Some memories are privileged, others are fragile, gendered, racialised, ethnicised, nationalised…
Public memory is a minefield
In recent years, we’ve seen tangible reminders of that memory been variously lobbied for, defaced, re-storied or removed.
To name just a few:
Australia: so-called ‘discoverer’ of the country, Captain James Cook, attracts condemnation
South Africa: quintessential British imperialist Cecil Rhodes excites controversy and violence
USA: the original design for a monument to ‘real’ women, the first in New York’s Central Park, forgot to include non-white women
Who to include?
Women's Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, New York, commemorating Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton - Original work: Meredith Bergmann
Power and memory
Protests around monuments like these draw our attention to the potency and affective potential of public memory.
They reveal much about agency and power differentials as some groups demand and effect change while others remain silent and invisible.
Who mediates memory?
Who gets to decide about who is remembered and what form that takes?
Who feels entitled to demand that the memory landscape change?
Emotional pasts in the present
This is about history.
It is about whose stories – whose contributions to the development and shaping of our worlds and times – matter and are made known and available.
It is about which communities are equipped with knowledge and recognition so that they can understand themselves and their group identity.
This is an emotional issue.
How the past is represented publicly can also produce or reproduce trauma.
The absence of certain pasts in the memory landscape, too, can produce or reproduce trauma.
Angela Davis at Women's March on Washington
‘Mobilising Affect and Trauma: The Politics of Gendered Memory and Gendered Silence’
In our recent special issue in Women’s History Review (online now!), a group of us got together to consider these issues and questions.
We were inspired to apply these considerations to our respective areas of expertise:
Katharine McGregor and Ana Dragojlovic examine reception of a Dutch-Indonesian film-maker’s semi-documentary film about domestic workers in late colonial Indonesia
Victoria Haskins analyses the testimonies of First Nations’ women— often mediated through white interlocutors— who experienced violence on the Pacific coast of what is now the US state of California
Eveline Buchheim analyses a museum dedicated to the victims and survivors of militarised sexual abuse in the Asia-Pacific War
Ana Stevenson investigates the reception of the slogan ‘I’d rather be a rebel than a slave’ used in publicity for the cinematic feature film Suffragette (2015)
Along with Vera Mackie, I look at how the 2017 Women’s March and subsequent marches referred to feminist history and (unintentionally) re-inscribed histories of racialised omission, thereby re-invoking trauma in those not included in the phenomenon’s memory culture.
A woman holding a sign at the 2017 Women's March in Los Angeles.
Marcywinograd - Own work
What did we collectively find?
Well, taken together, the articles in this forum remind us that remembering the past, campaigning for a more ethical representation of history, and imagining and fighting for a better future all feed into each other to form a memory-activism nexus.
They demonstrate that generations of women in very different circumstances have sought to tell their stories, to preserve their histories.
Seen through a gendered lens and with attention to intersectionality, they also remind us of the complexities of the relationship between history, memory, agency and affect.
For example, Native American women used testimonies of affect to tell their histories and to establish themselves as truth tellers.
The degree to which largely white women interviewers mediated these stories complicates the notion of agency and representation.
Still, in the telling, these fragile histories of gender, dispossession and violence are recorded.
On the other hand, this forum demonstrates that remembering women traumatised by violence in sites of memory, like film and exhibitions, can be directed by the emotions of museum protocols (empathy), geopolitics (including shame) and national hauntings and narratives (for example, guilt/shame complexes).
As historians, we paid attention not only to the presence but also to the absence of some memories.
Not including certain groups in acts of remembering has served to further traumatize these women as they have had to once again establish their historical presence and reaffirm the value of their contributions to the building of society.
This is apparent in the cases of women of colour ¬
o originally being omitted from the organising committee of the 2017 Women’s March
o histories of slavery not being considered when movie slogans were devised
o or not being included in the initially successful ‘all-white’ design for a statue to American women’s suffragism in New York’s Central Park.
This collection has revealed that while some versions of the past occupy a privileged and robust place in mainstream societies, other memories are fragile, gendered, racialised, ethnicised, nationalised.
It has also exposed ongoing work to document, preserve and disseminate gender history through the efforts of memory-activists in the present.
What remains to be seen is how these grassroots memory campaigns, often conducted both digitally and materially, will serve future generations of activists, those fighting for gender equality, social justice and human rights.