ABSTRACT
The performance of memory is inevitably a political act. Mnemonic communities are sustained through repeated institutional enactments, including those evident in commemorative ceremonies, festivals, courtrooms and other public rituals designed to legitimate and reproduce a specific social order. In this conceptualisation, memory acts as a form of self-regulation, a way of achieving stability and maintaining a particular political economy. Conversely, memory is also required to envisage social change, to challenge official accounts of history by raising awareness of alternative perspectives. Michel Foucault described this form of historical representation as ‘counter-memory’, in which the popular memories embedded in the experiences of everyday life might be exhumed, and the voices of the subordinated or silenced
might be heard (Foucault 1977). Foucault’s insights into how representations of the past might be unfixed has held wide appeal for radical historians interested in reconstructing public histories and who have recognised the dynamic and political interplay of remembrance and forgetting in creating a sense of the present. One consequence of this way of thinking about memory draws attention to its instability and fluidity, and acknowledges the different ways in which memories are shaped and reshaped performatively. Furthermore, rather than harking back to an imagined community in which homogenisation, unity and shared values served as a basis for social interaction, counter-memory highlights both the shared experiences and the discontinuities and differences inherent in contemporary social life.
