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Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work ‘Memory Unbound’ refer to as ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the fundamental forms ‘collective memories take in the age of globalization’, this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized. Since global disseminations of local memory cultures and the implicit canonization of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever calls ‘archival violence’ and will show its inherent relation to the formation of cosmopolitan memory. Another related concept that I will use and that will problematize the transformation of living, embodied memory into archival, cultural memory upon which the formation of cosmopolitan memory depends is the witness. Using Agamben’s writing (2002) in this context that in Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness, I will show that this transformation that determines the very possibility of cosmopolitan memory is far from unproblematic and readily accessible as Levy and Sznaider seem to assume. What will emerge as the most distinctive concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the very formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what should solicit vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives.

This Special Issue would not have been possible without the enduring effort of the contributors whose patience has been paramount to what, at times, must have seemed as an endless unfolding of revisions before we could find the right pitch and I’m indebted to all of you for your commitment and support. Special thanks also is due to the Institute for American Universities and Professor Maria Van Liew whose initiative for a conference on the topic in Barcelona 2018 provided a much appreciated catalyst for the volume. School of Education and Communication at Jönköping University and its research focus in Communication, Culture and Diversity with Professor Ylva Lindberg at the helm have also been instrumental in providing continuous suport for the project as well as my own Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg with its established research field in Transcultural Studies. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the editorial team at Moderna Språk and our brilliant Anna Gudmundson, above all, whose attentive eye, appreciation and tireless enthusiasm have made this volume finally see the light of day. Most of all, however, I want to thank my awesome wife Maria and my son and daughter, Mies and Dalia Belle, whose love and joy are the foundational pillars of all my endeavours. Zlatan Filipovic, July 2020.

Reflecting on the affective nature of diasporic experience, the essay begins by developing Arendt's understanding of displacement as a temporal disjunction of being caught between the claims of the past and the exigencies of the present. The impossibility of salvaging the past against the often stifling imperatives of the present that she accounts for in her essay ‘We Refugees’ is, however, also what produces affective economies in the diasporic subject that I argue are crucial to diasporic identity formation. In this respect, I focus on shame, which I see as an affective residue of the unsalvageable past in the experience of displacement. In order to determine and further develop the significance of shame for diasporic subject formation, this essay will consider its impact on subjectivity in a comparative close reading of two contemporary novels, V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, both of which manifest the elision of the past in diasporized subjects and the movement towards strategies of identification articulated in mimicry. Mimicry, seen in Fanon's rather than Bhabha's terms, as a disavowal of the past, fails, however, to provide a viable strategy of identification for a diasporic subject in the novels that testify rather to the affective cost of our incumbent efforts to start anew.