History and Memory

Is reconciliation achieved through historical amnesia? Or, is remembrance, the acknowledgement of past error, and forgiveness the answer to conflict? If reconciliation is the object, is ‘the truth’ at all germane to the goal? The focus of our deliberations is conceived as the exploration of collective memories the world over. Who ‘remembers’ what – what is selected, highlighted, even amplified or modified from the reservoir of memory? Is the project of raising memory fitted to the conceptions, ideology, and relations of power in the present and promoted in one’s own context? Who carries what and to where in a network of global encounters is not only factual based, upon a closed concept of historical truth, but also imaginatively represents the desires of the present.

In the context of historical encounters between peoples, cultures and nation-states, the dynamics of cross-cultural contact need examination. Critical to our purpose is the question: Are the protagonists of the encounters open to cross-cultural dialogue and multiple ways of seeing the past? It is historically significant and contemporaneously crucial that we study the ways in which they are represented today drawing upon often contradictory and contentious ‘memories’. As Kerwin Lee Klein puts it, “The memory industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books that invoke memory as a key word”.1

Memory thus, ranges freely over unrestrained time - from centuries ago to just some years past. The role of memory in the life of people, and entire societies, can at times be cohesive and at other times disruptive. In the latter case, the past (often imagined and constructed) is dredged up for the production of memory that challenges social cohesion and secular institutional norms.

Social capital is generated by connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. If social cohesion is challenged social capital nose dives since boundaries of the ‘Other’ become demarcated and norms of mutual respect and tolerance get challenged. Objects, events and histories get re-presented to rationalize suspicion and distrust. We need to ask what political and institutional moves may help in the augmentation of social capital and creation of mature democracies. We would also like to express greater interest not in the origins of memory but more in its effects today. The troubling vista the spectre of memory opens up undercuts the vocabulary of a secular, critical discourse. Thus, we cannot appropriate words such as trauma, healing, catharsis, testimony and so on without careful discussion. The conference is planned to engage with some of the following issues:

Themes for sessions:

1. Memories of pain held by social groups.
2. Responses to the memory by states and social groups.
3. Memory and group identities.
4. Memory and Time
5. Memory and Truth.
 6. Memory and resistance.
7. Memory and accommodation.
8. Politics of Memory.
9. Memory and contemporary relevance.

Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) ‘On The Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69, Winter:329.