Europe’s Melancholias: Diasporas in Contention and the Unravelings of the Postwar Settlement

Rosenhaft explores some ways in which discourses of human rights, racism and antisemitism that emerged in the global North after 1945 have been appropriated, complicated and disrupted in this century’s memory conflicts. She examines Black Holocaust fictions in the light of changes in the global Black diaspora, and reflects on the recent debates on antisemitism and Holocaust memory that place diasporic actors in contention as well as on the populist trope of a “white, Christian Europe”. Following Paul Gilroy’s use of the term “postcolonial melancholia” to characterize British nostalgia for empire, she identifies analogous forms of nostalgia driving the current memory wars, and deploys the notions of “post-Holocaust” and “post-imperial” melancholias as complementary responses to the challenges posed by the (re-)emergence of a multicultural Europe.

What the World Owes the Comfort Women

The women who served in Japan’s military brothels across Asia during the Second World War are a focus of the politics of memory in East Asia as well as a touchstone for international human rights and sexual violence against women. By the 1990s, the “comfort women” had become a “traveling trope,” which like the Holocaust, both recognized and transcended its original time and place. Gluck traces their “coming into memory” through changes in five areas of the evolving postwar “global memory culture”: law, testimony, rights, politics, and notions of responsibility. She shows how the ideas and practices of public memory changed over time, in the course of which the comfort women became “global victims” in a transnational memoryscape.

Introduction: Mnemonic Solidarity—Global Interventions

Lim and Rosenhaft introduce “mnemonic solidarity” as a scholarly and political program, situating it in the context of the wider project and publication series “Entangled Memories in the Global South.” Their programmatic approach arises from the observation that a global memory formation has emerged since the late twentieth century, involving interchanges of various kinds between national memory cultures and structured by the terms of Holocaust memory. This development and its political implications have been addressed in various ways by scholars under the rubrics of “cosmopolitan,” “multidirectional,” “traveling,” “prosthetic,” “transnational,” and “agonistic” memory, but the new field of memory studies remains Eurocentric and relatively insensitive to the double-edged character of globalized memory—the interplay between de-territorialization and re-territorialization. This volume aims to reset the agenda.

Eddies and Entanglements: Africa and the Global Mnemoscape

Van Der Rede and Erasmus provocatively characterize Africa as a “disobedient object” of memory studies, posing a series of radical challenges to the terms and methods of the field. In empirical terms, they point out how two specific cases, the Red Terror in Ethiopia and States of Emergency during Apartheid in South Africa, inflect our Europe-centered models of trauma and memory. Beyond this, positing Africa “not as a cartographic and geological location but as a concept and methodology,” van Der Rede and Erasmus challenge the liberal universalism implicit in the problematics of memory studies (and indeed in the notion of mnemonic solidarity) with an insistence on hearing/listening rather than speaking that draws on postcolonial theory and the new methods of sound studies.

Postcolonial Reflections on the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crimes, and Colonialism

Lim sets out the origins and progress of the mnemonic confluence of three historical traumas—the Holocaust, the crimes of colonialism, and Stalinist terror. He traces this process back to the “thaw” in memory cultures precipitated by the end of socialism after 1989, and adopts a postcolonial perspective to analyze how victimhood memories arising out of these experiences have become entangled globally. Against the flat model of the cosmopolitanization of the Holocaust, Lim argues for the non-hierarchical comparability of historical traumas. He concludes by proposing “critical relativization” and “radical juxtaposition” as ways of de-hegemonizing and de-centering universal memories and deconstructing mnemonic nationalism.