Politics Of Memory Research Articles

ABSTRACT In Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois developed a framework conceptualizing collective memory as a political project of knowledge construction where revisionist history served as the political propaganda of the colonizer. The mechanisms of historical distortion have long been built into our colonial epistemological fabric, reproduced through academic knowledge production. To examine these dynamics and their legacies today, this paper shows how Du Bois's Black Reconstruction provides a framework for both studying and challenging the politics of revisionist memory through three interconnected domains: theory, method, and praxis. The Du Boisian theory of memory shows that truth‐telling not only helps us better reexamine the contingencies that lead to collective memory in the present. Truth‐telling is a guiding force shaping the creative ways we collectively imagine and embark on the future.

Ricardo Piglia (19402017), the Argentine writer, sets his novel The Absent City (1992) against the backdrop of Argentinas dictatorship. Through the suspense framework of detective fiction and the posthuman imagination of science fiction, the novel constructs a profound political allegory. The central figure in the novelthe cyborg Elenaachieves a triple revolutionary transcendence of traditional human identity through the practices of the posthuman body: the fluid construction of gender identity, the resistant inscription of memory politics, and the generative force of narrative reality. Elenas cyborg body deconstructs singular authority across the layers of story, narration, and reality, driving the novel toward a hybrid, fluid, and heterogeneous New Baroque aesthetic. This demonstrates Piglias forward-looking exploration of the constructive potential of narrative in the posthuman era.

The paper analyzes the instrumentalization of Lesia Ukrainka’s image in the cultural memory of Georgia, drawing on the material of Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations. Using various sources—including translations, critical articles published in Georgia, Georgian poetry, and research works—it demonstrates how memory politics circulated in Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia. The study shows that the image of Lesia Ukrainka is generalized within the discursive construction ‘Georgia-Ukraine.’ The commemoration of her personality demonstrates that the poetess acquired a symbolic role in the discourse of friendship (during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods) and partnership (post-colonial times) between the two countries. Georgian textual coherence related to Lesia Ukrainka’s biography and work shows that she became a symbol of Ukraine as a whole and a site of memory about Ukraine, which also reflects the particularities of Georgian memory politics regarding Ukraine. The paper reviews recent scholarly literature that presents new Georgian perspectives on Lesia Ukrainka. Special attention is given to specific cases in the history of the translation of her poetry into Georgian. This empirical material is analyzed as ‘textual coherence’ with the aim to interpret the diverse textual sources reflecting literary relations as sites of memory. The research of empirical material employs methods such as discourse and content analysis, reception studies, comparative analysis, and others. This approach revealed pluralistic paradigms in the study of Georgian-Ukrainian literary relations, with memory studies standing out as one of the most promising directions.

In this article commission Peggy Phelan examines the recent work of Joyce Kozloff (b.1942), focusing on her engagement with maps, craft and history. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kozloff completed Uncivil Wars (2020–23), a series of thirteen acrylic paintings based on battle maps from the American Civil War, and Memory and Time: Labor and Cultural History (2021), a commission for the Federal Courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina. The latter combines aerial maps, Cherokee basket patterns and historical quilts to interrogate the politics of labour, slavery and memory, highlighting the legacies of Native American histories alongside the rise of the southern textile industry. Kozloff’s practice, emerging from the Pattern and Decoration movement and informed by decades of public art, conceptual rigour and feminist engagement, treats maps as platforms for both historical documentation and speculative imagination. Her work challenges viewers to reconsider historical narratives, power and the implications of visual representation.

This paper examines the commemoration of Victory Day and its evolution since 1991 in a city in southern Ukraine. It focuses on analysing commemorative events held in Kryvyi Rih. The study examines how local practices of commemorating this day reflect the peculiarities of local memory politics and correlate with state initiatives of memory regulation. Using the micro-analysis methodology and Clifford Geertz's ‘thick description,’ the author analyses city districts commemorative events, scrutinising their staging, participants and visual design. The example of Kryvyi Rih demonstrates that to understand the situation regarding the memory and commemoration of World War II in Ukraine, it is not enough to limit analysis to the initiatives of state agents of memory regulation. Locally, these initiatives may not be adopted, or may be adopted only if there is direct responsibility for ignoring them. Local memory politics regarding World War II, including the Victory Day commemoration style, were largely determined by local authorities and their political agenda, and could be implemented as a deliberate act of opposition to the central government's efforts. The analysis of Victory Day commemoration practices at the city district level in Kryvyi Rih also demonstrates a change in their function during the period of independence. While during the Soviet and early post-Soviet periods, their main function remained commemoration, since the mid-2000s, the politicisation of events has become noticeable, intensified after 2014. Simultaneously with the replacement of participants in the celebrations by a new categories and the passing of the veteran generation, these events have taken on the features of carnivalisation. An analysis of the situation in Kryvyi Rih reveals both the significant specificity of the local situation in relation to nationwide initiatives in the field of memory politics and the need for a nuanced analysis of the commemoration practices of the Second World War in a chronological perspective, since Victory Day in 1991 and 2015 had different meanings and essences in the city.

A Hero of Two Worlds: The 1910/11 Steuben Statues in Washington and Potsdam and German American Memory Politics

This essay examines the ambiguous cultural politics of Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie,” focusing on how the narrative generates empathy for immigrant suffering while containing it in aestheticized, mediated forms that limit political subversion. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s fort-da paradigm, the essay demonstrates how the plot’s oscillation between presence and absence maps the second-generation immigrant’s conflicted relationship to cultural inheritance. It also employs thing theory to explore how the origami animals function as fragile repositories of diasporic memory, simultaneously treasured in the private sphere and devalued in the racialized public sphere. The interlocking concepts of postmemory and translation are also mobilized to illuminate how linguistic incongruity—specifically the mother’s inability to speak English, the son’s inability to read Chinese, and the reliance on a tourist translator—produces a safe distance from cultural trauma, enabling retrospective empathy without destabilizing the present. By integrating these psychoanalytic, material, and linguistic perspectives, this essay reconsider Liu’s work in terms of multiculturalism, assimilation, and the politics of memory, claiming that its enduring effect of cultural politics lies in rendering visible the contradictions of diasporic identity without resolving them.

This article examines the memory of state socialism in Kosovo through a gender and slow memory lens. It revisits the ‘archive’ of a woman’s scholarship from the socialist era to shed light on gender and power dynamics in memory frameworks and storytelling. The focus is on three points: First, an attempt is made to uncover patterns of gendered remembrance and how they have influenced Kosovo’s dominant memory and historical narratives. Second, it is shown how neglect and nostalgia for the socialist era shape contemporary memory politics. And third, through attention to gendered temporalities, it is argued that the slow memory approach renders visible the interplay between silence and remembrance of the distant and recent past. It empowers the gendering of knowledge and storytelling to recentre memory and envision alternative futures.

Local dynamics are crucial for uncovering Russian influence operations and understanding how Russia operates. In Serbia, pairing memory politics with state capture strategies proves to be a powerful tool for both local elites and Russian activities. Memory politics enables Serbian elites and nationalists to exploit historical grievances, garnering support and legitimizing their narratives, which often hinders democratic progress and social cohesion in both Serbia and its neighbouring countries. State capture facilitates this by enabling media, judiciary, and security institutions to propagate the regime’s ideological agenda. This troubling dynamic extends beyond the ruling party, as large parts of the Serbian opposition also embrace nationalist narratives, thereby limiting democratic pluralism and prolonging the influence of nationalism, even in the event of potential regime changes. Serbia uses its ethnic minorities in Bosnia and Kosovo as proxies to stall state-building and exacerbate divisions, perpetuating identity-based conflicts that impede institutional stability in the region. The vulnerabilities of the Serbian nation across its borders create opportunities for exploitation by Russia, especially in the context of recent events in the Balkans and the Ukraine War. Moreover, Serbia's situation highlights similar risks in divided countries like Georgia, Moldova, and Montenegro. To effectively counter Russian foreign policy, it is crucial to understand the local causes, drivers, and potential triggers of instability.

This article examines how historical ambiguity becomes a distinctive political resource in post-colonial societies. Analysing presidential communications from 2016 to 2022, I demonstrate how former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte strategically exploited documentary gaps surrounding the hero Lapulapu. Where colonisers destroyed or never created comprehensive pre-colonial records, “narrative vacuums” emerge, enabling populist leaders to construct historical meanings with a flexibility not available in contexts where they must contest established records. Duterte transformed the documentary void surrounding Lapulapu into a political opportunity, recasting him as a Muslim and Visayan hero to bridge ethnic and religious constituencies. This ethnopopulist strategy builds coalitions by connecting divided groups while directing antagonism toward Manila-based elites. Duterte institutionalised his interpretation through the Order of Lapulapu and influenced quincentennial commemorations, demonstrating how leaders convert vacuums into political capital. This pattern illuminates populist movements across post-colonial contexts where similar historical uncertainties provide opportunities for narrative construction and coalition building.

ABSTRACT Although anti-communism has long been central to far-right ideology, its role in normalising far-right discourse within post-communist societies remains underexplored. This article examines how anti-communist memory politics in Albania enables such normalisation even in the absence of a consolidated far-right party. It identifies two key mechanisms: the relativisation of historical knowledge about communism and anti-fascist resistance, and the naturalisation of wartime and Cold War-era anti-communist stereotypes. Together, these dynamics delegitimise leftist alternatives and rehabilitate fascist collaborators, reflecting broader mnemonic trends across CEE. Combining process-tracing with critical realist discourse analysis, the study conceptualises anti-communism as a normalising mechanism across structural and discursive domains.

Abstract This article investigates the transformation of the official historical narrative of the Golden Horde in Kazakhstan, tracing a significant shift from Nazarbayev to Tokayev’s presidencies. The narrative of the Golden Horde became a strategic component of the second president, Tokayev, who announced the commemoration of 750 years of the Horde foundation in Kazakhstan and proclaimed that it laid the foundations for Kazakh statehood. The research explores the abrupt transformation of the official historical narrative and underscores the pivotal role of historians as memory actors. The study investigates the “memory game” between two schools of historians in independent Kazakhstan, revealing the agency of a new generation of historians in reshaping the national historical narrative through historicizing strategies, thus engaging in memory politics. This contribution extends the literature on the mnemonic context in Kazakhstan and non-state memory actors in authoritarian settings, shedding light on the dynamics of historical representation and memory politics in evolving mnemonic landscapes.

ABSTRACT This article explores art as a tool for transgenerational remembering the violence of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I depict the making of a local memorial site as a dialogue between transnational memory work, national memory politics and local (post)memories. Art came to the village as part of the outreach activities of the international court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and civil society interventions. NGO activists, together with international and national artists, introduced the concept of art as transgenerational memory work and facilitated the local adaptation of this tool. Youths in the art workshops assumed the role of artistic intermediaries by translating their own postmemory as well as the fragmented narratives of village survivors into visual forms, thereby contributing to the materialisation of new memoryscapes in which old and new memories intertwine. The national political narrative of collective suffering and victimhood framed the making of the memorial site. Consequently, transgenerational memory work could not transcend that framework and convey the complex blurred victim-perpetrator subjectivities that mark the past and the present of the village.

This article examines cancel culture as a form of enforced forgetting that shapes the social and historical identity of large communities. Focusing on cases in Russia, the analysis explores instances where historical events or periods have been deliberately rejected. As a tool of memory politics, cancel culture operates through public denunciations of the past, serving as a mechanism for political actors to legitimize themselves and construct identity. The article also explores ways of mitigating the negative effects of this culture. The first section discusses cancel culture in relation to the erasure of specific historical periods or events, arguing that it is a distinct form of the politics of forgetting that extends beyond it, involving violations of historicism, presentism, and universalism. While claiming to restore historical justice and inclusivity, cancel culture ultimately opposes meritocracy by undermining individual achievements. The second section examines strategies to counteract cancel culture, highlighting the fact that since decontextualization is central to its operation, the primary corrective mechanism should be recontextualization, which involves restoring historical context through a comprehensive narrative and an appropriate descriptive framework. Additionally, the discussion shifts from an ethical approach to memory politics toward an instrumental one. Finally, the article advocates for an agonistic memory framework that acknowledges the multi-actor nature of political and social processes.

Abstract This article examines diasporic Iranian responses to protests sparked by the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022. While Amini’s death galvanized widespread dissent inside Iran, it also spurred diasporic Iranian solidarity, often expressed through the call to “be the voice” of Iranian protestors. I analyze two key practices of diasporic narration: first, framing the Woman, Life, Freedom protests as a “revolution” in social media discourse; and second, the circulation of nostalgic video montages idealizing pre-1979 Iran as a lost era of political freedom. Together, these practices reveal how diasporic narratives may dilute protest demands by fitting them into revisionist frameworks. The conclusion reflects on both the potential and limits of diaspora narration in shaping political memory and understanding.

ABSTRACT This article is devoted to the post-1989 commemorative resolutions of the Sejm and Senate of the Republic of Poland commemorating events and persons associated with the Second World War. This event and narratives about the war are an integral part of Polish political and media discourse. The problematic of this article is related to the answer to the question of the contemporary ways in which the Polish Parliament narrates the Second World War in the resolutions commemorating this event. The topic is justified insofar as the commemorative resolutions of the Polish Parliament are often treated as an instrument of historical politics. They are used by the authorities to conduct internal and external state policy. The theoretical framework and conceptual grid of this article is determined by the concept of commemorative politics, which is linked to the authorities and their efforts to shape collective memory. The method of analysis is qualitative source analysis. From the collected corpus of 774 commemorative resolutions of the Sejm and the Senate of the Republic of Poland, those were selected that were directly related to the commemoration of various aspects of the Second World War.

The long shadow of 2020’s protests against a rigged election continues to shape Belarus’s political, social, and cultural landscape. The country has undergone a profound reconfiguration of state-society relations, and the ruptures exposed by the protests were further deepened by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Though the regime suppressed the protests and reasserted control, the events of 2020 triggered a deep societal transformation marked by new forms of civic subjectivity, political consciousness, and diasporic mobilization. This article examines the regime’s repressive turn and memory politics, the impact of politically driven migration, the rise of a transnational Belarusian identity, and the role of digital infrastructures in sustaining civic networks beyond the state’s reach.

ABSTRACT This research paper interprets Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the context of post-Soviet trauma, restorative nostalgia and the entrenchment of authoritarian politics. It holds that the underlying cause of the 2022 conflict reflects the unresolved social and psychological crises of the 1990s. That decade, remembered for market fundamentalism known as shock therapy, precipitated most Russians into a deep-seated social anomie. Out of these abrupt changes emerged a collective longing to resurrect the perceived stability of the Soviet past. Vladimir Putin drew upon this ressentiment, projecting his leadership as both the guardian and the restorer of ‘historic’ Russia while positioning Ukraine at the centre of his memory politics. In the Kremlin’s narrative, Ukraine’s emergence as a sovereign state – especially its ongoing westward pivot – constitutes the last blow to Russia's imagined historical unity. Rather than a territorial expansion, the invasion is framed as an act of redemption, meant to rejuvenate a sense of national purpose. Ukraine has become a site of loss as much as a target for recovery, enabling the conflict to reinforce Putin’s one-man rule as the embodiment of Russians’ restorative efforts against foreign manipulation and geopolitical fragmentation.

The work of David McKitterick, former librarian of Trinity College and now emeritus professor at Cambridge, offers profound insight into bibliophilia and the concept of the book as an object. What is the value of a book? What makes a book rare? Why are some old books so sought after by collectors? The author is among the first to clearly establish a connection between the politics of memory and the book as a physical object of cultural heritage. The common understanding of a book is often limited to its text, rather than its material embodiment. This is partly because a text must be distributed to reach a wide audience. Yet, replication is incompatible with terms like uniqueness or collectible value. Modern cultural studies question the primacy of information over its physical carrier. This new perspective calls for seeing a printed book not merely as a passive vessel for information, but as a “thing in itself”, which demands new methods and approaches. David McKitterick emphasizes that digitization, though increasingly in demand today, strips a book of its material dimension. The availability of digital copies can make readers oblivious to the existence of tangible books. The other extreme is to attribute excessive value to any old book. The author employs the method of historiography to define rarity as the core criterion for a book's value. Rarity involves not only a scarce number of copies but also a wide variety of individual aspects specific to an entire edition or a particular copy. McKitterick's work clearly demonstrates how a rare book, regardless of how we define the term, becomes an object of memory akin to a work of art, reflecting the cultural experience of a country and its generation.

This article explores how various methods of conceptualizing digitalization influence the interpretation of the relationship between digitalization and the dynamics of political continuity. Theoretical and methodological priorities in examining the nature and role of digitalization within political communications significantly affect how its possibilities and risks for maintaining political continuity are understood. Emphasis is placed on overcoming methodological scientistic reductionism in the analysis of digitalization processes. The importance of investigating the political and cultural specifics of the symbolic structures of political memory and their temporal regime is highlighted when assessing digitalization’s influence on contemporary political communications. In discussing both the constructive and destructive aspects of digitalization’s impact on the political traditions of a specific temporal regime, it is crucial to consider parameters such as repeatability, articulation, and controllability. It is asserted that digital communications act as triggers for the crisis of neoliberal forms of political communication and practices aimed at nurturing political traditions. Temporal regimes in political communications predetermine tendencies toward the homogenization of temporal representations within communities, which contributes to the creation of more stable conditions for the integration of representations of the past, present, and future. Traditionalization (continuity) plays a crucial role in the institutionalization and maintenance of models of political solidarity, serving as a major cultural resource for the temporary structuring of the political sphere, counteracting political inversion and arbitrariness in the actions of political actors. The need to address methodological aporias found in modernist and postmodernist research strategies related to communication processes based on principles of contemporary cultural sociology is also emphasized.