Memory and Crisis: An Introduction

Abstract

Through the Fall of 2019 and Spring of 2020, the Memory Studies Association (MSA) was hard at work planning its fifth annual meeting, which was to take place in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA), in June 2020. We had chosen Charlottesville for a number of reasons, including the desire to hold the meetings outside of Europe as well as because one of us works at the University of Virginia and was able to arrange use of the university's facilities. More significant, of course, was the notoriety Charlottesville had obtained 2 years prior, when a violent "alt-right" "rally" was held there to protest the city's plans to remove two statues honoring Southern military leaders from the US Civil War (1860-1865).The call for papers thus read as follows:Although long important in US history, Charlottesville became more widely known in August 2017 when White nationalists staged a rally to protest the city council's decision to move a monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the center of the city to a more peripheral location. The protest devolved into a melee resulting in three deaths, and frightening images quickly spread around the world. Since then, Charlottesville has come to stand for conflict over the unworked-through legacies of the American past, and as a flashpoint in debates about racial justice, populism, and commemoration. In addition to its relevance for the unworked-through legacies of the American past specifically, Charlottesville has entered transnational discussions about the legacies of slavery, segregation, and antisemitism more broadly. The 2020 meeting of the MSA will therefore highlight questions about the role of public memory in democratic societies and in the struggle for racial justice.Alas, it was not meant to be. Throughout the Spring, we watched anxiously as first reports of COVID-19 led to unprecedented lockdowns around the world and to an increasing sense of crisis-of public health, of the economy, of governance, and ultimately of ontological security. Like

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“…fundamentally enhance or inhibit) the work of and on the memories of a society. In this sense, as urged by Larkan and Murphy (2017) in their work Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis, and more recently by Olick and Teichler (2021), the time has come to direct our attention toward contemporary crises. Amid tumultuous times, marked by social, political, and environmental upheavals, the exploration of memory is crucial.…”

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“…In the US, statues and monuments in the South that are associated with the Civil War, the Confederacy and slavery have been exposed to what is commonly called iconoclasm, that is, the desire to overthrow and tear down previously sacred relics (cf. Olick & Teichler, 2021). Conflicts over memories often take place physically around tangible monuments, but they also occur in other fora such as in newspapers and in social media (Steinberg, in press).…”