This book grew out of questions about the nature of memory—how the past lives on in the present, and the extent to which our personal and collective memories shape our futures. Many years ago I began thinking about how our relationship to the past affects our sense of what is possible, and how memory affects our ability to achieve those possibilities. As I learned more about the tortured history of North America and nations attempting to transition to democracy, these concerns began to take a more explicitly political shape. In this volume, I ask which relationships to memory enable, or threaten, democratic possibilities.

My purpose in this preface is to offer the reader a clear sense of why I take these themes to be so deserving of closer consideration. The questions about memory that animate this book are political and theoretical. They are also personal—though my own memories are not the explicit theme of the chapters that follow. That said, I begin with an unconventional preface that includes a description of my own encounters with memory in an American context.