ABSTRACT
As Astrid Erll, whose essay begins this collection, argues, memory needs to travel to stay alive. How and why does it travel, and how does memory studies keep pace? These are the questions that contributors to this edited volume engage with and to whose work this short introduction can only begin to frame.1 In recent years, memory studies has travelled from the collective to the cultural to the transcultural. It is a commonplace but nonetheless useful orientation in tracing the path of memory studies to cite Maurice Halbwachs’s conception of the social frames in which individual memory work takes place, and of the difficulty of prizing apart individual and collective remembrance. Despite the particularity of individual experience of past events, that experience of the event and subsequent remembrance of it will be socially encoded, and, as Halbwachs puts it, ‘the framework of collective memory confines and binds our most intimate remembrances to each other’.2 The inherently social nature of remembrance means that memories can be shared, no matter our proximity to, or distance from, the events remembered. As Aleida Assmann has pointed out, it is the concept of ‘cultural memory’ rather than ‘collective memory’ that perhaps best explains how this sharing takes place. Cultural memory describes the artefacts (texts, objects and symbols) by which memory is socialised, or, rather, by which memory is further socialised and mobilised. When individual memory, social by nature, is represented artefactually, it has the potential to be unmoored from social groups, and no longer necessarily identifiable with or affiliated to those groups, their experiences, values, ideas and temporal horizons.3 In describing the materialisation and mobilisation of memory, the concept of cultural memory illuminates the dynamic nature of the artefacts of memory, their actual and potential itineraries.
