Civilizational mnemonics and the longue durée: The Bulgarian case

Constructivist assumptions have dominated the field of memory studies, producing an avalanche of case studies focusing on the instrumental and expedient factors shaping memory politics. However, this constructivist bias has also yielded new blind spots. For one, it tends to privilege “events” and “contingencies” over the longue durée of a particular memory configuration. Two, it remains caught in a binary juxtaposition with some states adopting globally circulating mnemonic scripts, signaling universal aspirations, while other states pursue nation-centric approaches. To overcome these blind spots (and binaries), we propose two interrelated conceptual moves: first, we are taking the importance of enduring memory figurations into consideration. Second, we expand the nation-state focus by introducing the notion of “civilizational mnemonics,” which does not replace national memories, but frequently underwrites them. Bulgarian memory politics, our test case, is part of a complex nexus of imperial legacies and post-colonial discourses. Bulgaria has been a middle ground, accommodating competing imperial projects—Ottoman, Russian, and Western. These intersections allow us to draw general inferences about mnemonic tropes and their enduring salience.

Trauma and allegory: truthfulness in fact and fiction. Making a private archive productive

Herengracht 401 (H401), until 2019 known as Castrum Peregrini, represents the complex and intriguing history of a hermetic community of artists and scholars in Amsterdam which was formed in the years of the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, 1940–1945.This article attempts to take stock on what we have learned in these ten years about the history of the place, as an indicator of memory politics. It also reflects on the hermeneutic gap of what we cannot know of H401’s history as we lack experiential knowledge of eyewitnesses. As the author argues below, the site of H401 shows how the ‘hermeneutic gap’ can offer a chance to make an archive, such as in the case of ‘the house on Herengracht 401’, productive and meaningful through the artistic practice of research.

Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy

This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.

A Pragma-Dialectical Approach to Memory Politics: Spanish Contemporary Memory Politics, Populism Studies, and Argumentative Dialectics

This paper establishes a dialogue between populism studies, typologies of reconstruction of the past, and argumentative dialectics. The paper analyzes what types of argumentative strategies are employed in the context of the discussions regarding Spanish memory politics and how those strategies can be associated with typologies of re-elaboration of the past (Caramani and Manucci 2019). Building from argumentative dialectics (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004), the paper studies argumentation structures uttered after the endorsement of the 2007 Spanish Historical Memory Law and the proposal of the 2021 Draft Democratic Memory Law. Departing from the distinction between diverse strategies of re-elaboration of the past, namely, heroization and cancellation (Caramani and Manucci 2019), the paper questions if Spanish decision-makers’ rhetorical strategies and political decisions in the field of memory politics disclose the adoption of particular types of populist behavior. The paper claims that the argumentative tactics used, in the domain of memory politics, by Spanish left-wing leaders reveal the adoption of a heroization strategy. In contrast, the rhetoric of Spanish right-wing leaders favors a strategy of cancellation. The paper also claims that, in the Spanish case, mainly from 2018 onwards, the adoption by Spanish left-wing leaders of a heroization strategy had two consequences. First, it did not reduce the cultural opportunity structure for right-wing populism. Second, it fostered a cultural opportunity structure for the affirmation of left-wing populism. The paper selected argumentative dialectics as a methodological framework (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). The paper discusses the scientific significance of analyzing memory politics through the lenses of populism studies.