Archive partisans: Forbidden histories and the promise of the future (original) (raw)
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Memory Studies, 2019
Remembering past injustices has been regarded as central to overcoming intra-societal conflicts with the end of World War II. Since, memory has increasingly been charged as a means to achieve reconciliation. But only in recent years have archives, and here especially human rights archives, in the Mashreq and Maghreb moved from being semi-functional repositories for academics to become important loci for political activists to reappraise violence and injustice. The role of the archive in preserving or erasing personal memories is critically investigated by such activists. This article covers an emergent discourse on the memory milieus of violent conflict, war, and occupation extant in this region. In a selective overview covering Morocco, the Western Sahara, Lebanon, and Egypt, it asks what the visibility of violent experiences means for the wider social context and how traumatic pasts are re-socialized through private and public archiving initiatives. The author investigates the archive less as a place of storage than as a milieu around which various actors conceptualize the past and struggle over future justice.
Introduction: Outlines of a New Politics of Memory in the Middle East
Mediterranean Politics, 2008
While the historical trajectories of emergent attempts to deal with legacies of political violence in the Arab Middle East differ widely, certain commonalities can help us understand this new field across the region. On the one hand, evidence presented in this volume suggests that grassroots movements have to some extent succeeded in ending the politics of pretence and denial that long dominated Arab states. On the other hand, particular political groupings and media monopolize discourses of a universally applicable process of truth and reconciliation in a way that consciously makes use of international idioms, but effectively obfuscates other aspects of social and political justice and reform.
2019
In the aftermath of two unsuccessful military coups (1971 and 1972) against the Moroccan King Hassan II (1961-1999), fifty-eight officials and soldiers were disappeared for eighteen years in what was then the secret prison of Tazmamart. Eventually released in 1991, some of the prisoners who survived madness, illness and death have been bearing public witness to the atrocities taking place in this desert prison. Concentrating, in particular, on the questions of place and "emplacement" of the memory of Tazmamart, in this article I explore the many enactments of memory by which survivors have challenged the state-imposed politics of silence and oblivion, and which today continue to counter the official narrative of democratic transition. Tracing memory's transformative potential, I show that survivors' orientation toward the past, but also, crucially, toward the present and future makes memory a crucial site of collective agency and political imagination.
Therapeutic History and the Enduring Memories of Violence in Algeria and Morocco
Middle East Topics and Arguments, 2018
This article examines the experience of transitional justice and its relation to collective memory of authoritarian repression in Morocco (1965-1992) and the Civil War in Algeria (1991-2002). It confronts and compares to the two states’ therapeutic historical discourse produced to heal the national community after these periods of violence and its impact on the countries’ historians, journalists, film makers, and novelists from 2004 to 2017. The article argues that Algeria and Morocco’s rigorous definition of the “victim” during these two episodes (the imprisoned and disappeared) excluded the way communities suffered during this period and, as a result, has delayed healing, forgiveness, and national reconciliation. This article highlights the limits of two overpoliticized processes of transitional justice in the Maghreb and their limited conception of what it meant to “come to terms with the past.” However, it finds optimism in the ongoing efforts by new historiography and cultural actors to confront the lasting traumatic aftermaths outside of official denitions and on their own terms.
Archival Science, 2009
This paper seeks to address, from the critical perspectives of cultural heritage discourse, the issues at stake in critically apprehending the archive as both a technology of disinheritance and one of potential inclusion and re-inheritance. The first section draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said and other critics whose work has sought to address the marginalizing capacity of dominant European/North American archival and cultural–museological institutions. The remainder of the paper grounds these conceptual–ethical issues in the context of Palestinian cultural politics and memory-work. This critical framework is used not only to draw out the absences and silences in archives and cultural institutions, and the epistemological and ‘real’ violences at play in what Derrida characterises as ‘archive trauma’, but responds to Said’s call to ‘re-read’ the colonial archive ‘contrapuntally’ in order to create an ‘othering’ of dominant archival discourse. What is needed to provoke such an ‘othering’ is a commitment to rethink the archive in terms of alternative understandings of ‘hospitality’, ‘memory-work’ and what Derrida has referred to as ‘heritage dignity’. This strategy is capable of apprehending in greater depth the moral-ethical ‘debts’ and ‘duties’ and the operational ‘responses’ and ‘responsibilities’ towards ‘inclusion’ and towards full recognition of those constituencies which have been disenfranchised or exiled outside the realms of dominant cultural–institutional discourse.
L-Makhzan al-'Akbari: Resistance, Remembrance and Remediation in Morocco
Abstract Morocco was prompted by the sense of making and witnessing history that began as the backdrop to the mass uprisings across the region in 2011 and continued well into 2012. At several moments the country at large burst into a mosaic of rebellion. As expected, the state intervened with media propaganda, smear campaigns and intimidation to pre-empt the growing impact of the activists and as such to erase this revolutionary episode effectively from Morocco’s collective memory. This article examines the practices and implications of the remediation of past experiences of struggles and brings the memories of past resistance together with experiences of present struggles. This article takes particular interest in the intersection between 20Feb activists’ political projects and the growing array of digital politics and allows us to understand better the impact of digital media in times of revolution. Key Words: Activism; Digital Mediation; Makhzan; Memory; Remembrance; 20Feb
Curriculum Inquiry, 2022
This article tells the story of Palestinian visual archives in the post-Oslo period, specifically the archives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and their whereabouts following the PLO’s departure from Tunisia in the 1990s. It also narrates the story of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) in the West Bank and Gaza and the challenges it encountered in preserving its visual archive. The article posits that the displacement, loss, and seizure of Palestinian visual archives did not result from the perceived threat they posed to Zionism alone. It underscores that the politics surrounding archives are imbricated in the broader social relations of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and the neoliberal agendas that bourgeois national interests have produced in Palestine, as well as in the ideological differences between Palestinian political factions. The article then shifts to a discussion of the ways that archival violence maintains Israeli hegemony by erasing and silencing the anti-colonial curriculum and historiography of Palestinians to produce the settler state’s ideology, public memory, and discourses of state formation. The article uses Palestine as a case study to also tell the story of what we conceptualize as an erased curriculum. While Zionism undoubtedly produces both curricular erasures and historical silencing, we underscore how the vested interests of Palestinian political factions, specifically in the post-Oslo period, have contributed to archival violence and silencing as well. We show that despite archival violence, individuals and civil society organizations are enacting a politics of reclamation to trace, preserve, claim, and repatriate Palestinian archives, effectively practicing a form of counter-archiving.
Violence and the politics of memory in a global context: an overture
Culture & History Digital Journal, 2014
Engaging with a growing body of literature regarding post-violence remembrance, this article considers how distinct disciplines approach the study of contemporary "memory cultures" and addresses the issues that arise when violent pasts are considered in a global, comparative perspective. The paper reflects on theoretical and conceptual debates that have emerged in the permanent seminar, Traces and Faces of Violence, an intellectual ILLA-CCHS-CSIC-based symposium dedicated to the interdisciplinary, comparative analysis of post-violence memory cultures in different social, political and historical contexts. It identifies two specific arenas of interpretation that have been particularly useful for engaging with global memory studies literature: the historical, judicial, political, social and personal discourses regarding the past and reflections on the relationship between memory and materiality. By "traveling" through a series of case studies and by identifying their points of convergence, as well as their points of tension, this "overture" suggests that we approach the temporal and spatial movement of memory, as well as its immobility, as two ends in the process of remembering. In doing so, the article illustrates how local case studies inform, shape and transform globally circulating discourses and how the emergent transnational repertoire of knowledge regarding violent pasts provides a framework for reacting to a wide variety of local struggles.
Violence, Law, and the Archive
POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2019
This article examines the politics of protest in Pakistan as practiced by the human rights activists and litigants seeking justice for people who have been “disappeared” by the state's military and intelligence services. Based on fieldwork among the family members and friends of these “missing” persons, it discusses how they create dossiers of memory to retain the memory of the disappeared within public sphere and records. Most studies of state bureaucracy and legality trace their history—assumed to be embedded in official files and documents—in state archives. The dossiers assembled by families and friends challenge the state narrative on its war against terrorism and serve as counter‐archives through which state violence can be traced politically and ethnically and mapped geographically. The article draws attention to how marginalized groups use law and its documentary forms against the state in order to hold it accountable for the excesses committed against them.