#multidirectional memory

[findepartida]

We cannot stem the structural multidirectionality of memory. Even if it were desirable -- it sometimes seems to be-- to maintain a wall, or cordon sanitaire, between different histories, it is not possible to do so. Memories are mobile; histories are implicated in each other. Thus, finally, understanding political conflict entails understanding the interlacing of memories in the force field of public space. The only way forward is through their entanglement.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

Most discussions of coming to terms with the past tend to assume a homology between collective memory and national or ethnic identity: scholars have provided numerous accounts or critiques of how Germans come to terms with German history, or how the French come to terms with French history. In "Multidirectional Memory," I have been emphasizing that coming to terms with the past always happens in comparative contexts and via the circulation of memories linked to what are only apparently separate histories and national or ethnic constituencies.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

A multidirectional awareness of history's crosscutting echoes can help produce a vision that recognizes the aporia of responsability --the difficult work of avoiding acting-in-complicity while remembering the generalized complicity in human being as such.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

By virtue of its circulation, memory  in the form of testimony can help build counterpublic spheres dedicated not only to exposing the dirty secrets of the state but to refiguring what counts as collective --a crucial aspect of the politics of memory.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

As the hold of a single normative cultural center declines, forms such as double consciousness and parallel minoritization are also thrown into increasing confusion. [...] New forms of cultural and economic exchange multiply the possibilities for identification with the histories of others. Yet the multiplicity of those very same means of communication also ensures that the paths of identification will be difficult to stabilize or limit to binary forms of substitution.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

The categories of victim and perpetrator derive from either a legal or a moral discourse, but the concept of trauma emerges from a diagnostic realm that lies beyond guilt and innocence or good and evil. While everyday usage of these terms understandably lacks precision, scholarly approaches should carefully distinguish different discursive domains. Precisely because it has the potential to cloud ethical and political judgments, trauma should not be a category that confirms moral value.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

Colonialism blurs the distinction between the state of exception and the norm and thus collapses the opposition between "bare life" and political existence and between the animal and the human.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory

[findepartida]

Perhaps most provocative in this account is the possibility that the "shock" experienced by Europeans in Africa emerges from the very universalism and humanism of Enlightenment thought, which leads the colonizers to expect an encounter with sameness. It is from within the expectation of homogenous universality that difference becomes traumatic.

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory