The Resurgence of Memory: Navigating the Intersection of History and Identity
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We are witnessing a world-wide upsurge in memory. Over the last twenty-five years, every country, every social, ethnic or family group, has undergone a profound change in the relationship it traditionally enjoyed with the past. This change has taken a variety of forms: criticism of official versions of history and recovery of areas of history previously repressed; demands for signs of a past that had been confiscated or suppressed; growing interest in “roots” and genealogical research; and a growing attachment to what in the English-speaking world is called “heritage.” This upsurge in memory intersects, with two major historical phenomena, one temporal and one social. The first concerns what is usually referred to as the “acceleration of history” – an accelerated precipitation of all things into an ever more swiftly retreating past. Broadly speaking, the future could be interpreted in one of three ways, which themselves determined the image people had of the past. It could be envisaged as a form of restoration of the past, a form of progress, or a form of revolution. Today, we have discarded these three ways of interpreting the past, which made it possible to organize a “history.”
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We are utterly uncertain as to what form the future will take. We do not know what our descendants will need to know about ourselves in order to understand their own lives. And this inability to anticipate the future puts us under an obligation to stockpile, as it were, in a pious and somewhat indiscriminate fashion, any visible trace or material sign that might eventually testify to what we are or what we will have become. For the other effect of this “acceleration of history”, symmetrical with that of the future, is to abruptly distance us from the past – we are cut off from it. It has become what an English demographic historian has famously described as “the world we have lost”. We are no longer on very good terms with the past. We can only recover it by reconstructing it in monumental detail with the aid of documents and archives; in other words, what we today call “memory.”
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The second reason for this outbreak of memory is of a social nature and is linked to what might be called, by analogy with “acceleration”, the “democratization” of history. This takes the form of a marked emancipatory trend among peoples, ethnic groups and even certain classes of individual in the world today; in short, the emergence, over a very short period of time, of all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups for whom rehabilitating their past is part and parcel of reaffirming their identity… The explosion of minority memories of this kind has profoundly altered the respective status and the reciprocal nature of history and memory – or, to be more precise, has enhanced the very notion of “collective memory”. Unlike history, which has always been in the hands of the public authorities, of scholars and specialised peer groups, memory has acquired all the new privileges and prestige of a popular protest movement.
