300661 Postcolonial and Transnational Memory (MA: Soziologie der globalen Welt) (S) (SoSe 2024)

Collective memory has a vital function for society’s self-understanding. As collective memory shapes society’s cultural and political identity, we also speak of cultural memory (Jan Assmann). Despite the enormous scope of globalization, cultural memory often functions as a nationally framed anchor of self-assertion. A particular challenge is to incorporate social upheavals, wars and violent political, economic or other transformations into cultural memory, such as colonial histories. Following the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002, 63), it is about “inscribing the ambivalences, the contradictions, the use of violence and the tragedies and ironies that accompany it into history” – and cultural memory.
Against this background, the key questions in this seminar are: How can historical, structural and cultural experiences and the social reality ‘outside the West’ be brought into social-theoretical debates about cultural memory? And how can the self-referentiality of collective memory and the related hegemonies be made visible? To what extent do we need a decolonization of global memory culture and what does this mean sociologically speaking?
These questions arise against the backdrop of the increasing pluralization, globalization and a related fragmentation of memory, as well as of ‘new’ frameworks such as the human rights frame and the cosmopolitisation of memory (Levy/Sznaider 2001). A challenge also results from racism and xenophobia as a hidden facet of memory culture (e.g. think of the 1990s in Germany or Hanau 2020). Another component is the discourse according to which the histories of colonialism and the Holocaust are incomparable. This indicates that collective memory is not only shaped by fragmentations, but also by entangled histories and part of shared modernities/colonialities (Randeria/Conrad 2002; Boatcă/ Costa 2010; Go 2013).
The seminar begins with a theoretical foundation of the understanding of memory. After an introduction to the social conditionality and construction of memory, supplemented by a reading of classic sociological literature on memory (e.g. M. Halbwachs, Assmann & Assmann, W. Benjamin, P. Nora, A. Warburg), the seminar will focus on current debates such as multidirectional memory (M. Rothberg; A. Goldberg & B. Bashir; N. Sznaider and others). This will be embedded in postcolonial approaches to memory culture. I will leave two to three meetings free for your suggestions. You are welcome to contact me in advance and make suggestions for topics and texts beyond the mentioned thematic scope.

Bibliography

Selected Literature:
Assmann, Aleida, 2008: Canon and Archive, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.), Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin: de Gruyter, S. 97ff.
Assmann, Jan, 2008: Communicative and Cultural Memory, in: Astrid Erll/Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.), Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin: de Gruyter, S. 109ff.
Boatcă, Manuela/ Costa, Sergio (2010): Postcolonial Sociology. A Research Agenda, in: E. Gutierrez Rodriguez/M. Boatca/S. Costa (Hrsg.), Decolonizing European Sociology. Farnham: Ashgate, S. 13-31.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2002: Europa provinzialisieren. Postkolonialität und die Kritik der Geschichte, in: S. Conrad/ S. Randeria (Hrsg.), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, S. 283-312.
Conrad, Sebastian/Randeria, Shalini (Hrsg.), 2002: Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Erll, Astrid/Nünning, Ansgar (Hrsg.), 2008, Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin: deGruyter.
Go, Julian, 2013: Postcolonial Sociology. Emerald.
Levy, Daniel/Sznaider, Natan (Hrsg.), 2021: Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Rothberg, Michael, 2009: Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Goldberg, Amos/Bashir, Bashir (Hrsg.), 2018: The Holocaust and the Nakba. A New Gram-mar of Trauma and History. Columbia University Press.
Zimmerer, Jürgen (Hrsg.), 2023: Erinnerungskämpfe. Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusst-sein. Ditzingen: Reclam.