Realms of Forgetting: Theorizing the Other Side of Memory

After I completed my first book, it struck me that the field of Memory Studies has a blind spot, forgetfulness. Using the work of the late philosopher historian Paul Ricoeur as a starting point, this proposed paper (which is part of my second book) is experimenting with ways of theorizing (and doing) Memory Studies by centering forgetting to get beyond the rut of what societies remember. The paper considers theories of forgetting as critical to our analysis of memory in societies today, especially how policy sometimes unwittingly encourages socio-cultural amnesia by choosing to commemorate some elements of the remembered past over others. Using the case of European migration and immigration into Southern Africa in the mid-twentieth-century, the paper offers examples of how paying attention to what is forgotten when societies remember, historians and scholars of memory can offer “citizens, policy makers” and society at large, new intellectual and cultural skills for negotiating what is remembered in a multicultural and ever globalizing world. By showing how dependent memory is on forgetting, I invite a conversation and reconsideration of new intellectual (and methodological) paths for Memory Studies.