VAD e.V.

New states, new nations, and the politics of memory

Convenors: Anna-Maria Brandstetter Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spam Bots geschützt, Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie es sehen können (Mainz), Carola Lentz Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie sie sehen können. Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spam Bots geschützt, Sie müssen JavaScript aktivieren, damit Sie es sehen können (Mainz)

The VAD conference of 2010 takes place in a year in which many African states celebrate their independence jubilees—a date that suggests itself to explore the politics of memory. Nation-building and state-making undoubtedly depend on the creation of a corps of ‘national’ bureaucrats and institutions, the construction of a material infrastructure that supports nation-wide communication, and the dissemination of schools and education. At the same time, it involves a symbolic dimension, namely, the creation of cultural emblems and symbols as well as the (re)writing of ‘national’ history. It is these processes of creating a national ‘imaginary’ and the politics of memory involved in nation-building that stand at the centre of attention of this panel.

Politics of memory involve a wide range of issues. On the one hand, the collective memory is informed by official history as it is depicted in history books and museums, represented in national monuments or other ‘lieux de mémoire’, celebrated in national days as well as canon-ised and preserved in institutions such as national academies and historical commissions. On the other hand, popular, subaltern, and personal historical narratives create a broader commu-nicative memory that sometimes complements, and often contradicts the official politics of memory. Both aspects of memory politics form part of nation building. More generally, it is only through active collective memory politics, (re)constructing and (re)creating the past, that a society imagines itself as a unique nation, united beyond manifold internal differences and, at the same time, set apart from other nation-states or the former colonial powers. Yet the of-ten heated debates about what should be remembered or forgotten reveal the fault lines of the nation under construction.

We invite presentations that contribute towards a comparative perspective and address varia-tions in the politics of memory, including the making and unmaking of ethnic, racial, religious, political and socio-economic differences, and their role for nation-building in different African countries, exploring, for instance:

• strategies of referring to the pre-colonial and colonial past;
• ways of linking national and regional or ethnic identities (e.g. concepts of ‘unity in diver-sity’ versus ‘unity through homogeneity’);
• styles of communication and public debates on (national) history.