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Locating Transnational Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2014

Michael Rothberg
Michael Rothberg*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 208 English Building, MC-718, 608 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: mpr@illinois.edu
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Abstract

This special issue demonstrates the strengths of a located approach to transnational memory. The issue focuses intensively on Argentina and Spain, but also makes forays into Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, among other locations. By ‘located’ I do not mean simply ‘local’ – indeed, negotiating the question of the local and its relation to the global is high on the agenda of this special issue. A located approach to transnational memory might take inspiration from the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich’s concept of a ‘politics of location’.1 A politics of location does indeed pay rigorous attention to the local – starting from the intimate terrain of the body – but it situates such attention in relation to other scales: from the regional to the national to the global. While Rich’s essay ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’ does not address the question of memory directly, her famous assertion that ‘a place on the map is also a place in history’ resonates with the stakes of the essays collected here – essays that deal, as does Rich’s ‘Notes’, with the contradictory and intersecting legacies of state-sponsored violence (Ref. 1, p. 212).

Type
Afterword
Information
European Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 652 - 656
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2014 

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References

References and Notes

1.Rich, A. (1986) Notes toward a politics of location. Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton), pp. 210–231.Google Scholar
2.See Smith, N. (1992) Contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the produce of geographical scale. Social Text, 33, pp. 54–81.Google Scholar
3.Radstone, S. (2011) What place is this? Transcultural memory and the locations of memory studies. Parallax, 17(4), pp. 109–123; 113–114.Google Scholar
4.Macdonald, S. (2009) Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (New York: Routledge), p. 4.Google Scholar
5.Clifford, J. (2013) Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p. 41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6.Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press).Google Scholar
7.See Hall, S. (1986) On postmodernism and articulation: an interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10(2), pp. 45–60. In her keynote lecture at the Diasporic Memories, Comparative Methodologies conference at the University of Illinois (1 November 2013), Ann Rigney also used the concept of ‘articulation’ in a similar sense. Her lecture was entitled ‘Diaspora Poetics and the Articulations of Memory.’Google Scholar
8.Lie’s useful distinction between ‘centripetal’ forms of multidirectional memory that confirm the nation’s identity and ‘centrifugal’ forms that unsettle it is also relevant here.Google Scholar