Professor Mihai has written an engaging, provocative, and occasionally frustrating study of the ills of political memory and of the work of those engaged in “aesthetic care,” a care designed to display those limitations and, in so doing, to open a new narrative space in their place. At the core of this book, then, is an argument that political memory has, in some cases, effected a “double erasure” masking both mass complicity in past injustices and the radical flaws of resistance to them. Still other shortcomings in political memory cry out for this work of “heretical” care: excluded past voices, individualist/legalistic reductionism in understanding the breadth of coresponsibility, a “masculinist” emphasis on heroism in resistance narratives (pp. 4, 6), and unequal access (in the present) to meaning making. Mihai argues that these two broad kinds of erasure, and the tainted political memory they pass on to present-day inheritors, are the fields in which artworkers struggle to render the “hermeneutical space” more just and inclusive. Those acts of artistic care, disruption, and making room for the new are the central focus of this book, and not memory as a particular relationship to the past.

In tightly knit consecutive chapters, Mihai explores the political memory of three historical events: World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, the overthrow of Ceauşescu and his regime in Romania, and the transformation of South Africa from an apartheid society into a democracy. In each case, the author’s focus is less on the events that figure prominently in the memory narratives of these communities, and more on the artist-memory activist’s caring intervention in shaping a more just narrative, one that (unlike the dominant social “doxa”) does not hide from sight the more difficult facets of the past: its broad complicity and tainted resistance. It is noteworthy, and tells us something about political memory, that much of the material discussed in these three chapters will be largely unfamiliar (outside of their communities of origin) to all but a specialized readership, and even once summarized (as they are in this book) will likely not move readers as they might a person who has lived in the midst of that particular community of memory.

If the political memories mentioned in the three case study chapters are mostly outside the horizon of readers not embedded in their bounded Lebenswelt, what is nevertheless clear is that they signal the author’s commitment to a “hoping … ‘agential’” (p. 35) view of the world. It is that orientation that motivates this study and provides an alternative path to thinking about political memory. The caring memory activist searches out “fissures in the national doxa” and transforms it into a space where “dissonant memories … challenge hegemonic traditions” (pp. 38–39; quoting Charles Mills). This artwork intervention in political memory is variously described as prosthetic, hesitation producing, and interrupting the dominant habitus (pp. 54, 56, 57). Here “refusenik” art aims at creating a plural space in memory, emerging from a “caring” comportment, one that is inclusive and supportive of social ties (pp. 61–62). Helpful in this is an orientation not simply to the historical victim of injustice, and the past wrongs she suffered, but also toward present persons, those who are downstream of that past and what they can hope to be in the future (p. 122). By challenging the “official story,” and opening political memory to formerly ignored visions and voices, “caring refuseniks,” Mihai argues, do some of the foundational work for that latter possibility. In short, her study seeks to show how art can “reboot” political imagination (pp. 237, 239, 241). Political memory is not simply (as Aristotle wrote) “about the past” but also about the present and future, temporal registers whose shape it can help (for better or worse) to determine by freezing it in a false national doxa or opening it up to the kaleidoscope of voices and visions.

Readers may wonder—and the often esoteric academic terminology and references in this book may well provoke them to do just that—how artwork can accomplish something as widely and profoundly transformative as disrupting a community’s Lebenswelt. But more important than the question of art’s transformative efficacy in the here and now is the issue of questions about our relationship to the past and its denizens that are largely absent from this study given its orientation toward an encounter with political memory meant precisely to free us from its bonds. So, for example, what we owe (or can owe) to past persons, to former persons who in death seem to become nonentities is not discussed here. Similarly, questions of how responsibility can flow forward and be attributed to persons who were not alive and therefore were without agency at the time of the crime’s commission are not raised.

Showing us how art can “reboot the political imagination” (p. 237) is this book’s principal ambition, and there is a great deal to be learned from Mihai’s treatment of it. In particular, and in several variations, we see her desacralize political memory and the imaginary it sustains, showing them to be intimately bound up with struggle, domination, falsehood, and idealization. In short, Mihai insists on putting politics back into our understanding of memory, a theme that sometimes is accorded a diffident, almost reverential, treatment. At the same time, however, her study passes over, or treats only lightly, issues of duties to the past and remembrance, the moral standing (if any) of the dead, and the continuity of political communities as persisting and accountable entities. Already an excellent study, this book would have been made even better by sustained reflection on our relationship to the past, not simply as material to be transformed for the sake of a more just future but as an enduring part of our moral world arrayed across time.