I think one of the most striking points in common between the two readings is their acknowledgment of the inherent tensions in memory work. Connerton notes that societies often oscillate between the necessity to forget for peace and the demand to remember for justice. I think it is particularly true in post-colonial societies: to which point can we hold on to the past to forge our own identity in the present? In a North African cultural and religious sphere, forgetting is often considered a gift from the heavens, allowing people to live a normal life after traumatic events. Perhaps in this context, Nelson Mandela’s quote “We should forgive, but never forget” fulfills its meaning. Although it is interesting to note the dichotomy of how European countries keep the memory of certain historical events (such as WWI and II) alive through books and cinematography while asking Europeans of African descent to forget about the genocides and horror their ancestors went through in the past because: “slavery happened a long time ago.” Similarly, Jelin highlights how memory is shaped by competing interests, those who seek to preserve it and those who aim to erase or distort it. Both authors recognize that memory is not just a bunch of facts but a site of negotiation, conflict, and meaning-making.
Jelin extends this idea by examining the power dynamics in memory creation. Her discussion of how dominant institutions and cultural frameworks legitimate certain narratives while silencing others complements Connerton’s exploration of repressive erasure. The act of forgetting, whether intentional or incidental, can serve as a tool for marginalization or reconciliation, depending on the circumstances.
Repressive erasure manifested in the documentary Descendents, where William Foster burned the ship and tried to destroy any traces of evidence on this illegal expedition, and how the Africatown community fought to keep their traditions alive and to change the narrative from the ship to the community that was built on the shore. They reminded me that memory is not merely about preserving the past but about shaping the present and future based on what you learned from it. This reflection underscores the necessity of approaching memory with both an analytical lens and an ethical commitment to inclusivity, justice, and healing.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana
“Cuál es la diferencia entre recuerdo, memoria e historia?” – As seen on the outside of a building in Ciudad Colonial, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana.
Before going into why I chose those two quotes to start this reflection, I am going to be a history nerd for just a moment. I sweat its relevant, or at least the connections I made to the readings are relevant. When the Titanic sank in 1912, two inquiry commissions were set up in New York and London to investigate what had happened. They interviewed survivors, engineers, and a lot of people who were in some way related to the sinking. One of the questions that the investigators wanted to know the answer to was how exactly the Titanic had sunk. A bunch of women who survived the sinking, from first and second class for the most part, explained to the commissions that as the bow (the front part of the ship) plunged into the waters of the North Atlantic they saw the bow break apart from the stern (back part of the ship), leaving the stern floating like a cork for a few minutes before following the bow into the bottom of the ocean. Most of the people in the inquiry commissions were doubtful that their recollections of the event were true, due to the emotional toll of the tragedy and from having witnessed the deaths of their husbands. They interviewed the highest ranking official from the crew that had survived and when he said that at no point, he witnessed the ship break in two, the commissions basically said that was undeniably the truth. It took until 1985 when the wreck was discovered to find that, indeed, the women were correct, and the ship had broken apart during the sinking. The Titanic was built in the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland; at the time, it was the biggest ship to be built and the entire city was proud of that achievement but following the event, the city wanted to forget at all costs that the Titanic had been built there. It became a taboo topic in Belfast until the early 2000’s when James Cameron’s Titanic premiered in 1997 and there was a renewed interest in the Titanic. Witnessing, remembering, collective memory and forgetting are essential aspects of how the Titanic, both the ship itself and its history, are understood.
Back to the quotes, the second one can be translated to “What is the difference between a memory [singular], memory [collective] and history?”. It is a complicated phrase to translate because in Spanish we have two different words for a memory and memory. And it is an even more difficult question to answer, because as the chapters by Elizabeth Jelin explained, every person will have their own particular set of memories that are shaped by the collective memory and by their own history, both personal and as part of a larger group. Jelin’s third chapter in particular resonates a lot with me, mainly because I know what the national history or official version of the events can cause to a country (Mexico). While Mexico did not have a dictatorial regime in the most common meaning of the word, it was under a single-party rule for 70 years, many of which were marked by repression. In particular, the student uprising of 1968 and the Tlatelolco massacre that followed are seen as one of the most clear examples of the State wanting to erase what happened. The current sociopolitical landscape in Mexico is most definitely shaped by those 70 years. And yet, people undoubtedly remember those years differently depending on where they were in Mexico, their socioeconomic status and whether or not they were directly affected by the state repression.
Before I go into a whole essay on memory, I’ll just finish with the questions I keep reflecting on.
Questions:
Is there such a thing as “too much memory” or “too much forgetting”?
What are the implications of “forgetting” and “memory” when we cannot be a witness?
One key takeaway from this week’s materials is that memory is not merely about the past but is deeply connected to the present demands for justice and recognition, serving as a foundation for creating a more just and inclusive future.
Jelin’s work highlights that memory is not static but a dynamic process shaped by people, events, and cultural contexts. This idea is echoed in the documentary Descendant, which portrays the ongoing struggle of the descendants of the Clotilda to reclaim their history and seek justice. Watching this documentary made me realize that daily acts of remembering play a crucial role in collective resistance against the erasure of traumatic pasts. Remembering is essential for creating a shared memory that addresses historical injustices and fosters justice and healing.
Another thought that emerged while reading Jelin’s work is about the contested nature of memory in post-dictatorship societies, where different groups compete to establish their narratives as the dominant version of history. The phrase “history is written by the winners” highlights why injustices persist in various forms in different places despite ongoing efforts to support marginalized people or victims of injustice. This is closely tied to power dynamics, as those who win wars or hold power have the authority to shape how events are remembered and recorded. Jelin emphasizes this point by highlighting the role historians play in constructing national memory and identity, often influenced by those in power. In dictatorships, when those in power control the creation of official histories that are often one-sided and exclude marginalized voices, it perpetuates injustices. These dominant narratives are frequently challenged by alternative memories or narratives, leading to power struggles over the interpretation of the past. The documentary reflects this dynamic by showing how the history of the Clotilda was suppressed, with only recent efforts by the descendants bringing it to light. These struggles over memory illustrate the power dynamics in determining who gets to remember and who is forgotten.
Connerton’s piece outlines seven types of forgetting, highlighting the complex interplay between remembering and forgetting in shaping individual and collective identities. I found the concepts of repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting particularly relevant to societies under dictatorships, including my own country. In such societies, the state, often led by a military regime, is typically responsible for the repressive erasure of memories, such as destroying monuments or rewriting history to glorify the regime and portray the armed forces as saviors or protectors. These actions silence the voices and erase the histories of those who oppose the regime, making reconciliation between opposing groups difficult and hindering justice for the oppressed. Prescriptive forgetting can be a deliberate strategy to counter these issues, particularly in achieving reconciliation and peace in post-conflict societies. However, the challenge lies in determining what to remember and what to forget, ensuring that critical historical truths are preserved.
Question:
Given the challenge presented, my question would be: How can we ensure that marginalized communities have the opportunity to seek justice without escalating tensions with other groups, such as the oppressive state or dominant factions?
At the outset, I found myself repulsed by the idea that there could be too much remembering. I was really thinking of forgetting as a personal or collective failure. Like if we (I) could just Be Better (TM), we (I) would never forget anything. This is a bananas perspective that speaks more to my lifelong history of aspirational perfectionism than anyone’s reality. So, I kind of read Connerton, who rolls out with this Nietzschean idea that forgetting is fundamental to happiness, through whatever the opposite of rose-coloured glasses are. Like, I guess it’s great that the monarchies party to the Thirty Years War agreed to forget the fighting and signed the Treaty of Westphalia, but they also probably didn’t lose their entire families to famine during the War. Who are they to say people must, or should, forget? I thought back to Descendant, wherein it is claimed that “forgiving is disguised as a way to medicate the healing so we can forget about it, but the imbalance of the injustice is still there” (1:02:03). When I think about the examples in Connerton (and in life, really), I struggle to imagine forgetting without forgiving, and forgiving seems like not the universal panacea we might want it to be. The examples presented made me think of the gaps between macropolitical policy and individual behaviour; just because the state was not purging Nazis from the civil administration does not mean their neighbours were inviting them to the block party. Even if forgetting begets peace or some other seemingly universal benefit, that does not mean that the not-remembering happens. It just becomes “clandestine,” as Jelin says.
The aspiring historian who lives inside me also bristled a bit with Jelin, who called the archives a “surplus of memory” and more with Connerton, who said that “to say that something has been stored, in an archive or computer, is in effect to say that, though it is in principle always retrievable, we can afford to forget it” (40). In my mind, it means we put it into some amorphous third space. We can afford to forget it but we can’t afford to not remember it. We archive our ‘maybe one day’ and our ‘just in case’ memories and in lots of ways, those days and cases do come.
I thought Jelin’s grammatical breakdown of the word “de-termin(at)ed” (25) was delicious. Jelin is referring to the past, which is both determined and terminated, happened “(at)” another time and place and is, in some ways, repetitively “de-terminated” in the “un-terminate” interpretation of the word, as we constantly unravel, retie and re-ravel pieces of the past looking for and creating new meanings.
Descendant has left sticking points in my mind. I am stuck on the idea of telling stories the way they were told when they were told for the first time. This comes up early in the film, talking about telling stories by the fire the way they would have been told, and also when talking about Zora Neale Hurston recording herself singing the songs she learned in Africatown, rather than transcribing lyrics or writing summaries. I think this is part of why archives contain things we can’t not remember. Maybe in another time or place, we would sing the songs or tell the stories around the fire, but we are in this time and place. So what do we do, with the stories that would have told our family lineages or stories from home? We write them down and put them in the basement of the Royal BC Museum or the library or our houses and laptops, and hope they are around when we need them. They might be better told in song or story, but their preservation is part of what makes it possible to recognize the prayer at the end of the film: to “love your history enough that you want it told everywhere you go” (1:34:00).
A question (or 2):
What role does forgiveness play in forgetting? What role does forgetting play in forgiving?
Some key learnings from the readings that stick out to me are that: memories are both individual and collective; memories are deeply connected to identity and culture; trauma plays a huge role in what is and isn’t remembered; memories can be weaponized, intentionally forgotten, or effectively re-written in the name of nationalism and political (in)action; forgetting can be systemic and structural; there is a difference between recognition and recall; and that we should all strive to have exemplary memories.
It was difficult not to think about the labor and pain involved with remembering, especially for survivors of war, genocide, and sexual violence. Memory is so vital to preventing atrocious events in history from repeating themselves, yet it is clear that as recalling by memory entrepreneurs and laborers persists, memories continue to be systemically ignored and silenced by states, the press, society, families, and individuals.
In the chapter on What memories are we talking about?, Jelin paraphrases Bourdieu by saying that “the power of words is not located in the words themselves but in the authority they represent and in the power-related processes connection to the institutions that legitimate them.” This quote is particularly relevant to the quest of Africatown’s community members to find the Coltilda in Brown’s documentary, The Descendents. As I was watching the film, I have to admit that I asked myself several times why the town’s community members needed to find the ship to validate their experiences and stories passed down from their ancestors.
Once the ship was found, however, you immediately saw more politicians start to get involved and saw resources come in to set up the Africatown Heritage House. Avenues were also created for the descendants of slaves brought over on the ship, to enter into dialogue with the descendants of people who worked on the ship too. This isn’t to say that the discovery of the wreck gave more validation to the community’s history, but it did make a difference in who cared about it and opened up new opportunities for the town moving forward.
Despite the story of the Cotila being published in Hurston’s book Bacaroon, it was interesting to see how the family member of the ship’s captain who went to the wreckage site with the journalist and members of the community, still (either intentionally or subconsciously) tried to spin what was written of the captain in a positive light as a “pretty good guy.”
Question: Is it unethical to encourage people to “remember” (especially when forgetting supports survival) when systems are set up to ignore the most marginalized?
This week, as I went through the readings, I wondered, where is memory located?
I first asked myself this as I read Paul Connerton’s chapter “Seven types of forgetting.” In it, he mentioned that “Trobriand Islanders locate memory in the stomach” (158). This struck me because I had never asked myself where in the body memory resides, but if I had I would have instinctually said the brain. Or perhaps, if pressed, I might have said that different memories reside in different places in the body. I have scars that serve as memories of different times in my life. Some I have even put there myself in order to remember a particular event. My feet are shaped by a childhood spent dancing. I was once told by a yoga instructor that trauma is stored in the hips and not to be surprised if in certain poses I felt overwhelmed by emotions coming back or the urge to cry. But the stomach?
I then thought about this question as I looked for a photo to send to Dr. Baines. Where has memory been stored in the places I have lived and visited? I ultimately chose to send a photo of the memorial set up on the side of a road that goes up a hill over the Maidan (main square) to commemorate the Euromaidan protests of 2013/14. During these protests, government soldiers used this hill to set up snipers and shoot down at the protesters. After the revolution, family members of the deceased started piling up paving stones from the roads as burial mounds, and placing flowers and photos of the deceased there. The road was eventually renamed “heroyiv nebesnoyi sotni” alley, or “hundred heroes of heaven.”
The Kyiv memorial is an explicit display of memory and place, but I had originally thought to send in a photo of my grandma, or of letters between my grandpa and his niece, because fundamentally I think memory is stored within people and especially within relationships. My grandma was a storyteller. My grandpa barely shared anything. Memory can be both collective and individual.
Another question that came up for me was, is remembering a necessary part of forgetting?
Connerton speaks of prescriptive forgetting as a sometimes necessary part of reconciliation after traumatic events within societies: “sometimes at the point of transition from conflict to conflict resolution there may be no explicit requirement to forget, although the implicit requirement to do so is nonetheless unmistakable” (153). This reminds me of the maxim: forgive and forget. But forgetting without first remembering seems more like erasure to me. I think of truth and reconciliation mechanisms: truth telling is a necessary precursor to reconciliation. I don’t know if forgetting is a desirable outcome in the long term, but I do think that too often those in power impose silence on those they have dominated in order to try to achieve a sort of forgetting.
Maybe a better question is, does reconciliation require remembering? And does forgetting require reconciliation?
I’m particularly drawn to the ties between memory and identity that arose in this week’s readings. In Chapter 2 of Elizabeth Jelin’s State Repression and the Labors of Memory, Jelin explains that memory is integral to identity formation. Jelin argues that it sustains a sense of continuity over time. Jelin highlights how groups engage in struggles to affirm their version of the past as legitimate, tying memory directly to group identity. This relationship between memory and identity becomes particularly visible in the creation of official histories. Each of these examples can be seen in the documentary “The Descendent.” For these communities, their ability to memorialize and remember ancestral histories is crucial in present-day identity formation.
In contrast, Connerton describes forgetting as constitutive in identity formation. Connerton says this occurs when one selectively disregards memories incompatible with current identity/goals. This results in individuals fostering new social ties and affiliations. Connerton’s argument that forgetting can be a necessary part of creating new identities contrasts Jelin’s focus on the active reconstruction of memory. For instance, Connerton posits that sometimes societies msut often discard outdated or divisive memories to establish cohesive narratives, particularly during transitional periods. I had a particularly challenging time sitting with some of the arguments Connerton presents, because I find the idea of forgetting in identity formation to be complex and potentially fraught. While Connerton’s perspective highlights the pragmatic aspects of moving forward by discarding divisive or outdated memories, it raises questions about whose memories are deemed outdated or divisive and who decides what is forgotten.
The documentary highlights the importance of ancestral memory in identity formation. It documents details of how this process was one of justice, reparations, and reconciliation. To that extent, I wonder how Connerton’s writing of ‘forgetting’ might be reconciled with the need to honour and preserve such memories.
The class readings allowed me to reflect more deeply on the dynamic nature of memory and how memory serves to give meaning and credibility to the past.
Thinking about how we have come to understand certain traumatic events, such as Argentina’s dictatorship, I found Jelin’s prescriptive forgetting, the intentional decision by a state to forget certain aspects of the past, closely related to Argentina’s military past. From 1976-1983, Argentina was ruled by a military junta. Citizens who disagreed with the military dictatorship were kidnapped, tortured, executed, and thrown from planes into the ocean. After the country’s return to democracy, Argentina’s regime actively worked towards suppressing information about the disappeared such as the destruction of evidence and burning of records, not to mention the fear and censorship fostered discouraging families of the disappeared to speak up about their lived experiences. Yet, while the regime attempted to instill a form of historical amnesia and prescriptive forgetting, Argentina has had a strong history of social mobilization and advocacy efforts preventing the erasure of events from happening. In this case, I believe Connerton makes a strong case by defining human rights movements as key forms of memory entrepreneurs as “privileged actor in the political enterprise of memory.” For example, in the case of Argentina. Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo made collective demands to politicize and visibilize the issue of los desaparecidos (the disappeared) led by the campaign of terror. This organization would collectively gather in La Plaza de Mayo, in front of La Casa Rosada, (the executive presidential house) displaying photographs of the disappeared, some of them whose family members were amid the disappeared. In this case, Las Madres kept issues alive that would otherwise be forgotten and held the government accountable for the atrocities committed.
By the end of Argentina’s regime, human rights movements became deeply embedded in national debates, shaping the country’s social and political landscape. For instance, the country’s La Marea Verde (The Green Wave), a movement aimed at legalizing abortion rights in the country, reflects this history of activism, placing attention to the women and girls who have lost their lives to femicide, ensuring that their stories and identities are not forgotten. This connects to Connerton’s remembering and forgetting, highlighting how social movements play a crucial role in preserving collective memory.
“The past is gone, it is already de- termin(at)ed; it cannot be changed.
The future, by contrast, is open, uncertain, and indeterminate. What
can change about the past is its meaning, which is subject to re-
interpretations, anchored in intentions and expectations toward the
future”
As I final note, I really liked this quote and I think it really shows the role social movements have in helping reconstruct the past or a “memory of an event” so it’s not forgotten or completely distorted by those in power.
Journalists play a big role in the way knowledge is disseminated and how past and current events are understood. In what ways do you think journalists can do a better job of centering people’s memories and recollections of an event?
I used to have a pretty narrow view of forgetting. Either it was something good, like when your body forces you to forget a traumatic event so you can move on, a kind of self-preservation for your mind and body, or it was something bad, like losing cultural stories and knowledge that can only survive through intentional remembering. But reading Paul Connerton’s Several Types of Forgetting really opened my eyes. Societies have different ways of viewing forgetting, and those views shape their identity and values. I hadn’t even considered the ethical implications of forgetting before.
What really struck me was how forgetting can be personal, like forgetting a traumatic experience, or collective, like forgetting cultural heritage. It reminded me of the documentary where one person said, “I would feel complete; I would feel whole if I could connect back to my grandmother,” while another said, “I don’t need to see the ship to know it happened. I’m living proof that it happened.” These perspectives highlight how there’s no one-size-fits-all way to process or remember a collective event. We’re all connected by the event itself, but our individual relationships to it can be vastly different.
When I think of places where memory is alive, I usually picture physical locations. For me, heritage and remembering aren’t about vanity; they’re about valuing people. The spaces we live in say a lot about how we value ourselves and each other. Architecture and the environment we inhabit affect our self-esteem and even our sense of identity. Someone living in a decaying, forgotten space might feel their worth is tied to that space. Nation-building, fostering a healthy society, and instilling respectful cultural values should start with making people feel valuable. One of the simplest ways to do that is to provide spaces where they can exist with dignity.
The image I selected is of Benazir Bhutto, the first female prime minister in a Muslim-majority country. She was assassinated in December 2007, and I think about her often. I was just nine years old, visiting Pakistan with my younger sister, who was six. We were staying with our grandparents when she was killed. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but looking back nearly 17 years later, I see it differently. I think my mind blocked it out until I was ready to process it.
For me, Benazir Bhutto is more than a historical figure. She’s an icon of democracy and justice. She stood as a symbol of resistance against authoritarianism and amplified critical conversations about women’s rights, governance, and accountability in Pakistan. Most importantly, she proved that women could lead in spaces traditionally reserved for men. Her memory is preserved in the ongoing dialogue about democracy, human rights, and the essential role of women in shaping political landscapes.
Before starting the readings and watching the film, my initial thoughts on memory were connected to its role in history and historical interpretations of events. I wondered why history cannot be personal and subjective, acknowledging the diverse actors and perspectives within the events people remember and recognizing that individuals recall things differently. I also considered that this might be due to the fact that the memories of marginalized individuals are often overshadowed and suppressed by those who perpetrate the marginalization. Then, I read Jelin’s work, which suggests that dominant groups impose their “official” memories to serve their own interests while marginalized groups resist and present alternative narratives.
I understand and appreciate that everyone has the right to interpret events differently based on their recognition and experiences. This can stem from individuals’ upbringing, biases, beliefs, and so forth. However, I also acknowledge that this phenomenon can be detrimental when power dynamics are at play, as dominant groups have the capacity and privilege to undermine someone else’s intrinsic right to memory. I found her description of a state’s involvement intriguing and agree with her analysis of the state’s role in suppressing memory work. However, facilitating memory work would necessitate that they admit their wrongdoings and clearly acknowledge the actions they were complicit in. We see clear examples of this suppression in the government’s response to the Palestinian genocide. We also observe noteworthy instances of ineffective facilitation and, in my view, suppression of Indigenous memory through performative statements of reconciliation and reparation.
Regarding Paul Connerton’s seven types of forgetting, I found his arguments and framework thought-provoking, as they reveal the dual nature of forgetting as both a natural and socially constructed phenomenon. Each type of forgetting he identifies shapes and influences the complexities of memory’s role in society. Forgetting has been used as a tool of oppression, reinforcing epistemic injustice by erasing histories, voices, and identities that dominant groups deem inconvenient or irrelevant. This intentional erasure acts as an active mechanism to control, establish power, and suppress any alternative narrative, as illustrated in Descendent. The film demonstrated the significance of memory as a pathway to justice and the reclamation of stolen identity. Their stories were intentionally designed to be forgotten through tactics of silence and invisibility. Instead of succumbing to forgetfulness, they revived their stories, using memory to pursue justice and recognition in their fight against systematic erasure. Memory is not merely about preserving the past; it’s about reshaping the present and creating opportunities for empowerment for future generations. In this sense, memory is creative, deeply personal, and justice-oriented, or should be at least.
I’ve struggled with the idea of hope for a little while. So I wonder, what role does hope have in memory, its reclamation, and its pathway to justice?
One theme that stood out to me throughout the readings and the movie assigned this week is the role of the listener for the transmission of memories. In Descendants, a woman self-identified as the treasure keeper of her family recalled her own grandmother using storytelling as a way to pass on memories. She states that now, she keeps the history of her family alive by telling those stories “to whoever will listen”. The way she stated this left me reflecting on the idea that the transmission of memories depends on the presence of a listener. This theme arose again in chapter 2 of State Repression and the Labours of Memory, when the author described the importance of “an attentive ear, of finding others with the capacity to listen” in order to avoid silences at the individual level due to the fear of being misunderstood. I found this quite compelling in reflecting on the role of individuals who have not been directly affected by an event or experience in remembering. The discussion in State Repression and the Labours of Memory on the different ways to conceptualize ownership of memory related to these thoughts as well. The question raised was whether people who have not lived through an event or experience have the legitimacy to remember that experience, and whether we can think of memories belonging to a broader collective. I can think of many past events and experiences that I did not live through, many of which occurred even before I was born, but that I carry memories of. Even in viewing the Descendants documentary, I was a listening “other” as I learned about the stories and truths of the community members of Africatown. Based on these several lines of thought, I feel that people who are not directly affected by an event can and often should still engage in the labour of memory. In my own life, I have found that sharing memories with “others” can be affirmative, as alluded to in the readings, and – as in the case of the community members of Africatown in Descendants – can support efforts for seeking justice. As time passes and past events become more distant from the present, I think it becomes increasingly important for “others” and listeners to take part in remembering, especially if we intend to use memory in the exemplary sense, as discussed in the readings.
This leads into my other main reflection, which is how remembering and forgetting can be used quite intentionally to achieve some goal or objective. This was a major theme in Descendants as we learned about how the Clotilda ship was intentionally hidden and subsequently not uncovered for a long time due to misleading information from those in power, which feels like a perfect example of Connerton’s “repressive erasure”. On the other hand, the ultimate finding of the ship was a way for the Africatown community members to seek justice for the crimes committed against their community, and also to carry on the stories of their ancestors. In the movie, a man standing at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice wonders what people will do next after visiting the memorial – what action they will take. He recognizes the reality that for most people, visiting the memorial is all they will do. He is wishing to see people use memory more in the exemplary sense – to learn from the memories and act on them in their own lives. Here, the theme about the responsibility of the “other”/listener to remember is extended to a responsibility to learn from the memories and use those learnings in our future actions.
One theme that stood out to me throughout the readings and the movie assigned this week is the role of the listener for the transmission of memories. In Descendants, a woman self-identified as the treasure keeper of her family recalled her own grandmother using storytelling as a way to pass on memories. She states that now, she keeps the history of her family alive by telling those stories “to whoever will listen”. The way she stated this left me reflecting on the idea that the transmission of memories depends on the presence of a listener. This theme arose again in chapter 2 of State Repression and the Labours of Memory, when the author described the importance of “an attentive ear, of finding others with the capacity to listen” in order to avoid silences at the individual level due to fears of being misunderstood. I found this quite compelling in reflecting on the role of individuals who have not been directly affected by an event or experience in remembering. The discussion in the book on the different ways to conceptualize ownership of a memory related to these thoughts as well. The question raised was whether people who have not lived through an event or experience have the legitimacy to remember that experience, and whether we can think of memories belonging to a broader collective. I can think of many past events and experiences that I did not live through, many of which occurred even before I was born, but that I carry memories of. Even in viewing the Descendants documentary, I was a listening “other” as I learned about the stories and truths of the community members of Africatown. Based on these several lines of thought, I feel that people who are not directly affected by an event can and often should still engage in the labour of memory. In my own life, I have found that sharing memories with “others” can be affirmative, as alluded to in the readings, and in the case of the community members of Africatown in Descendants, can support efforts for seeking justice. As time passes, I think it becomes increasingly important for “others” and listeners to take part in remembering, especially if we intend to use memory in the exemplary sense, as discussed in the readings.
This leads into my other main reflection, which is how remembering and forgetting can be used quite intentionally to achieve some goal or objective. This was a major theme in the documentary as we learned about how the Clotilda ship was intentionally hidden and subsequently not uncovered for a long time due to misleading information from those in power, which feels like a perfect example of Connerton’s “repressive erasure”. On the other hand, the ultimate finding of the ship was a way for the Africatown community members to seek justice for the crimes committed against their community, and also to carry on the stories of their ancestors. In the movie, a man standing at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice wonders what people will do next after visiting the memorial – what action they will take. He recognizes the reality that for most people, visiting the memorial is all they will do. He is wishing to see people use memory more in the exemplary sense – to learn from the memories and act on them in their own lives. Here, the theme about the responsibility of the “other”/listener to remember is extended to a responsibility to learn from the memories and use those learnings to guide our future actions.
A question I have based on this is how can “others”/listeners position themselves in efforts for justice through memory?
Something that stood out to me in these readings was the ways that time seems so very tricky to conceptualise and put into practice when we’re talking about remembering, forgetting, and community. The parts of the Jelin reading that covered conceptions of time both made my head spin and also felt profoundly “right” to me, and the critiques of “unchanging conceptions of past, present, and future” (13) resonated especially.
While I on one level mark my calendar with Christmas, Easter, and St Patrick’s Day, at the same time, my year is also divided up along the spatial memory of the last year my mom was alive. New Year’s, May Long Weekend, and my birthday are all mixed in with anniversaries including her birthday, the day she went into the hospital, and when she died. Often it feels to me like I’m living two layers of a year at once- in one, January means I’m going to grad school and working through my second term of classes, and in the other, simultaneously, I’m sitting in the hospital with my Mom, re-living 2016 over and over again (groundhog day style).
My view of remembering and commemoration has slowly shifted from one that focuses on memory as something we do on specific days to being something that is practiced in many ways, big and small, across the minutes of the day. While it might involve special days where we do specific intentional acts and rituals of remembering, there’s rhythm and cycle to remembering that feels less like a high holiday and more like breathing. (At least to me).This aligns pretty well with Jelin’s arguments, especially in terms of how the limitations of our conceptions of time impact our approaches to memory, remembering, and struggle. Often, approaches seem to view memory and justice as linear and not something that we will be doing all the time for the rest of time. In Descendant, members of Africa town’s community repeatedly reflect on how they are told to “get over” this huge formative event in their community that continues to play out in the power cleavages in their community, as if there is such a thing as “getting over” something– especially something that continues to reverberate through the everyday and reproduce truly unequal power dynamics.
And yet, just as I’ve settled into my peaceful, cyclical remembering, Connerton comes along and points out that the framing of “forgetting” as a failure is flawed (Connerton, 59). What gives! As a sentimental person, it was difficult to come to grips with the idea that forgetting and loss aren’t necessarily bad and sad. I have difficulty throwing out dried up tubes of glue, so the idea that losing whole memories might be, in some ways, healing, productive, or even liberatory is not something that came naturally to me. Both Connerton and Jelin make points I find very convincing, but one hesitation I am still working through is how possibly subjective it is to decide what kind of forgetting is happening. What if one person’s prescriptive forgetting feels like another’s repression? This screams memory struggle to me. What if people have irreconcilable differences in how they want to remember (or not)? Call me “obsessed with memory” (Jelin, 19), but what if I don’t want to forget? How can I ask someone else to? Like Jelin says, memory exists in a state of constant flux (12). What if I change my mind about wanting to forget later, but the memory is already gone?
Sara Ahmed writes about the concept of artificially forcing closure in her “overing” discourse- this is more or less when a person or community is strong-armed into moving away from a significant (often difficult) thing, which may be forced through things like apology. It seems to me that part of the “struggle” in memory struggle is the desire to “over” something, to draw a line under it and escape from the messy discomfort of reckoning with things that could potentially be horrifying or unsettling to us. I do feel that forgetting could be powerful, I just worry that it could potentially be, at the same time, overing.
Questions:
How do we know we are ready to forget (or remember)?
What if one person’s overing is another’s liberatory forgetting?
If anyone who knows me knows one thing, it’s this: I have always believed that reconciliation after violent conflict or oppression requires uncovering the truth. For as long as I can remember I’ve carried this conviction like a compass. It’s guided how I approach the world, how I view history, and how I imagine justice. But this week’s readings and the film forced me to question the simplicity of that belief. Can truth alone bring healing? And, perhaps most unsettling of all, can forgetting ever be justified?
The readings opened with Paul Connerton’s Seven Types of Forgetting. His concept of prescriptive forgetting unsettled me. I had always thought of forgetting as a betrayal of history, a silencing of truths. But Connerton suggests that societies may need to forget certain things to move forward. I thought about how this idea might apply to my own family’s silences. Growing up, I remember how certain topics of trauma, loss, and betrayal were avoided in our household. These silences frustrated me, but now I wonder: were they a form of self-preservation, a way to create space for living in the present?
As I read Elizabeth Jelin’s State Repression and the Labours of Memory, my perspective shifted again. Jelin’s idea of memory as a labor, a struggle against silence and denial, resonated with me on a personal level. My grandmother’s stories about India’s partition that had affected my family back in 1950 were full of resilience, but they were also fragmented. Some memories she shared in vivid detail; others, when asked, she left unspoken. Jelin’s framing helped me see those silences not as failures but as acts of resistance. The gaps in my grandmother’s narrative were spaces where her agency lived. She decided what to share and what to withhold. Her memory, like Jelin’s concept of “memory entrepreneurs,” became a form of quiet defiance against the forces that sought to erase her experiences.
Similarly, watching the story of Africatown, I felt this weird sense of familiarity. The story of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship, reminded me of how marginalized histories are often buried by those in power. One line from the film stayed with me: the idea that those who were enslaved remembered freedom, but their descendants, born into slavery, had no concept of it and had no idea about the difference. This reminded me of Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory, which explains how memories are shaped by social frameworks. It made me wonder: what does it mean to inherit memories of a world you’ve never known? How do you carry the weight of a past that wasn’t yours to live but is still yours to remember?
Jelin’s exploration of how states manage and manipulate memory helped me understand the power dynamics at play. Who decides which spaces are preserved and which are forgotten? What does it mean when a graveyard becomes a classroom, or a well becomes a site of both life and death (In 1919, at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India, a massacre by British forces led to hundreds of unarmed protesters being killed. Many, in desperation, jumped into a well to escape the bullets. The well, once the only source of life in the village-giving water, became a symbol of both survival and tragedy)?
These reflections left me with more questions than answers. Do we remember only what we are allowed to remember? And can forgetting ever truly be necessary, or is it always an act of violence against the past?
Since my grandfather’s dementia diagnosis, memory has become very personal to me. Through my grandfather’s struggle, I witnessed the grief and vacuum of memory loss. So when Jenin wrote, “The ability to recall or remember something from one’s own past is what sustains identity”; I felt that deeply. Before this course, I have never thought of memory in the larger scheme of the global world we live in. Now that I am exposed to it, I cannot stop thinking of its influences.
How do memories of war and genocide shape the lives of victims? How do memories of old national tensions dominate foreign policy efforts today? How much of my memory has been curated for me by memory entrepreneurs? How does my memory shape my current behaviors and actions?
I see memory as deeply personal and paramount and the documentary ‘Descendants’ captured both by presenting the struggles of the descendants of the Clotilda to reclaim their history. However, while the memory of Cotilda served as justice and as a path to community fulfillment, I agree with Connerton’s pragmatic argument on ‘prescriptive forgetting’. While remembering is powerful, I believe in certain contexts letting go of a memory can serve the self-interests of those involved gravely. In my personal life, I have practiced this many times for my own peace of mind.
As I witness the genocide of Palestinian people daily, I read books by Palestinian authors, listen to more Palestinian artists on Spotify, wear a ceasefire pin on my bag, and follow more Palestinian activists on social media. Now I see my actions as resistance towards ‘repressive erasure”. Western media from the very beginning has tried to silence and misconstrue the Palestine story. Connenton was right when he said “Repressive erasure need not always take malign forms, then; it can be encrypted covertly and without apparent violence”. However, as a generation, we cannot give in to “planned obsolescence” despite the overload and burn out from surfeit information; because memories must be honoured for there to be justice.
Jenin’s work deepened the need to hold on to these actions for me as she pointed out how “memory, truth, and justice blend into each other”. When you consider how memory can be politically weaponized by silencing alternative truths through “official narratives”, you recognize your own responsibility to honour the marginalized. You also respect the spirit of Palestinians more deeply who are serving as their own ‘memory entrepreneurs’ by preserving their history through live streaming, storytelling, art, and activism, even under repression.
When it comes to forgetting, I would like to start this reflection by quoting a line from one of my favorite movies, “Coco” -“When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world.”This deeply touches my understanding of forgetting. On a personal level, forgetting means the ability to actively or passively forget past history. For the unfortunate death of a loved one, it is a fact that has to be accepted, and no matter whether one chooses to remember or forget, as time passes, forgetting will come. We have been interactinged with them, and need to actively choose to remember rather than forget. The traditional Chinese festival of Qingming (Tomb Sweeping Day) is associated with having the next generation visit the graves of departed loved ones, so that we always remember our elders. Connerton’s (2017) description of forgetting, which differs from that of the individual and is based on social and political grounds, has given me a very different understanding of the forms of forgetting. In particular, I was impressed by the third type of forgetting, “Annulment.” Because in the history that I have studied, there is this type of forced memory erasure, where the brutal history of the past is erased and kept away from the people in order to preserve the political system of the country. This differs from individual forgetting, as this defines forgetting as a strategy to change the ideology of citizens, a practice that the state government intentionally chooses to make its citizens forget, which cannot be erased from history forever. As Jelin (2003) proposes, memory is dynamic, and some actors will bring the history that has been forcibly erased back into the public eye, suggesting that this forgetting is not continuous but can be altered by intervention.
Question：Can politically motivated forgetting be challenged?
I think one of the most striking points in common between the two readings is their acknowledgment of the inherent tensions in memory work. Connerton notes that societies often oscillate between the necessity to forget for peace and the demand to remember for justice. I think it is particularly true in post-colonial societies: to which point can we hold on to the past to forge our own identity in the present? In a North African cultural and religious sphere, forgetting is often considered a gift from the heavens, allowing people to live a normal life after traumatic events. Perhaps in this context, Nelson Mandela’s quote “We should forgive, but never forget” fulfills its meaning. Although it is interesting to note the dichotomy of how European countries keep the memory of certain historical events (such as WWI and II) alive through books and cinematography while asking Europeans of African descent to forget about the genocides and horror their ancestors went through in the past because: “slavery happened a long time ago.” Similarly, Jelin highlights how memory is shaped by competing interests, those who seek to preserve it and those who aim to erase or distort it. Both authors recognize that memory is not just a bunch of facts but a site of negotiation, conflict, and meaning-making.
Jelin extends this idea by examining the power dynamics in memory creation. Her discussion of how dominant institutions and cultural frameworks legitimate certain narratives while silencing others complements Connerton’s exploration of repressive erasure. The act of forgetting, whether intentional or incidental, can serve as a tool for marginalization or reconciliation, depending on the circumstances.
Repressive erasure manifested in the documentary Descendents, where William Foster burned the ship and tried to destroy any traces of evidence on this illegal expedition, and how the Africatown community fought to keep their traditions alive and to change the narrative from the ship to the community that was built on the shore. They reminded me that memory is not merely about preserving the past but about shaping the present and future based on what you learned from it. This reflection underscores the necessity of approaching memory with both an analytical lens and an ethical commitment to inclusivity, justice, and healing.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana
“Cuál es la diferencia entre recuerdo, memoria e historia?” – As seen on the outside of a building in Ciudad Colonial, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana.
Before going into why I chose those two quotes to start this reflection, I am going to be a history nerd for just a moment. I sweat its relevant, or at least the connections I made to the readings are relevant. When the Titanic sank in 1912, two inquiry commissions were set up in New York and London to investigate what had happened. They interviewed survivors, engineers, and a lot of people who were in some way related to the sinking. One of the questions that the investigators wanted to know the answer to was how exactly the Titanic had sunk. A bunch of women who survived the sinking, from first and second class for the most part, explained to the commissions that as the bow (the front part of the ship) plunged into the waters of the North Atlantic they saw the bow break apart from the stern (back part of the ship), leaving the stern floating like a cork for a few minutes before following the bow into the bottom of the ocean. Most of the people in the inquiry commissions were doubtful that their recollections of the event were true, due to the emotional toll of the tragedy and from having witnessed the deaths of their husbands. They interviewed the highest ranking official from the crew that had survived and when he said that at no point, he witnessed the ship break in two, the commissions basically said that was undeniably the truth. It took until 1985 when the wreck was discovered to find that, indeed, the women were correct, and the ship had broken apart during the sinking. The Titanic was built in the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland; at the time, it was the biggest ship to be built and the entire city was proud of that achievement but following the event, the city wanted to forget at all costs that the Titanic had been built there. It became a taboo topic in Belfast until the early 2000’s when James Cameron’s Titanic premiered in 1997 and there was a renewed interest in the Titanic. Witnessing, remembering, collective memory and forgetting are essential aspects of how the Titanic, both the ship itself and its history, are understood.
Back to the quotes, the second one can be translated to “What is the difference between a memory [singular], memory [collective] and history?”. It is a complicated phrase to translate because in Spanish we have two different words for a memory and memory. And it is an even more difficult question to answer, because as the chapters by Elizabeth Jelin explained, every person will have their own particular set of memories that are shaped by the collective memory and by their own history, both personal and as part of a larger group. Jelin’s third chapter in particular resonates a lot with me, mainly because I know what the national history or official version of the events can cause to a country (Mexico). While Mexico did not have a dictatorial regime in the most common meaning of the word, it was under a single-party rule for 70 years, many of which were marked by repression. In particular, the student uprising of 1968 and the Tlatelolco massacre that followed are seen as one of the most clear examples of the State wanting to erase what happened. The current sociopolitical landscape in Mexico is most definitely shaped by those 70 years. And yet, people undoubtedly remember those years differently depending on where they were in Mexico, their socioeconomic status and whether or not they were directly affected by the state repression.
Before I go into a whole essay on memory, I’ll just finish with the questions I keep reflecting on.
Questions:
Is there such a thing as “too much memory” or “too much forgetting”?
What are the implications of “forgetting” and “memory” when we cannot be a witness?
One key takeaway from this week’s materials is that memory is not merely about the past but is deeply connected to the present demands for justice and recognition, serving as a foundation for creating a more just and inclusive future.
Jelin’s work highlights that memory is not static but a dynamic process shaped by people, events, and cultural contexts. This idea is echoed in the documentary Descendant, which portrays the ongoing struggle of the descendants of the Clotilda to reclaim their history and seek justice. Watching this documentary made me realize that daily acts of remembering play a crucial role in collective resistance against the erasure of traumatic pasts. Remembering is essential for creating a shared memory that addresses historical injustices and fosters justice and healing.
Another thought that emerged while reading Jelin’s work is about the contested nature of memory in post-dictatorship societies, where different groups compete to establish their narratives as the dominant version of history. The phrase “history is written by the winners” highlights why injustices persist in various forms in different places despite ongoing efforts to support marginalized people or victims of injustice. This is closely tied to power dynamics, as those who win wars or hold power have the authority to shape how events are remembered and recorded. Jelin emphasizes this point by highlighting the role historians play in constructing national memory and identity, often influenced by those in power. In dictatorships, when those in power control the creation of official histories that are often one-sided and exclude marginalized voices, it perpetuates injustices. These dominant narratives are frequently challenged by alternative memories or narratives, leading to power struggles over the interpretation of the past. The documentary reflects this dynamic by showing how the history of the Clotilda was suppressed, with only recent efforts by the descendants bringing it to light. These struggles over memory illustrate the power dynamics in determining who gets to remember and who is forgotten.
Connerton’s piece outlines seven types of forgetting, highlighting the complex interplay between remembering and forgetting in shaping individual and collective identities. I found the concepts of repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting particularly relevant to societies under dictatorships, including my own country. In such societies, the state, often led by a military regime, is typically responsible for the repressive erasure of memories, such as destroying monuments or rewriting history to glorify the regime and portray the armed forces as saviors or protectors. These actions silence the voices and erase the histories of those who oppose the regime, making reconciliation between opposing groups difficult and hindering justice for the oppressed. Prescriptive forgetting can be a deliberate strategy to counter these issues, particularly in achieving reconciliation and peace in post-conflict societies. However, the challenge lies in determining what to remember and what to forget, ensuring that critical historical truths are preserved.
Question:
Given the challenge presented, my question would be: How can we ensure that marginalized communities have the opportunity to seek justice without escalating tensions with other groups, such as the oppressive state or dominant factions?
At the outset, I found myself repulsed by the idea that there could be too much remembering. I was really thinking of forgetting as a personal or collective failure. Like if we (I) could just Be Better (TM), we (I) would never forget anything. This is a bananas perspective that speaks more to my lifelong history of aspirational perfectionism than anyone’s reality. So, I kind of read Connerton, who rolls out with this Nietzschean idea that forgetting is fundamental to happiness, through whatever the opposite of rose-coloured glasses are. Like, I guess it’s great that the monarchies party to the Thirty Years War agreed to forget the fighting and signed the Treaty of Westphalia, but they also probably didn’t lose their entire families to famine during the War. Who are they to say people must, or should, forget? I thought back to Descendant, wherein it is claimed that “forgiving is disguised as a way to medicate the healing so we can forget about it, but the imbalance of the injustice is still there” (1:02:03). When I think about the examples in Connerton (and in life, really), I struggle to imagine forgetting without forgiving, and forgiving seems like not the universal panacea we might want it to be. The examples presented made me think of the gaps between macropolitical policy and individual behaviour; just because the state was not purging Nazis from the civil administration does not mean their neighbours were inviting them to the block party. Even if forgetting begets peace or some other seemingly universal benefit, that does not mean that the not-remembering happens. It just becomes “clandestine,” as Jelin says.
The aspiring historian who lives inside me also bristled a bit with Jelin, who called the archives a “surplus of memory” and more with Connerton, who said that “to say that something has been stored, in an archive or computer, is in effect to say that, though it is in principle always retrievable, we can afford to forget it” (40). In my mind, it means we put it into some amorphous third space. We can afford to forget it but we can’t afford to not remember it. We archive our ‘maybe one day’ and our ‘just in case’ memories and in lots of ways, those days and cases do come.
I thought Jelin’s grammatical breakdown of the word “de-termin(at)ed” (25) was delicious. Jelin is referring to the past, which is both determined and terminated, happened “(at)” another time and place and is, in some ways, repetitively “de-terminated” in the “un-terminate” interpretation of the word, as we constantly unravel, retie and re-ravel pieces of the past looking for and creating new meanings.
Descendant has left sticking points in my mind. I am stuck on the idea of telling stories the way they were told when they were told for the first time. This comes up early in the film, talking about telling stories by the fire the way they would have been told, and also when talking about Zora Neale Hurston recording herself singing the songs she learned in Africatown, rather than transcribing lyrics or writing summaries. I think this is part of why archives contain things we can’t not remember. Maybe in another time or place, we would sing the songs or tell the stories around the fire, but we are in this time and place. So what do we do, with the stories that would have told our family lineages or stories from home? We write them down and put them in the basement of the Royal BC Museum or the library or our houses and laptops, and hope they are around when we need them. They might be better told in song or story, but their preservation is part of what makes it possible to recognize the prayer at the end of the film: to “love your history enough that you want it told everywhere you go” (1:34:00).
A question (or 2):
What role does forgiveness play in forgetting? What role does forgetting play in forgiving?
Some key learnings from the readings that stick out to me are that: memories are both individual and collective; memories are deeply connected to identity and culture; trauma plays a huge role in what is and isn’t remembered; memories can be weaponized, intentionally forgotten, or effectively re-written in the name of nationalism and political (in)action; forgetting can be systemic and structural; there is a difference between recognition and recall; and that we should all strive to have exemplary memories.
It was difficult not to think about the labor and pain involved with remembering, especially for survivors of war, genocide, and sexual violence. Memory is so vital to preventing atrocious events in history from repeating themselves, yet it is clear that as recalling by memory entrepreneurs and laborers persists, memories continue to be systemically ignored and silenced by states, the press, society, families, and individuals.
In the chapter on What memories are we talking about?, Jelin paraphrases Bourdieu by saying that “the power of words is not located in the words themselves but in the authority they represent and in the power-related processes connection to the institutions that legitimate them.” This quote is particularly relevant to the quest of Africatown’s community members to find the Coltilda in Brown’s documentary, The Descendents. As I was watching the film, I have to admit that I asked myself several times why the town’s community members needed to find the ship to validate their experiences and stories passed down from their ancestors.
Once the ship was found, however, you immediately saw more politicians start to get involved and saw resources come in to set up the Africatown Heritage House. Avenues were also created for the descendants of slaves brought over on the ship, to enter into dialogue with the descendants of people who worked on the ship too. This isn’t to say that the discovery of the wreck gave more validation to the community’s history, but it did make a difference in who cared about it and opened up new opportunities for the town moving forward.
Despite the story of the Cotila being published in Hurston’s book Bacaroon, it was interesting to see how the family member of the ship’s captain who went to the wreckage site with the journalist and members of the community, still (either intentionally or subconsciously) tried to spin what was written of the captain in a positive light as a “pretty good guy.”
Question: Is it unethical to encourage people to “remember” (especially when forgetting supports survival) when systems are set up to ignore the most marginalized?
This week, as I went through the readings, I wondered, where is memory located?
I first asked myself this as I read Paul Connerton’s chapter “Seven types of forgetting.” In it, he mentioned that “Trobriand Islanders locate memory in the stomach” (158). This struck me because I had never asked myself where in the body memory resides, but if I had I would have instinctually said the brain. Or perhaps, if pressed, I might have said that different memories reside in different places in the body. I have scars that serve as memories of different times in my life. Some I have even put there myself in order to remember a particular event. My feet are shaped by a childhood spent dancing. I was once told by a yoga instructor that trauma is stored in the hips and not to be surprised if in certain poses I felt overwhelmed by emotions coming back or the urge to cry. But the stomach?
I then thought about this question as I looked for a photo to send to Dr. Baines. Where has memory been stored in the places I have lived and visited? I ultimately chose to send a photo of the memorial set up on the side of a road that goes up a hill over the Maidan (main square) to commemorate the Euromaidan protests of 2013/14. During these protests, government soldiers used this hill to set up snipers and shoot down at the protesters. After the revolution, family members of the deceased started piling up paving stones from the roads as burial mounds, and placing flowers and photos of the deceased there. The road was eventually renamed “heroyiv nebesnoyi sotni” alley, or “hundred heroes of heaven.”
The Kyiv memorial is an explicit display of memory and place, but I had originally thought to send in a photo of my grandma, or of letters between my grandpa and his niece, because fundamentally I think memory is stored within people and especially within relationships. My grandma was a storyteller. My grandpa barely shared anything. Memory can be both collective and individual.
Another question that came up for me was, is remembering a necessary part of forgetting?
Connerton speaks of prescriptive forgetting as a sometimes necessary part of reconciliation after traumatic events within societies: “sometimes at the point of transition from conflict to conflict resolution there may be no explicit requirement to forget, although the implicit requirement to do so is nonetheless unmistakable” (153). This reminds me of the maxim: forgive and forget. But forgetting without first remembering seems more like erasure to me. I think of truth and reconciliation mechanisms: truth telling is a necessary precursor to reconciliation. I don’t know if forgetting is a desirable outcome in the long term, but I do think that too often those in power impose silence on those they have dominated in order to try to achieve a sort of forgetting.
Maybe a better question is, does reconciliation require remembering? And does forgetting require reconciliation?
I’m particularly drawn to the ties between memory and identity that arose in this week’s readings. In Chapter 2 of Elizabeth Jelin’s State Repression and the Labors of Memory, Jelin explains that memory is integral to identity formation. Jelin argues that it sustains a sense of continuity over time. Jelin highlights how groups engage in struggles to affirm their version of the past as legitimate, tying memory directly to group identity. This relationship between memory and identity becomes particularly visible in the creation of official histories. Each of these examples can be seen in the documentary “The Descendent.” For these communities, their ability to memorialize and remember ancestral histories is crucial in present-day identity formation.
In contrast, Connerton describes forgetting as constitutive in identity formation. Connerton says this occurs when one selectively disregards memories incompatible with current identity/goals. This results in individuals fostering new social ties and affiliations. Connerton’s argument that forgetting can be a necessary part of creating new identities contrasts Jelin’s focus on the active reconstruction of memory. For instance, Connerton posits that sometimes societies msut often discard outdated or divisive memories to establish cohesive narratives, particularly during transitional periods. I had a particularly challenging time sitting with some of the arguments Connerton presents, because I find the idea of forgetting in identity formation to be complex and potentially fraught. While Connerton’s perspective highlights the pragmatic aspects of moving forward by discarding divisive or outdated memories, it raises questions about whose memories are deemed outdated or divisive and who decides what is forgotten.
The documentary highlights the importance of ancestral memory in identity formation. It documents details of how this process was one of justice, reparations, and reconciliation. To that extent, I wonder how Connerton’s writing of ‘forgetting’ might be reconciled with the need to honour and preserve such memories.
The class readings allowed me to reflect more deeply on the dynamic nature of memory and how memory serves to give meaning and credibility to the past.
Thinking about how we have come to understand certain traumatic events, such as Argentina’s dictatorship, I found Jelin’s prescriptive forgetting, the intentional decision by a state to forget certain aspects of the past, closely related to Argentina’s military past. From 1976-1983, Argentina was ruled by a military junta. Citizens who disagreed with the military dictatorship were kidnapped, tortured, executed, and thrown from planes into the ocean. After the country’s return to democracy, Argentina’s regime actively worked towards suppressing information about the disappeared such as the destruction of evidence and burning of records, not to mention the fear and censorship fostered discouraging families of the disappeared to speak up about their lived experiences. Yet, while the regime attempted to instill a form of historical amnesia and prescriptive forgetting, Argentina has had a strong history of social mobilization and advocacy efforts preventing the erasure of events from happening. In this case, I believe Connerton makes a strong case by defining human rights movements as key forms of memory entrepreneurs as “privileged actor in the political enterprise of memory.” For example, in the case of Argentina. Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo made collective demands to politicize and visibilize the issue of los desaparecidos (the disappeared) led by the campaign of terror. This organization would collectively gather in La Plaza de Mayo, in front of La Casa Rosada, (the executive presidential house) displaying photographs of the disappeared, some of them whose family members were amid the disappeared. In this case, Las Madres kept issues alive that would otherwise be forgotten and held the government accountable for the atrocities committed.
By the end of Argentina’s regime, human rights movements became deeply embedded in national debates, shaping the country’s social and political landscape. For instance, the country’s La Marea Verde (The Green Wave), a movement aimed at legalizing abortion rights in the country, reflects this history of activism, placing attention to the women and girls who have lost their lives to femicide, ensuring that their stories and identities are not forgotten. This connects to Connerton’s remembering and forgetting, highlighting how social movements play a crucial role in preserving collective memory.
“The past is gone, it is already de- termin(at)ed; it cannot be changed.
The future, by contrast, is open, uncertain, and indeterminate. What
can change about the past is its meaning, which is subject to re-
interpretations, anchored in intentions and expectations toward the
future”
As I final note, I really liked this quote and I think it really shows the role social movements have in helping reconstruct the past or a “memory of an event” so it’s not forgotten or completely distorted by those in power.
Journalists play a big role in the way knowledge is disseminated and how past and current events are understood. In what ways do you think journalists can do a better job of centering people’s memories and recollections of an event?
I used to have a pretty narrow view of forgetting. Either it was something good, like when your body forces you to forget a traumatic event so you can move on, a kind of self-preservation for your mind and body, or it was something bad, like losing cultural stories and knowledge that can only survive through intentional remembering. But reading Paul Connerton’s Several Types of Forgetting really opened my eyes. Societies have different ways of viewing forgetting, and those views shape their identity and values. I hadn’t even considered the ethical implications of forgetting before.
What really struck me was how forgetting can be personal, like forgetting a traumatic experience, or collective, like forgetting cultural heritage. It reminded me of the documentary where one person said, “I would feel complete; I would feel whole if I could connect back to my grandmother,” while another said, “I don’t need to see the ship to know it happened. I’m living proof that it happened.” These perspectives highlight how there’s no one-size-fits-all way to process or remember a collective event. We’re all connected by the event itself, but our individual relationships to it can be vastly different.
When I think of places where memory is alive, I usually picture physical locations. For me, heritage and remembering aren’t about vanity; they’re about valuing people. The spaces we live in say a lot about how we value ourselves and each other. Architecture and the environment we inhabit affect our self-esteem and even our sense of identity. Someone living in a decaying, forgotten space might feel their worth is tied to that space. Nation-building, fostering a healthy society, and instilling respectful cultural values should start with making people feel valuable. One of the simplest ways to do that is to provide spaces where they can exist with dignity.
The image I selected is of Benazir Bhutto, the first female prime minister in a Muslim-majority country. She was assassinated in December 2007, and I think about her often. I was just nine years old, visiting Pakistan with my younger sister, who was six. We were staying with our grandparents when she was killed. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but looking back nearly 17 years later, I see it differently. I think my mind blocked it out until I was ready to process it.
For me, Benazir Bhutto is more than a historical figure. She’s an icon of democracy and justice. She stood as a symbol of resistance against authoritarianism and amplified critical conversations about women’s rights, governance, and accountability in Pakistan. Most importantly, she proved that women could lead in spaces traditionally reserved for men. Her memory is preserved in the ongoing dialogue about democracy, human rights, and the essential role of women in shaping political landscapes.
Before starting the readings and watching the film, my initial thoughts on memory were connected to its role in history and historical interpretations of events. I wondered why history cannot be personal and subjective, acknowledging the diverse actors and perspectives within the events people remember and recognizing that individuals recall things differently. I also considered that this might be due to the fact that the memories of marginalized individuals are often overshadowed and suppressed by those who perpetrate the marginalization. Then, I read Jelin’s work, which suggests that dominant groups impose their “official” memories to serve their own interests while marginalized groups resist and present alternative narratives.
I understand and appreciate that everyone has the right to interpret events differently based on their recognition and experiences. This can stem from individuals’ upbringing, biases, beliefs, and so forth. However, I also acknowledge that this phenomenon can be detrimental when power dynamics are at play, as dominant groups have the capacity and privilege to undermine someone else’s intrinsic right to memory. I found her description of a state’s involvement intriguing and agree with her analysis of the state’s role in suppressing memory work. However, facilitating memory work would necessitate that they admit their wrongdoings and clearly acknowledge the actions they were complicit in. We see clear examples of this suppression in the government’s response to the Palestinian genocide. We also observe noteworthy instances of ineffective facilitation and, in my view, suppression of Indigenous memory through performative statements of reconciliation and reparation.
Regarding Paul Connerton’s seven types of forgetting, I found his arguments and framework thought-provoking, as they reveal the dual nature of forgetting as both a natural and socially constructed phenomenon. Each type of forgetting he identifies shapes and influences the complexities of memory’s role in society. Forgetting has been used as a tool of oppression, reinforcing epistemic injustice by erasing histories, voices, and identities that dominant groups deem inconvenient or irrelevant. This intentional erasure acts as an active mechanism to control, establish power, and suppress any alternative narrative, as illustrated in Descendent. The film demonstrated the significance of memory as a pathway to justice and the reclamation of stolen identity. Their stories were intentionally designed to be forgotten through tactics of silence and invisibility. Instead of succumbing to forgetfulness, they revived their stories, using memory to pursue justice and recognition in their fight against systematic erasure. Memory is not merely about preserving the past; it’s about reshaping the present and creating opportunities for empowerment for future generations. In this sense, memory is creative, deeply personal, and justice-oriented, or should be at least.
I’ve struggled with the idea of hope for a little while. So I wonder, what role does hope have in memory, its reclamation, and its pathway to justice?
One theme that stood out to me throughout the readings and the movie assigned this week is the role of the listener for the transmission of memories. In Descendants, a woman self-identified as the treasure keeper of her family recalled her own grandmother using storytelling as a way to pass on memories. She states that now, she keeps the history of her family alive by telling those stories “to whoever will listen”. The way she stated this left me reflecting on the idea that the transmission of memories depends on the presence of a listener. This theme arose again in chapter 2 of State Repression and the Labours of Memory, when the author described the importance of “an attentive ear, of finding others with the capacity to listen” in order to avoid silences at the individual level due to the fear of being misunderstood. I found this quite compelling in reflecting on the role of individuals who have not been directly affected by an event or experience in remembering. The discussion in State Repression and the Labours of Memory on the different ways to conceptualize ownership of memory related to these thoughts as well. The question raised was whether people who have not lived through an event or experience have the legitimacy to remember that experience, and whether we can think of memories belonging to a broader collective. I can think of many past events and experiences that I did not live through, many of which occurred even before I was born, but that I carry memories of. Even in viewing the Descendants documentary, I was a listening “other” as I learned about the stories and truths of the community members of Africatown. Based on these several lines of thought, I feel that people who are not directly affected by an event can and often should still engage in the labour of memory. In my own life, I have found that sharing memories with “others” can be affirmative, as alluded to in the readings, and – as in the case of the community members of Africatown in Descendants – can support efforts for seeking justice. As time passes and past events become more distant from the present, I think it becomes increasingly important for “others” and listeners to take part in remembering, especially if we intend to use memory in the exemplary sense, as discussed in the readings.
This leads into my other main reflection, which is how remembering and forgetting can be used quite intentionally to achieve some goal or objective. This was a major theme in Descendants as we learned about how the Clotilda ship was intentionally hidden and subsequently not uncovered for a long time due to misleading information from those in power, which feels like a perfect example of Connerton’s “repressive erasure”. On the other hand, the ultimate finding of the ship was a way for the Africatown community members to seek justice for the crimes committed against their community, and also to carry on the stories of their ancestors. In the movie, a man standing at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice wonders what people will do next after visiting the memorial – what action they will take. He recognizes the reality that for most people, visiting the memorial is all they will do. He is wishing to see people use memory more in the exemplary sense – to learn from the memories and act on them in their own lives. Here, the theme about the responsibility of the “other”/listener to remember is extended to a responsibility to learn from the memories and use those learnings in our future actions.
One theme that stood out to me throughout the readings and the movie assigned this week is the role of the listener for the transmission of memories. In Descendants, a woman self-identified as the treasure keeper of her family recalled her own grandmother using storytelling as a way to pass on memories. She states that now, she keeps the history of her family alive by telling those stories “to whoever will listen”. The way she stated this left me reflecting on the idea that the transmission of memories depends on the presence of a listener. This theme arose again in chapter 2 of State Repression and the Labours of Memory, when the author described the importance of “an attentive ear, of finding others with the capacity to listen” in order to avoid silences at the individual level due to fears of being misunderstood. I found this quite compelling in reflecting on the role of individuals who have not been directly affected by an event or experience in remembering. The discussion in the book on the different ways to conceptualize ownership of a memory related to these thoughts as well. The question raised was whether people who have not lived through an event or experience have the legitimacy to remember that experience, and whether we can think of memories belonging to a broader collective. I can think of many past events and experiences that I did not live through, many of which occurred even before I was born, but that I carry memories of. Even in viewing the Descendants documentary, I was a listening “other” as I learned about the stories and truths of the community members of Africatown. Based on these several lines of thought, I feel that people who are not directly affected by an event can and often should still engage in the labour of memory. In my own life, I have found that sharing memories with “others” can be affirmative, as alluded to in the readings, and in the case of the community members of Africatown in Descendants, can support efforts for seeking justice. As time passes, I think it becomes increasingly important for “others” and listeners to take part in remembering, especially if we intend to use memory in the exemplary sense, as discussed in the readings.
This leads into my other main reflection, which is how remembering and forgetting can be used quite intentionally to achieve some goal or objective. This was a major theme in the documentary as we learned about how the Clotilda ship was intentionally hidden and subsequently not uncovered for a long time due to misleading information from those in power, which feels like a perfect example of Connerton’s “repressive erasure”. On the other hand, the ultimate finding of the ship was a way for the Africatown community members to seek justice for the crimes committed against their community, and also to carry on the stories of their ancestors. In the movie, a man standing at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice wonders what people will do next after visiting the memorial – what action they will take. He recognizes the reality that for most people, visiting the memorial is all they will do. He is wishing to see people use memory more in the exemplary sense – to learn from the memories and act on them in their own lives. Here, the theme about the responsibility of the “other”/listener to remember is extended to a responsibility to learn from the memories and use those learnings to guide our future actions.
A question I have based on this is how can “others”/listeners position themselves in efforts for justice through memory?
Something that stood out to me in these readings was the ways that time seems so very tricky to conceptualise and put into practice when we’re talking about remembering, forgetting, and community. The parts of the Jelin reading that covered conceptions of time both made my head spin and also felt profoundly “right” to me, and the critiques of “unchanging conceptions of past, present, and future” (13) resonated especially.
While I on one level mark my calendar with Christmas, Easter, and St Patrick’s Day, at the same time, my year is also divided up along the spatial memory of the last year my mom was alive. New Year’s, May Long Weekend, and my birthday are all mixed in with anniversaries including her birthday, the day she went into the hospital, and when she died. Often it feels to me like I’m living two layers of a year at once- in one, January means I’m going to grad school and working through my second term of classes, and in the other, simultaneously, I’m sitting in the hospital with my Mom, re-living 2016 over and over again (groundhog day style).
My view of remembering and commemoration has slowly shifted from one that focuses on memory as something we do on specific days to being something that is practiced in many ways, big and small, across the minutes of the day. While it might involve special days where we do specific intentional acts and rituals of remembering, there’s rhythm and cycle to remembering that feels less like a high holiday and more like breathing. (At least to me).This aligns pretty well with Jelin’s arguments, especially in terms of how the limitations of our conceptions of time impact our approaches to memory, remembering, and struggle. Often, approaches seem to view memory and justice as linear and not something that we will be doing all the time for the rest of time. In Descendant, members of Africa town’s community repeatedly reflect on how they are told to “get over” this huge formative event in their community that continues to play out in the power cleavages in their community, as if there is such a thing as “getting over” something– especially something that continues to reverberate through the everyday and reproduce truly unequal power dynamics.
And yet, just as I’ve settled into my peaceful, cyclical remembering, Connerton comes along and points out that the framing of “forgetting” as a failure is flawed (Connerton, 59). What gives! As a sentimental person, it was difficult to come to grips with the idea that forgetting and loss aren’t necessarily bad and sad. I have difficulty throwing out dried up tubes of glue, so the idea that losing whole memories might be, in some ways, healing, productive, or even liberatory is not something that came naturally to me. Both Connerton and Jelin make points I find very convincing, but one hesitation I am still working through is how possibly subjective it is to decide what kind of forgetting is happening. What if one person’s prescriptive forgetting feels like another’s repression? This screams memory struggle to me. What if people have irreconcilable differences in how they want to remember (or not)? Call me “obsessed with memory” (Jelin, 19), but what if I don’t want to forget? How can I ask someone else to? Like Jelin says, memory exists in a state of constant flux (12). What if I change my mind about wanting to forget later, but the memory is already gone?
Sara Ahmed writes about the concept of artificially forcing closure in her “overing” discourse- this is more or less when a person or community is strong-armed into moving away from a significant (often difficult) thing, which may be forced through things like apology. It seems to me that part of the “struggle” in memory struggle is the desire to “over” something, to draw a line under it and escape from the messy discomfort of reckoning with things that could potentially be horrifying or unsettling to us. I do feel that forgetting could be powerful, I just worry that it could potentially be, at the same time, overing.
Questions:
How do we know we are ready to forget (or remember)?
What if one person’s overing is another’s liberatory forgetting?
If anyone who knows me knows one thing, it’s this: I have always believed that reconciliation after violent conflict or oppression requires uncovering the truth. For as long as I can remember I’ve carried this conviction like a compass. It’s guided how I approach the world, how I view history, and how I imagine justice. But this week’s readings and the film forced me to question the simplicity of that belief. Can truth alone bring healing? And, perhaps most unsettling of all, can forgetting ever be justified?
The readings opened with Paul Connerton’s Seven Types of Forgetting. His concept of prescriptive forgetting unsettled me. I had always thought of forgetting as a betrayal of history, a silencing of truths. But Connerton suggests that societies may need to forget certain things to move forward. I thought about how this idea might apply to my own family’s silences. Growing up, I remember how certain topics of trauma, loss, and betrayal were avoided in our household. These silences frustrated me, but now I wonder: were they a form of self-preservation, a way to create space for living in the present?
As I read Elizabeth Jelin’s State Repression and the Labours of Memory, my perspective shifted again. Jelin’s idea of memory as a labor, a struggle against silence and denial, resonated with me on a personal level. My grandmother’s stories about India’s partition that had affected my family back in 1950 were full of resilience, but they were also fragmented. Some memories she shared in vivid detail; others, when asked, she left unspoken. Jelin’s framing helped me see those silences not as failures but as acts of resistance. The gaps in my grandmother’s narrative were spaces where her agency lived. She decided what to share and what to withhold. Her memory, like Jelin’s concept of “memory entrepreneurs,” became a form of quiet defiance against the forces that sought to erase her experiences.
Similarly, watching the story of Africatown, I felt this weird sense of familiarity. The story of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship, reminded me of how marginalized histories are often buried by those in power. One line from the film stayed with me: the idea that those who were enslaved remembered freedom, but their descendants, born into slavery, had no concept of it and had no idea about the difference. This reminded me of Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory, which explains how memories are shaped by social frameworks. It made me wonder: what does it mean to inherit memories of a world you’ve never known? How do you carry the weight of a past that wasn’t yours to live but is still yours to remember?
Jelin’s exploration of how states manage and manipulate memory helped me understand the power dynamics at play. Who decides which spaces are preserved and which are forgotten? What does it mean when a graveyard becomes a classroom, or a well becomes a site of both life and death (In 1919, at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India, a massacre by British forces led to hundreds of unarmed protesters being killed. Many, in desperation, jumped into a well to escape the bullets. The well, once the only source of life in the village-giving water, became a symbol of both survival and tragedy)?
These reflections left me with more questions than answers. Do we remember only what we are allowed to remember? And can forgetting ever truly be necessary, or is it always an act of violence against the past?
Since my grandfather’s dementia diagnosis, memory has become very personal to me. Through my grandfather’s struggle, I witnessed the grief and vacuum of memory loss. So when Jenin wrote, “The ability to recall or remember something from one’s own past is what sustains identity”; I felt that deeply. Before this course, I have never thought of memory in the larger scheme of the global world we live in. Now that I am exposed to it, I cannot stop thinking of its influences.
How do memories of war and genocide shape the lives of victims? How do memories of old national tensions dominate foreign policy efforts today? How much of my memory has been curated for me by memory entrepreneurs? How does my memory shape my current behaviors and actions?
I see memory as deeply personal and paramount and the documentary ‘Descendants’ captured both by presenting the struggles of the descendants of the Clotilda to reclaim their history. However, while the memory of Cotilda served as justice and as a path to community fulfillment, I agree with Connerton’s pragmatic argument on ‘prescriptive forgetting’. While remembering is powerful, I believe in certain contexts letting go of a memory can serve the self-interests of those involved gravely. In my personal life, I have practiced this many times for my own peace of mind.
As I witness the genocide of Palestinian people daily, I read books by Palestinian authors, listen to more Palestinian artists on Spotify, wear a ceasefire pin on my bag, and follow more Palestinian activists on social media. Now I see my actions as resistance towards ‘repressive erasure”. Western media from the very beginning has tried to silence and misconstrue the Palestine story. Connenton was right when he said “Repressive erasure need not always take malign forms, then; it can be encrypted covertly and without apparent violence”. However, as a generation, we cannot give in to “planned obsolescence” despite the overload and burn out from surfeit information; because memories must be honoured for there to be justice.
Jenin’s work deepened the need to hold on to these actions for me as she pointed out how “memory, truth, and justice blend into each other”. When you consider how memory can be politically weaponized by silencing alternative truths through “official narratives”, you recognize your own responsibility to honour the marginalized. You also respect the spirit of Palestinians more deeply who are serving as their own ‘memory entrepreneurs’ by preserving their history through live streaming, storytelling, art, and activism, even under repression.
When it comes to forgetting, I would like to start this reflection by quoting a line from one of my favorite movies, “Coco” -“When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world.”This deeply touches my understanding of forgetting. On a personal level, forgetting means the ability to actively or passively forget past history. For the unfortunate death of a loved one, it is a fact that has to be accepted, and no matter whether one chooses to remember or forget, as time passes, forgetting will come. We have been interactinged with them, and need to actively choose to remember rather than forget. The traditional Chinese festival of Qingming (Tomb Sweeping Day) is associated with having the next generation visit the graves of departed loved ones, so that we always remember our elders. Connerton’s (2017) description of forgetting, which differs from that of the individual and is based on social and political grounds, has given me a very different understanding of the forms of forgetting. In particular, I was impressed by the third type of forgetting, “Annulment.” Because in the history that I have studied, there is this type of forced memory erasure, where the brutal history of the past is erased and kept away from the people in order to preserve the political system of the country. This differs from individual forgetting, as this defines forgetting as a strategy to change the ideology of citizens, a practice that the state government intentionally chooses to make its citizens forget, which cannot be erased from history forever. As Jelin (2003) proposes, memory is dynamic, and some actors will bring the history that has been forcibly erased back into the public eye, suggesting that this forgetting is not continuous but can be altered by intervention.
Question：Can politically motivated forgetting be challenged?