Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject ed. by Joan Tumblety (review)

Memory studies emerged as a distinct field of intellectual enquiry in the 1970s, and since 1990 there has been a memory boom across academic disciplines and national boundaries; postconflict scholars and historians of war, genocide and mass violence propelled this boom especially. More recently, however, historians with a wider variety of empirical foci are engaging with memory issues. In a tightly framed introduction to this collection, Joan Tumblety argues that we need to explain historically both the growth of memory studies and “we must also historicize the notion of memory itself” (2). The book aims to “animate and interrogate” rather than resolve problems and debates within memory studies (10); it is directed at historians but will resonate with many humanities scholars. Tumblety argues: “We must bear in mind, in fact, that historians do not approach memory just as subject. That is, they seek evidence not only of memory (what is remembered), but evidence about memory (how and why the past is remembered in one way and not another)” (2, emphasis in the original).

The book appropriately locates memory studies at the center of historical research. This argument will strike a positive chord with many oral historians who have fought for decades for the legitimization of oral history as both methodology and as a field of intellectual enquiry within historiography. But like so many edited volumes, Memory and History is a mixed bag of articles, some very good and some lacking coherence and critical reflection.

The opening cluster engages “oral testimony.” The first, by Michael Bosworth, is a meandering piece, with no clear argument. In contrast the next, by Lindsay Dodd, is an excellent account of French experiences under occupation and Allied bombing during World War II. She provides useful insights about “cultural scripts” and argues that

in oral history, memory becomes not simply a source for the investigator of the past, but an object of study in its own right. The way that memories are narrated, connected to each other and to other events, the way they struggle against and absorb parts or wholes of collective or public memories, the way that their notions of chronology are bulging with inherent meaning are integral to how historians use them (47).

I also liked Roseanne Kennedy’s ambitious exploration of the tensions between oral history and the law, across Holocaust and Stolen Generation trials. Kennedy makes the following interesting observation: “The decision either to privilege the past by reconstructing ‘what the event was’ for the society in which it occurred, or to examine the effects of past events in the present, is one of the fault-lines between historians and memory scholars to-day” (57). Yet in my view, historians, and especially oral historians, are well-placed to do both in their research, as the priorities that Kennedy describes are not mutually exclusive. And as Tumblety rightly argues in describing her motivation for the book, we need to approach memory as both “source and subject.”

The second cluster of articles discusses memorialization, and like the first cluster, it commences with a meandering contribution by Polly Low on classical Athens. This is followed by an underdeveloped piece by Susan Crane. In spite of the article’s shortcomings, I liked Crane’s critique of logocentricism, through an exploration of photographs in museum exhibits. She draws on Cornelia Brink’s view that photographs are not only illustrative but can argue points—as do written and oral texts—that enable the production of historical knowledge. In a similar vein, Franziska Seraphim’s chapter on Japanese visual culture makes the important point that images function differently to words: “We see with memory.…Images tend to tap into the habits of mind (as distinct from critical thinking)…to make sense” (98).

The final cluster of articles approaches the theme of “reception” and is framed within debates about individual and collective memory. But I am doubtful about Jeffrey Olick’s term “collective...