Realms of Memory

When should we remember difficult and divisive histories?  After a career of covering conflicts around the globe, writer and political analyst David Reiff offers his thoughts on the question. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies, Rieff posits that in some cases there is a consensus around the need to remember past crimes.  More often, however, there is no agreement.  The only way out of messy conflicts is to agree to forgive and forget.  Find out more about possibilities and perils of memory on the July 1st episode of Realms of Memory. 

The people on the borders have been forgotten and left out of the story of the partition of Ireland.  Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, the three lost counties of Ulster, are both a source of shame and embarrassment for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  They are an unrecognized minority within the largely homogenized Catholic nation of Ireland.  They are also the abandoned kin of the people of the six counties of Ulster that comprise Northern Ireland.  Listen to University College Dublin Professor Edward Burke, author of Ulster's Lost Counties: Paramilitarism and Loyalism since 1920, and find out why we can't understand the story of the partition of Ireland without including the lost counties.  

Typically left out of the story of the partition of Ireland are the three lost counties of Ulster.  These are the counties of Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan that were excluded from what became Northern Ireland despite their historic ties and shared stand against the creation of an independent Irish state.  If Dublin and Belfast failed to form closer ties, it is impossible to understand why without considering the lost counties.  If the Republic of Ireland struggled to come to terms with its own diversity, the history of the lost countries was a significant impediment.  Remembering the lost countries of Ulster with University College Dublin Professor Edward Burke, coming to the June 3rd episode of Realms of Memory.  

The memory of the Soviet triumph in World War II, or what is known as the Great Patriotic War, has become the centerpiece of Russian nationalism today. Penn State Professor Katya Haskins argues that the propensity to remember the victory over Nazi Germany and to forget Stalin's terror contributes to the Russian willingness to support the war in Ukraine. Steeped in the memory of the Great Patriotic War, Russians are inclined to believe Putin's claims about foreign threats and the need for a “special military operation” in Ukraine. How the memory of the Great Patriotic War hinges appeals to family memory is the focus of Katya Haskins' book and the subject of this episode–Remembering the War, Forgetting the Terror: Appeals to Family Memory in Putin's Russia.

The memory of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War, has become the centerpiece of Russian nationalism.  State driven politics of memory, however, cannot fully explain this development.  Duty bound to remember the unimaginable sacrifices of the World War II generation, Russian families are a receptive audience to patriotic messaging.  Products of a Soviet Culture with a long history of commemorating the war, Russian families are already imprinted with an understanding of the past that can be reinforced in the present.  Raised in the Soviet Union and a graduate of Moscow State University, Pennsylvania State University Professor Katya Haskins reveals how Russian families are integral to the ways in which the Great Patriotic War is remembered in Putin's Russia.  A conversation with Katya Haskins about her book, Remembering the War, Forgetting the Terror: Appeals to Family Memory in Putin's Russia, next on the May 6th episode of Realms of Memory.

From Spain to the Baltic States Europe is littered with sites connected to the personal lives of former dictators.  Birthplaces, childhood homes, summer and winter residences, mausoleums and tombs these sites of dictators can be powerful poles of attraction for extremists, nostalgists, and dark tourists.  They can also offer opportunities to bolster democratic systems by educating citizens about difficult pasts. How have Europeans taken up the challenge of managing these memory sites?  What do these sites reveal about the politics of memory in Europe?  These are the questions Spanish historian Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas takes up in his book Sites of the Dictators: Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945-2020.  A conservation with Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas about sites of dictators in this episode of Realms of Memory.  

Continental Europe is littered with the memory sites of past dictators.  From birthplaces to summer residences, these remains from Europe's darkest chapters present serious challenges to the democratic present.  How do Europeans confront this past?  Find out from historian  Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, author of Sites of the Dictators: Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945-2020, on the April 1st episode of the Realms of Memory podcast. 

The National Rifle Association, known simply as the NRA, is often cast as a giant bogeyman for proponents of gun reform.  Fears about the NRA are largely based on a misreading and misunderstanding of the organization as a political lobby whose influence peddling in Washington is the chief impediment to sensible gun reform. Entirely off the radar is the true source of power and influence of the NRA, its ability to shape a dynamic American gun culture through the power of memory and storytelling. By using its substantial communications, education, and outreach resources the NRA tells memory laden, historically inspired stories that have had a profound impact on how American gun owners understand firearms and their desire to defend them.  A conversation with Noah Schwartz about his book On Target: Gun Culture, Storytelling and the NRA on this episode of Realms of Memory.  

The National Rifle Association is often understood as a powerful political lobby able to influence politicians and shape legislation.  University of the Fraser Valley political scientist Noah Schwartz argues that the true power of the NRA is how it uses storytelling and memory.  Through its extensive cultural, educational, and communications resources, the stories and memories circulated by the NRA have much to do with how Americans understand guns and gun culture today.  A conversation with Noah Schwartz about his book On Target: Gun Culture, Storytelling, and the NRA, next on the March 4th episode of Realms of Memory.

The 9/11 2001 attacks on America unleashed a surge of memorial work unmatched since the Civil War.  New York City became a magnet for billions of dollars of spending on the construction of a memorial, museum, and high profile projects such as One World Trade Centre and the Oculus.  What do these projects reveal about the nature, constraints, and abuses of 9/11 memory? To what extent have they helped or hindered American efforts to understand and to come to terms with the past?  For more, listen to my conversation with New York University Professor Marita Sturken about her book Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums and Architecture in the Post 9/11 Era.  

The attacks of September 11th 2001 challenged core beliefs about how Americans understand themselves, their relationship to others and their place in the world.  How Americans responded to the attacks through their memorial work and the rebuilding of ground zero in New York City is the focus of Marita Sturken's book Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums and Architecture in the Post 9/11 Era.  A conversation with New York University Professor Marita Sturken, next on the February 4th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.  

In 1989 and 2004 something unusual happened in the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi.  After decades of silence whites finally joined their black neighbors in commemorating the 1964 murders of three young civil rights workers.  What was different about 2004, however, was that the commemoration was just the beginning. The organizers forged an identity, as the Philadelphia Coalition, and went on to achieve several transformative goals.  They helped bring justice to the Klan leader responsible for the murders, they helped make civil rights education mandatory across the state, and they helped establish a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look at racially motivated crimes in the state's past.  How commemorations can become something larger, something transformative, is the focus of Furman University sociologist Claire Whitlinger's book, Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi. 

In 1964 three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in Neshoba County Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign.  How did the white community silence this past while local African Americans kept it alive? Why did both white and black Neboba Countians ultimately come together to organize two commemorations of these murders with very different outcomes?  Find out from Furman University Professor Claire Whitlinger on the January 7th episode of Realms of Memory.  

For decades the Cold War border between East and West Germany was one of the most militarized places on the planet.  Hundreds of East Germans died and thousands more were imprisoned in their attempts to cross it.  How did this former death strip become Germany's largest conservation zone, known as the Green Belt?  How did memory become a core feature of the Green Belt and how can mnemonic, or memory strategies, found in the Green Belt help make conservation work more meaningful and lasting?  This is the focus of Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck's book Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain.  Episode logo courtesy of Thomas Stephan ©/Thomas Stephan/mail@thomas-stephan.com

How did the death strip that once separated East and West Germany become the country's largest protected ecological corridor?  Drawing from her recent book, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain, Bates College Environmental Studies Professor Sonja Pieck explains the origins and evolution of what is known as Germany's Green Belt.  In particular she details how conservation and memory work are interwoven in the transformation and revitalization of the former Cold War border that divided Germany. The full episode airs on December 3rd. 

The Great Depression was perhaps the closest the capitalist system in the United States has ever come to complete collapse.  Equally unprecedented was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal response which dramatically transformed the relationship between government, capitalism, and the American people.  How was it possible that there was no national memorial to Franklin Roosevelt in Washington D.C. until 1997, over fifty years after FDR's death?  The conundrum of the absence of a shared American memory of FDR and the New Deal response to the Great Depression is the focus of University of Mississippi historian Darren E. Grem's book project, Hard Times USA: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory.

The Great Depression was one of the most seismic events in modern American history.  Equally important was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal response to the crisis which dramatically transformed the role played by the government in the United States and the lives of its citizens.  Why then is there no shared, collective memory of the New Deal and the Great Depression?  Why did it take decades before Franklin Roosevelt was memorialized on the national stage in Washington DC?  In his book project, Hard Times USA: The Great Depression and New Deal in American Memory, University of Mississippi historian Darren E. Grem explores the remembering and forgetting of this traumatic chapter and why it matters in the present.  Tune in on November 5th for my conversation with Darren E. Grem.  

Author, co-author, and co-editor of over twenty books on the history of Ukraine, Georgiy Kaisanov has devoted much of his attention to the study of memory politics.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010s, he reveals how Ukrainian history is based on a revamped, century-old, ethnonationalist history that excludes and alienates a significant part of the population.  Moreover, he highlights the unplanned, haphazard approach to the past driven by the actions and responses of particular interest groups seeking influence and advantage.  Rather than galvanizing the will of the people and harnessing the collective spirit of the nation, the past has been a battlefield that has divided more than united Ukrainians.  

Memories of the past have been central to the process of nation-state building in Ukraine.  Rather than starting anew after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians dusted off a hundred year old ethnic-nationalist history and applied it wholesale to the present.  In Memory Crash: The Politics of History in and around Ukraine 1980s-2010, historian Georgiy Kasianov argues that the consequences of the uses of the past have been disastrous.  Rather than forging strong ties to the nation across a culturally diverse population, minority populations have been ignored and even alienated.  For more on the politics of memory in Ukraine past listen to the October 1st episode of Realms of Memory.  

Make America Great Again, Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign slogan has become synonymous with his entire political movement.  MAGA, the acronym, is now a catch phrase used for Trump's most ardent supporters.  Emblazoned on millions of red hats, which Trump himself helped promote, the Make America Great Again slogan lived on, even after Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential elections.  With its clear reference to better times in the past, what does Make America Great Again actually refer to? How do Trump's supporters and opponents understand the slogan?  What does it reveal about how American understand their national past?  Find out from historian Matthew Rowley, author of Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again.

Across the political divide Americans view each other with ever deepening sentiments of distrust and suspicion.  Historian Matthew Rowley argues that the absence of shared memories of a national past fuels this polarization and the rise of violence in American politics.  In Trump and the Protestant Reaction to Make America Great Again, Rowley looks at what the published work of American Protestants from across the political spectrum reveals about the challenges and possibilities of forging a common narrative that could bridge the current divide.  

How can the past be turned against its memory keepers?  How can the successes and accomplishments of a person or movement be undone by intentionally misremembering and distorting the past?   University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that this is precisely what's been happening with the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  Since the Reagan era the memory of this past has been used by diverse actors on the right to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement.  The memory of Dr. King has been exploited to further the goals of a wide array of conservative groups.  For more, listen to a conversation with Hajar Yazdiha about her book, The Struggle for the People's King:  How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.

From Latinos and women to the disabled and the LGBTQ community, a wide range of disadvantaged groups have achieved significant legal gains in the United States since the 1960s.  This minority rights revolution inevitably sparked a backlash among white conservatives who felt threatened by change.  In this fierce struggle over the values and character of the nation, University of Southern California sociologist Hajar Yazdiha argues that all sides have sought advantage by laying claim to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  To learn more listen to Hajar Yazdiha discuss her recent book, The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.  Next on the August 6th episode of Realms of Memory.

In the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd the toppling of scores of monuments to the Confederacy made national and international news.  But four years on the vast majority of these monuments remain firmly in place.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox spent much of her career studying the women responsible for building most of these monuments.  She decided to write No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice to help communities make informed decisions about what to do with this past.  Her work sheds much needed light on the reasons why these monuments were built, why they have been defended and preserved, and the long struggle to denounce and remove them. 

For communities to determine the fate of the hundreds of remaining monuments to the Confederacy they need to understand the context and purpose for which they were built.  University of North Carolina at Charlotte historian and professor emerita Karen L. Cox stresses that these monuments were erected to restore and perpetuate a system of white supremacy.  Situated in prominent public spaces, particularly outside courthouses, monuments to the Confederacy worked in tandem with Jim Crow laws and racial terror to create a system of white domination that lasted another hundred years after emancipation.  A conversation with Karen L. Cox about her book, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, coming July 2nd on Realms of Memory.  

As campaign season in the United States kicks into high gear the border has once again become a political football for both the right and left.  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that these uses and abuses of the border typically rely on collective amnesia about the past.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez shines a much needed light on how the US-Mexico War created the southern border and what this has meant for Mexicans, from Texas to California, who became American citizens. In particular, he shows how the memory of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war inspired generations of Mexican Americans to fight to achieve the unfulfilled promise of full citizenship rights. 

Fears of the border are reaching fever pitch in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential elections.  Much of the alarm hinges on the forgetting of the US-Mexico War (1846-1848).  University of Texas at San Antonio historian Omar Valerio-Jiménez reminds us that it was the United States that invaded and annexed half of Mexico.  In Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship, Valerio-Jiménez reveals how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war, and its unfulfilled promise of full citizenship rights, has never been forgotten by Mexican Americans. Since the mid-nineteenth century, memories of the US-Mexico War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo have inspired successive generations of Mexican Americans to fight for their civil rights.

Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss.  We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero.  What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss contends that memorials embody public emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  They help process tragic events like school shootings or terrorist attacks.  They allow us to express our gratitude for past sacrifices or shame for episodes that run counter to our shared values and ideals.  At their best, memorials allow for our participation in the process of memory making.  They can be powerfully therapeutic, encouraging conversations and engaged, critical thinking about the past.  At their worst, they can entrench us in our emotions, lock us into self-gratulatory modes of thought, or magnify our fears without helping us to understand the hows and whys of what we are memorializing.  

From the 9/11 to the Salem witch trials memorial, University of Texas at Dallas art historian Erika Doss argues that we are living in an age of memorial mania.  In her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss explains how memorials embody and allow for the public expression of emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  What are the benefits and drawbacks of today's memorial culture and what does it reveal about America and Americans?  Find out on the May 7th episode of Realms of Memory.  

It took nearly fifty years before a single dollar was spent on commemorating Emmett Till in the state of Mississippi where he was brutally murdered in August 1955.  Dave Tell, University of Kansas Professor and author of Remembering Emmett Till, argues that we can't understand the remembering and forgetting of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta where he died without considering the natural and built environment.  From the Tallahatchie River where the fourteen-year-old boy's body was sunk to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market where the story was set in motion, the buildings and natural features of the Mississippi Delta have had a profound impact on memory of Emmett Till.  

In August 1955 Emmett Till was abducted from his uncle's home, tortured, shot, bound by barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and sunk in the Tallahatchie River.  The outrage triggered by the photo of the mangled remains of the fourteen-year-old boy's body in the open cassette at the funeral in Till's native Chicago rallied many to the cause of the nascent civil rights movement.  University of Kansas Professor Dave Tell, author of Remembering Emmett Till, helps us understand the forces that broke the decades long silence in the Mississippi Delta where the murder took place.  The built and natural environment of the Delta, Tell argues, has had a profound influence on the memory and legacy of the murder.  For my full conversation with Dave Tell, tune into the April 2nd episode of Realms of Memory. 

Beginning in 1880s Africans Americans became the targets of a lynching craze that claimed thousands of lives.  In Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lyching on Black Culture and Memory, University of Oklahoma historian Karlos K. Hill argues that narratives are key to understanding not just what drove the lynching craze but how African Americans responded.  It was the narrative of the black beast rapist that fueled and justified the lyching mania.  African American activists and cultural actors responded with their own victimization and consoling narrative to galvanize public support and to offer examples of courage and heroism to inspire future generations.  Victimization and consoling narratives were both examples of how African Americans found usable pasts to fight against racial violence and injustice.  

Dehumanizing narratives of black male bodies drove the lynching epidemic that claimed thousands of African American lives between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  Dr. Karlos K. Hill, author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, explains how African American political and cultural actors fought back against this reign of terror with their own humanizing and heroic narratives of lynched black bodies.  Remembering lynched black bodies in ways that encouraged empathy or instilled sentiments pride was a means of finding empowering usable pasts during one of the darkest chapters in American history.  

Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era.  How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)?  In what ways were the therapeutic claims of the ECCC overblown and destined to disappoint?  How did the Cambodian government use the ECCC to support its own self-serving reading of the past?  What important memory work did NGOs take on that is often forgotten because of the tendency to focus exclusively on prominent institutions such as the ECCC?  To answer these questions and more listen to University of Bath sociologist Pete Manning, author of Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia: Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers.

Cambodia has often been cast as a broken, amnesiac nation, unable to confront the memory of the horrors it experienced during the Khmer Rouge era.  How did these assumptions justify the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms such as the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)?  In what ways were the therapeutic claims of the ECCC overblown and destined to disappoint?  How did the Cambodian government use the ECCC to support its own self-serving reading of the past?  What important memory work did NGOs take on that is often forgotten because of the tendency to focus exclusively on prominent institutions such as the ECCC?  To answer these questions and more listen to the February 6th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast featuring Dr. Pete Manning, author of Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia: Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers.

The system of enforced prostitution by the Japanese military went unpunished and unexamined for decades after the Asia-Pacific War.  International recognition only began in 1991 when Korean survivor Kim Hak-sun spoke out in graphic detail about her dark past.  In Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, University of Melbourne historian Kate McGregor tells the story of the transnational struggle for recognition and redress for and by the women of East and Southeast Asia.  Focusing on the less studied case of Indonesia, she points out how the sexual abuse and exploitation of Indonesian woman began during the Dutch colonial era.  She reveals how collaboration with the Japanese, sentiments of shame, and Cold War political and economic pressures favored the silencing of this past.  

During the Asia-Pacific War the Japanese military forced thousands of women across East and Southeast Asia into a brutal system of organized prostitution.  The label of “comfort women” only masks the true reality of this massive human rights crime that went largely unpunished for decades after the war.  Most attention to this history has focused on Korea and Japan where the movement for redress began earliest.  Find out how the struggle for recognition and redress unfolded in Indonesia on the January 2nd episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.  Listen to University of Melbourne historian Kate McGregor, author of Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia.  

The May 1980 clash between government forces and the people of Gwangju marks a key turning point toward democracy in South Korea.  The nation's sixth largest city, the citizens of Gwangju suffered immeasurably for the uprising. The city lost development support and its citizens were cast as traitors and North Korean sympathizers.  The decision to select Gwangju to host a major international art exhibition, or what became known as the Gwangju Biennale, was an effort to address the injustices of the past.  Author of The Cultural Politics of Urban Development in South Korea: Art, Memory and Urban Boosterism in Gwangju, HaeRan Shin discusses the challenge of reconciling urban development with the memory of the Gwangju Uprising.  

The April 2014 Sewol ferry disaster is an all too familiar South Korean tragedy.  Corruption, deceit, greed, and failed regulations and oversight cost nearly three hundred lives—most of whom were high school students on a trip to Jeju Island, a popular resort destination.  Seoul National University Professor HaeRan Shin explains how the Sewol ferry disaster has become a site of remembering and forgetting.  She reveals how economic interests worked against efforts to memorialize the tragedy.  Lastly, she notes how opponents tried to discredit the memorialization project by associating it with memory activists from Gwangju and the May 18th Gwangju massacre.  

The military regime, which ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, murdered hundreds and tortured thousands more perceived enemies of the state.  How is it possible that this period of political repression, censorship, and state sponsored terror is now remembered nostalgically by many Brazilians?  How did Jair Bolsonaro harness this nostalgia to win the 2018 presidential elections?  Once in power, how did Bolsonaro frame the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of the memory of dictatorship with catastrophic consequences for Brazil?  Leda Balbino, researcher, journalist, and deputy editor at the foreign desk of O Globo, one of Brazil's leading newspapers, examines these and other questions in her recent book, Digital Memory in Brazil: A Fragmented and Elastic Negationist Remembrance of the Dictatorship.  

In 1964 the military seized power in Brazil and ruled the country for the next 21 years.  During this period the military used censorship, torture, and murder to silence its critics and maintain its grip on power.  How did Jair Bolsonaro use the memory of this past to catapult himself to the presidency?  How did Bolsonaro's manipulation of the memory of dictatorship have catastrophic consequences for Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic?  For answers to these questions and more, listen to the November 7th episode of the Realms of Memory featuring deputy editor Leda Balbino, from Brazil's O Globo newspaper.  We'll be discussing her recent book Digital Memory in Brazil: A Fragmented and Elastic Negationist Remembrance of the Dictatorship. 

In the face of rising nationalism and denialism about crimes committed during the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia, memory activists in Serbia have been struggling to confront the past.  For the last two decades Dr. Orli Fridman, from the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK) in Belgrade, has made memory activism in Serbia and the wider region of the former Yugusolavia the focus of her research.  Find out how several generations of memory activists have taken to the streets and on-line digital platforms to fight against denial, to preserve and communicate memories of the wars of the 1990s, and to build solidarity, compassion, and empathy in the region.  Listen to my conversation with Dr. Orli Fridman about her recent book Memory Activism and Digital Memory Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories.  

How do memory politics in Serbia shape the memories of the wars in Yugoslavia?  What role do memory activists play in this process and what practices and claims do they put forward? Dr. Orli Fridman, a professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK) in Belgrade, has spent the past two decades looking at these questions. Author of Memory Activism and Digital Memory Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories, Orli Fridman will be the featured guest of the October 3rd episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.    

Much of the focus on the memory of the partition of British India has been on the region of the Punjab.  King's College London Professor Ananya Kabir is interested in the repercussions of partition for the region of Bengal where she has ancestral ties.  How did cultural actors, from archeologists and artists to singers and novelists, use their craft to shape and assess the memories of the new nations of South Asia?  How did they contend with the two stages of partition—the division of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947 then the civil war within Pakistan in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh?  My conversation with Ananya Kabir draws from a discussion of her book, Partition's Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia. 

In part 2 of my conversation with De Montfort University historian Pippa Virdee we'll look closer at whether the violence of partition could have been avoided.  We'll consider how the difficulty of labeling the violence complicates efforts to remember what happened.  We'll learn how much of this violence targeted women who were doubly victimized both during and after partition.  We'll discuss whether the rise of populist nationalist leaders like Narendra Modi represents a failure to learn from partition.  Lastly we'll think about whether the recent creation of massive digital archives devoted to the memory of survivors gives us a better understanding of partition.  

The partition of British India in 1947 displaced over 14 million people and claimed the lives of another 1 million.  Some of the worst violence occurred in the Punjab.  Pippa Virdee, historian at De Montfort University in the UK and author of From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab, explains how it took decades to include the experiences of those who suffered most from the story of partition—women, Dalits (untouchables), refugees.  She points out how the once pluralistic region of the Punjab has become an increasing communalized and divided space.  Lastly, she notes how despite tensions and unrest in the years and months leading up to partition, British authorities and their Indian and Pakistani counterparts, failed to anticipate the chaos and bloodshed that would follow the end of British India. 

The partition of British India is a story of extreme communal violence, mass rape, honor killings, abduction, and forced migration.  It is a story where the same individuals, depending on which side of the border they found themselves, could be both victims or perpetrators.  Dr. Pippa Virdee, author of From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining the Punjab, discusses the challenge of memorializing partition on the August 1st episode of Realms of Memory.  

Nottingham Trent University historian Jenny Wüstenberg, author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, argues that Germany experienced a dramatic transformation of its memorial culture during the 1980s.  It was in the course of this decade that Germany pivoted from commemorating the German victims of World War II to the victims of Nazi crimes and terror during the years from 1933 to 1945.  By focusing on the role of Germans as perpetrators and the suffering experienced by the victims of the Nazi regime, this negative memory culture deepens democracy by connecting the past to the present and reinforcing the importance of tolerance, respect for difference and equal rights.  

German memory culture underwent a dramatic transformation in decades after World War II.  In the immediate aftermath of the war the memories of veterans, Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the victims of allied bombings dominated the remembrance of the Nazi era.  By the 1980s the focus had almost completely shifted to the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the diverse groups victimized by the Nazi regime.  To understand this change tune in to the July 4th episode of Realms of Memory.  Listen to a conversation with Nottingham Trent University Professor Jenny Wüstenberg and a discussion of her book, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany.

The beginnings of many nations are marred by traumatic memories.  This is certainly true for Turkey.  The modern Republic of Turkey began with the dispossession and even eradication of many of the ethnic and religious minorities who had lived for centuries within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.  The Armenian genocide is one of the most prominent examples.  In Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory:  Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories, author Eren Yetkin argues that from the time of the genocide, which took place between 1915 and 1918, the government of Turkey has chosen to deny rather than confront the past.  While Kurds acknowledge their participation in the genocide they explain it in terms of an instrumentalization thesis in which they were manipulated by Turkish authorities and Kurdish elites.  For Kurds, remembering the Armenian Genocide helps them to talk about their own long history of victimization.  

The  Armenian genocide would not have been possible without the active participation of local populations.  Kurds, who often coexisted in the same towns and cities with Armenians, undoubtedly played a part in the genocide.  Eren Yetkin, a sociologist at Koblenz University in Germany, explores the memories of the Armenian genocide in Turkey.  Author of Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory:  Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories, Yetkin is particularly interested in how Turkey's Kurdish community remembers this past.  For more, listen to the June 6th episode of the Realms of Memory podcast.