Cover Memory Studies

Bringing together memory studies with the emerging field of contradiction studies, in this article, I suggest the need for an alternative way of thinking about collective memory by juxtaposing the ideal of wholeness that necessarily underlies any group’s identity with that of the inevitable contradiction of the plurivers. I discuss the power of the Western narrative order in regard to the Haitian Revolution and examples of mnemonic disharmony in contemporary Germany and seek to illuminate the epistemic violence constitutive of this narrative order. The article therefore interrogates memory study’s epistemological foundation and the practices in which these underpinnings result. The aim is to highlight the potential of contradiction in an attempt to pluriversify responses to the past as well as future visions for the worlds we live in. Special attention is paid to the question of what it is we hope for when attempting to (scholarly) contribute to making collective memory more inclusive, and where the limitations of this might lie. The purpose of my contribution, then, is to explore the tacit imperative of harmony that often remains unchallenged in memory studies, and to propose a shift in focus, from the ways in which memory might help us understand (e.g., current clashes of identities), toward a research agenda that is considerate of its own entanglements with power, yet, at the same time, lives up to its potential to contribute to transformation.


Memory Studies 16(6), 1529-1545.
DOI: 10.1177/17506980231202337

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articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”

Martin Nonhoff
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano