History and Collective Memory: Dual Narratives of the Past
How are memories formed and how do they shape our understanding of the past, and in this case, history in particular? Maurice Halbwachs believes that memory is a social institution, a set of individual memories constructed out of personal experience but, more importantly, out of information learned from social groups of which people are a part of. Halbwachs raises a crucial debate in the field of memory studies that seeks to delineate and synthesize the relationship between individual and collective memory. Historians seek to examine the relationship between the two, and to explain how memories influence not only the way events are remembered collectively, but the way that histories are written.
David Blight’s Race and Reunion is a model work in this project. In this monograph, Blight traces the ways in which differing narratives about (or collective memories of) the Civil War competed to become the dominant national memory of the war’s events and aftermath, and eventually the dominant historical narrative (until historians in the 1960s began work to uncover forgotten narratives and competing memories). Adroitly, Blight demonstrates how individual memories shaped social memories to write the dominant narrative and then how, interestingly, these dominant narratives created a kind of cultural amnesia surrounding the role of African Americans and slavery in the war. Though reception is a tricky problem, Blight’s wide range of sources demonstrates a breadth of information defining how competing groups in post-Civil War America came together to shape the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War. Blight’s book is an intriguing work of history as well as a thorough investigation into the way collective memories are formed. Though there is evidence of the role of individual memories in the narrative, it is not Blight’s project to demonstrate how collective memory shapes individual memory.
In this way, Blight is attempting to do the opposite of what Alison Landsberg does in her book Prosthetic Memory. Landsberg’s goal is to trace how collective memories can be transferred to individuals through the means of mass media so that their consiousnesses will be altered to create what she dubs “prosthetic memories.” For Landsberg, these memories are meant to inspire empathy in the receiver that will then allow this individual to take empathetic action not possible before the implanting of this memory. Landsberg’s argument is extremely provocative, but it raises many questions. For example, as raised in our discussion, what is the difference between memory and knowledge? Can an experiential museum like the Holocaust Museum really implant memories of the event in a person who has no previous experience of the Holocaust Museum, or is it simply imparting knowledge to the visitor? How can one “have” an experience that they have never actually experienced? And while Landsberg’s book is more a work of presentism, she provides no historical examples of this process being successfully carried out. There are problems of reception – she provides no proof through investigation of these supposed memory receivers that historical actors’ consciousnesses were actually changed. Whereas Blight’s book traces a demonstrable history, Landsberg’s only posits an interesting possibility with no proof of concept. She might argue that Halbwachs social groups have been transformed into mass media culture that helps shape the memories of previously disparate peoples, but even in Halbwachs’ formulation the individual must have individual memories with which to corroborate social memories. For Landsberg this is not so.
For me the most confounding work on collective memory which we read was Lipsitz’s Time Passages. Lipsitz argues that popular culture such as TV and rock and roll keep alive collective memories of groups who are not part of the hegemonic discourse, for example working class immigrants and African Americans. This idea of counter-narratives is provocative because it demonstrates how popular culture can be a dialectic. But it also raises the question: once these forms are synthesized into popular culture, don’t they lose their place as a counter-narrative? There is no work on reception – we hear nothing from cultural receivers about the way they processed the narrative of these cultural forms. And there is no work on cultural amnesia – how there forms may have their counter-narratives erased once they are absorbed into the mainstream. Demonstrating that popular culture can be a repository or reflection of collective memory is a valid project, but often gets lost in Lipsitz’s confusing and incomplete presentation.
