

Gender, War and Remembrance: ‘Points of Memory’ in the Narratives of Women Participants in the P artisan War (1944–1953) in Lithuania This article sets out to build a model of gendered memory entrepreneurship. The analysis is based on points of memory, a concept developed by Marianne Hirsch, who defined them as ‘points of intersection between past and present, memory and post-memory, personal remembrance and cultural recall’. The theoretical inquiry is enriched by examining the narratives of two former partisan messengers, Aldona Vilutienė (née Sabaitytė, 1931– 2020), who created the first museum about the anti-Soviet resistance and the deportations carried out under Stalin, and Elena Žilvytienė (neé Aleliūnaitė, 1925–2020), whose story (focusing on her father) was covered by the mass media in 2019. Key words: women and war, memory entrepreneurs, points of memory, testimonies, traumatic memory.

Making and contesting far right sites of memory. A case study on Romania

Among the strategies followed by far right groups for normalising their messages of intolerance in contemporary Europe, sites of memory play a pivotal role. Adopting an actor-centred and instrumentalist perspective of memory work and memory politics, the article considers sites of memory as products of the framing and staging of the past by the memory entrepreneurs, leading figures within the community of remembrance who, mastering the art of memorialisation, strive to establish their revisionist history within the state-endorsed memory politics. The far right memory entrepreneurs spatialise their memory work in sites of memory that downplay the history of violence of their group and present its heroic and patriotic side. The degree of success in contesting such sites shows whether the memory entrepreneurs have succeeded in normalising their messages. The article analyses the making and the contestation of a site of memory established by the far right in post-communist in Romania.

A history of post-communist remembrance: from memory politics to the emergence of a field of anticommunism

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: the anticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes. Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism.

Black creative genius matters: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Jazz and People’s Movement, and the politics of “black classical music.”

ABSTRACT The Jazz and People’s Movement, led by multi-instrumentalist and Atlantic Records recording star Rahsaan Roland Kirk, began disrupting network television talk shows in 1970. The movement aimed to stop the erasure of “black creative genius” not only from the nation’s television airwaves, but from its collective history and memory – to make that which was practically invisible visible once again. But Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Jazz and People’s Movement do not fit neatly into the usual categories historians use to describe the politics of the “long Sixties.” Kirk occupied a hybrid position – equal parts radical, reformist, and countercultural – and fashioned himself as what scholars such as Elizabeth Jelin and Lorena Oropeza have called “memory entrepreneurs”- men and women who give voice to those disappeared or otherwise silenced by the state. Rahsaan Roland Kirk acted as jazz’s foremost memory entrepreneur not to expose state violence, exactly, but to reveal the whitewashing – the disappearing – of black creative genius out of American popular memory. That whitewashing falls into another category of violence – cultural violence – executed in service of the maintenance of American racial hierarchies. This essay restores both Kirk’s and the Jazz and People’s Movement’s places in the respective histories of the long civil rights movement, Black Power, and the counterculture. It shows how easily the cultural politics of the three – so often treated separately by historians – overlapped and were intertwined. As such, the essay argues for Kirk as a prominent black political artist who illuminated the intersection of popular music and civil rights politics over the long Sixties.

R.I.P., Rest in Pieces: Mnemonic Transnationality, Travel, and Translation of the Marcos Burial in the Heroes’ Cemetery

On 18 November 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte allowed the interment of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani or Heroes’ Cemetery. This essay interrogates the discrepancy between two mnemonic signifiers that lay claim to patriotism and nationhood: the Libingan and Marcos’ body. Close reading the burial process via the frameworks of memory, ideology, cultural studies, and translation studies allows a focus, not only on the cemetery as a site but also on the mnemonic discursive interventions of the Marcos family. As hegemonic memory agents fueled by money, myth, and exilic privileges linked to the USA, the Marcoses exploit the political translated body of the patriarch. As such, dictatorial exile is partly divested of its admonishing power. While the translation (as mobility and “survival”) of the corpse attempts to absorb the heroic signification of the cemetery, in turn, the honorable signification of the lieu de memoire is also discursively challenged. Hence, while Marcos now rests among the heroes, most of his desaparecidos still want entombment. Notions of the nation are also therefore challenged. The paper thus demonstrates how a “fixed” mnemonic signifier, such as a cemetery exemplifying patriotism, can be modified through “memory entrepreneurs.” Understanding memory-as-process, and not only memory-as-site, allows us to discern the hegemonic meaning-making in memory politics by revealing the means and not only the ends. This perspective questions the malleability of space and takes us towards the horizon of what Ricœur calls a “just allotment of memory.”

THE “AFFAIRS” OF POLITICAL MEMORY

Self-serving hegemonic visions of history are institutionalized by dominant memory entrepreneurs, simultaneously imposing an authoritative version of “what happened” and their right to articulate it. These visions and the hierarchies of honour they consecrate are cultivated trans-generationally, aiming to ensure the community’s political cohesion, as well as the emotional attachments that can ensure its reproduction over time. This paper has three objectives. First, it brings insights from social epistemology to bear on a conceptualization of political memory-making and proposes the concepts of “hermeneutical dissidence” and “hermeneutical seduction” to capture the critical interrogation of such mythologies. It highlights the obstacles facing any attempt at subverting them, particularly given the resilience of cognitive and emotional investments in particular schemas of perception and understanding in relation to the boundaries of the community and its history. Second, I transplant the descriptive concept of “affair” formulated by pragmatic sociologists into debates about political memory, infusing it with a dose of normativity in order to shed critical light on various types of hermeneutical dissidence from dominant, emotionally anchored, exclusionary imaginaries. Third, to render the theoretical proposal concrete, I introduce two “memory affairs,” both triggered by debates over the meaning and gender of political resistance.

A day of unfinished mourning: Historicizing commemorative practices of Bleiburg among the Croatian diaspora in Argentina

The Croatian post-Second World War diaspora in Argentina developed a specific identity due to the historical context of its exile (the war defeat of the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia, the postwar killings of the defeated troops and the civilians at Bleiburg, Austria, with subsequent death marches in 1945—commonly referred to as “Bleiburg,” and the eventual forced migration) that served as a baseline of its identity across generations. While in Communist Yugoslavia Bleiburg was practically a taboo, the efforts to preserve its memory were carried out by the Croatian political exiles in Argentina as of 1947. This article explores historical memory practices of Bleiburg among the Croatian diaspora in Argentina. Based on an analysis of written, photographic, and audiovisual material, as well as personal testimonies, the study identifies five major periods of memory of the Croatian diaspora in Argentina from 1947 until today. The results of the study show a tendency of double and cumulative victimization: while the first generation was framed as victims of the postwar killings and exile, the post-memory generation also perceives itself as long-term victims of Tito’s Yugoslavia because of being born in Argentina. There is an intergenerational transmission of memory throughout the described five periods, and the real change of generations occurs when the survivors perish and new memory entrepreneurs take over the commemorations. The post-memory generation framed commemorations in such a way that they serve to reinforce their identity and enable them to resignify their community history, while maintaining their sense of uniqueness toward both the country where they were born and the country their grandparents were forced to leave.

Itineraries of the Great War and the rise of the local on the Western Front: Memory, commemoration and the shifting regimes of remembrance tourism

The mainstream grand narratives of the Great War have tended to disregard local perspectives from territories on the Western Front. Using on-the-field visits of battlefields, interviews with stakeholders and analysis of battlefield guidebooks and itineraries, this article addresses these gaps by examining local assertions in the re-invention of battlefield itineraries and remembrance trails of the Great War, the new socio-spatial order they establish and discordance of perspectives it triggers between the nation and the territory. The itinerary, thus, devised by memory entrepreneurs and performed by visitors on the ground becomes an ‘effort of remembrance’ and a dynamic scheme mediating between participants and place.

Advocating for the cause of the “victims of Communism” in the European political space: memory entrepreneurs in interstitial fields

The European Parliament (EP) adopted, between 2004 and 2009, a series of resolutions calling for recognition of Communist crimes and commemoration of their victims. This article focuses on an overlooked aspect of anti-Communist activism, the awareness-raising activities carried out by some Central European Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to perpetuate the cause through networks that enable them to exchange institutional credibility, scientific legitimacy, and policy-oriented knowledge with Institutes of National Memory, parts of academia, and victims associations. Although they use the techniques of expertise and scandalization that are often effective in European institutions, these memory entrepreneurs have largely failed to further their claims in the European Union (EU) after 2009. In line with the turn toward “practice” in EU studies and the increased attention paid to agency in memory politics, this article contends that the conditions of production of their narrative of indictment of Communism accounts for this relative lack of success. Because their demands produced a strong polarization inside the EP while colliding with established Western patterns of remembrance, these MEPs’ reach remains limited to their Conservative peers from the former Eastern bloc. This weak national and ideological representativeness hinders their capacity to impose their vision of the socialist period in the European political space.

From Partisan Warfare to Memory Battlefields: Two Women's Stories about the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Lithuania

This article explores how women fighters tell their stories in relation to the dominant state narratives about a partisan war. In addition to engaging their individual stories, it explores how they speak, write and act as memory entrepreneurs, creating collective memory about a past that they have experienced instead of allowing others to select actors and events for historical narratives. It argues that memory regimes and gender cultures are intertwined, and that gender cultures are essential in understanding the cultural choices made by memory entrepreneurs in memory making. The article analyses the oral testimonies and written memoirs of two women, Rakhel’ Margolis and Aldona Vilutienė (neé Sabaitytė), who were partisans in Lithuania during the Second World War (Margolis) and its aftermath (Vilutienė) and created the first museums dealing with the Second World War and its legacy in post‐Soviet Lithuania. Read as stories about what it was like to be a woman during a partisan war, the narratives include some common themes: widespread betrayal, the difficult physical conditions that they had to endure as women and the vulnerability that came with these experiences. Read as stories told by memory entrepreneurs, the narratives reveal that the two women acted as mnemonic warriors fighting for competing memory regimes built on opposing gender ideologies.

Integrating the Central European Past into a Common Narrative: The Mobilizations Around the ‘Crimes of Communism’ in the European Parliament

After the Cold War, a new constellation of actors entered transnational European assemblies. Their interpretation of European history, which was based on the equivalence of the two ‘totalitarianisms’, Stalinism and Nazism, directly challenged the prevailing Western European narrative constructed on the uniqueness of the Holocaust as the epitome of evil. This article focuses on the mobilizations of these memory entrepreneurs in the European Parliament in order to take into account the issue of agency in European memory politics. Drawing on a social and political analysis centered on institutionally embedded actors, a process-tracing analysis investigates the adoption of the furthest-reaching official expression of a ‘totalitarian’ interpretation of Communism to date: the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism from April 2009. This case study shows that the issue was put on the parliamentary agenda by a small group of Central and Eastern European politicians who had managed to ‘learn the ropes’ of effective advocacy in the Assembly. An official vision of Communism then emerged through intense negotiations structured by interwoven ideological and national lines of division. However, this narrative largely remains of regional, rather than pan-European, relevance. In the competition for the definition of ‘Europe’ and its values, the persistent diversity in the assessment of Communism gives evidence of the local rootedness of remembrance despite the pan-European ambitions of memory entrepreneurs.