Conference Alert

Memories of Colonial Pasts

Université de Nanterre | 6–8 December 2022

Over the last few decades, memory issues have multiplied across the world. From the Holocaust to Latin American dictatorships, from genocides to colonization and slavery, from world wars to decolonization, different moments in history have been the subject of debates and have prompted new practices and reflections concerning remembrance, anamnesis and forgetting within a phenomenon of “globalization of memory”. In each case, a specific memory is turned into a public matter through which different actors seek the recognition of their claims in order to turn them into memory policies. This form of memory has become a key value for contemporary democracies.

​While it is relevant to question the phenomenon of memory in its global dimension, it is also interesting to understand how the different mobilizations and politics of memory have circulated between different spaces and historical contexts. Moreover, studies have shown that there is not a single memorial matrix, but “multidirectional” influences between different memories in a national or transnational context. The entangled memories of the Holocaust, decolonization and post-slavery are examples, the study of which has also challenged the common notion of “competitive memories”.

This conference aims to question the specificity of memories linked to various colonial pasts in different contexts. It also intends to understand the social and political processes behind these memory constructions, to identify the vectors and the entrepreneurs of memory, while focusing on the “memory regimes”, that is, on the mechanisms intended to establish the meaning of the past in the social space.

Whether linked to the colonization of the Americas, Africa or Asia, to slavery or to the wars of liberation, so-called anti-colonial or – more recently – postcolonial memories are at the heart of political and social claims whose study requires a broad perspective. All these different memories seem to have given rise to the status of “ancestral victims” shaped by individuals or groups who seek recognition and even demand reparation on this ground. This idea goes hand in hand with new memory policies that consider these pasts as traumatic, and call for their public policy or for a social healing through the action of the public authorities. Therefore, two underlying questions may arise: what does it mean to remember a past sometimes located in very distant times from the contemporary period? And why do these memories bring up such intense controversies in the public space today?

Through brand-new empirically grounded papers, this conference will offer the opportunity to discuss and clarify the notion of “memory(ies)” which has become particularly polysemic today. The issue is nevertheless also a disciplinary one because this notion is still too often apprehended, within the historical field, in a strict, and very reductive and ineffective opposition between history and memory. Such an opposition delegitimizes historians’ inquiry into this object of study, as evidenced by the institutional weakness of this field of research, and, on the other hand, engenders a form of confusion, by involving another register which is that of the social role of the historian acting as an expert on a “memory” object ruled as a public problem, as we have seen recently for the Algerian war.

For more information and the entire program, please visit the conference website.

It is possible to join either in person or via Zoom. Register here.