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

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Volha Bartash and Tatiana Klepikova (both University of Regensburg) are co-speakers of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Research Network Margins of Memory

How do individuals and communities remember and cope with their pasts when they are denied a voice in public space? What are the commonalities and tensions between collective remembrance and marginalized histories across different historical and political contexts?

In this talk, we introduce the main ideas behind a new research initiative, the research network Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance, funded by the Leibniz ScienceCampus, Regensburg. Our work is driven by stories that have long remained untold because they do not—or did not—fit into dominant historical narratives. We seek to illuminate the politics of hegemonic remembrance by exploring how margins of memory are produced and contested in societies around the world. The network brings together researchers from History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, and Political Science, whose work spans regions including Eastern and Western Europe, the South Caucasus, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Australia.

The goal of the network is to theorize margins of memory and examine how they are shaped across different national and sociopolitical contexts. In the first part of our talk, we outline the network’s core ideas and key themes (agency, trauma, silence, sites of memory activism among marginalized groups, and geographies of belonging), while providing theoretical directions for engaging with them. In the second part of the talk, we discuss two specific case studies: queering memory and the silences surrounding the history of Roma in Soviet archives.