A week ago I came from the conference "Historical Justice and Memory" which was held in Melbourne, at Swinburne University. The conference hosted the Emerging Scholars Workshop that brought together 13 PhD students from different disciplines and different countries, and I was proud to be a part of this small group of very inspiring and thought-provoking people. The workshop itself proved to be a unique experience of interaction and mingling that helped us generate new ideas and open up new perspectives on own PhD projects. At some point I will come up with more detailed reflection on the conference, but in my post here I want to share my general impressions of the conference and the workshop.
First of all, I want to give credit to the idea of organising conference where both scholars of memory and those of historical justice could meet and establish the dialogue. In academia, surprisingly, there is a distinct divide between those two “camps” of scholarship, and the conference (as well as the Historical Justice and Memory Network itself) is the first step in bridging this gap. Another important feature of the conference that I want to underline straight from the beginning was its focus on both scholars and activists. So, the conference featured sessions with officers from Truth and Reconciliation commissions, artists, and architects who are involved in creation of memorial spaces. Mingling of such a diverse audience significantly broadened the perspective on justice and memory. I realized how coming to terms with historical injustices becomes someone's job beyond the cosy space of university office, whereas truth and justice are not so much questioned and conceptualised but tackled with and encountered with the agenda to make after-injustices life of the community (of both victims and perpetrators) possible. Here, I am not saying that someone's job is more important, but what I want to stress is the importance of dialogue between theory (scholars) and practice (activists). I must confess, I was surprised by ‘professionalisation’ of TRCs, whereas experts travel from TRC in one country to another as if the executives of big transnational companies. I was also surprised by the degree of commodification of truth, whereas one’s stories become a commodity with the exchange value.
The conference made me think of a quite broad theme of differences between approaches to the past in post-totalitarian societies. The main difference seems to be between South America, Africa, Asia Pacific and Eastern Europe. While the former tried to tackle the questions of injustices of former regimes by establishing special institutions for telling apart victims from perpetrators (TRCs, court trials, etc), the latter seem to take on the principle of starting from the scratch, without accusations and tangible punishments. Both approaches involve a certain degree of oblivion, the prescribed oblivion, either with knowledge who is guilty, or without such knowledge. I wonder, can the institutes of national memory (IMs) that mushroomed in Eastern Europe be compared to TRCs? I think, not, as the mandate and agenda of these institutions are quite different. Whereas TRCs aim at collecting testimonies from both victims and perpetrators (and granting amnesty for testimony), IMs function more as museums commemorating sufferings of the victims. Another significant difference is that TRCs seem to present an individual approach to each subject they are dealing with, whereas IMs focus on collective representation of victimhood. Moreover, the work of TRCs is limited in time, they have mandate for a specific period after which their work is to be finished (and hopefully reconciliation and normal functioning of the community achieved). In contrast, IMs are not restricted in time and their work does not have the final goal of reconciliation, functionality, whatsoever.
Finally, the most interesting topic for me was spectrality of the past. It came out from presentation to presentation and made me think about the past that haunts us, that somehow matters for us in a way that we cannot get rid of it. This is quite a challenge for Freudian ideas of memory. For the haunted past, remembering does not bring closure; quite on the contrary, it brings suffering as long as we remember (here, James Booth’s ideas on the relationship between memory and violence come to my mind). What should be made to getting rid of the past? Is it possible to get rid of the ghosts haunting us? But is it necessary, really? Rama Mani suggested that we should learn to honour the ghosts, so that they won’t haunt us but be our guards and companions in the present moment. What is the role of historian in this? Does she have to play a role of the Furies from Greek mythology or a role of a person who can tame the ghosts and make them into our companions? I will come back to this in my upcoming posts.
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