Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age

Memoryscapes

Introduction

Surveying Global Memoryscapes: The Shifting Terrain of Public Memory Studies

Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes

There can be little doubt that the study of public memory has emerged as a rich and productive field for interdisciplinary research. This seems especially true within rhetorical studies where attention to the symbolic practices of remembering in public has spawned dozens of essays and several books. Over the past two decades, rhetorical scholars have attended to a wide variety of artifacts related to public remembrance, ranging from official monuments to impromptu roadside memorials and from commemoration through public address to remembrance in popular culture.¹ Underlying the vast majority of these scholarly investigations has been recognition of the interrelationship between rhetoric and memory. Not only are memories constructed, disseminated, challenged, and reformulated by rhetorical means, but so too rhetorical gestures are made both sensible and persuasive by an underlying foundation of collective, cultural remembrance. Rhetorical claims are grounded in our collective remembrance of a shared past in such a way that each claim both recalls and reformulates that past. In the same fashion, our experience of the past is framed so heavily by collective social structures as to make each instance of remembrance—especially those conducted in front of others—an essentially rhetorical act. In this way, rhetoric and memory often become so fused as to be indistinguishable in practice and, in part because of this, rhetoricians have become active participants in the scholarly conversations about public memory.

It was out of this strong connection between rhetoric and memory that the 2004 edited volume Framing Public Memory was developed and subsequently published in the University of Alabama Press’s Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique series. Edited by one of us, this earlier volume contained interdisciplinary elements—with representative voices from philosophy and sociology—but was largely a forum for rhetorical scholars to explore how the notion of public memory might be framed. The collected works in the previous volume suggested that the notion of public memory could be thought of in at least two ways: as the memory of a collective body, or a public, and as a visible manifestation of memory in the sense of making a memory public. Importantly, of course, both senses of public memory intermingle and intersect in diverse and provocative ways as various publics seek to make their memories public before others and these efforts are, in turn, contested or confirmed by other publics. Of equal importance, both senses of memory can be thought of as deeply rhetorical and, as such, the ways in which memories help constitute our collectivity and how we seek to make those collective memories visible are, ultimately, rhetorical efforts.²

The present volume seeks to contribute to this already vibrant conversation about the relationship between rhetoric and memory and to do so in a way that expands the regular foundations. It is worth noting here that of the ten essays collected in Framing Public Memory, nine attended primarily to memory practices within the United States. The one exception to this was an essay by Barry Schwartz and Horst-Alfred Heinrich that examined the different ways that young Americans and young Germans understood their moral responsibility for past injustices committed by their respective countries. In a way, Schwartz and Heinrich’s essay highlights what the present volume will more fully explore, namely, the ways in which memory practices are framed by, contest, and slip beyond the frameworks established by the nation-state. As we will explore more fully later in this introductory chapter, much of the work related to public memory has been framed in terms of specific national cultures that have both constituted and been constituted by collective memories. While these numerous studies of national memory cultures have been productive and appropriate, in the present volume we seek to move outside the national framework and explore the ways that some memory practices can be understood as traversing and at times unsettling national boundaries.

More specifically, the essays collected here explore the practices of memory as they relate to the notion of globalization, which we understand to mean the movement of people, ideas, technologies, and messages across national boundaries and the emergence of new, transnational social structures ranging from international non-governmental organizations to transnational religious communities to broad cultural movements that are not bound by national borders or identities. The cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai has described the processes of globalization as movements of people and ideas across a complex and varied global landscape. Borrowing from his work, we envision a similar movement of memory along the global landscape and in this way use the phrase global memoryscape to capture the intersection between memorial practices and global forces. The essays in this volume provide a series of vivid and provocative snapshots of the global memoryscapes and the unique contours of memorial practices occurring within these global dynamics. The case studies range from instances in which local memories have been affected by sweeping global changes—as in the transformation of memory sites after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Haskins, Lindauer)—to the complex intersection of global media messages in the remembrance of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Sorensen). These case studies also range from official memories—as in the construction of a memorial at the Tule Lake site of a Japanese internment camp (Cervantes)—to vernacular memory practices— as in the possessions carried by Armenian immigrants to symbolize their lost homeland (Turan).

To be clear, the essays contained herein do not coalesce around a single, coherent theory of a global memoryscape, as if such a theory were even possible. What they do provide is an important call to explore more fully the intersection between public memory and globalization. Interestingly, while both public memory and globalization have become remarkably prominent topics of academic research throughout the humanities, there has been strikingly little consideration of their intersection. Much of the reason for this neglect may arise from the deep, almost foundational relationship between theories and practices of public memory and the nation-state. Therefore, before turning more fully to a consideration of the global memoryscape as a concept, it makes sense to briefly consider the connection between public remembrance and the nation-state.

Public Memory and the Nation-State

Even a cursory glance at the various memory practices circulating in contemporary life suggests the important interconnection that has existed, and still remains, between public memory and the nation-state. The vast majority of holidays, parades, monuments, and historical documents involve foundational myths related to the development of the nation. Whether Lincoln’s birthday, the Fourth of July, the World War II Memorial, or Memorial Day parades, our memory practices, especially official practices, are largely tied to the broader narrative of the nation-state.

In one way, this makes sense. Maurice Halbwachs, one of the pioneers in the study of collective memory, observed, No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.³ In Halbwachs’s work there are numerous social frameworks, ranging from family to community and religious affiliations, and among these the nation-state was a broader frame. However, in Halbwachs’s work the nation was a distant framework that had less influence on the practices of individual recollection than more immediate frames like religion, class, or the family: Ordinarily, the nation is too remote from the individual for him to consider the history of his country as anything else than a very large framework with which his own history makes contact at only few points.⁴ Part of this dismissal of the nation-state arose from Halbwachs’s broader project, which was to understand the ways that collective social formations helped frame the practices of individual recollection and assert the fundamental argument that all recollection occurs within broader, collective frames.

For those who followed Halbwachs, however, the nation-state would prove a much more fundamental concept. Against the backdrop of social turmoil during the 1970s, Pierre Nora began an influential project with numerous other scholars to trace the transformations of French national memory that would form the three volumes of Les lieux de mémoire. Nora’s project to trace the sites of memory in French national culture is important in the present context because of the emphasis placed on the nation as a primary framework for the constitution of collective memory and the importance that collective memory had for the identity of the nation. As Nora argues, History was holy because the nation was holy. The nation became the vehicle that allowed French memory to remain standing on its sanctified foundation.⁵ Nora’s project was largely centered around the nation-state and, as Anne Whitehead observes, the crisis of French national identity in that period formed an important background for the project.⁶ This backdrop of crisis is infused throughout the work as Nora insists upon the need to recover the sites of memory in an effort to understand French national culture. France is, as Nora argues in the introduction to the third volume of the series, a nation of memory, and for this reason it is crucial to explore the sites, traditions, and symbols of national memory.⁷

As Nora notes, "This national memory has congealed in a historical tradition, a historiography of landscapes, institutions, monuments, and language which the historian can treat as so many lieux de mémoire. In these symbols we discover the ‘realms of memory’ at their most glorious."⁸ In his preface to Realms of Memory, the translator Lawrence Kritzman notes that Nora’s project follows in the longstanding rhetorical tradition of conceptualizing memory as located in specific cultural sites and thereby constitutes an "inventory of loci memoriae. The rhetorical force of these memory sites served to bind various communities together within the broader, imagined community of the nation. As Kritzman observes, If memory places are symbolic in nature it is because they signify the context and totemic meaning from which collective identity emerges."⁹ The rhetorical sensibility of this wider project is clear and typical of the work pursued by others in subsequent projects.

Yael Zerubavel’s work on the development of Israeli national culture through the construction of collective memories is an example of this continuing focus on the rhetorical connections between memory and the nation-state. The nation-state has occupied the position of what Zerubavel calls a master commemorative narrative, by which she means the foundational myths that frame other official commemorations. These master narratives help craft and reinforce the sense of collectivity that is at the heart of the fiction of the nation. As Zerubavel notes, The master commemorative narrative focuses on the group’s distinct social identity and highlights its historical development. In this sense it contributes to the formation of the nation, portraying it as a unified group moving through history.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, a substantial amount of scholarly work on public memory has attended to the ways that these national commemorative narratives have influenced practices of memory and, in turn, the ways that commemorative practices have shaped the broader contours of national identity.

America’s experience with public memory further underscores the importance of public memory in the forging of the nation-state. In his study of the shifting relationship between American national culture and national memory, Michael Kammen contends that Public memory, which contains a slowly shifting configuration of traditions, is ideologically important because it shapes a nation’s ethos and sense of identity.¹¹ These practices of public memory helped forge a set of foundational narratives that became the basis for the creation of American national culture. As John Bodnar notes in his influential Remaking America, In the first half-century of the new nation the major symbols of public memory in this country were associated with the American Revolution. That struggle not only represented the origins of the nation-state but produced the leaders, documents, and dates that served as important subjects for commemoration. Symbols had to serve needs in the material world, and no greater political need appeared to exist at the time than to ensure that the new nation survived.¹² These narratives have not, of course, remained unchanged, but it is notable that even during times of change and upheaval the core national memories are often invoked; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s use of Lincoln’s memory in his call for civil rights legislation stands as an obvious example. As Kammen observes, Within the United States, at least, a pattern is apparent that for innovations and ‘new traditions’ to succeed it helps to build them upon established traditions.¹³ Perhaps not surprisingly, the struggles over older and newer traditions of memory have motivated various rhetorical investigations, ranging from Stephen H. Browne’s study of the rhetorical uses of Crispus Attucks, one of the members of the Boston Tea Party, to Charles E. Morris’s exploration of reactions to Larry Kramer’s declaration that Abraham Lincoln was gay.¹⁴

The connection between national culture and public memory has not been confined solely to studies of single national cultures; it has also motivated numerous and important investigations of the differences between national memory cultures. In his groundbreaking study The Texture of Memory, James Young examines the divergent memorial practices surrounding the Holocaust in different national contexts, including Israel, Poland, Germany, and the United States. Not surprisingly, Young finds that these national memorial practices construct the Holocaust in ways that serve to further a collective sense of national identity. In his careful reading of various official monuments, Young finds a wide range of rhetorical messages that combine the broader call to remember with, as Young puts it, a government’s need to explain a nation’s past to itself.¹⁵ In a similar vein, M. Lane Bruner examines clashes over national identity and memory in his Strategies of Remembrance. In his examination of memory controversies in nations like Germany, post-Soviet Russia, and Canada, Bruner observes the rhetorical dimensions of patriotic commemorations and argues that different strategies of remembrance (politicized forms of public memory) are thought to have different consequences for the character of nations and the quality of international relations.¹⁶

Thus a strong connection can be observed between public remembrance and the nation-state evident in both theory and practice. Indeed, the very notion of a national identity can be said to have been largely constituted through practices of public remembrance that serve to forge a common origin as well as a sense of collective destiny. But, as suggested above, the relationship between public memory and the nation-state is not as stable as it may appear. While it would be foolhardy to claim that no connection exists, it seems apparent that the grounds upon which public memory and the nation-state are conjoined have begun to shift. Indeed, as noted above, for some scholars of public memory it is precisely the shifting nature of national culture and identity that motivates their work. Pierre Nora, for instance, laments in the latter pages of Realms of Memory, The dissolution of the unifying frameworks of the nation-state has exploded the traditional system that was its concentrated symbolic expression. There is no commemorative superego: the canon has vanished.¹⁷

Others are not so pessimistic. John Gillis, for instance, observes, Today, the constructed nature of identities is becoming evident particularly in the Western world, where the old bases of national identities are being rapidly undermined by economic globalization and transnational political integration.¹⁸ Under these new conditions, Gillis notes, we have no alternative but to construct new memories as well as new identities better suited to the complexities of a post-national era.¹⁹ It is the complex and shifting dynamics of both memory and identity that we conceive as occurring upon the global memoryscape. Before turning to consider this concept more fully, however, it is worth making a few observations about our conception of globalization and the ways this phenomenon has changed the cultural and symbolic nature of the nation-state.

Globalization and the Nation-State

Like public memory, globalization has sparked scholars to produce an enormous amount of scholarly literature in a variety of fields. Given the tremendous amount of literature surrounding the notion of globalization, it should not be surprising to find a wide variety of interpretations ranging from optimistic hopes for a new global village to pessimistic fears of hegemonic global imperialism. For present purposes, we seek only to trace a few of the broader contours of both globalization and globalization literature and, therefore, will not seek to encapsulate all the varied and competing perspectives. For our purposes, globalization can be thought of as a shifting and dynamic set of relationships and encounters between peoples from various nations and, in this regard, is not necessarily understood as inherently negative or positive.

One of the crucial aspects of globalization is that it is not a new process. Regarding the interactions among peoples, ideas, and technologies that have come to define contemporary globalization, Barry Gills and William Thompson comment, Their pace and scale may have accelerated, but they are anything but novel.²⁰ Indeed, much of the history of human civilization has been driven by the encounters between peoples of different cultures and nationalities. Globalization, then, should be thought of as both the processes by which individuals become interconnected and the ways these global interconnections are understood. In this way, two things have changed in relation to this ongoing process. First, the speed with which peoples from various parts of the world can encounter one another—whether physically or virtually—has increased dramatically with innovations in both transportation and communications technologies. Second, there has been a growing recognition of the processes of globalization, especially since the end of the World War II. Johann Arnason captures this second point when she contends, the term globalization can be used to refer both to a historical process and to the conceptual change in which it is—belatedly and still incompletely— reflected.²¹ Thus, what seems to be emerging in the contemporary world is both an acceleration and a recognition of globalization as a real, almost tangible force in the lives of virtually every person on the planet and, in this way, contemporary globalization differs, at least in quality, from the longstanding global encounters that have marked human history since antiquity.

Raka Shome and Radha Hegde capture our sense of globalization, observing that globalization as a phenomenon produces a state of culture in transnational motion—flows of people, trade, communication, ideas, technologies, finance, social movements, cross border movements, and more. Conceived in this way, globalization is not a uniform process of homogenization but a diffused, fragmented, and diverse set of encounters that serve to both connect and disconnect peoples from different nations. Some of these encounters come in the form of emerging transnational social structures— multinational corporations, religious and social organizations, even fan cultures—but they may also come as changes in local cultures wrought by global events. As Shome and Hegde note, events and developments in far-away distant places can have an impact on local happenings and events, just as forces and structures of local places can influence and enable events with rather significant global effects.²² Thus, while processes of globalization do not eradicate the symbolic and cultural importance of local/national sites, it seems clear that these local and national frameworks are altered by their encounters with global forces and movements.

The expansion of transnational networks does not, it is important to stress here, mean the end of the nation-state or of national cultures. Instead, the processes of global encounters cause us to rethink both national and local identities and cultures. In his writings about the transformative encounters between different national cultures, Néstor García Canclini notes, In the exchanges of traditional symbols with international communications circuits, culture industries, and migrations, questions about identity and the national, the defense of sovereignty, and the unequal appropriation of knowledge and art do not disappear. The conflicts are not erased, as neoconservative postmodernism claims.²³ Canclini and others are hopeful that the changes being wrought by accelerated globalization may result in a new, more tolerant way of engaging with others, and while there is clearly still a great deal of conflict related to nationality, ethnicity, and culture there is also a growing recognition that individuals are not wholly or exclusively defined by their local and national cultures. Whatever the ultimate valence of these changes— whether toward or away from more tolerance and opportunity—it is clear that the shifting global landscape has created at least some level of uncertainty as political, economic, and cultural events seem dictated by forces outside the traditional frameworks of understanding. Thus, as Stephen Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim note, individuals find themselves in a world where power and responsibility feel increasingly dispersed, where the causes of events seem evermore uncertain.²⁴

Considered in this way, what is occurring is not the eradication or erosion of the nation-state but a decentering of it as the primary locus of cultural meaning such that even national decisions are increasingly rendered in relation to transnational networks. Thus, globalization is a process of recontextualizing both national and local cultures in relation to broader transnational networks. Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort suggest that ‘Globality’—for want of a better term—spells significant changes in the cultural landscapes of belonging, not just because it supplants the nation-state . . . but because it changes the contexts (politically, culturally, and geographically) for them, situates national identity and belonging differently, and superimposes itself on ‘nationality’ as a novel frame of reference, values, and consciousness.²⁵ Along similar lines, Ackbar Abbas contends that globalization results in a dis-location of culture such that even familiar objects are no longer what they used to be.²⁶

On the macroscopic level, globalization—seen as an accelerating process of global encounters and recognitions—has altered the functioning of the nation-state. Politically, nations are increasingly bound together in a series of overlapping and mutually influencing international structures like the United Nations, European Union, Organization of American States, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and North American Free Trade Agreement. These explicit relations of interconnection create networks in which the national interests, identities, and actions of one nation are implicated and influenced by others. Economically, the movements of capital and goods in our era of late capitalism have created a complex network of multinational corporations and corporate interests such that the employment prospects for a worker in upstate New York can be profoundly affected by the labor conditions in Shunde, China, and the price of garments in Abu Dhabi will be affected by the currency rate in El Salvador.²⁷ Thus, even national economies can no longer be thought of as separate from the complex transnational networks through which goods, workers, capital, and information travel. Culturally, the increasing movement of people across national boundaries in the form of immigrants—both legal and illegal—and refugees poses challenges to traditional concepts like national culture and even citizenship.²⁸ Added to these cultural shifts is the capacity of contemporary popular culture to achieve global penetration, meaning that music made popular in Bangladesh might be sampled and mixed into dance music played in a Berlin