Between the Local and the Global

In the introduction to their coedited volume on memory in a global age, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad ask some of the important questions relating to the new configurations of memory today:

How are memories transformed, mutually eclipsed and politically contested as they reach a wider audience and move into a supranational arena of attention? How do memories spread and travel around the world? How are memories changed when they transcend their former habitat and move into the framework of global spectatorship, traffic, and commerce? What role do the new media play in the construction and transmission of memories in a world of growing interconnectedness and intervisuality?

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In her own chapter, Aleida Assmann traces the process by which the Holocaust has gained global status in recent decades. She shows that, although this process of decontextualization of memory risks cutting the Holocaust off from its roots in local, personal, and social histories, the shared understanding of the event that emerges can, nevertheless, also serve as a humanitarian and moral compass for victims of trauma in other sites of racialized violence. She pursues a similar line of argument in her chapter cowritten with Corinna Assmann on the iconic status of the Iranian woman Neda Agha-Soltan, who was killed in the antigovernment demonstrations in Tehran at the time of the Iranian presidential election in June 2009. The transformation of this local event into a global image of victimhood at the hands of an oppressive regime, and the consequent effacement of the specificity of the event itself, are portrayed by the authors in positive terms, as the broadening of meaning that the image has acquired in its evolution towards global status has constructed a cosmopolitan collective memory around human rights.

In a section dealing with state recognition of past oppression of minorities, Christopher Daase adopts a similarly positive view of the phenomenon of the official apology. Recognition allows the state and individuals to acquire a new moral code and is thus a means towards reconciliation and the formulation of a common history. However, in their chapter on the apology in 2008 by the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to the Indigenous people of Australia, Danielle Celermajer and A. Dirk Moses are more circumspect. They point up the ambivalent nature of apology culture: at its best it can lead to reconciliation and a new shared future, but at its worst (a criticism voiced by postcolonial and postliberal commentators) it can be seen as just another form of colonialism, as “national elites . . . think they have solved the problem of Indigenous (or minority) alterity” (47). They maintain that apology is genuinely radical only if it leads to a new openness to the other and a renegotiation of the norms upon which the nation has been built. Apology culture is, of course, one of the consequences of the new politics of victimhood, whose dynamics (often competitive and distasteful) Jie-Hyun Lim dissects in a wide-ranging discussion embracing Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

An implicit tension in the collection surfaces if one reads the chapters against the yardstick of local versus global. When the debate is framed in terms of what happens to local memories in a global age (how they are transformed, what the role is of new media, and so on), the risk is to assume the singularity and autonomy of the memory in the first place (and its attachment to a specific identity) before globalization refashioned it. In his chapter “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory,” Jan Assmann clearly makes this assumption by maintaining the rigid distinction between memory, which is related to identity and difference, and globalization, which effaces all differences. For him, then, “the concept of global memory is a paradoxical notion” (123). The framing of the volume by the editors in their introduction does not go this far but at times implies that memory loses its attachment to a particular...