Introduction From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century


Forsdick, C, Mark, J and Spišiaková, E 2020 Introduction. 
From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the 
Twenty-First Century. Modern Languages Open, 2020(1): 17 
pp. 1–34. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.342

GLOBAL CRISIS IN MEMORY

Introduction
From Populism to Decolonisation: How We 
Remember in the Twenty-First Century
Charles Forsdick1, James Mark2 and Eva Spišiaková1,3
1 University of Liverpool, GB
2 University of Exeter, GB
3 University of Vienna, AT
Corresponding author: Charles Forsdick (craf@liverpool.ac.uk)

This article introduces, and contextualises, the contributions to the collection The 
global crisis in memory. Since the 1980s, the idea of ‘coming to terms with the 
past’, shaped by the values of neoliberal economics and liberal politics, became 
part of a globally-powerful consensus over how societies should overcome violent 
and traumatic experiences. In the 2010s, in the context of the global rise of 
populist nationalisms, political hostility linked to global migra tion, and increasingly 
vocal criticisms of a neoliberal order, this consensus was powerfully challenged. 
Rather than rejecting memory politics, new political formations have in fact 
embraced them. The white resentment embodied in the ‘History Wars’ controversy 
in Australia; legislation such as the Polish ‘Holocaust Bill’; the growing scepticism 
of African states towards the International Criminal Court; or the rewriting of 
the histories of Indian independence by Hindu nationalists all reveal the ways in 
which diverse movements critiqued and reworked previous memory tropes. At the 
same time, attempts to decolonise western memory have engaged actively with 
previous manifestations of memory around which apparent consensus had been 
constructed. Moreover, these various new memory practices increasingly have their 
own alternative internationalisms too, reaching across or beyond regions in new 
transnational formations.

1. Overview
Across the world, what many commentators have called a liberal and universal(ist) model 
of ‘coming to terms with the past’ has come under attack. While various attempts to reckon 
with traumatic history date from the end of the Second World War, the present-day crisis in 
endeavours to ‘come to terms’ with difficult pasts is mostly associated with the momentous 
geopolitical changes of the last decades of the twentieth century. This paradigm crystallised 
in the so-called memory boom as the Cold War came to a close: the fall of military regimes 
in Latin America and the end of communist dictatorships in Europe and Africa, the post-
Yugoslav wars, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda alongside various African civil wars 
were all followed by the emergence of fledgling democracies frequently built on the debris of 
traumatic memories. These new socio-political contexts inevitably brought a renewed need to 

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Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 2 of 34

consider how to make sense of the atrocities and injustice stretching across the past century 
and how to ensure the continuation of peace into the new millennium. 

These processes had many national specificities, but as a powerful ideal they were also 
linked between countries and regions by a common idea that the defence of civic and human 
rights, and thus of liberal citizenship, required that we remember past atrocities and state 
violence. Sometimes this was based around the transnational memory of the Holocaust, sum-
moned up regularly in remembrance to ensure nie wieder (‘never again’). The terminology that 
dominated during the memory boom – coming to terms in English, devoir de mémoire (‘duty of 
memory’) in French (see Ledoux; Rousso, Face au passé) or Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘mas-
tering the past’) in German1 – suggested that populations could overcome the legacies of 
violence through memory. Recently, those who promote liberal memory work have become 
more critical of the idea of mastering the past; only by ensuring that memory retains its power 
to unsettle in the present might societies, they reckon, really ensure peace and democracy 
(Frost and Watanabe; Grosescu, Baby and Neumayer 307–8). German state policy adopted 
the term Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working through the past) to emphasise the open-
ended and ongoing nature of the process, necessary lest populations become desensitised to 
threats from anti-democratic forces (Finch). 

Critics of this liberal paradigm have existed ever since it emerged and assumed a hegem-
onic position in the 1980s; yet, as many of the contributors document here, the 2010s wit-
nessed a significant expansion in this challenge, both geographically and ideologically. On 
one side, new populist authoritarians – from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Rodrigo Duterte in 
the Philippines – attacked those who sought justice for past atrocities, and rejected a set of 
late twentieth-century judicial and social practices that aimed to tackle the experience of 
dictatorship, genocide and violence. On another, critics from Eastern Europe to Africa framed 
such cosmopolitan memory cultures as fundamentally colonial impositions of a model 
of remembering that had never captured local experiences or was unsuited to addressing 
transnational structures of imperial violence whose legacies lasted into the present. On yet 
another, various forces on the left, from Latin America to Southern Africa, criticised what 
they saw as a Western-led depoliticisation of the past. They cast the memory boom as bour-
geois ideological ballast for an unequal, neoliberal world, and as such incapable of sustain-
ing a public historical culture that could keep the radical right at bay. The alternatives these 
groups proposed were various, from the simple erasure of the past and the re-establishment 
of cultures of impunity, to the discovery of new forms of justice that arose out of local tradi-
tions and cultures, to calls for more radical histories, public cultures and trials to deal with 
structural and economic injustices that had been left untouched at the end of dictatorships 
and wars.2 

In order to understand these contemporary challenges, first we historicise the growth of 
this liberal memory paradigm. It was shaped by the moment of its birth in the late 1970s, 
when the global anticolonial project in its various manifestations, including tricontinental-
ism – the transnational attempt to link the liberation movements of Africa, Asia and South 
America (Mahler) – was losing its appeal, and Western-led neoliberal globalisation began on 
its road to dominance. In adopting this broader perspective, we can more easily observe how 
this eventually hegemonic framework was shaped by a set of individualising and Eurocentric 

 1 By 1959 President Theodor Heuss was calling ‘die unbewältigte Vergangenheit’ (the unresolved past) a ‘Schlag-
wort’ (buzzword); the verbal forms ‘die Vergangenheit bewältigen’, ‘unbewältigte Vergangenheit’ mutated into 
the compound noun Vergangenheitsbewältiung by the mid-1960s (Eitz and Stötzl, 608–9). Thanks to Chloe 
Paver for this information.

 2 For a recent work that seeks to explore the move away from individual notions of responsibility to address how 
societies are more deeply implicated, see Rothberg, The Implicated Subject.



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 3 of 34

assumptions about what was significant in dealing with violent pasts. In the second part, we 
examine the rise of right-wing populist counter-memory. Right-wing populists were both 
anti-elitist and anti-pluralist, and based their legitimacy on the claim that only they could 
genuinely represent the will of the people (Müller). Memory politics have been crucial for 
many such projects. In appropriating the right to speak for a popular unity, populists imagine 
themselves as the true founders of democracies or nations (Bull); as the only ones able genu-
inely to represent the nation’s suffering in war or under persecution; or position themselves 
in direct succession to former patriotic authoritarian strongmen. In so doing, they present 
their movements as the protectors of national community from what they identify as the 
emasculating effects of shame, guilt and repentance at the core of cosmopolitan liberal inter-
nationalism and its memory practices. Such populist movements have been adept at employ-
ing both social media and popular culture, through cartoons, songs, festivals or religious 
ceremonies, to embed these new historical narratives (Kockel et al.; Wodak and Forchtner). In 
the third part, we explore the critiques of cosmopolitan liberal memory and justice as neoco-
lonial from the perspective of the global South, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa and South 
America. In addition, we assess the decolonial responses that challenged the propensity of 
Western liberal memory practices to reproduce hierarchical civilisational orders. These critics 
often sought to show the interconnections in histories of suffering, in ways that might elicit 
empathy and undercut exclusivist ethno-populism and racism: such interventions came from 
historians, memory studies scholars and in public memory work. Others questioned outright 
the usefulness of memory based upon suffering and victimhood. Finally, we explore why 
there was resistance to this decolonial turn, mostly in the West, and the prospects for change.

This collection brings together scholars working on these various manifestations of memory 
politics from all corners of the globe, deploying their expertise from most world regions: from 
Brazil to Japan, South Africa to Austria. The articles are drawn from a conference that took 
place in London in February 2019, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council 
(AHRC) in the context of its ‘Care for the Future’ and ‘Translating Cultures’ strategic themes. 
As such, it highlights the need to historicise the present while adopting approaches to mem-
ory that are comparative, transnational and linguistically sensitive. The event became a first 
stage for discussions about the possible links between these global shifts in memory politics, 
generating debates that illustrated the inevitable co-dependency of these movements across 
the globe. This initiative develops this discussion further through an extended collection of 
papers that cover a broad range of both geographical areas and arenas for memory politics: 
from museums and war memorials to comic books and street paintings.

2. Emergence of a Paradigm 
The contributions here from Cercel and David explore how memory studies has too often 
tended to neglect its relationship to historical change – an important task in order to under-
stand the ideology of the ‘memory boom’ that is currently under fire. Outlining ideas central 
to her 2020 book The Past Can’t Heal  Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name 
of Human Rights, David presents the irruption from the 1980s onwards of a victim-centred 
memorial culture as a cumulative accretion of rights culture since the Second World War – 
from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the 1966 International Covenant on 
Civil and Political Rights, which gradually ‘force[d] states to face, and be held accountable for, 
past human rights abuses’. Yet this was not a smooth journey. The ‘coming to terms’ paradigm 
also had its roots in the late 1950s, in a western European postwar generation’s sense of the 
failure to confront societies properly about their role in violence and the genocide against 
European Jews. Institutions such as the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and 
Tokyo – established not only to prosecute war criminals but also to help societies acknowledge 



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and remember the atrocities of the Second World War – had been sidelined. This had partly 
occurred because of the onset of Cold War confrontation, which undermined the possibility 
of a shared understanding of wartime violence. Other venues such as the UN War Crimes 
Commission (1943–48) were shut down due to the reluctance of Western powers to face 
justice for, or even acknowledge colonial crimes. Moreover, these institutions were accused of 
being more concerned with judging and delegitimising wars of aggression than publicising or 
seeking justice for the Holocaust. In both the liberal West and the communist East, albeit in 
very different ideological registers, the crimes of fascism were blamed on elites – often at the 
expense of confronting society as a whole. Only a few intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, 
resisted this framing. 

It was the violence of the accelerating processes of decolonisation in the late 1950s that led 
to the first postwar memory boom. Certainly, an emerging Western New Left played a large 
role. They connected the violence of a now hastening end to European empire in the late 
1950s to the broader failures of Western civilisation to work properly through the remnants 
of fascism and wartime violence (Clifford, Gildea and Mark; Kundnani; Shepard). In France, 
young activists connected the brutality with which their elites suppressed the Algerian inde-
pendence movement to the unresolved legacies of the Second World War, notably the failure 
to prosecute collaborators who would go on to torture and kill in North Africa (Rothberg, 
Multidirectional Memory). The sheer violence of Algerian decolonisation was in that sense 
fundamental to the evolution and contestation of postcolonial memory; it became the test 
case through which a new generation established an equivalence between the unresolved 
legacies of the Second World War and the ongoing, neocolonial violence of the West. For this 
reason, parts of the right in Germany and France have ever since argued that it would be 
unbalanced to grant to Algeria this representative status for the whole of the colonial expe-
rience (“Was weiß der Postkolonialismus vom Kolonialismus?”). The 1950s and 1960s was 
the period, too, when the Holocaust was becoming more widely discussed, even if in main-
stream culture it was not yet remembered, as it later would be, as an evil above all others. 
Nevertheless, such framings had already been long apparent in the thought of non-European 
anticolonial intellectuals: In his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, Afro-Caribbean poet and poli-
tician Aimé Césaire, like many other advocates of decolonisation, encouraged Europeans to 
see the Holocaust as a result of their own colonial practices coming home – in other words, 
as a genocidal tragedy which could only be vested with greater meaning by connecting it to 
episodes of colonial violence. The Russell Tribunal, a private People’s Tribunal established in 
1966 by leftist intellectuals Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to try US crimes in Vietnam, 
tied its mission to its forebear at Nuremberg. In their view, remembering the Holocaust was 
crucial for the fight against the ongoing crimes of Western imperialist capitalism (Molden; on 
the importance of alternative anti-fascist Holocaust internationalisms before liberal human 
rights, see Rothberg, “The Witness as ‘World’ Traveler”). 

Many rejected – or did not even consider – such connections. The 1950s French debates 
over Algeria aside, the postwar political cultures of present or former European colonial pow-
ers – namely Britain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands – did not witness sig-
nificant public debate about the association between imperial violence and the brutality of 
fascism in Europe. The haunting memory of victimisation in the Netherlands and France dur-
ing the Second World War had the effect of rendering the colonial violence that had forced 
the end of their empires in the war’s aftermath all but invisible (Foray). Even the French 
survivors of concentration camps were not able to conceive of the brutal violence meted out 
by their own state in internment camps in North Africa in the 1950s as in any way equivalent 
to their own experience (Kuby). Horrific episodes outside Europe could still be understood by 
many as irrational aberrations (King and Stone 4). 



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The revival in the late 1940s of the idea of totalitarianism – which equated the state vio-
lence of fascism and communism as the outcomes of similar historical processes – also served 
to ensure that the debate over the origins of modern genocide became a very Eurocentric 
one. In this view, it was necessary only to have to explain ‘eruptions of barbarity’ in the place 
that white Europeans considered most civilised and thus least expect it to happen – that is, 
on their own continent (Moses 8–9). It should be noted that Hannah Arendt, who published 
one of the most influential postwar works on this topic, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), 
did connect the European use of racialised violence, from population transfer to genocide, to 
underpin her account of the brutalisation of European politics back home. However, her ear-
lier desire to write primarily about Nazi racism and imperialism had been replaced by the late 
1940s, and the onset of the Cold War, with a greater emphasis on the twin threats of fascism 
and Soviet communism – ideologies that both aimed at ‘total domination’. Her contempo-
rary defence of Western civilisation in the face of the contemporaneous Soviet threat served 
in part to sideline her earlier stringent attacks on racist imperialism’s perversion of Western 
civilisation. She thus later came to emphasise the British Empire as having been the last 
bulwark against Nazi barbarism, and rejected the critiques of its violence from anticolonial 
intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Césaire himself (Moses 4–5). Indeed, the smaller part 
of Origins that did address connections between imperial violence and Europe’s destruction 
in the 1930s and 1940s was soon forgotten in the reception of her work. It was only after the 
collapse of the communist threat that this interpretation became prominent once again: her 
boomerang thesis came to the fore in the 2000s in the work of postcolonial scholars such as 
Paul Gilroy.

Others questioned the seemingly excessive focus on victims of the Second World War. In both 
the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’, anti-imperialists made the connection between European 
fascism and empire primarily through the lens of resistance. It was a political imperative to 
connect the anti-fascist struggle of the Second World War with the anticolonial struggle for 
liberation in the present – not the memory of suffering. When the North Vietnamese military 
visited communist-led Poland in the late 1960s to gain support for their struggle against 
the United States, they wanted to see the inspiring sites of the Polish national struggle from 
the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. A supposed overemphasis on victims from a particular ethnic-
religious group was dismissed in some quarters too, especially in those Eastern European 
communist states where the Holocaust had taken place but antisemitism persisted. One 
Czech communist dismissed the heightened recognition of the Holocaust in the West as 
merely an ‘epidemic of Jewish literature on concentration camps’ (Kolár).

The so-called coming to terms paradigm that developed in the 1970s and 1980s – culmi-
nating in the explosion of memory practices after the Cold War – marginalised the connec-
tion of violence between the European and colonial worlds, which had been one aspect of the 
first postwar memory boom. Both Cercel and David here explore how, as the global anticolo-
nial project weakened in the 1970s, the use of memory to bolster resistance and struggle was 
gradually replaced by a newly dominant paradigm that highlighted the suffering of victims 
of genocide and criminal dictatorships. Cercel draws on a longer-term left critique of this 
new memory culture. The focus on individual victims and criminality bolstered a Western 
system that reasserted individual rights and the market economy and, in doing so, depoliti-
cised the past, defanging history as a resource to claim social justice or economic equality 
(Traverso). Remembering victims became a way to stabilise the ‘transitions’ to a politically 
liberal democratic and neoliberal economic order that took place across Southern Europe, 
Latin America, Eastern Europe and then South Africa between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s 
(Miles). Cercel argues that it was no coincidence that the rise of memory occurred at this 
juncture: it was closely linked to the ‘transnational stabilization of a neoliberal consensus […] 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 6 of 34

the abandonment of the politics of redistribution, the erosion of social and economic rights, 
deregulation and privatization’. Here, he connects the rise of a new economics to newly tri-
umphant conceptions of rights. Dominant Western powers successfully saw off the radical 
claims of the South for real self-determination, greater equality in the world economic system 
and socio-economic justice (Richardson-Little, Dietz and Mark). These were replaced by more 
individualistic conceptions that emphasised protecting the citizen from dictatorship, political  
repression and restrictions on mobility (Eckel and Moyn; Iriye, Goedde and Hitchcock). 
A concern with redress for political or moral wrongs perpetrated on the individual agent 
displaced collective struggles for justice (Copello; Slaughter; Whyte). 

The victim had replaced the resister. In this sense, this liberal paradigm aimed at erasing 
the opposition between colonialism and anticolonialism as a central guiding struggle of poli-
tics, replacing it with the opposition between dictatorship (of whatever hue) on one side and 
liberal democracy on the other. Post-dictatorial sites of memory in the late twentieth century 
were generally constructed at places of violence or imprisonment in Europe, Latin America, 
and East and Southeast Asia, where a compelling account of the transformation from suffer-
ing to freedom could be narrated (Druliolle, “Remembering and Its Places”; Hughes; Mark; 
Schumacher). The victim of dictatorship became central to the imaginations of these democ-
ratising states. Legal compensation, or declarations of regret, were offered to them after trials 
or research at secret police archives – processes that also often served as public performances 
designed to inculcate new civic values (Apor, Horváth and Mark; Osiel; Traverso 29). Yet these 
definitions often excluded those who did not conform to a model of the individual victim of 
state brutality: victimhood built around the claims of structural violence, notably on the basis 
of gender, or economic exclusion and poverty, usually received scant attention (Roht-Arriaza).

These memory practices were placed in national containers too. This was part of a wider 
ideological apparatus that removed a consciousness of structural interconnected violence 
from countries whose modernisation had been attempted by dictatorships (notably in Eastern 
Europe and Latin America), replacing them with an account of strictly national trajectories 
from an iniquitous criminal past to a liberal democratic present. This is readily discernible 
in the first judicial mechanisms after third-wave democratisations: they focused on the over-
bearing authoritarian nation-state as a source of criminality and usually ignored, or provided 
no mechanisms through which to scrutinise or prosecute, businesses or transnational corpo-
rations that had committed human rights abuses (Koposov 52–8; Pietropaoli vii).

At the heart of this emerging paradigm was a belief that memory could be used to achieve 
‘social reconciliation’; in the context of the late Cold War, this meant the deradicalisation of 
the Marxist left, and a commitment from the authoritarian right to democracy. This notion 
of the ritualised reconciliation of enemies as ultimately a good had emerged in the inter-
national sphere in the context of East–West détente from the late 1960s; its values would 
soon find concrete national form in the ‘consenso’ transition after the fall of the Franco dic-
tatorship in Spain from the mid-1970s. Representatives of the authoritarian regime and its 
opposition sought ways to enable compromise in order to avoid violence, often in return for 
a collective amnesty and a degree of continuation in the institutions and personnel of the 
previous regime. In Spain, amnesia reigned, in the name of achieving social peace and pre-
venting a return to the social divisions that had led to civil war (Aguilar). Yet elsewhere, first 
in Latin America and then South Africa, the idea of the History Commissions emerged, used 
to acknowledge suffering and violence, but also in the hope of crafting new shared historical 
narratives to ensure social cohesion through a sense of shared overcoming of past trauma 
(Moon).

The extent of the universality of this paradigm – and its capacity to travel – has long been 
an important question. This ‘cosmopolitan memory’, a term coined by Levy and Sznaider in 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 7 of 34

their key work on the subject, was supposed to ‘transcend […] ethnic and national bounda-
ries’ through a globally shared consciousness of victimhood (Levy and Sznaider 88), with 
the Holocaust serving as global model from which all others might learn. Traumatic pasts 
could be addressed in similar ways across the world – a transnational synchronised ‘poli-
tics of regret’ commemorating the ‘innocent victim’ as the agent of remembrance par excel-
lence across Europe, Latin America, and East and Southeast Asia (Jager and Mitter; Lim; Mark; 
Olick) was seen as central to the processes of democratisation and social stability, and a guard 
against the return of the far right across the world (Assmann and Conrad; Grosescu, Baby and 
Neumayer 309; Mudde 114). Accelerating further after the end of the Cold War, the growth of 
an international human rights system, culminating in the establishment of the International 
Criminal Court in 2002, was also of great significance in propagating this cosmopolitan mem-
ory culture (Biedendorf).

At the centre of these remembrance frameworks stood the memory of the Holocaust: it 
became such a powerful and lasting symbol of the ultimate failure of reason and justice 
that it was transformed into a frame of reference, a yardstick by which to measure all crimes 
against humanity. As the fundamental narrative of the victory of good against evil, Holocaust 
memory was able to penetrate geographic, religious or linguistic boundaries, and became 
so generalised that it could be channelled regardless of personal relationships to the events 
(Baer and Sznaider; Eder; Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory). From the 1990s, it was pro-
moted for memorialisation by the European Union as a key element of a common European 
identity based on facing the continent’s dark past. A recognition for the other victims of 
Nazi genocide – notably Roma and homosexuals – slowly developed under the pressure 
of activism. A transnational ‘duty to remember’ was challenging for Southern and Eastern 
Europeans, whose memory cultures were initially resistant (Bottici and Challand; Littoz-
Monnet). Nevertheless, this particular idea of genocide helped create a ‘convergence in “lan-
guages of commemoration”’ (De Cesari and Rigney 12) and eventually became the framework 
in which human rights abuses under Latin American dictatorships, Franco’s violence in Spain 
and communist crimes in Eastern Europe could be understood (Baer; Crenzel; Mark; von 
Lingen). Japanese peace activists in the later stages of the Cold War drew inspiration from the 
German model of reconciliation and deployed it against the militarism of their own political 
right. Holocaust memory served to bolster the attempted globalisation of this paradigm, not 
only as it became viewed as a transnational duty, but also because it provided a template to 
narrate other atrocities through which those occupying less powerful positions on a global 
media stage could make their claims for justice to audiences across the world. It should be 
noted that recently some have questioned how global this paradigm really was, noting that 
in many places – from India to Latin America – Holocaust memory hardly featured (Confino). 
Some sceptics thus question the reach of the memory boom, deeming it to reflect the limita-
tions of a Eurocentric memory studies that paid excessive attention to the universalisation of 
its Western forms, and which failed to address how globally powerful paradigms and vocab-
ularies emerged from other regional and local traditions of memory (Grosescu, Baby and 
Neumayer 309). Hence, emerging projects are attempting to ‘globalize national memories of 
the South as well as to provincialize the Eurocentric memory regime’.3

The idea of the Holocaust that underpinned these new memory cultures became detached 
from colonial violence and came to be considered as the evil that stood above all others 
(Rothberg, The Implicated Subject 175–9). This was already apparent in the early 1960s, as 
its exposure on television through the Eichmann Trial lent it a media visibility beyond other 
violence (Levy and Sznaider; Novick; Rothberg, The Implicated Subject). Some Jewish writers, 

 3 See the Palgrave Macmillan book series ‘Entangled Memories in the Global South’.



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 8 of 34

such as Elie Wiesel, emphatically placed the Holocaust as part of a specific and separate two-
thousand-year history of Christian anti-Jewish persecution: the stress on modern imperial 
violence as the key to understanding the Holocaust threatened to undermine the crucial role 
that its memory as a unique genocide played as bulwark against the return of antisemitic 
forces (Tollerton). The idea of the singularity of the Holocaust accelerated still more in the 
late Cold War, as it became the pre-eminent illustration of the necessity of society’s to commit 
to a liberal tolerant order in which such an atrocity could ‘never again’ take place. The exclu-
sions concomitant with remembering it, particularly in Europe, were further cemented by 
the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989–91. Remembering imperial violence was thereafter 
associated with a demonised socialist internationalism in the continent’s east, where new 
anti-communist elites claimed, in any case, that their countries were free of colonial guilt as 
their states had never held empires. Meanwhile, Eastern European conservatives’ successful 
advocacy for a recognition of the Gulag alongside the Holocaust as constitutive of the mem-
ory of a post-Cold War European culture further reinforced the importance of the suffering of 
Europeans over those who had been the victims of European imperialism. 

Since the very beginnings of a postwar liberal memory culture, its advocates have been 
anxious about its vulnerabilities. Some agonised that remembrance might become routinised 
in ways that no longer inspired societies to defend their democracies. Neuhäuser here dis-
cusses German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s early fears in 1959, in his essay “Was bedeutet 
Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”, that memory might become just a defence mechanism to 
keep responsibility at a safe distance. Such memory work would have to be deemed a failure 
if it did not elicit ‘inner unrest’ in either the individual or in society. In Germany, some Jewish 
survivors did not support Vergangenheitsbewältigung, as it suggested the possible settlement 
of matters too forcibly and thus repressed rather than continued to keep open and raw the 
processes of reconciling with the past (Finch). Such a ‘settling of the past’ might be just as 
dangerous as silence, as analysts of the rise of the radical right argued (Mudde 114). Thus, an 
ongoing, disquieting and ever vigilant Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (‘working through the 
past’) was preferable. 

A number of the contributors here note the contemporary challenges to sustaining politi-
cally and socially meaningful cultures of memory, and are themselves involved in important 
institutional projects and political activism to address them. Hansen and Bull explore the 
non-antagonistic nature of many state-endorsed memory practices that focus solely on a par-
ticular form of victimhood and leave the wider context of grievances unacknowledged. Such 
forms of remembrance, they argue, sought superficial narratives of healing without confront-
ing the conflicting memories that lie beneath, and thus failed to resist the rise of ‘antagonis-
tic’ nationalist memory cultures. Rather, they advocate a ‘radical multiperspectivism’ and a 
‘conflictual consensus’ in which the multiple subject positions of victims and perpetrators 
can be argued over – rather than shown as simple illustrations of good and evil (Bull and 
Hansen). Others address the fact that the idea of resolution embedded in ‘coming to terms’ 
can be too easily mobilised for impunity; they contend, rather, that memory practices should 
be designed to enable ongoing engagement with, and management of, social and politi-
cal conflict (Druliolle, “H.I.J.O.S. and the Spectacular Denunciation of Impunity”; Opotow). 
The role of artistic (and often ‘agonistic’) interventions in such processes of maintaining 
continually unsettling engagement is beginning to attract the attention it merits (Bull and 
Clarke). Vaisman’s contribution posits that the abstract idea of unity after violence is often 
more attractive than the hard and ongoing work of reconciliation; rather, she contends, the 
voices of survivors who seek the truth about the past have for this reason frequently been 
obscured and censored. In her examination of the recurrence of disappearances in modern-
day Argentina, she raises questions about the extent to which a ‘facing the past’ paradigm can 
really alter society and state institutions sufficiently to prevent the recrudescence of violence. 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 9 of 34

3. New Right, New Populisms: Challenging the Liberal Paradigm
One of the first challenges to this liberal paradigm emerged from the New Right in the 1980s. 
Neuhäuser suggests here that such voices anticipated the arguments of populists critical of 
Vergangenheitsbewältigung almost thirty years later. He notes the case of Kurt Waldheim, 
soon to be president of Austria, who, in 1986, against the background of revelations of his 
Nazi past, became one of the first causes célèbres that the right defended. Some in the con-
servative Austrian People’s Party were already denigrating the media, employing cries of ‘fake 
news’, while promoting Waldheim as the real victim and accusing Jewish groups of coordinat-
ing a global media conspiracy against him. And elsewhere in the 1980s, the remembrance of 
victims was not invoked to support the construction of a cosmopolitan empathetic culture of 
‘never again’, but rather to give form to nationalist victimhood. In Germany, Ernst Nolte trig-
gered the Historikerstreit (‘Historians’ Dispute’) of 1986 and 1987 by using atrocities under 
Stalin as a diversion from Nazi violence. Reformist Chinese elites around Deng Xiaoping 
increasingly invoked wartime suffering during this decade, employing nationalist appeals 
to preserve legitimacy (Hillenbrand). Stories of the victimisation of China by Japan in the 
Second World War were used to bolster his reformist movement and divert attention away 
from the domestic violence of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (Frost, 
Vickers and Schumacher). A major national site emblematic of this approach – the Memorial 
Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders – was opened in 1985. 

It was in the 2010s, however, that the challenges to these liberal hegemonic forms of 
remembering attained an even wider political and geographical reach. Many of these con-
testations thrived in a new global climate in which convergence with Western liberal democ-
racy no longer appeared inevitable or desired. The global financial crisis of 2008 inaugurated 
a decade of widespread unemployment, housing market crises, failure of businesses and 
decline in consumer wealth: this was used by populist elites to further fuel the need to 
blame ‘others’, and to promote an increased scepticism regarding liberal Western political 
and social models. The collapse of consensus that followed created space for the expansion of 
an ethno-nationalist populism, built largely on anti-globalism, protectionism, nativism and 
often opposition to Islam, immigration and gender politics (Kaya; Mudde; Wodak). And as 
Subotić argues here, history was the ‘handmaiden of populism’: legislation such as the Polish 
‘Holocaust Bill’ (Ray and Kapralski), commemorations of dictatorial pasts in Latin America 
and the reignited ‘History Wars’ controversy in Australia (Attwood; Taylor), are but a few of 
the most visible examples.

A number of contributions here explore how the very rise of such populism was connected 
to the failure to entrench a liberal culture of memory, whether in Eastern Europe, Latin 
America or East Asia. Indeed, Schneider, in her essay on the ascent of President Bolsonaro, 
and McKay on that of his equivalent, Duterte, explicitly link their rise to the failure to sustain 
a human rights paradigm in both Brazil and the Philippines respectively, demonstrating how 
it is possible to revive the memory of past dictatorships as the true protectors of nation. 
Crenzel, in addressing the case of Argentina under President Macri (2015–19), demonstrates 
that even in the Latin American country most committed to a culture of human rights and 
anti-impunity, populists will attempt to undermine transnational rights systems and justice – 
and use deeply embedded domestic human rights law to consolidate immunity for previous 
abusers.

While these movements appeared to be independent from one another in their particular-
ist focus on national and local histories, they were invariably connected through a shared 
determination to overturn the previously established liberal and would-be universalist human 
rights approaches to coming to terms with the past, seeing them as a political bedrock for 
a global liberal order. They sought to protect the nation from the perceived threat posed by 
globalisation, of which such memory practices were seen as part, the culture of the nation 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 10 of 34

supposedly undermined by the constant requirement to embrace post-imperial self-flagel-
lation or post-Holocaust mourning. They desired to replace this with their own particular 
brand of victim-centred identity politics, which portrayed themselves as the true representa-
tives of the nation’s history and – often – its suffering (Bull; Kochanski). In Germany, where 
‘pluralism in the content of public memory overall’ is matched by ‘a lack of pluralism when it 
comes to the regulatory framework of remembrance’ (Wüstenberg, “Pluralism, Governance, 
and the New Right” 90), the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party increas-
ingly exploited disquiet at the perceived lack of representation of certain memories of vic-
timisation. In particular, they highlighted the suffering of so-called ‘ordinary Germans’ during 
the Second World War, a history they now employed in defence of a nation now supposedly 
threatened by the rise of immigration. In a speech in 2017, Björn Höcke, AfD’s state leader in 
Thuringia, alluded to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by claiming: ‘Germans 
are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital’ 
(Bochum). Neuhäuser here highlights how the House of Austrian History, opened in Vienna 
in 2018, was attacked by the far right, who regarded it, as they already did the memorials at 
Mauthausen and Auschwitz, as a ‘cult space’ for an education in liberal guilt. 

The cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust was a particular target for populists, who 
viewed its widespread dissemination as part of a global liberal conspiracy. In Eastern Europe, 
for instance, the stress on the uniqueness of the Holocaust in the internationalist ‘never 
again’ pan-European culture of memory was, following accession to the European Union, 
countered by transnational networks of conservative politicians, activists and institutions. 
Having suffered under both communism and fascism, they argued against a marginalisation 
of their own nations’ demands to be recognised as victims (Mälksoo; Mark; Neumayer, The 
Criminalisation of Communism; Neumayer, “Integrating the Central European Past”; Radonić, 
The Holocaust/Genocide Template; Subotić). Where Holocaust memory threatened to stifle 
such claims, it was attacked: in 2018, Polish president Andrzej Duda vocally supported the 
country’s Holocaust Bill, exempting the ‘Polish nation’ from any complicity in the Holocaust 
and other Nazi atrocities. In this collection, Subotić explores how the displacement of the 
Holocaust with the idea of ‘communist genocide’ in Eastern European nationalist memory 
cultures was connected to a right-wing programme to weaken a liberal idea of a post-national 
Europe of ‘unity in diversity’. At the same time, the memory of the Holocaust has also pro-
vided populists with a powerful template of suffering. Indeed, they used this transnation-
ally recognised paradigm to promote their own nationalist histories of victimization (David, 
Against Standardization of Memory). In this sense, Holocaust memory was appropriated by 
those with ethno-nationalist agendas to undermine the very cosmopolitanism it had been 
employed to build. The German sponsorship of memorials to sites of Jewish and other atroci-
ties in Eastern Europe was in some cases exploited by local anti-communist activists who 
align such sites with their local cultures of suffering and resentment (Bekus). In China, com-
munists instrumentalised the memory of the Holocaust mainly to highlight atrocities com-
mitted under Japanese occupation (Confino). 

The defence of nationhood was also gendered. Cosmopolitan memory was sometimes 
blamed for instilling progressive support for feminism and LGBTQ politics that these popu-
list detractors saw as undermining the foundations of national cultures. Populists often drew 
on historical narratives that cast the nation as a masculine, heterosexual, potent force able to 
project power on the international stage. Sawkins here explores why Russia’s first embrace 
of the memory of the Holocaust in the 2010s – after many decades of downplaying its dis-
tinctiveness in an otherwise powerful culture of Great Patriotic War memory – occurred in 
the context of the country’s invasion of Crimea and conflict with the West. An emergent 
Holocaust memory enabled President Putin, in the context of his own expansionist geopo-
litical project, to project an assertive masculine Russia as the saviour of Jews, to claim the 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 11 of 34

passivity of feminised Europeans in the face of genocide and to highlight the Nazi collabora-
tionism of the former Soviet republics such as Ukraine. Steele likewise offers here a gendered 
reading of the importance of the maintenance of the memory of the lost Southern struggle 
in the American Civil War. He locates it in a culture of a right-wing Southern masculinity in 
crisis, fuelled by sexual anxiety and a fear of violation by migrants. He sees in the defence of 
the Lost Cause and its monuments a reassertion of white masculinist supremacy, a project 
grounded in the fear that the United States was becoming feminised, so much so that it could 
no longer lead the defence of the West.

In some countries, these new victim-centred memory cultures became tied to culturally and 
racially exclusive modes of belonging preoccupied with the protection of nation, especially 
in the context of the ‘threat’ of migration (Bull; De Cesari and Kaya). Following the European 
‘migrant crisis’ (or, more accurately, the crisis of political will and hospitality) of 2015, a wave 
of anti-immigration sentiment emerged across the continent. Eastern European conserva-
tives in particular made the argument that a liberal human rights-based, Holocaust-centred 
memory culture had left vulnerable to ‘Islamic infiltration’ a continent that was ‘overly tol-
erant’ and too ready to open its borders (Kalmar; Mark, Iacob, Rupprecht and Spaskovska; 
Sayyid). Such fears were apparent in India too, where attempts to exclude Islamic migrants 
from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh from Indian citizenship in the late 2010s were 
accompanied by a memory politics that retold the story of Indian independence as a violent 
struggle to build a Hindu nation. 

In post-imperial European nations, populists looked to defend a national culture – often 
coded as white - based on an older nostalgic vision of European empire. This was enabled 
by, as Paul Gilroy puts it (referring to the UK), a ‘postcolonial melancholia’: in this view, the 
Empire was a source of discomfort and many of the violent aspects of its ‘unsettling history’ 
silenced (Gilroy). And according to David, the ‘coming to terms’ paradigm was also in part 
responsible for this quietening. It had attempted to create a ‘standardisation of memory’ 
which was fundamentally Eurocentric, neo-imperialist and had paid too little heed to cultural 
variation. It also only sought to address those extraordinary circumstances that followed vio-
lent dictatorship or war: hence, ongoing structural violence inherited from colonialism, such 
as the treatment of Aboriginal peoples in Australia or Native Americans in North America, 
despite much activism and memory work, did not become mainstream at the height of the 
memory boom (Orford). Forged in the Western celebration of victory over dictatorship in the 
late Cold War, it became a framework that allowed a liberal world to celebrate its achieve-
ments less encumbered by the burdens of its colonial past. 

Conjunctures did arise through which interconnections between these forms of violence 
could be made visible in Western cultures; but often the opportunities for transformation 
they threw up were as swiftly closed down. In France, for instance, the trial of Maurice Papon 
in 1997 offered one such moment. Papon was a French colonial official who had served in 
Morocco and Algeria, suppressing the Sétif uprising of 8 May 1945, and who, subsequently, 
as chief of police in Paris, oversaw the massacre of peaceful North African immigrant fami-
lies protesting in the city on 17 October 1961. Although he was charged with crimes against 
humanity as a result of his complicity in the deportation and murder of French Jews as a sen-
ior civil servant during World War Two, the trial entangled this wartime atrocity with a height-
ened awareness of the huge death toll of the Algerian War of Independence. Momentary 
national consciousness of these interconnections rapidly subsided, however, as memories of 
Vichy collaboration, historically untangled from questions of colonial complicity, again took 
centre stage. The country’s ‘Vichy syndrome’ (Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome) eclipsed what oth-
ers have dubbed its ‘Algeria syndrome’ (Donadey). Likewise, in Britain, the public revelation 
of the use of detention camps, violence and torture by the authorities against the Mau Mau 
during Kenya’s decolonisation, and the prominent court case on behalf of three of its victims 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 12 of 34

in British courts from 2011, did not fundamentally unsettle a broad national consensus on 
the benevolence of the Empire (Brown; Elkins). 

The incapacity of the ‘coming to terms’ paradigm to attribute a similar gravity to the crimes 
of colonialism as it did the Holocaust or communist violence has had important conse-
quences. Gordon, Morin and Noussis all address how this relativising amnesia, disavowal or 
silencing have enabled positive memories of British Empire or the so-called French presence 
overseas to come back into the mainstream in the 2000s. Indeed, French president Nicolas 
Sarkozy claimed that an excessive guilt and drive for repentance or reparation for colonial-
ism were a malady that undermined French national identity (Bruckner; Lefeuvre). Natalya 
Vince’s work, which highlights the great divergence between Algerian and French views of 
the conflict, is instructive here. In French debates, the devoir de mémoire was often criticised 
as a liberal identity project of self-flagellation in the domestic sphere, rather than an attempt 
to address seriously the long-term effects in North Africa. In Algeria, by contrast, memory was 
not about reconciliation or healing, but rather concerned the question of who could claim to 
be authentic fighters in the anticolonial struggle. Only elite Algerian memory actors in well-
connected cities used the international idiom of genocide to promote their memorialisation 
or film projects on a world stage. Algerian and French debates were kept within their national 
containers (Vince). French memory could not readily be unsettled by Algerian voices. Yet 
slowly in the 2000s, through social media, the activism of both Caribbean French politicians 
and hard left figures such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the issue of colonial crimes, slavery and vio-
lence returned. This broader shift set the scene for President Emmanuel Macron, as Noussis 
explores, to call the colonisation of Algeria a crime against humanity and to recognise the 
barbarity of the French state during the former’s struggle for independence.

As Gordon argues in this collection, underlying sentimental attachments to British Empire 
were never challenged either by a ‘coming to terms’ paradigm that focused on the Holocaust, 
or a national story that repeatedly recalled having fought the ‘good war’ between 1939 and 
1945. A contemporary soft imperial nostalgia might incorporate an awareness of the Empire’s 
dark underbelly; nevertheless, such memories were often relativized in ‘balance sheets’ of 
good and bad, in ways that allowed a comforting memory of British imperial power still to 
be deployed to great political effect (Ward and Rasch). Gordon demonstrates how readily 
the Brexit campaign was able cleverly to mix aspects of colonial and anticolonial histories, 
uncritically invoking the glories of the Empire to highlight the potential of ‘global Britain’ 
that would bestride the world economically after the country’s ‘liberation’ from its own sup-
posed colonisation by the European Union (O’Toole). 

Some populists mobilised an imperial longing in defence of a white anti-multicultural 
identity. The AfD party, for example, attempted to build political capital through celebrat-
ing the ‘positive’ sides of the country’s colonialism, as a counterbalance to what it consid-
ered liberal self-flagellation. Germany, in the AfD account, was absolved of colonial guilt 
and was under no obligation to rename streets or pull down statues. The AfD’s leaders in 
fact recognised episodes of violence such as the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–8), but 
downplayed their significance as not structurally core to the German colonial project, and as 
outweighed by the large amount of development aid given to Namibia since independence 
(Melber). Morin explores in this collection the French right and far right’s attempts to revive 
positive memories of Algerian colonisation and its defence in order to inspire a new struggle 
against an imagined ‘grand remplacement’ or ‘reverse colonisation’ by Muslim immigrants. 
Similar examples can be seen in Italy, where populists such as Matteo Salvini targeted positive 
memories of fascist empire in Africa in the 1930s and the Abyssinian invasion, especially vis-
à-vis the diaspora. Such a defence of whiteness can also be discerned in the widespread ‘Irish 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 13 of 34

slavery myth’. This misleading memory enables those of Irish heritage across the world to 
draw on the memory of African slavery, building a community identity around an imagined 
white victimisation under a multiculturalism which, they imagine, threatens their privilege. It 
cites a one-sided history of Irish suffering under British colonialism, while forgetting the role 
that Irish people played as beneficiaries of colonialism in the Caribbean and North America 
(Hogan, McAtackney and Reilly).4

In some places, where populists took power, governments have sought to reshape their 
country’s spaces of memory. Museums were a particular target in Central-Eastern Europe. PiS 
and Fidesz governments removed politically unsympathetic directors at the Museum of the 
History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest respec-
tively. They also established the processes to create new (as yet unopened) museums such as 
the House of Fates in Hungary (which, as Sawkins shows here, will be used to articulate the 
politics of the Christian nation as protector of its Jewish community from a contemporary 
Islamic threat) or the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, which will privilege the role of the Polish 
nation as rescuer over its complicity in antisemitic violence (Segal; Radonić ‘Our’ vs. ‘Inherited’ 
Museums). Structures once used to propagate a liberal memory culture can be taken over too: 
more and more, the transnational networks enabled by European Union funding are used to 
connect those radical right groups across the continent who seek to create their own memory 
politics based on racially exclusive readings of national heritage (Kaya; Pasieka). 

In India, Hindutva-inspired populist BJP (Indian People’s Party) state governments targeted 
statues. Memorials to post-independence leaders such as Gandhi or the Dalit leader B.R. 
Ambedkar, and other socio-religious reformers denounced as cultural traitors, were defaced 
or removed. Many Lenin statues had endured despite the country’s liberalisation; but after 
President Modi’s party took power, they were widely attacked – most notably in West Bengal 
and Tripura. Claims to be the only true founders of nation was often key to populist memory: 
this was particularly challenging for Modi’s BJP as they had no major figures of the independ-
ence era as part of their political tradition. So, they revived figures such as revolutionary 
Hindu Shyamji Krishna Varma, who founded the India Home Rule Society in London and died 
in 1930. Modi brought his ashes back to India from Geneva in 2005 when he was chief min-
ister of Gujarat – almost a decade before he became prime minister. Since then, the Hindutva 
populists have crafted his image as a ‘masculine and pugnacious anti-Gandhi’, prepared to 
use violence to force change, and whose struggle anticipated their own project to transform 
India. His recrafted biography as a key mover for independence, and its invented connections 
to the present, provided a vital alternative independence myth for the populist right (Fischer-
Tiné). As India marked the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth in 2019, Narendra 
Modi’s Hindutva movement worked to marginalise the legacies of his non-violence and even 
revived the memory of the anti-Islamic struggles of the British Empire.

In other cases, the practitioners of right-wing memory politics were skilled at promoting 
anti-liberal memory in spaces where populist historical effusions were still frowned upon – 
or could not obtain an institutional hold. The contribution from Takeda here explores the 
politics of translation in this regard, showing how speeches by the Japanese prime minister 
Shinzo Abe concerning his country’s wartime atrocities committed in East Asia were trans-
formed into a ‘language of regret’ for an international audience. The original Japanese, by 
contrast, avoided the appearance of apology so as to be acceptable to a nativist right at home. 
The scale of these populist, far right or neo-nationalist movements, and their similarities, 

 4 Similar recognition of complicity in transatlantic slavery is increasingly emerging regarding Scotland (Mullen) 
and Wales (Evans).



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 14 of 34

mean that it is vital to consider the intersections and borrowings that inform them and the 
media that connect them. Many of these new memory practices increasingly have their own 
alternative internationalisms, reaching across or beyond nations and regions in new transna-
tional formations, even as they have reversed the earlier ‘cosmopolitan’ functions of memori-
alisation. Several Eastern European right-wing populist governments cooperate with both the 
US and Israeli right in the creation of nationalist versions of Holocaust memory – as Sawkins 
explores here. 

A number of contributors also highlight the importance of social media – an area that 
has become one of the strongest and most recognisable channels for a politics that subverts 
the traditional cosmopolitan model of remembering (Fielitz and Thurston; Guhl, Ebner and 
Rau). The lack of editorial control, relative cost-effectiveness and the rapidity with which con-
cepts and information can spread across the virtual world, as well as the opportunity to host 
discussions and share posts in order to create whole new networks of readers, make social 
media one of the most popular arenas for these new memory groups (Zucker and Simon). The 
absence of official sanction also becomes an asset for campaigners who question the integrity 
of public authorities and see themselves as excluded from the institutions of official memory 
politics. The subversive nature of these challenges to memory practices appears always at the 
edge of seriousness, eternally playful and disruptive, thus appealing to those disillusioned 
by the status quo. The sheer scale of some social media platforms makes it nearly impossi-
ble to prevent extremist ideas from spreading, and several recent elections won by populist 
candidates have demonstrated the full capacity for social media to sway voters’ preferences. 
Schneider considers here how Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil is widely accredited to an 
aggressive campaign via WhatsApp messaging, while Indonesia’s 2014 and the Philippines’ 
2016 presidential campaigns actively used Facebook to fight political opponents with con-
siderable success. Perhaps nothing represents the power of social media to influence world 
politics at the highest level more strikingly than does the Twitter account of the US president 
Donald Trump. Furthermore, as the examples from this volume show, the unique outreach 
of social media now intersects with memory politics. McKay analyses in this collection how 
the Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte recast the memory of the Marcos dictatorship on 
Facebook and similar platforms when targeting the vote of diaspora communities in multiple 
election campaigns. 

While the examples mentioned in this brief overview touch on only some of the most prom-
inent and publicised instances of these new memory politics, they serve to illustrate both 
their truly global impact and the similarities in their methods and patterns of development. 
However, despite their widespread reach and the clear links discernible between them, an 
interconnected globally aware account of this shift in memory politics remains elusive. There 
is still a need for research that charts networks and circulations underpinning these new 
memory paradigms across a range of political, cultural and linguistic contexts, and to explore 
the methodological approaches with which these can be captured from a global perspective. 
We recognise that there is increasing scholarly attention paid to memory beyond the national 
frames to which it has been traditionally limited (Bond, Craps and Vermeulen; Buchinger, 
Gantet and Vogel; de Cesari and Rigney; Erll and Rigney), not least in its state-endorsed forms 
(much of this work has been concentrated around the journal Memory Studies, founded 
in 2008). The twenty-first century has witnessed a clear ‘tension between the production 
of remembrance through transnational processes and its grounding in concrete locations’ 
(Wüstenberg, “Locating Transnational Memory” 371), and new paradigms – such as ‘trav-
elling memory’ (Erll) – allow us to understand better the reworking of stories as they are 
transmitted across borders into new cultural spaces. Most of the articles in this collection 
remain national, however, although some do point to the new networks of authoritarians 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 15 of 34

and right-wing populists who share approaches to memory politics, or to forms of media. 
However, detailed studies that would trace the connections and networks behind these 
seemingly unconnected contemporary movements are still urgently required – to chart the 
ideological origins and growth of contemporary memory practices in transnational terms, 
to address the ways in which they draw on techniques and tropes from earlier paradigms, 
and to analyse their relationship to new ideological formations based on race, nationalism 
and gender. The current collection exposes the possible systemic structures that underpin 
these developments across the globe, while trying to answer the question of whether the 
liberal ‘coming to terms with the past’ paradigm is indeed undergoing a (worldwide) crisis. Its 
intention is to encourage the formulation of further case studies, but more importantly the 
identification – as we suggest in the following section – of new memorial dynamics evident 
in theory and practice.

4. From the Neocolonial to the Decolonial: Alternatives to the Liberal Memory 
Paradigm
The essentially colonial nature of the liberal memory paradigm has been central to many of 
its detractors’ and opponents’ objections; yet the arguments over the nature of that colonial-
ity, and the alternative projects established to supersede it, have taken many different forms. 
As we saw above, new populists drew on what has been termed a right-wing postcolonialism, 
which sought to bolster the pride of the white or Hindu nation. In the West, this was pitched 
against the perceived threat from globally powerful, colonising, multicultural and ‘shaming’ 
liberal discourses about the past. Yet there also developed critiques of the neocolonialism of 
contemporary judicial practices from across the global South and calls for new decolonial 
approaches that might supersede what their proponents consider to be the provincialism of 
memory practices within the West. 

The argument that cosmopolitan forms of memory and justice were essentially neocolo-
nial powerfully returned in the 2010s. The International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 
the Netherlands in 2002 to prosecute individuals for genocide and crimes against humanity, 
increasingly became targeted as an instrument of the West and its justice as culturally inap-
propriate (Kaleck). South Africa and the Gambia threatened to leave, with Burundi (2017) 
and the Philippines (2019) actually taking that step. Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, his 
Kenyan counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta and Rwandan president Paul Kagame, all criticised the 
court – the latter claiming it was never about justice ‘but politics disguised as international 
justice’ (Taulbee, 340). Many in the African Union pointed to the West’s hypocrisy in failing 
to prosecute crimes committed during the Iraq War of 2003. Here Maingi’s contribution 
examines how the arguments that African elites employed about Western neocolonialism 
were in fact critiqued and ridiculed in popular culture. He examines the visual culture of 
resistance to Kenyan politicians’ recent attempts to obtain impunity from the ICC. His close 
reading of a rich culture of political cartoons and paintings shows how the strategic use by 
national elites of neocolonial discourses to avoid a judicial reckoning for political violence 
became vivid material for local artists who viewed their leaders’ appeals as hypocritical and 
ripe for satire.

Liberal paradigms were also considered to be colonising in that they aimed to depoliti-
cise memory, thus robbing progressive movements of the tools for constructing a histori-
cal consciousness that could inspire resistance to neoliberal globalisation and its domestic 
supporters. Its memory culture, in this view, was only fit for an age that aimed at social 
deradicalisation and no longer had ambitions for structural economic transformation. In this 
critique, the fight against global injustice had been displaced by the veneration of the histori-
cal victims of authoritarian states whose suffering was instrumentalised to underpin a series 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 16 of 34

of national, liberal settlements based on limited claims to justice, equality and rights.5 As 
Roberts explores here, recent critiques from a second post-apartheid generation of radicals 
from the African National Congress contend that the collective struggle to transform the 
society and economy of South Africa was sacrificed to the memory politics of the Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which valued national reconciliation and stability (so as to 
attract foreign investment) over economic justice (similarly on Liberia, see Glucksam). The 
TRC, he argues, was part of a much longer genealogy of colonial population management in 
Africa, and a ‘conceptually simplistic’ local accommodation to the global discourse of tran-
sitional justice which mainly served the purpose of further integrating South Africa into a 
neoliberal global economy. The promotion of the TRC across the world as a model for over-
coming difficult pasts should, in this view, be understood as a neocolonial reproduction of 
control at the global periphery. Salt’s contribution also addresses such failures of our present 
memory politics, noting how their past effacement of colonialism partly explains the incapac-
ity of dominant models of memory to critique a neoliberal system which is still in essence  
neocolonial; without this acknowledgement, she contends, it is not possible to open up polit-
ical spaces for alternative postcolonial futures.

Thus, alternatives were developed. In the 2010s, in both Africa and Latin America, anti-
neoliberal legal networks fought what they view as the ‘soft justice’ that had followed late 
twentieth-century democratic transitions. They were critical of approaches that had restricted 
the definition of criminality to exclude economic suffering and began to fight for the recog-
nition of those who had endured socio-economic violence under dictatorship (Nagy 287). 
Judicial campaigns on behalf of victims moved away from an individualised framework to 
set the crimes of dictatorship in the context of collective struggle against not only their local 
dictatorial elites but also transnational corporations that had helped to sustain them. They 
were critical of nationalised memory paradigms that erased historical awareness of the struc-
tural and connected nature of violence within the global system (Grosescu; Lai; Pietropaoli; 
Verbitsky and Bohoslavsky). 

Histories told at sites of memory began to change too. In Latin America, leftist populist 
memory activists began to occupy those places of atrocity and former prisons which had been 
the preferred spaces for liberal human rights advocates to create their ‘never again’ memory. 
At sites such as Londres 38 in Santiago, Chile, they sought to politicise more explicitly their 
histories, placing a greater emphasis on stories of struggle alongside suffering (Bădescu, 
Beyond the Bare Walls). Working to bolster a new struggle against an authoritarian populist 
right that was no longer clearly committed to preserving democratic values, they framed the 
history of the violence of the left in ways that were no longer aimed at deradicalisation and 
political accommodation (Bădescu, Transnational place-making).

There were also calls to ‘decolonise’ both memory studies and public cultures of memory 
of western countries. Such approaches usually critique both the Eurocentric, provincialised 
forms of remembering they observe in the liberal paradigm, and the remembrance practices 
of new ethno-nationalist populisms which justify exclusivist nationalisms or white suprem-
acy. Very often, such works were written by, or sought to incorporate the views of, those from 
the global South or, in the West, from minority communities. These often attempted to give 
public visibility to those who lack it, and encourage an understanding of the importance of 
the West’s imperial violence – alongside the Holocaust or Gulag – in the making of the mod-
ern world. In so doing, they have sometimes developed paradigms that refuse competition 
between different types of historical suffering and exclusion, and instead encourage cultures 
that recognise the interconnections and encourage empathy between them. In other cases, 

 5 Sometimes this is extended to a claim about the co-production of human rights and neoliberalism. See Whyte.



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 17 of 34

practitioners have constructed approaches that question whether the memory of suffering 
actually serves any purpose. 

These innovations need to be situated in the context of a conservative turn within the acad-
emy, particularly in response to active attempts to ‘decolonise’ memory. Pierre Nora, one of 
the most important founding figures of studies of contemporary memory, associated himself 
in 2018 with efforts to counteract the perceived threats of decoloniality in contemporary 
France on the grounds of their ‘détournement indigne des valeurs de liberté, d’égalité et de 
fraternité qui fondent notre démocratie’ (‘shameful hijacking of the values of liberty, equality 
and fraternity on which our democracy is built’) (‘Le “décolonialisme”, une stratégie hégé-
monique’). He opposed radical efforts, evident also in the work of memory studies in the 
English-speaking world (see Rothberg, Sanyal and Silverman on noeuds de mémoire [knots of 
memory]), to ‘come to terms with the past’ that destabilise conveniently coherent and often 
introverted narratives of national memory. This was in fact nothing new: the rapid growth of 
the discipline of memory studies in the 1980s – which he played a large role in shaping – had 
been nationalist, Eurocentric and anti-anticolonial. This was very evident in a key term of 
the emerging discipline, lieux de mémoire: ‘sites’ or ‘realms of memory’ (Nora). The field has 
often failed to carry out the rigorous contextualisation and historicisation that concepts of 
this sort require. The idea of the lieu de mémoire itself emerged from a specific ideological 
niche associated with the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the fin-de-siècle crisis in 
French republican identity. Methodologically nationalist in conception, the term ‘realms of 
memory’ has now been deployed in universal ways; these often omit to recognise how Nora’s 
original collection failed to engage with the colonial past (Achille, Forsdick and Moudileno), 
but may also be seen – as ‘neither an oversight nor blindness’ (Stoler 161) – as being rooted 
in wider efforts to avoid any association of official French memorial practices with that past. 
Ann Laura Stoler has highlighted the importance of Nora’s initial research in the 1960s on 
the pied noir population of Algeria, detecting in his first book, Les Français d’Algérie, a barely 
veiled disdain for his subjects, not least because they are seen to diverge from a benchmark 
of authentic Frenchness. 

It was this methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism to which Nora’s work contrib-
uted that practitioners in memory studies have recently attempted to critique. Huyssen has 
described the risks of such ‘cultural fortressing’, a phenomenon that many scholars and prac-
titioners have sought to transcend. They have instead looked to interconnected paradigms as 
alternatives to hierarchical and competitive memory cultures. The work of Michael Rothberg 
on multidirectional memory, in particular, has foregrounded the need to situate memories of 
the Holocaust in relation to that of other historical traumas, not least slavery and colonialism 
(Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory), and a number of other scholars have entered into dia-
logue with this approach (Rothberg, Sanyal and Silverman; Sanyal; Silverman). Problematics 
associated with multidirectional or interconnected memories are now increasingly visible 
in memory studies, with this work also underpinned by recent shifts in historiography. 
Historians of Germany have, for instance, shed light on the links between colonial violence 
and the Holocaust (Kim; Madley; Mazower; Olusoga and Erichsen; Zimmerer). 

As is often the case, literature and the creative arts have had a vanguard function in the 
emergence of such work at historical intersections, providing a space for experimentation 
immune to the threats of intellectual censorship or legal intervention. The aesthetics and 
poetics of memory literature have played a key role in illustrating and generating such multi-
directionality. Rothberg drew on literature and film in developing his original concept, study-
ing works such as Didier Daeninckx’s 1984 detective novel Meurtres pour mémoire (Death in 
Memoriam) and Michael Hanneke’s 2005 film thriller Caché (Hidden) to reflect on the links 
between the Holocaust and the Algerian War of Independence (Rothberg, Multidirectional 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 18 of 34

Memory). The Swedish author Sven Lindqvist explored in his Utrota varenda jävel (Exterminate 
All the Brutes) the interconnections of colonial brutalities and the Shoah. Lindqvist reveals 
the ways in which the barrier between memories of the Holocaust and of imperial genocides 
has been a site of great cultural tension. Similar approaches were evident in the visual, plastic 
and performance arts, where important work revealed ‘artistic memory practices in which the 
European and the non-European are indissolubly folded into each other’ (Huyssen 1).

However, applying new models – primarily the multidirectional and decolonial – in 
approaches to public memory was very difficult to achieve. The interconnections between 
different moments of extreme violence that were established in critical memory theory were 
not well represented in public praxis, especially when this was state-endorsed. Holocaust 
Memorial Days were established in most European countries in the early 2000s. These were 
were increasingly used to mark other genocides too, such as that against the Tutsi, but this 
approach invariably focussed on questions of difference rather than any interconnective par-
adigm. They could sometimes be connected to contemporary racisms against Black, Jewish 
and Roma communities in Europe in the name of ‘never again’ (Kushner), but nevertheless 
seldom linked the phenomenon of the Holocaust itself to the longer-term development of 
European racial violence linked to colonialism. In other cases, such days were in fact used to 
reassert national virtue and exceptionalism, as in Turkey and Hungary (Karakaya and Baer).

So, despite substantial historical research, and some popular pressure, there has been con-
siderable resistance to the incorporation of a consciousness of Europe’s colonial violence 
alongside the story of the Holocaust and Gulag – either in national debates or within EU 
public memory projects (Lawson; Sierp). This is particularly the case in Germany, where mis-
readings of the work of Achille Mbembe led to the philosopher being accused of relativising 
memories of the Holocaust and colonialism, whereas his work is much more about multi-
directionality than competition (Rothberg, “The Specters of Comparison”; Khanna). Indeed, 
Mbembe’s writings may be seen as an indictment of how Germany’s privileging of Holocaust 
memory contributes to the ‘refusal to acknowledge the practice of German colonialism and 
countenance the consequences’ (Melber and Kössler). A major new museum in Berlin, the 
Humboldt Forum, due to open in 2020, also brought these issues of Germany’s relation-
ship to its colonial history to the fore. The housing of ethnographic collections in a rebuilt 
Prussian palace; the physical separation of ‘primitive art’ from the histories of European cul-
tural progress told on nearby Museum Island; accusations of relative incuriosity concerning 
the relationship between colonialism and the collections themselves; and opposition from 
minority groups who felt their perspective was excluded from an institution that first and 
foremost celebrated German Enlightenment humanism, all rendered it a controversial pro-
ject (El-Tayeb; Pelz; Steckenbiller).

Nevertheless, to a limited degree, there had been signs of a shift to acknowledge the dark 
sides of colonialism within specific national debates. In Belgium, as early as the 2000s, the 
question of whether the colonial practices of the Congo Free State where, from 1885 to 1908, 
an estimated 10–15 million Africans had died, constituted genocide, was publicly debated. 
Pressure started to be exerted on museums that addressed this colonial period, and demands 
to remove statues of Léopold II, sovereign of the Congo Free State, became audible (Hasian 
and Wood). In the Netherlands too, the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum, one of a number of 
imperial foundations grappling actively with the legacies of this colonial past, started first 
tentative steps of decolonisation of the institution (van Huis) with a temporary exhibition in 
2003, ‘Oostwarts! Kunst, cultuur en kolonialisme’ (Eastwards! Art, culture and colonialism). 
This is now integrated into the museum’s permanent collections and continues in recent dis-
plays such as ‘Heden van het slavernijverleden’ (Afterlives of Slavery). Efforts elsewhere were 
less successful, with the long-awaited refurbishment of displays in the Royal Museum for 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 19 of 34

Central Africa at Tervuren being met with widespread disappointment and major criticism at 
the perceived failure of an opportunity to address the institution’s complicity in the excesses 
of Belgium’s colonial past (Hassett). 

A number of contributors to the current collection – notably Noussis on France, and Arens 
on Belgium – highlight how challenges to colonial memory are no longer contained within 
only national debates. The increasing transnational power of right-wing memory politics pro-
duced a counter-reaction, a growing realisation among the liberal left that colonialism’s lega-
cies need to be challenged in the realm of memory, leading to a much more assertive case for 
a decolonised public sphere across many Western countries.6 Such processes are evident in 
the museum and heritage sector, where groups such as Museum Detox in the UK have held 
heritage institutions to account regarding the attention they pay to deconstructing systems 
of inequality across their operations. Some historians and memory activists, most notably 
on the left and within minority communities, are therefore trying to break down such barri-
ers, and use an understanding of violence now widely socially embedded through Holocaust 
memory to encourage their societies to face up to the brutality of their own imperial pasts. 
Initiatives are both state endorsed and community led, and although there are inevitable ten-
sions between these approaches, complementarities are evident too.

This is very apparent vis-à-vis the memory of transatlantic slavery, which is relatively mar-
ginalised in the wider field of memory studies. Growing activism in this area is complemented 
by an emerging institutional activity that increasingly avoids the one-sided and often deeply 
insensitive emphases on abolitionism – evident at the commemorations of the 150th anni-
versary of the abolition of the slave trade in France in 1998, and the 200th anniversary in 
Britain in 2007. Indeed, the very choices of these dates centred the role of European pow-
ers as saviours, marginalising the experience of the enslaved as both oppressed and libera-
tors. Avoiding past controversies around competing understandings of victimhood and the 
uniqueness of historical traumas (Burzlaff; Zierler), more recent work has also sought con-
structively to bring together study of the ways in which transatlantic slavery and the Shoah 
have been commemorated (Katz). In Learning From the Germans, Susan Neiman suggests, for 
instance, that any stress on ‘comparative evil’ should be replaced by attention to ‘compara-
tive redemption’, allowing a focus on how communities have reacted to and processed their 
memories of difficult pasts. Increasingly, Germany’s postwar confrontation with Nazism was 
publicly promoted as a model in the United States for its reckoning with slavery. 

Recent public commemorations of transatlantic slavery have often been coordinated from 
the top down, although there is a pressing need to acknowledge the importance of the voices 
of the Black activists and politicians who have, often for decades, fought for such histories 
to gain greater visibility within state institutions. The advocacy of French Guianese politician 
Christiane Taubira and Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant was crucial in the passing of the 
Taubira law in 2001, recognising historical slavery as a crime against humanity. The French 
state developed a major commemorative apparatus in this area, focused around annual 
events on 10 May, the National Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade, Slavery and their 
Abolition, and culminating in the establishment in 2019 of the Fondation pour la mémoire de 
l’esclavage. Arguably a means of forging a unified ‘duty of memory’ in an area where – unlike 
that of the Algerian War of Independence – relative consensus exists, this nevertheless rep-
resents a state-endorsed process of ‘coming to the terms with the past’ that regularly attracts 
criticism from the far right. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement national (National 
Rally), formerly the Front national (National Front), has repeatedly called for a ‘rebalancing’ of 
school curricula in this area (Sessions). Elsewhere, responding to the international reparations 

 6 See for example: the Horizon2020 CoHERE project, https://research.ncl.ac.uk/cohere/.

https://research.ncl.ac.uk/cohere/


Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 20 of 34

movement, major initiatives such as Universities Studying Slavery have seen higher education 
institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom addressing the direct and indirect 
place of slavery and its legacies in their histories. A report and series of recommendations 
produced by the University of Glasgow in 2018 (Mullen and Newman) has triggered parallel 
responses in other universities, suggesting various ways in which ‘coming to the terms with 
the past’ continues to benefit from a degree of institutional traction in relation to reparative 
memory practices in the twenty-first century. As such, they resonate with the ‘Rhodes Must 
Fall’ movement, a campaign launched in March 2015 against a statue commemorating Cecil 
Rhodes on the campus of the University of Cape Town, which has become a global movement 
advocating the ‘decolonisation’ of education.

That challenges to Western memory of colonialism and slavery are now part of transna-
tional movements, and no longer confined to national debates, was made clear in the global 
impact of Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020. This movement started in the United 
States in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and saw protests 
across the country that connected a populist president, contemporary state violence and 
the militarisation of the police with much longer histories of racial injustice. A striking 
aspect of the movement was its recourse to historical memory. Its insistence on understand-
ing the long-term history of white supremacy as key to the struggle against contemporary 
racial injustice rapidly led to the targeting of buildings and monuments that represented 
this ideology and the survival of which embodied its persistent power. Waves of defacement, 
crowd-driven toppling and state-sanctioned removal of statues linked to the Civil War-era 
Southern slave-owning Confederacy spread across the United States. Steele’s contribution to 
this special collection shows how a recent white memory politics that grew out of a feeling 
of decline in the United States’ status as a great power – based on a sense that the Afghan 
and Iraqi conflicts were eventually lost – turned to memory politics. As the whiteness of a US 
populist right was rendered fragile, so its leaders revalorised the early twentieth-century ‘Lost 
Cause’ monuments – such as the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia – which evoked 
an earlier era of racial supremacy. It was partly the fact of this revival that made them such a 
focus for removal by protesters in 2020.

The Black Lives Matter movement soon inspired other acts of iconoclasm, particularly in 
post-imperial Western Europe. It was the consciousness of shared political objectives across 
Black communities in the United States and Europe that was crucial in creating a transnational 
challenge to the way in which imperialism and slavery were remembered. In Britain, attacks 
on monuments to those who had been complicit in the slave trade accelerated following the 
toppling of the late nineteenth-century statue to Bristol slaver and philanthropist Edward 
Colston in June 2020. In Belgium, monuments to Léopold II were defaced and removed. The 
movement spread well beyond Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic; this may 
have been due in part to the fact that the historical consciousness it brought to light provided 
a compelling counter-agenda to the ethno-populist visions of nation, identity and memory 
that had intensified over the previous decade. Yet entry into the mainstream of the idea that 
slavery and colonial violence were part of a system of racialised global supremacy that had 
potent legacies in the present quickly became a challenge to a Eurocentric memory culture. 
It placed under question a European tradition of using concern over racial injustice in the 
United States as a displacement tactic to evade confrontation with the continent’s history of 
colonial violence (Younge; Wekker): questions of racisms past and present were now brought 
straight to Europe’s shores. And so there was also resistance and ambivalence. In Germany, 
an insistence on the singularity of Holocaust memory had to be restated, although a process 
leading to an apology for the Namibian genocide was accelerated (Melber). British opponents 
of the sudden, unplanned removal of statues often connected attacks on monuments that 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 21 of 34

commemorated slavery with a mostly invented fear that war memorials were to be next – 
to enable more effectively an argument, through conflation, that such attacks constituted 
an assault on national identity and indeed history itself. As they attempted to contain this 
street-level reckoning, they also responded by invoking, by way of contrast, the measured, 
state-sanctioned nature of German memory culture. In Eastern Europe, all this inspired a 
small Roma Lives Matter movement, and led to marches in solidarity with Black Lives Matters 
in various capitals; nonetheless, rightist populists pointed to its lack of relevance, drawing on 
well-established (and contested) arguments that the region had not participated in European 
colonialism.

Such appropriation is also to be read in the light of an established critique of any con-
temporary overemphasis on remembering history in terms of victims, trauma, melancholia 
and loss – a tendency mirrored in the approach to memory analysed by many of our con-
tributors. It is the presence of such approaches in cultures of public memory that has, it is 
argued, fostered countervailing grievance cultures. Similarly, the dominant focus of memory 
studies has often been – as this collection demonstrates – on past violence, trauma and 
processes of ‘working through’, reconciliation and transitional justice. Thus, more recently, 
there have been sustained critiques of this paradigm, in an attempt to move memory beyond 
its exclusive focus on violence and victimisation (see Arnold-de Simine; Kansteiner; LaCapra; 
Radstone; Rigney).

As stated at the outset, this collection sits at the intersection of two AHRC research themes: 
‘Care for the Future’ and ‘Translating Cultures’. The first of these seeks to historicise the con-
temporary; the second to foster comparative and transnational understandings, rooted in a 
sensitivity to linguistic and cultural variation, that challenge the universalisation of the partic-
ular. Responding to these agendas, the articles gathered here are an attempt to launch a wider 
debate regarding the perceived crisis in public memory practices in ‘coming to terms with the 
past’. As this introduction has demonstrated, they represent at the same time a critique of 
memory studies, an indication of the risks incurred by virtue of the field’s Eurocentrism and 
the need for more active internationalisation and accompanying decolonisation. As such, the 
essays that follow call for attention to a wider range of contexts and paradigms that will per-
mit us to grasp the re-politicisation of memory in the twenty-first century – and the urgent 
need for the elaboration of new paradigms to allow us to understand such shifts. 

5. Structure of the Collection
The contributions in this volume are organised around six main themes. The first centres on 
the tensions in contemporary forms of cosmopolitan memory, starting with Cristian Cercel’s 
piece which finds parallels between the recent boom in memory politics and the global rise of 
neoliberalism. Cercel follows the origins of both phenomena as they developed through the 
1980s and 1990s, describes their spread through their mutual entanglement and ultimately 
demonstrates how their interconnected paths led to the current crisis of both liberal democ-
racy and cosmopolitan memory. These connections generate questions about how best to use 
such memories for the future, and whether it is the future, rather than the past, with which 
we need to come to terms.

The paper by Lea David adopts a critical approach to the global ‘coming to terms with 
the past’ agenda and questions the purported universality and superiority of this model of 
transnational remembering, synonymous as it is with the preservation of human rights. She 
exposes some of the inconsistencies and paradoxes of its design, including the incongruity 
of applying patterns of dealing with trauma drawn from human psychology to something as 
heterogeneous as a whole nation, and reveals how the victim-centric focus of these memory 
politics creates destructive forms of societal competition and hierarchies of victimhood.



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 22 of 34

The following two articles build on the lessons learnt from these tensions and imagine 
different pathways that could lead out of the crisis of memory. The study by Anna Cento 
Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen is based on their results from the UNREST project, an EU-wide 
endeavour that explores the possibilities for a transnational remembering that is neither cos-
mopolitan nor antagonistic. This so-called agonistic mode of memory, drawing on the work of 
Chantal Mouffe, embraces conflict instead of ‘coming to terms’ with it and deliberately avoids 
attaching labels such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to groups or movements. The empirical evidence 
from Bull and Hansen’s case studies, collected from various European museums and other 
heritage institutions, shows the real possibilities that flow from the effective application of 
these alternative memory pathways.

Adopting an approach inspired by postcolonial studies, Karen Salt reimagines Derek 
Walcott’s concept of twilight zone in the context of the present-day crisis in memory politics. 
Her piece looks for different pathways to lead us out of this twilight of remembering and into 
a future that might leave the darkness of the past behind. Salt also stresses, however, that 
the way out lies in a continual process of becoming, rather than in aiming to reach a horizon 
point where that history is wholly forgotten.

The second theme revisits what became the fundamental ‘never again’ moment of 
European history, the memory of the Holocaust. The papers in this section trace the varied 
local manifestations of this supposedly global, or pan-European, memory and expose the 
frequent appropriation of these narratives into local populist movements. 

Jelena Subotić explores how this universalist notion of the Holocaust as the ultimate sym-
bol of the failure of human rights is frequently compared with the crimes of the communist 
regimes in Europe’s former Eastern Bloc. Drawing on examples from various museums and 
commemorative practices, she follows the genesis of these developments, dating back to the 
acceptance of these countries into the shared memory space of the European Union, and 
then details how this creation of apparently seamless parallels between Nazi and communist 
victimhood feeds into nascent nationalist and populist narratives which consciously militate 
against the model of cosmopolitan memory. 

Isabel Sawkins’s article maps the development of Russia’s memory of the Holocaust under 
Putin. Previously, the specificity of Jewish suffering was not emphasised over the wider 
national narrative of the Second World War. Yet as a Holocaust memory has emerged there 
for the first time, it has served Russian nationalist aims rather than become part of the liberal 
cosmopolitan version. Using the example of a celebrated film centred around a Soviet leader 
of a revolt in an extermination camp in Poland, Sawkins demonstrates how the Putin gov-
ernment uses stories of Russian Jewish heroism in order to emphasise the country’s central 
position on the Eurasian stage, as its depiction intentionally shifts from ambivalence over the 
suffering of Russian Jews during the Second World War towards the glorification of heroes of 
the resistance in more recent years. 

Stephan Neuhäuser illustrates Austria’s complicated relationship with its involvement in 
the Second World War through the arduous process of opening the country’s first national 
history museum. His contribution traces the complications and controversies surrounding 
the attempts to build the House of Austrian History in central Vienna, details the various 
methods through which its opponents tried to forestall its opening and discredit its aims, and 
finally links these movements with a nationwide reluctance to ‘come to terms with’ – or work 
through – the country’s past.

The third theme leaves the European realm behind and traces the connections between 
new populist memory practices and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism across the globe. 
It starts with two South American examples. Nina Schneider scrutinises Jair Bolsonaro’s 
rise to power in Brazil while asking whether the election of a president openly supporting 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 23 of 34

right-wing dictatorships and other human rights violations can be ascribed to a ‘failure’ of 
memory politics. Her detailed overview of the Brazilian attempts – or the lack thereof – to 
‘come to terms with’ the country’s violent past on both ends of the political spectrum reveals 
ample scope for unintentional forgetting, and she indicates how these cases of seemingly 
nationwide amnesia are frequently exploited and deepened as part of Bolsonaro’s politics.

Emilio Crenzel’s article looks back at the three and a half decades since the fall of Argentina’s 
dictatorial regime, contemplating how the transitional justice structures, and in particular, the 
country’s pronounced emphasis on incorporating human rights into the judicial system, has 
influenced memory narratives. Through detailed analysis of four present-day judicial trials that 
took place under the current Macri administration, Crenzel demonstrates how a gradual ero-
sion of the human rights paradigm has been justified through reinterpretations of the country’s 
own history of dictatorship, and how the inter-American system for the protection and defence 
of human rights was undermined in right-wing attempts to return justice to the national sphere. 
He also explores the strength of the backlash against these tendencies from those liberals and 
progressives who refuse to equate ‘coming to terms with the past’ with political impunity. 

Across the Pacific, Deirdre McKay uses examples from recent Filipino history to investigate 
one of the newest and as yet rarely explored agents of the present-day memory crisis: social 
media. Through her study of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign and his depiction of 
the national memory of the Martial Law Era of the 1980s, McKay demonstrates how Facebook 
and other platforms were deliberately used to create alternative interpretations of history, 
and how the global reach of these media allowed for their spread far beyond the country’s 
official borders. Her study reveals just how important it is to include such material in any dis-
cussions on memory politics, given an increasingly globalised world that uses social media as 
its primary means of communication, while also emphasising the new challenges associated 
with the archiving and evaluation of these sources.

Lastly, Brent Steele’s chapter addresses the United States under Donald Trump as the presi-
dent seeks parallels between the military politics of his administration and the memory of 
the American Civil War in the Southern states. By juxtaposing the reinterpretation of Civil 
War memory through the Lost Cause mythology and the erection of memorials in the South 
against the trauma of military defeats following the War on Terror of the 2000s, Steele dis-
covers how the concept of national loss may precipitate the rise of populist memory politics 
within a wider context of socio-political and economic crises. During the demonstrations in 
the United States in May and June 2020 that followed the killing of George Floyd by police in 
Minneapolis, those monuments to the Confederacy that had been revalorised by a recrudes-
cent white populism, such as the Robert E. Lee statue and the Daughters of the Confederacy 
building in Richmond, were targeted by protesters.

The fourth theme traces the pathways of right-wing populist memories in European coun-
tries that were once colonisers. It starts with two French case studies. Paul Max Morin’s 
chapter demonstrates how the unchallenged coexistence of conflicting memories, aiming to 
appease all sides while not asking any uneasy questions about the past, can easily feed into 
the rise of extremisms present in Europe since the turn of the millennium. Using examples 
from the discourses surrounding the Algerian War of Independence in France, Morin shows 
how an allegedly peaceful method of remembrance devoid of critical reflections – as cur-
rently pursued by the French president Emmanuel Macron – leaves scope for easy appro-
priation of these national memories by groups on both sides of the political spectrum, and 
how the lack of a clear national narrative can result in a reversal of the victim–perpetrator 
dynamic, fuelled by nationwide insecurities and frustrations.

Giorgos Noussis then explores how the different presidencies of the past two decades 
have addressed the topic of national memory. He focuses on the French activist Maurice 



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to DecolonisationArt. 17, page 24 of 34

Audin, whose death in Algeria under French military torture became a symbol of the antico-
lonial struggle. By juxtaposing Nicolas Sarkozy’s anti-repentance approach with Emmanuel 
Macron’s ostentatiously public apology to Audin’s widow, Noussis positions each of these 
stances in their respective socio-political contexts, reveals the motives underpinning the dif-
ferent approaches to national memories and links these with the difficult transformation of 
a living memory into a cultural one.

Britain’s memory politics vis-à-vis the country’s colonial past is recounted by Michelle 
Gordon, who demonstrates how the concept of British ‘exceptionalism’ helped crystallise a 
mythological image of a less violent colonial past within the context of recent Brexit debates. 
These narratives continue resurfacing in political as well as in public discussions, and Gordon 
demonstrates the dangerous potential of such partial depictions of the past when used as a 
tool in legitimising exclusionist practices. She suggests that both the core of the problem and 
its solution can be found in the communication channels between historians and the wider 
public, and calls for a greater contextualisation of Britain’s colonial past within the broader 
discourse of national history.

Sarah Arens considers the role of visual cultures in the complex web of memories tied 
to the colonial past in Africa through an analysis centred around a comic book set during 
the First World War in Belgian Congo. Behind the story of an unlikely friendship between 
a Belgian colonial officer and a native soldier, Arens traces patterns of preconceptions that 
resonate in Belgian society to this day and demonstrates that the frequently underestimated 
medium of comic books or graphic novels can provide a nuanced depiction of competing 
national memories while remaining accessible to a wide range of audiences.

The fifth theme addresses left-wing responses to these new memory politics, examining 
the recurring patterns of the violent past(s) and questioning the echoes and limitations 
of reconciliation practices. Noa Vaisman’s article, centred on the disappeared Argentinian 
activist Santiago Maldonado, follows the ripples of the country’s dictatorial regime awak-
ened through the actions and discourses surrounding this disappearance. She explores how 
the conflicting narratives of a violent history can help to recover these patterns despite the 
claims that the past has already been dealt with, and ultimately highlights the limits of 
such practices within the broader context of the transitional justice movements in Latin 
America.

Ronald Suresh Roberts draws on his personal involvement with South Africa’s Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s and reflects on how its approach has been con-
sidered and reconsidered in the three decades following its conception. He reveals how the 
frameworks of ‘transitional justice’ came to eclipse the original aims of the African National 
Congress government, and how the anticolonial and anti-apartheid aims that were at the core 
of the ANC’s agenda developed under the influence of global philanthropists into a recycled 
version of an older colonial ideology.

Finally, the sixth theme goes beyond strictly local case studies and looks at ways in which 
populism and memory negotiate increasingly international spaces. Donald Maingi offers an 
insight into the work of Kenyan artists who used art to process their country’s history in the 
aftermath of the violent Kenyan post-election crisis of 2007–2008, as well as their country’s 
shifting international position. Through political satire that combines global populism with 
local memories of the failings in Kenya’s transitional justice process, the artists create vivid 
connections between the errors of the past and the present-day neoliberal crisis in memory 
politics. Maingi’s use of examples from various artistic media, including paintings, political 
cartoons and puppet show posters, highlights the potential for art to be a compelling unifier 
and powerful stage for scrutinising a community’s relationship with its past.



Forsdick et al: Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation Art. 17, page 25 of 34

Lastly, Kayoko Takeda’s research combines memory studies with translation studies in a pro-
ject analysing the English versions of speeches from Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, relat-
ing to various points of the country’s contested war history. Focusing on frequently debated 
keywords such as ‘comfort women’ and ‘forced labour’, her comparison demonstrates that 
the past can be strategically adapted and manipulated in the process of interpreting to suit 
the expectations of target audiences, showing the crucial role of translation in producing 
transnational memories.

Acknowledgements
We offer our gratitude to David Clarke, Martin Thomas, Raluca Grosescu and Max Silverman 
for providing incisive comments on earlier drafts of this introduction. We would also like 
to express our deep gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for 
funding this initiative; and to Andrew Thompson and Henry French, who, as theme fel-
lows, supported this collaboration between its Care for the Future and Translating Cultures 
programmes. We also wish to thank Hannah Dutton and Susan Leedham, who provided 
vital support and encouragement throughout this initiative; and proofreader Martin Thom, 
whose attention to detail and creativity greatly improved our texts. The contributions of 
Charles Forsdick and Eva Spišiaková to this special issue were part of their work on the 
AHRC Translating Cultures leadership fellowship (Phase II) (AH/N504476/1), the support 
of which they acknowledge with gratitude. James Mark acknowledges the support of the 
AHRC-funded ‘The Criminalisation of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global 
Perspective’ (AH/N504580/1) project, and a Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 
the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) fellowship, both of which funded time for 
research, writing and editing.

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How to cite this article: Forsdick, C, Mark, J and Spišiaková, E 2020 Introduction. From Populism to 
Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century. Modern Languages Open, 2020(1): 
17 pp. 1–34. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.342

Published: 04 August 2020

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	1. Overview 
	2. Emergence of a Paradigm  
	3. New Right, New Populisms: Challenging the Liberal Paradigm 
	4. From the Neocolonial to the Decolonial: Alternatives to the Liberal Memory Paradigm 
	5. Structure of the Collection 
	Acknowledgements 
	References