About | Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance

This ScienceCampus research network builds on the studies of marginalization and memory studies to explore how margins of memory are produced and challenged in societies across the globe. In answering this question, we bring various strands of research on memory cultures of marginalized groups together—informed by gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, Holocaust studies, migration studies, peace and transitional justice studies, and beyond—as we seek to theorize a nuanced and intersectionally-informed concept of margins of memory.

Our interdisciplinary endeavor involves researchers from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, History Education, Literary Studies, and Political Science. The work of the network members covers memory cultures of marginalized groups across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia, which span over a hundred years—from the 19th century to today. We ground our analysis in exploring oral/written memories and memorials as well as “non-verbal” memories and silences that find expression in arts, images, sounds, other sensory engagements, performances, and social acts. Drawing on this rich dataset, we conceptualize margins of memory as a comparative analytical tool and a connective lens to explore slippages and entanglements between historical and contemporary cultures of memory across the globe.

By focusing on cultures and politics of non-hegemonic remembrance, the network contributes to pluralizing theoretical and methodological approaches to memory studies. Through the concept of margins of memory, we develop modalities of listening to and interpreting the silences of the archive while also attending to the agency of marginalized groups from a comparative perspective. Against the backdrop of today’s securitization of memory  as well as contemporary and historical memory wars across the globe that disproportionately affect marginalized groups, we seek to theorize how non-hegemonic communities make sense of their pasts to spatially and temporally orient their lives, deal with their present, and build their futures. Mindful of multiple forms of marginalization in dynamic contexts across the globe, we seek to develop ways of mobilizing the concept of margins of memory to serve the studies of differently vocal, transnationally mobile, and ever-increasingly virtual communities of memory.