Realms of Memory

Victims of Commemoration in Turkey

A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past.  In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the regime were slated to become memorials and museums.  What inspired this desire to confront the past?  What were these sites of memory?  How did the violent histories of these sites complicate these initiatives?  These are the questions Professor Eray Çaylı examines in his recent book Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey.  

Memory and Violence in Syria

Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule.  Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of aggression.  Extreme forms of violence, such as  torture or massacres, or ordinary forms of policing and surveillance, need to be understood as methods of rule aimed at dehumanizing, debilitating, and crushing the will to resist and dissent. The rule of violence has an enduring effect by using fear and terror to sear itself into the memory of its victims.  

Remembering the Asaba Massacre in Nigeria

In October 1967 Nigerian federal troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians in the town of Asaba.  Elizabeth Bird, anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of South Florida, argues that the Asaba Massacre wasn’t just one of the many atrocities committed during the Nigerian Civil War.  It was a pivotal event that prolonged a conflict that claimed over a million lives. What were the causes of the Asaba Massacre?  How did it prolong the war?  How did it affect the lives of the people of Asaba and how it has been remembered? Liz Bird, co-author with Fraser Ottanelli of The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War, provides answers to these questions. 

Remembering the Genocide in Rwanda

In Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda,Tim Longman argues that the memory of the genocide has been instrumentalized by the long-ruling Rwandan Patriot Front or RPF.  By casting itself as the selfless liberator of the Tusti minority, the RPF has used the genocide to mask its own crimes, abuses of power, and political ambitions.  Showcasing the horrors of the genocide at commemorative sites helps the RPF to justify its own brand of authoritarian rule.  Suspicious and distrustful of both the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, the RPF’s top down approach to governance has failed to move the country beyond its deeply rooted ethnic divisions. 

Forensic Science and the Memory of the Civil War and Franco Era in Spain

The bones of the tens of thousands of victims of the Franco regime buried in mass graves throughout Spain are now telling their stories.  Nicole Iturriaga, author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, chronicles the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and how it is helping to shatter the silence about the crimes of the Spanish Civil War and Franco era.   Building on a movement originating in Argentina, organizations like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), are using the power of forensic science to reveal the crimes of the past and to foster openness and reconciliation in the present. 

Memories of Civil War in El Salvador

Over a decade of civil war tore apart the tiny Central American nation of El Salvador.  Throughout the 1980s the United States poured billions of dollars into the conflict to stop the spread of communism in Central America.  Beyond the massive loss of life and even greater human displacement, deathsquads and special military units massacred, tortured, and disappeared civilian populations caught in the crossfire.  When a peace agreement was finally reached in 1992, all sides agreed to a general amnesty.  There would be no trials, no effort to identify the perpetrators of human rights abuses or war crimes.  Yet beginning in the 1990s, El Salvador experienced an unprecedented outpouring of personal accounts of the war from the former participants.  Furman University historian Erik Ching, author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle Over Memory, tells us what we can learn from these accounts about the civil war and those who fought it.  

Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Part 2

In Part 2 of Remembering Stalin’s Victims,  Georgetown University Professor Kathleen Smith explains how a conservative backlash swept Khrushchev from power and ended the first attempt to confront the Stalinist past.  While destalinization persisted in the form of the dissident movement, the nearly twenty year Brezhnev era that followed was one of official silence about the crimes of the past.  It was Gorbachev’s attempt to rescue the Soviet economy that unleashed a much broader wave of popular participation in remembering the past.  Conservative efforts to once again reverse course ultimately failed and contributed to the acceleration of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  Boris Yeltsin, as head of the Russian Federation successor state, had another opportunity to confront the Soviet past.  His failure to do so, and the general turbulence and instability of the period over which he presided, have been skillfully exploited by Vladimir Putin to return Russia to the authoritarianism we see today.  

Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Part 1

The early decades of the Soviet Union were marred by massive human dislocation, terror, and loss of life known collectively as the repressions.  With antecedents in the Lenin years but more closely associated with Stalin, Soviet leaders struggled on two occasions to confront the memory of the repressions.  Kathleen Smith, author of Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, compares the memory politics of the Khrushchev and Gorbachev years.  In many respects, Smith argues, it was the failure to come to terms with the past that opened the door to the kind of authoritarian rule we see in Russia today.  

Rehabilitating the Memory of Stalin in Putin’s Russia

The militarism we see in Russia today has much to do with the rehabilitation of the memory of Stalin.  The Stalin of the Great Terror, mass famine, and deportations has been recast as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriot War.  In Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia, Todd Nelson argues that this reimagining of Stalin is the deliberate work of Putin after his rise to power over twenty years ago.  Putin used everything from schools and the media to memorials and museums to craft a new Stalin narrative to instill Russians with a sense of national pride and to bolster the legitimacy of his authoritarian regime.

The Great Exodus from China: Memory and Identity in Taiwan

With the Communist victory in China in 1949 nearly one million civil war refugees flooded into Taiwan—the largest out migration from China in the modern era.  Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, author of The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, helps us understand the relationship between trauma and memory in new ways.  He reveals how the memories of mainlander refugees changed over time and the therapeutic role they served.  He sheds light on how mainlander refugees and their descendants used their memory work to lay claim to a new home in Taiwan.  Perhaps most importantly, Dominic reveals how his own personal journey might offer the promise of reconciliation for Taiwan’s long divided communities.