ABSTRACT
The question of what it means to contest the past is one that has become increasingly charged in the last few decades. It reveals certain presuppositions about the relationship between the present and the past, which have both historical and political purchase; and the discourse of memory has come to have a central part in thinking about that relationship. The focus of contestation, then, is very often not conflicting accounts of what actually happened in the past so much as the question of who or what is entitled to speak for that past in the present. The appeal to memory in determining the truth of the past, then, is widespread. But it is also problematic: both 'memory' and 'truth' are unstable and destabilising terms. To privilege memory as a tool of truth, through which the statements of authority may be subverted or contradicted, people must assume a direct correspondence between the experience and how it is remembered.
