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"An old Yugoslav aphorism goes: 'The future is not hard to predict, but the past is forever changing.' The essays gathered in this volume all deal in one way or another with the way people organize their collective memories of a past, and particularly a national past. The range of topics is remarkable, and the essays themselves are uniformly excellent--beginning with Jeffrey K. Olick's masterful introduction."--Kai Erikson, author of "A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters "

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States of Memory-CL

Duke University Press

Introduction

Since at least the nineteenth century, scholars and politicians alike have recognized the fundamental connection between memory and the nation. While political elites invented and propagated legitimating traditions, historians objectified the nation as a unitary entity with a linear descent. At the same time, critics like Renan pointed out that forgetting is at the heart of national self-understanding-forgetting alternative possible stories and alternate possible identications-while Nietzsche bemoaned the proliferation of "monumental" history. The First World War seemed to many good enough reason to abandon nationalist chauvinism, but for others a myth of the war experience "provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate" (Mosse 1990). And the anemic internationalism of the 1920s was just that-inter-nationalism rather than postnationalism, based on a nebulous and misunderstood notion of "self-determination"-where the burning memory of stabs in the back and imposed settlements fanned old antipathies to new heights. Memory has long been the handmaiden of nationalist zeal, history its high counsel. Even those like Nietzsche and Renan who critiqued memory's ambitions understood its centrality.

Recent theorists of nationalism, however, have challenged both national memory and historiographical nationalism by historicizing the nation as an identitarian as well as political form. As Benedict Anderson (1991: 5) puts it, there is a paradox in "the objective modernity of nations in the [non-nationalist] historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists." According to Anderson, the nation is the only candidate to make up for the missing existential securities lost with the decline of the religious world view resulting from the accelerated rhythms of life under print-capitalism. Anderson argues that a massive transformation of temporal perceptions and an associated rise of interest in the past thus made it possible, even necessary, "to think the nation" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nationalism, as Anthony Smith (1986) puts it, in the process became "a surrogate religion which aims to overcome the sense of futility engendered by the removal of any vision of an existence after death, by linking individuals to persisting communities whose generations form indissoluble links in a chain of memories and identities."

Theorists of postmodernity, however, have focused not on the rise of the memory-nation but on its demise in recent years. This is not old-style modernization theory, which sees nationalism as an intermediate stage in a progression from enchanted to disenchanted world views, though it does occasionally reverberate teleological overtones. Rather, these authors have problematized the role of memory as one component in a complex and shifting amalgam of perceptions that form the pervasive and permanent, though ever-changing, historicity of the world. There are no identities, national or otherwise, that are not constituted and challenged in time and with histories, but nations have had a special place in the history of memory and identity and in the history of their relations. Memory and the nation have a peculiar synergy. Even when other identities compete with or supplant the national in postmodernity, they draw on-and are increasingly nostalgic for-the uniquely powerful forms of memory generated in the crucible of the nation-state.

According to Pierre Nora (1992)-the preeminent figure in recent discussions of the memory-nation nexus-the memory-nation in its ascendancy relied on national historical narratives to provide continuity through identity. In the nineteenth century, Nora argues, the nation as a foundation of identity eroded as the state ceded power to society. The nation itself, earlier shored up by memory, now appears as a mere "memory trace." Nora thus sees the nation-state as declining in salience, the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history, a form in which history could provide the social cohesion memory no longer could. But history too has now lost its temporary ability to transmit values with pedagogical authority (Wood 1994). We are left with a proliferation of different memories; the remains of unitary history are but residues scattered throughout the social landscape.

"We speak so much of memory," Nora writes, "because there is so little of it left." Where premodern societies lived within the continuous past, contemporary societies have separated memory from the continuity of social reproduction; memory is now a matter of explicit signs, not of implicit meanings. Our only recourse has been to represent and invent what we can no longer spontaneously experience. The memory-nation of the late-nineteenth century was never really up to the task, though it managed for a while because it used the past to project a unitary future. Now, since the end of the twentieth century, we experience a memory boom in which novelty is associated with new versions of the past rather than with the future. In contrast to the historical fever to legitimize the nation-state that Nietzsche derided, "the mnemonic convulsions of our culture," Andreas Huyssen (1995) writes, "seem chaotic, fragmentary, and free-floating."

But theorists of postmodernity are divided as to whether this is a case of total loss. Nora's grand project to catalogue all of the "sites of memory" in French society has been labeled by some critics a neonationalist fantasy (Englund 1992). Patrick Hutton (1993) has characterized it as a call not to celebrate the past but to celebrate our celebrations of the past; Hutton refers to Nora's project as the attempt to autopsy the past's remains. On the other hand, many others are relieved by the refutation of nationalist grand narratives. Jonathan Boyarin (1994), for instance, points out that statist ideologies "involve a particularly potent manipulation of dimensionalities of space and time, invoking rhetorically fixed national identities to legitimate their monopoly on administrative control." Prasenjit Duara (1995) writes that the relationship between linear historicity and the nation-state is repressive: "National history secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time" enabling "conquests of Historical [sic] awareness over other, 'nonprogressive' modes of time." Huyssen (1995) sees in recent positions "a welcome critique of compromised teleological notions of history rather than being simply anti-historical, relativistic, or subjective."

At a more mundane level, it is clear that questions of memory and its relation to national and other identities have moved to the center of a variety of intellectual agendas in the past ten to twenty years (see Olick and Robbins 1998). Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and with diverse area specialties have begun to examine aspects of social memory. Sources of this scholarly interest include a revival in cultural sociology (Crane 1994) and the sociology of knowledge (Swidler and Arditi 1994), the turn first to social and then to cultural history and the associated questioning of historiography's epistemological privilege (Hutton 1993), as well as multiculturalism's interest in unrecorded histories as sources for alternative narratives and identities. Scholarly interest in memory, however, has...