Remembrance and Forgetting: Politics of Memory and Counter-Memory

In lieu of the recent European migration crisis, this paper would examine the theoretical framing of memory studies through a Foucaultian lens vis-à-vis migration and European memory (specifically German memory and its immigration history). This paper seeks to trace a “history of the present” of current and past migration communities within Germany and thus analyze how the current EU immigration regime came about, and, in turn, how immigration patterns in the past have been forgotten, in order to highlight the theoretical promise of Foucaultian and postcolonial theories for memory studies. The central goal of this paper is to highlight the strength and weaknesses of critical social and political theory in conjunction with Memory Studies; furthermore, this paper would be a small step in a larger project of examining different historical and theoretical conceptions of Europe through historical and theoretical postcolonial frameworks that emphasize subjected knowledges that have been hidden or dominated by official or predominantly Western narratives.