Abstract
Memory is key to understanding the temporal-spatial coordinates of producing ‘crisis’ and acting in it. By reshaping infrastructures of past, present, and future, and interlinking places and spaces of crisis, memory often appears to be instrumental for proclaiming, experiencing, and responding to states of emergency.
This chapter scrutinizes the varied workings of memory in/of crises by examining mnemonic chronotopes and exploring their potential as conceptual figures. Thinking about crises through chronotopes of memory, that is, temporal-spatial frameworks of recall involved in imagining and narrating, can reveal the mechanisms behind cycles of oppression (spaces marked as sites of perpetual crises; times of dispossession conceived as eternal) as well as ways of breaking these cycles, creating openings within them.
Drawing on various situated cases, the chapter reflects on the local and global dimensions of contemporary crises—of responses to migrants from the Middle East in the Greek borderlands and their ramifications within European politics; of post-truth politics in Russia in times of the war in Ukraine; of deepening structural inequalities and protest in South Africa; and of the ways in which post-transitional dystopian imaginations in the Global South and Eastern Europe are produced as well as countered through memory practices.
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Notes
- 1.
For some important contributions to the study of these intersections see the special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing “On Colonialism, Communism and East-Central Europe” (Kolodziejczyk and Sandru 2012), the volume Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures (Pucherova and Gafrik 2015), and Madina Tlostanova’s Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art (2017).
- 2.
In conceptualizing this practice, we draw inspiration from Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s (2002) method of “reparative reading” (as an alternative to “paranoid reading”) and from Svetlana Boym’s (2010) concept of the “off-modern” which suggests “lateral” politics of reading, beyond the modern and postmodern, and re-collects unexplored potentials for modernity.
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Robbe, K., Gedgaudaite, K., Stuit, H., Thomas, K., Timofeeva, O. (2021). In and Out of Crisis: Chronotopes of Memory. In: Boletsi, M., Lemos Dekker, N., Mika, K., Robbe, K. (eds) (Un)timely Crises. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74946-0_4
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