BOOKS & SPECIAL ISSUES
Las Luchas por la Memoria contra las Violencas en México.. Mexico City: El Colegio de México Press, 2023.
Edited with Alexandra Délano Alonso, Maria de Vecchi Gerli and Alicia de los Ríos Merino.
This book documents and analyzes the various struggles over memory throughout Mexico in the context of the “war on drugs” since 2006. It brings together perspectives from researchers, activists, architects, artists and family members of victims of enforced disappearance who reflect on the impact of these struggles on questions about truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition. The different contributions show the heterogeneity of memory spaces and memory actors and address the pressing questions that emerge from the particularity of the Mexican case: What role do struggles for memory play in a context of ongoing violence, and what is the function of commemoration in the absence of peace and justice? In addition to its academic contribution, the book aims to be a tool that contributes to understanding and transforming the structural conditions behind the violence.
Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Social Memory in the Age of Information. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014. (Paperback in 2017)
Edited with Lindsey Freeman and Rachel Daniell.
In an age of information and new media, social memory is shaped by new relationships to attention and distraction. The editors of this volume argue for a re-reading of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory. Drawing on case studies as diverse as domestic Israeli memorial videos and facebook campaigns around the disappeared in Argentina, the editors suggest that “spectacle” may now be thought of not merely as a tool of distraction employed by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time: in short, to make a link between past and present injustice.
Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory. German Politics and Society 39, 1 (2021).
Edited and introduction with Jonathan Bach.
Germany’s post-war practices and policies of Vergangenheitsbewältigung are widely evoked around the world as a model for an honest public reckoning with the past. Yet a German “model” of memory has always been contested within Germany itself. This special issue explores a critical dimension of this contestation: how postwar and post-unification German narratives about the past rely on the concept of innocence as part of the wider process of acknowledging collective responsibility. The articles collected here show how narratives of innocence are not “just” one more blind spot within Germany’s memory regime, but are part of a fundamental tension inherent in efforts to deal responsibly with the past. Accompanied by a substantial introduction by the co-editors, the issue’s five articles cover a wide range of settings in which innocence plays a central role: the performance of individual innocence immediately after the war, the trope of the “mercy of the late birth” (Gnade der späten Geburt) and childhood innocence during the Nazi era, the changing role of discourses about the air war, the shifting representation of the colonial past, and an examination of the newest attempt at a masterable past that connects the present to the Prussian enlightenment.
Borders and the Politics of Mourning. Social Research 83, 2 (2016).
Edited and introduction with Alexandra Delano.
In recent years, the increased numbers of migrant deaths as a result of border controls and border militarization have gained increased attention. However, their full implications for an articulation of political subjectivity and responsibility in a non-territorial sense have not been exhaustively addressed. This special issue includes several studies of the symbolic-material landscape of border spaces, all of which, in one way or another, explore how interventions through a ‘politics of loss’ challenge existing visions of the border as a rigidly controlled and controlling space. The issue understands the politics of mourning as a political-affective engagement with border deaths, from forensic efforts, to efforts of memorialization/commemoration, to the investment in objects, from Arizona to Lampedusa. In political-theoretical terms, the issue interrogates the potential (and the shortcomings) of grief as a political and ethical category, engaging with the role of mourning in the thought of Judith Butler, Burkhard Liebsch, and Jacques Derrida, among others.
Memory, Materiality, Sensuality. Memory Studies 9, 1 (2016).
Edited and introduction with Lindsey Freeman and Rachel Daniell.
This special issue argues for a renewed and theoretically rich focus on the actual, the felt, and the tactile in memory studies (a field which has recently taken a strong turn towards the virtual). The objects of study incorporated in the book range from the Berlin wall to the US border wall to museum displays in the new 911 museum. All of the contributors practice a material reading of history and culture, exposing the implications of specific modes of display and design, systems of circulation and distribution, and logics of exchange and investment. The volume intervenes in debates on social memory as well as in debates on a 'new materialism' (Latour, Bennett, Connolly) by stressing the power (and the limitations) of objects and bodies to incorporate and translate memories and to shape our political possibilities in the present.
Screen Memory. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26 (2013).
Edited and introduction with Lindsey Freeman and Laliv Melamed.
In the past, the Freudian notion of a “screen memory” has been viewed and employed rather one-dimensionally as a memory that obscures other memories by blocking or replacing them. This special issue moves away from thinking of screen memory as simply something that obscures. Like Michael Rothberg, we view screen memory not merely as a substitution, but as a temporary displacement in which the forgotten memory is subject to recall. Consequently, the relationship between memories is best understood as “multi-directional” in the sense that a covered memory, even if altered and reexamined in the process of interacting with other memories, can speak back. The contributors to the special issue arrive at the question of screen memory and screened memories from a variety of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, such as performance studies, cultural studies, political theory, anthropology, and sociology, but they share the attempt to untangle claims to the past in challenging environments where evidence is sometimes lacking, sometimes ahistorical, sometimes inauthentic, and often contested.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City.
Sociologica, 17,1 (2023): 9-23.
With Alexandra Delano.
This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests.
The Struggle for Memory and Justice in Mexico.
Current History 121, 832 (2022): 43-49.
With Alexandra Delano.
The debate about public memory has intensified in Mexico in a time of widespread violence and human rights abuses, particularly in the context of the guerra contra el narco (war against drug cartels) that began in 2006. Against government narratives that criminalize victims of enforced disappearance and criminal violence, and the state's failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, families of victims and other activists have led a struggle for truth, justice, memory and reparations. Through diverse memorial interventions throughout the country, they call attention to the continuities in state violence over time, and the need for memorial spaces that transform the structural conditions underlying different forms of violence and state neglect.
Memory Activism and Mexico’s 'War on Drugs': Countermonuments, Resistance, and the Politics of Time
Latin American Research Review 56 (2021). 353-370.
With Alexandra Delano.
The widespread violence in Mexico by state and non-state actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. We show that in this context, lacking a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time. Through acts of appropriation and the creation of alternative models of commemorative spaces, the memory activism described in this paper enlarges the historical trajectory brought into public focus, thereby often questioning the hierarchy of victims implied in state-sponsored memory projects and assigning responsibility to the state in relation to current and past violent events. At the same time, these projects confront broader issues of geographic neglect, urban renewal, and the restitching of the social fabric, which makes these interventions of memory activists commemorative and transformative at the same time.
Making Sense of and with “Profound Regret”: Howard County Board of Education’s Apology for a Racially Segregated Public School System
Journal of Educational Controversy 14 (2020).
With Rachel Garver.
In November 2012, the Board of Education of Howard County, Maryland approved a proclamation that expressed “profound regret that the Howard County Public School System maintained segregated and unequal public schools both prior, and subsequent to” Brown v. Board of Education. The proclamation describes Howard County’s slow response to comply with the 1954 decision, such that the school system was not officially desegregated until eleven years later in 1965. Through the analysis of stakeholder interviews and board meetings, we explore the various ways and the extent to which the Board of Howard County’s apology was bestowed with meaning. We argue that the apology was utilized as a narrative device to define the role of the Board, delineate the injustice committed, establish (dis)continuity between past and present injustices, and work out who has been wronged. Stakeholders used de jure segregation as a lens to understand contemporary de facto segregation and reflected on its continuing harm to current members of the community. We conclude by discussing the potential of public apologies as forms of governance that mold responsible and responsive public officials.
Transnational Memories, National Memory Regimes: Commemorating the Armenian Genocide in Germany
German Studies Review 43 (2020): 127-147.
Studies of initiatives related to the recognition of the Armenian genocide across Europe have stressed the importance of the idiosyncratic environments in which these efforts take place. This paper follows debates over two projects dedicated to the commemoration of the Armenian genocide in Germany: The Lepsiushaus in Potsdam and the Gedenkstätte für Genozidopfer im Osmanischen Reich in Berlin. I propose that these concrete expressions of the recognition struggle show the importance of local conditions for the reception of transnational memories as they depend on practices supported by a “memory regime” often perceived in national terms. I show that a culture of contrition and reflective memory contours the justification of both critics and proponents of the recognition efforts, where conventions from Germany’s own mode of Vergangenheitsbewältigung are carried over, ranging from an ethnic logic of historical responsibility to assumptions about the proper depiction of individual or heroic biographies, to the centrality of Holocaust memory for the Federal Republic.
Deaths, Visibility, and Responsibility: The Politics of Mourning at the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Social Research 83 (2016): 421-451.
With Alexandra Delano.
This paper addresses the politicization of bodies of undocumented migrants beyond their death, specifically of those who died while crossing the US-Mexican border. In the light of dramatically increasing numbers of fatalities, border activists in Arizona, California, and Texas have engaged in recording and documenting the deaths, but also in public events such as marches, projections, and collective acts of mourning to publicize the issue of undocumented migrants dying in their attempt to cross the desert. We argue that such a “politics of mourning” are stagings of dissensus in Jacques Ranciere’s sense, in as far as they constitute a challenge to existing frames within which we sense someone as publically ‘grievable’. Moreover, the dead and undocumented are a “part that has no part” (Rancière) in a dual sense, as they challenge the logic of counting not just once, but twice. If dissensus places one world into another, then we see a double lodging in the politicization of the border victims: of the dead and the living and of the irregularized and the formal citizen.
Invisible Victims: Undocumented Migrants and the Aftermath of September 11.
Politics & Society 42 (2014): 399-421.
With Alexandra Delano.
This article examines the processes of investigation and gathering evidence about victims of the September 11 attacks to better understand the inability of state and non-state institutions to effectively deal with the invisibility of undocumented migrants in terms of providing assistance and recognition at a moment of tragedy. The failure to make the invisible visible or to address the very question of visibility publicly is explained by three major reasons: 1) A general fear of coming forward on the part of undocumented migrants or their families, partly as a result of their legal status and their lack of trust in government agencies, which was compounded by ineffective communication about available relief services; 2) different procedural requirements and logics of evidence used by government and nongovernmental relief agencies, which, in some cases, made it impossible for undocumented migrants or their families to provide proof of their presence at the site or employment in the businesses affected; 3) the context of 9/11 as a disruptive event that influenced the overall climate in which issues of victimhood, memory, and immigration status could be addressed.
Authority without Foundations: Arendt and the Paradox of Postwar German Memory Politics.
The Review of Politics 76 (2014): 415-437.
With J. Matthew Hoye.
Hannah Arendt argued that the American Revolution revealed for the first time that all regimes require a reference to an absolute, while the French Revolution revealed that not all absolutes are equal. The American Revolution took as its absolute the act of founding itself, upon which the authority of the constitution could be grounded. By contrast, the failure of the French Revolution to establish an authority stemmed from its reference to the transcendental absolute of the nation. Beginnings, for Arendt, are historically determining. How then are we to explain the present view of authority in Germany which takes as its absolute referent the Holocaust? And how does this inform our understanding of the relationship between absolutes and new foundations? We argue that the key to understanding the German case is found in the particular nature of postwar German memory politics and that authority is not statically related to positive foundations.
Postnational Relations to the Past: A European ‘Ethics of Memory’?
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26 (2013): 41-55.
In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic “politics of regret”, the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed “postnational” approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a “European ethics of memory”). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational “essence”, most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.
Performing the Global.
Globalizations 10 (2013): 533-538.
In this commentary on Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s account of the field of ‘global studies’, I probe the merit of his arguments in relation to the study of social memory. While I endorse Pieterse’s general warning against careless aggregation and totalization in some approaches to globalization studies, I also suggest that questions of the “whole” are not to be given up per se: in fact, questions about exactly how and why one part stands in for the whole (and to whose benefit) need to remain at the core of a critical approach to globalization studies. I conclude by showing how this debate has played out in the literature on cosmopolitan memories, specifically the global memory of the Holocaust.
The Limits of Memory.
International Social Science Journal 62 (2012): 89–102.
With Ross Poole.
Psychologists and philosophers have long recognized the importance of memory in the life of the individual; the current memory boom is a belated recognition of memory’s importance in social, cultural, and political life as well. However, there are also reasons to be wary. Alongside the memory enthusiasts, there have been skeptics, those who have argued that that the study of memory is a little more than a sentimentalized, moralized, and ultimately religious substitute for the rigors of history. Some have suggested that the memory boom encourages nostalgia for a largely imaginary past, while it evades and conceals the oppression and injustice of the present. At a more fundamental level, some critics have argued that the notions of social, cultural, or collective memory, that is, of forms of memory other than that of the individual, are little more than misleading and unhelpful metaphors. Our concern in this paper will be to give an account of the role of memory in social and political life that provides an answer to these (and other) criticisms. Our purpose is not merely conceptual. We develop this account in relationship to two contemporary examples of memory politics. The first of these is the project of understanding the Holocaust as a universal memory symbol of moral evil; the second, the more limited project of constructing a conception of European identity based on the Holocaust.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Democratizing the Past.
In Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Routledge, 2023: 435-437.
The interest in the connection between memory and democracy has been central to the memory boom in the social sciences and humanities. However, exactly what kind of relationship we are interested in when discussing these terms together is often far from clear. This introductory chapter proposes that democratic theory can shed light on central normative questions that emerge when memory activism challenges the political and epistemic authority of state actors, experts, or curators from “below.” Based on the inherent tension characteristic of the modern political imaginary, which balances ideas of the liberal tradition with the values and aspirations of the democratic tradition, it suggests that memory can be evoked by activists as a defense of diversity and pluralism, but also, at times, as a unifying factor in the mobilization of civil society and the activation of a popular will.
Between Conflict and Consensus.
In Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Routledge, 2023: 454-458.
This chapter traces the recent agonistic turn in debates about the role of memory in democracies and its relevance for understanding and evaluating different forms of memory activism. Agonists are interested in creating arenas where differences can openly and competitively confront each other and where passions about different interpretations of the past are not barred from public debates but acknowledged as necessary components in sustaining a commitment to democratic action. The distinction between consensual and conflictual models of democracy not only provides us with an analytical and normative toolkit to understand different forms of memory activism, but also functions as a “category of practice”. Finally, drawing on political theorists who have questioned the sharp lines drawn between deliberationists and agonists, I argue that agonistic explanations of the shortcomings of a consensus-based politics of memory have mounted a powerful critique but have at times underestimated agonism’s own need for a consensual grounding in liberal and democratic values.
Mexico City’s Memorial to the Victims of Violence and the Facade of Participation.
In Museums as Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights, edited by Joyce Apsel and Amy Sodaro. Routledge, 2019: 153-173.
With Alexandra Delano.
[Translated into Spanish: "El memorial a las víctimas de la violencia de la Ciudad de México y la fachada de la participación" in Verdad, Justicia y Memoria: Derechos Humanos y Justicia Transicional en México. El Colegio de México, 2023.]
In response to the demands of families of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the narco-violence and the “War on Drugs” in Mexico, the outgoing administration of President Felipe Calderón built the Memorial to the Victims of Violence in Mexico City in 2012. While the memorial was designed by the architects Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall with a participatory audience in mind, its genealogy suggests a façade of participation that is not so much intended to bring more democratic legitimacy or open debate to the space, but to simply relieve decision-makers of accountability. In light of these shortcomings, some memory activists have decided to refuse any engagement with the memorial, while others have chosen to radically resignify the space. In this chapter, we suggest reading the struggle over the site of the memorial, in part, as a struggle over different notions of meaningful democratic participation in the public contestation of the past. We suggest that when mnemonic actors engage in struggles over sites of memory, they not only make claims about events in the past; they also, implicitly or explicitly, make claims about the functions of memorials as sites of persuasion and, specifically, about their relationship to democratic ideals and practices.
Death, Visibility, and the Politics of Dissensus at the United States-Mexico Border.
In Subjectivation: Political Theory in Contemporary Practices, eds. Andreas Oberprantacher and Andrei Siclodi. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 287-304.
With Alexandra Delano.
Making Absence Present: The September 11 Memorial.
In Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, eds. Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen. Oxford: Routledge, 2015: 398-413.
With Alexandra Delano.
[Translated into Italian: "Rendere visibile l’invisibile: il Memoriale dell’11 settembre a Manhattan" in Sociologie della memoria. Rome: Carocci, 2018]
The notion of allowing absence to “speak” for itself is central in the design of the National September 11 Memorial. However, the suggestion of the presence of absence in the memorial also opens up a space to reflect on what is not made visible. In this paper we focus particularly on the cases of undocumented migrants who were excluded from the list of victims on the memorial because their families were unable to prove their presence at the site. At the level of the bureaucratic processes, this exposes some of the challenges that governments face in identifying undocumented migrants, particularly at the moment of death. At a symbolic level, the absence of these unknown or unidentified victims in the memorial illustrates the silences and ambiguities that exist among government institutions and society at large with regard to these invisible members of the “nation of immigrants”. The memorial’s design itself does not explicitly point out the possibility that there might be unacknowledged victims, suggesting a finality with regard to naming the victims that seems to run counter to the view of the memorial as a “never-to-be-completed process,” in James Young’s terms. However, in its material qualities, it has also provided unexpected resources to reveal this “absence of an absence.”
Introduction: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information. and Conclusion: Comments on Silence, Screen, and Spectacle.
In Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information, edited by Lindsey Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014: 1-14, 239-243. (Paperback in 2017)
With Lindsey Freeman and Rachel Daniell.
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War.
Perspectives on Politics 20 (2022): 306-307.
Review of Militant Democracy and Its Critics: Populism, Parties, Extremism.
Constellations. 27 (2020): 761-763.
Review of The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies.
Memory Studies 10 (2017): 230-232.
Ghostly Politics. (Review of “The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations.”)
Time and Society 24 (2015): 129-133.
Review of What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society.
Journal of Economic Psychology (2015): 205-206.
With Stefan Trautmann.
Review of Money, Blood, and Revolution.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 52 (2014): 4-5.
With Stefan Trautmann.
The Past is Another Country: The Memory of Migration and the Migration of Memory. (Review of “History, Memory, and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation” and “Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies.”)
Migration Studies 1 (2013): 117-122.
Review of 'Talkin’ ‘bout my generation': Conflicts of Generation Building and Europe’s 1968.
Memory Studies 6 (2013): 113-115.
Review of How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life.
Journal of Socio-Economics 45 (2013): 94-95.
With Stefan Trautmann.
TRANSLATIONS
Zur Neubestimmung von Anerkennung. German Translation of “Rethinking Recognition” by Nancy Fraser, In Anerkennung (special issue), edited by Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher Zurn, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 21 (2009): 201-212.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Memory Activism with and against the State - Interview with Sergio Beltrán-García.
In Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Routledge, 2023.
With Alexandra Delano.
Border Deaths: From Disruption to Implication. A Comment on Soto.
Current Anthropology 63 (2022).
With Alexandra Delano.
Bringing The Dead Back Into Society: An Interview With Mercedes Doretti.
Social Research 83 (2016): 511-534.
With Alexandra Delano and Pablo Domínguez Galbraith.
Las Luchas por la Memoria contra las Violencas en México.. Mexico City: El Colegio de México Press, 2023.
Edited with Alexandra Délano Alonso, Maria de Vecchi Gerli and Alicia de los Ríos Merino.
This book documents and analyzes the various struggles over memory throughout Mexico in the context of the “war on drugs” since 2006. It brings together perspectives from researchers, activists, architects, artists and family members of victims of enforced disappearance who reflect on the impact of these struggles on questions about truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition. The different contributions show the heterogeneity of memory spaces and memory actors and address the pressing questions that emerge from the particularity of the Mexican case: What role do struggles for memory play in a context of ongoing violence, and what is the function of commemoration in the absence of peace and justice? In addition to its academic contribution, the book aims to be a tool that contributes to understanding and transforming the structural conditions behind the violence.
Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Social Memory in the Age of Information. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014. (Paperback in 2017)
Edited with Lindsey Freeman and Rachel Daniell.
In an age of information and new media, social memory is shaped by new relationships to attention and distraction. The editors of this volume argue for a re-reading of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory. Drawing on case studies as diverse as domestic Israeli memorial videos and facebook campaigns around the disappeared in Argentina, the editors suggest that “spectacle” may now be thought of not merely as a tool of distraction employed by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time: in short, to make a link between past and present injustice.
Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory. German Politics and Society 39, 1 (2021).
Edited and introduction with Jonathan Bach.
Germany’s post-war practices and policies of Vergangenheitsbewältigung are widely evoked around the world as a model for an honest public reckoning with the past. Yet a German “model” of memory has always been contested within Germany itself. This special issue explores a critical dimension of this contestation: how postwar and post-unification German narratives about the past rely on the concept of innocence as part of the wider process of acknowledging collective responsibility. The articles collected here show how narratives of innocence are not “just” one more blind spot within Germany’s memory regime, but are part of a fundamental tension inherent in efforts to deal responsibly with the past. Accompanied by a substantial introduction by the co-editors, the issue’s five articles cover a wide range of settings in which innocence plays a central role: the performance of individual innocence immediately after the war, the trope of the “mercy of the late birth” (Gnade der späten Geburt) and childhood innocence during the Nazi era, the changing role of discourses about the air war, the shifting representation of the colonial past, and an examination of the newest attempt at a masterable past that connects the present to the Prussian enlightenment.
Borders and the Politics of Mourning. Social Research 83, 2 (2016).
Edited and introduction with Alexandra Delano.
In recent years, the increased numbers of migrant deaths as a result of border controls and border militarization have gained increased attention. However, their full implications for an articulation of political subjectivity and responsibility in a non-territorial sense have not been exhaustively addressed. This special issue includes several studies of the symbolic-material landscape of border spaces, all of which, in one way or another, explore how interventions through a ‘politics of loss’ challenge existing visions of the border as a rigidly controlled and controlling space. The issue understands the politics of mourning as a political-affective engagement with border deaths, from forensic efforts, to efforts of memorialization/commemoration, to the investment in objects, from Arizona to Lampedusa. In political-theoretical terms, the issue interrogates the potential (and the shortcomings) of grief as a political and ethical category, engaging with the role of mourning in the thought of Judith Butler, Burkhard Liebsch, and Jacques Derrida, among others.
Memory, Materiality, Sensuality. Memory Studies 9, 1 (2016).
Edited and introduction with Lindsey Freeman and Rachel Daniell.
This special issue argues for a renewed and theoretically rich focus on the actual, the felt, and the tactile in memory studies (a field which has recently taken a strong turn towards the virtual). The objects of study incorporated in the book range from the Berlin wall to the US border wall to museum displays in the new 911 museum. All of the contributors practice a material reading of history and culture, exposing the implications of specific modes of display and design, systems of circulation and distribution, and logics of exchange and investment. The volume intervenes in debates on social memory as well as in debates on a 'new materialism' (Latour, Bennett, Connolly) by stressing the power (and the limitations) of objects and bodies to incorporate and translate memories and to shape our political possibilities in the present.
Screen Memory. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26 (2013).
Edited and introduction with Lindsey Freeman and Laliv Melamed.
In the past, the Freudian notion of a “screen memory” has been viewed and employed rather one-dimensionally as a memory that obscures other memories by blocking or replacing them. This special issue moves away from thinking of screen memory as simply something that obscures. Like Michael Rothberg, we view screen memory not merely as a substitution, but as a temporary displacement in which the forgotten memory is subject to recall. Consequently, the relationship between memories is best understood as “multi-directional” in the sense that a covered memory, even if altered and reexamined in the process of interacting with other memories, can speak back. The contributors to the special issue arrive at the question of screen memory and screened memories from a variety of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, such as performance studies, cultural studies, political theory, anthropology, and sociology, but they share the attempt to untangle claims to the past in challenging environments where evidence is sometimes lacking, sometimes ahistorical, sometimes inauthentic, and often contested.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City.
Sociologica, 17,1 (2023): 9-23.
With Alexandra Delano.
This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests.
The Struggle for Memory and Justice in Mexico.
Current History 121, 832 (2022): 43-49.
With Alexandra Delano.
The debate about public memory has intensified in Mexico in a time of widespread violence and human rights abuses, particularly in the context of the guerra contra el narco (war against drug cartels) that began in 2006. Against government narratives that criminalize victims of enforced disappearance and criminal violence, and the state's failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, families of victims and other activists have led a struggle for truth, justice, memory and reparations. Through diverse memorial interventions throughout the country, they call attention to the continuities in state violence over time, and the need for memorial spaces that transform the structural conditions underlying different forms of violence and state neglect.
Memory Activism and Mexico’s 'War on Drugs': Countermonuments, Resistance, and the Politics of Time
Latin American Research Review 56 (2021). 353-370.
With Alexandra Delano.
The widespread violence in Mexico by state and non-state actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. We show that in this context, lacking a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time. Through acts of appropriation and the creation of alternative models of commemorative spaces, the memory activism described in this paper enlarges the historical trajectory brought into public focus, thereby often questioning the hierarchy of victims implied in state-sponsored memory projects and assigning responsibility to the state in relation to current and past violent events. At the same time, these projects confront broader issues of geographic neglect, urban renewal, and the restitching of the social fabric, which makes these interventions of memory activists commemorative and transformative at the same time.
Making Sense of and with “Profound Regret”: Howard County Board of Education’s Apology for a Racially Segregated Public School System
Journal of Educational Controversy 14 (2020).
With Rachel Garver.
In November 2012, the Board of Education of Howard County, Maryland approved a proclamation that expressed “profound regret that the Howard County Public School System maintained segregated and unequal public schools both prior, and subsequent to” Brown v. Board of Education. The proclamation describes Howard County’s slow response to comply with the 1954 decision, such that the school system was not officially desegregated until eleven years later in 1965. Through the analysis of stakeholder interviews and board meetings, we explore the various ways and the extent to which the Board of Howard County’s apology was bestowed with meaning. We argue that the apology was utilized as a narrative device to define the role of the Board, delineate the injustice committed, establish (dis)continuity between past and present injustices, and work out who has been wronged. Stakeholders used de jure segregation as a lens to understand contemporary de facto segregation and reflected on its continuing harm to current members of the community. We conclude by discussing the potential of public apologies as forms of governance that mold responsible and responsive public officials.
Transnational Memories, National Memory Regimes: Commemorating the Armenian Genocide in Germany
German Studies Review 43 (2020): 127-147.
Studies of initiatives related to the recognition of the Armenian genocide across Europe have stressed the importance of the idiosyncratic environments in which these efforts take place. This paper follows debates over two projects dedicated to the commemoration of the Armenian genocide in Germany: The Lepsiushaus in Potsdam and the Gedenkstätte für Genozidopfer im Osmanischen Reich in Berlin. I propose that these concrete expressions of the recognition struggle show the importance of local conditions for the reception of transnational memories as they depend on practices supported by a “memory regime” often perceived in national terms. I show that a culture of contrition and reflective memory contours the justification of both critics and proponents of the recognition efforts, where conventions from Germany’s own mode of Vergangenheitsbewältigung are carried over, ranging from an ethnic logic of historical responsibility to assumptions about the proper depiction of individual or heroic biographies, to the centrality of Holocaust memory for the Federal Republic.
Deaths, Visibility, and Responsibility: The Politics of Mourning at the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Social Research 83 (2016): 421-451.
With Alexandra Delano.
This paper addresses the politicization of bodies of undocumented migrants beyond their death, specifically of those who died while crossing the US-Mexican border. In the light of dramatically increasing numbers of fatalities, border activists in Arizona, California, and Texas have engaged in recording and documenting the deaths, but also in public events such as marches, projections, and collective acts of mourning to publicize the issue of undocumented migrants dying in their attempt to cross the desert. We argue that such a “politics of mourning” are stagings of dissensus in Jacques Ranciere’s sense, in as far as they constitute a challenge to existing frames within which we sense someone as publically ‘grievable’. Moreover, the dead and undocumented are a “part that has no part” (Rancière) in a dual sense, as they challenge the logic of counting not just once, but twice. If dissensus places one world into another, then we see a double lodging in the politicization of the border victims: of the dead and the living and of the irregularized and the formal citizen.
Invisible Victims: Undocumented Migrants and the Aftermath of September 11.
Politics & Society 42 (2014): 399-421.
With Alexandra Delano.
This article examines the processes of investigation and gathering evidence about victims of the September 11 attacks to better understand the inability of state and non-state institutions to effectively deal with the invisibility of undocumented migrants in terms of providing assistance and recognition at a moment of tragedy. The failure to make the invisible visible or to address the very question of visibility publicly is explained by three major reasons: 1) A general fear of coming forward on the part of undocumented migrants or their families, partly as a result of their legal status and their lack of trust in government agencies, which was compounded by ineffective communication about available relief services; 2) different procedural requirements and logics of evidence used by government and nongovernmental relief agencies, which, in some cases, made it impossible for undocumented migrants or their families to provide proof of their presence at the site or employment in the businesses affected; 3) the context of 9/11 as a disruptive event that influenced the overall climate in which issues of victimhood, memory, and immigration status could be addressed.
Authority without Foundations: Arendt and the Paradox of Postwar German Memory Politics.
The Review of Politics 76 (2014): 415-437.
With J. Matthew Hoye.
Hannah Arendt argued that the American Revolution revealed for the first time that all regimes require a reference to an absolute, while the French Revolution revealed that not all absolutes are equal. The American Revolution took as its absolute the act of founding itself, upon which the authority of the constitution could be grounded. By contrast, the failure of the French Revolution to establish an authority stemmed from its reference to the transcendental absolute of the nation. Beginnings, for Arendt, are historically determining. How then are we to explain the present view of authority in Germany which takes as its absolute referent the Holocaust? And how does this inform our understanding of the relationship between absolutes and new foundations? We argue that the key to understanding the German case is found in the particular nature of postwar German memory politics and that authority is not statically related to positive foundations.
Postnational Relations to the Past: A European ‘Ethics of Memory’?
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26 (2013): 41-55.
In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic “politics of regret”, the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed “postnational” approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a “European ethics of memory”). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational “essence”, most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.
Performing the Global.
Globalizations 10 (2013): 533-538.
In this commentary on Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s account of the field of ‘global studies’, I probe the merit of his arguments in relation to the study of social memory. While I endorse Pieterse’s general warning against careless aggregation and totalization in some approaches to globalization studies, I also suggest that questions of the “whole” are not to be given up per se: in fact, questions about exactly how and why one part stands in for the whole (and to whose benefit) need to remain at the core of a critical approach to globalization studies. I conclude by showing how this debate has played out in the literature on cosmopolitan memories, specifically the global memory of the Holocaust.
The Limits of Memory.
International Social Science Journal 62 (2012): 89–102.
With Ross Poole.
Psychologists and philosophers have long recognized the importance of memory in the life of the individual; the current memory boom is a belated recognition of memory’s importance in social, cultural, and political life as well. However, there are also reasons to be wary. Alongside the memory enthusiasts, there have been skeptics, those who have argued that that the study of memory is a little more than a sentimentalized, moralized, and ultimately religious substitute for the rigors of history. Some have suggested that the memory boom encourages nostalgia for a largely imaginary past, while it evades and conceals the oppression and injustice of the present. At a more fundamental level, some critics have argued that the notions of social, cultural, or collective memory, that is, of forms of memory other than that of the individual, are little more than misleading and unhelpful metaphors. Our concern in this paper will be to give an account of the role of memory in social and political life that provides an answer to these (and other) criticisms. Our purpose is not merely conceptual. We develop this account in relationship to two contemporary examples of memory politics. The first of these is the project of understanding the Holocaust as a universal memory symbol of moral evil; the second, the more limited project of constructing a conception of European identity based on the Holocaust.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Democratizing the Past.
In Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Routledge, 2023: 435-437.
The interest in the connection between memory and democracy has been central to the memory boom in the social sciences and humanities. However, exactly what kind of relationship we are interested in when discussing these terms together is often far from clear. This introductory chapter proposes that democratic theory can shed light on central normative questions that emerge when memory activism challenges the political and epistemic authority of state actors, experts, or curators from “below.” Based on the inherent tension characteristic of the modern political imaginary, which balances ideas of the liberal tradition with the values and aspirations of the democratic tradition, it suggests that memory can be evoked by activists as a defense of diversity and pluralism, but also, at times, as a unifying factor in the mobilization of civil society and the activation of a popular will.
Between Conflict and Consensus.
In Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Routledge, 2023: 454-458.
This chapter traces the recent agonistic turn in debates about the role of memory in democracies and its relevance for understanding and evaluating different forms of memory activism. Agonists are interested in creating arenas where differences can openly and competitively confront each other and where passions about different interpretations of the past are not barred from public debates but acknowledged as necessary components in sustaining a commitment to democratic action. The distinction between consensual and conflictual models of democracy not only provides us with an analytical and normative toolkit to understand different forms of memory activism, but also functions as a “category of practice”. Finally, drawing on political theorists who have questioned the sharp lines drawn between deliberationists and agonists, I argue that agonistic explanations of the shortcomings of a consensus-based politics of memory have mounted a powerful critique but have at times underestimated agonism’s own need for a consensual grounding in liberal and democratic values.
Mexico City’s Memorial to the Victims of Violence and the Facade of Participation.
In Museums as Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights, edited by Joyce Apsel and Amy Sodaro. Routledge, 2019: 153-173.
With Alexandra Delano.
[Translated into Spanish: "El memorial a las víctimas de la violencia de la Ciudad de México y la fachada de la participación" in Verdad, Justicia y Memoria: Derechos Humanos y Justicia Transicional en México. El Colegio de México, 2023.]
In response to the demands of families of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the narco-violence and the “War on Drugs” in Mexico, the outgoing administration of President Felipe Calderón built the Memorial to the Victims of Violence in Mexico City in 2012. While the memorial was designed by the architects Julio Gaeta and Luby Springall with a participatory audience in mind, its genealogy suggests a façade of participation that is not so much intended to bring more democratic legitimacy or open debate to the space, but to simply relieve decision-makers of accountability. In light of these shortcomings, some memory activists have decided to refuse any engagement with the memorial, while others have chosen to radically resignify the space. In this chapter, we suggest reading the struggle over the site of the memorial, in part, as a struggle over different notions of meaningful democratic participation in the public contestation of the past. We suggest that when mnemonic actors engage in struggles over sites of memory, they not only make claims about events in the past; they also, implicitly or explicitly, make claims about the functions of memorials as sites of persuasion and, specifically, about their relationship to democratic ideals and practices.
Death, Visibility, and the Politics of Dissensus at the United States-Mexico Border.
In Subjectivation: Political Theory in Contemporary Practices, eds. Andreas Oberprantacher and Andrei Siclodi. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 287-304.
With Alexandra Delano.
Making Absence Present: The September 11 Memorial.
In Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, eds. Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen. Oxford: Routledge, 2015: 398-413.
With Alexandra Delano.
[Translated into Italian: "Rendere visibile l’invisibile: il Memoriale dell’11 settembre a Manhattan" in Sociologie della memoria. Rome: Carocci, 2018]
The notion of allowing absence to “speak” for itself is central in the design of the National September 11 Memorial. However, the suggestion of the presence of absence in the memorial also opens up a space to reflect on what is not made visible. In this paper we focus particularly on the cases of undocumented migrants who were excluded from the list of victims on the memorial because their families were unable to prove their presence at the site. At the level of the bureaucratic processes, this exposes some of the challenges that governments face in identifying undocumented migrants, particularly at the moment of death. At a symbolic level, the absence of these unknown or unidentified victims in the memorial illustrates the silences and ambiguities that exist among government institutions and society at large with regard to these invisible members of the “nation of immigrants”. The memorial’s design itself does not explicitly point out the possibility that there might be unacknowledged victims, suggesting a finality with regard to naming the victims that seems to run counter to the view of the memorial as a “never-to-be-completed process,” in James Young’s terms. However, in its material qualities, it has also provided unexpected resources to reveal this “absence of an absence.”
Introduction: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information. and Conclusion: Comments on Silence, Screen, and Spectacle.
In Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information, edited by Lindsey Freeman, Benjamin Nienass, and Rachel Daniell. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014: 1-14, 239-243. (Paperback in 2017)
With Lindsey Freeman and Rachel Daniell.
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War.
Perspectives on Politics 20 (2022): 306-307.
Review of Militant Democracy and Its Critics: Populism, Parties, Extremism.
Constellations. 27 (2020): 761-763.
Review of The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies.
Memory Studies 10 (2017): 230-232.
Ghostly Politics. (Review of “The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations.”)
Time and Society 24 (2015): 129-133.
Review of What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society.
Journal of Economic Psychology (2015): 205-206.
With Stefan Trautmann.
Review of Money, Blood, and Revolution.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 52 (2014): 4-5.
With Stefan Trautmann.
The Past is Another Country: The Memory of Migration and the Migration of Memory. (Review of “History, Memory, and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation” and “Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies.”)
Migration Studies 1 (2013): 117-122.
Review of 'Talkin’ ‘bout my generation': Conflicts of Generation Building and Europe’s 1968.
Memory Studies 6 (2013): 113-115.
Review of How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life.
Journal of Socio-Economics 45 (2013): 94-95.
With Stefan Trautmann.
TRANSLATIONS
Zur Neubestimmung von Anerkennung. German Translation of “Rethinking Recognition” by Nancy Fraser, In Anerkennung (special issue), edited by Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher Zurn, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 21 (2009): 201-212.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Memory Activism with and against the State - Interview with Sergio Beltrán-García.
In Handbook of Memory Activism, edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. Routledge, 2023.
With Alexandra Delano.
Border Deaths: From Disruption to Implication. A Comment on Soto.
Current Anthropology 63 (2022).
With Alexandra Delano.
Bringing The Dead Back Into Society: An Interview With Mercedes Doretti.
Social Research 83 (2016): 511-534.
With Alexandra Delano and Pablo Domínguez Galbraith.