"Entangled memories of violence", new article by Victoria Fareld
In a new article in the journal Memory Studies (16/2 2021), Victoria Fareld, associate professor in History of Ideas, Stockholm University, analyzes how the Austrian writer Jean Améry formulates his memories of the Holocaust in the contemporaneous situation of decolonisation.
Fareld argues that Améry found a language to remember and mediate his experience of Nazi violence in Franz Fanon's narrative about colonial violence. The article shows how both stories of violence echo each other in Améry's testimony, turning it into an entanglement of voices that transgresses clear-cut boundaries between individual and collective memories.
What is the cultural significance of memory? How and why do we remember the past, not only as individuals but across generations, as social and cultural communities? And how do these memory practices relate to politically and emotionally charged questions of national or ethnic identity, historical traumas, and experiences of dislocation, loss and forgetting?
