Encountering memory studies

Will Ranger (WR): I first came across you as the host of Realms of Memory because I was looking around for resources for students who were interested in memory studies. What was your first encounter with memory studies as a field of academic study? How did it impact the way you thought about the past as impacting the present?

Rick Derderian (RD): Coming out of an American context, there is lots of debate over what is taught in schools, how we remember our national past, which monuments should we keep, and which should we tear down. I really have not tried to frame the podcast within the context of memory studies. There are theories when you read each book; the author is going to frame and set up their perspective and refer to scholarship, but the podcast is more about highlighting their work. For instance, over the past few weeks I have interviewed Jeffrey Olick, who has spent his career both shaping and trying to write a history of the field of memory studies.

My first interaction with memory was when I was an exchange student in France. I lived with a family, and the father was a retired history professor. This was in 1986/87, and there were articles that came out on the memory of Vichy France and collaboration, the Holocaust and other related topics. There were big-name trials going on of people who had still survived that past and collaborated in that history, so that got me interested in it. This was also when the National Front was on the rise. The far-right National Front, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, became a force on the national scene on this anti-immigrant and xenophobic platform with slogans such as ‘France for the French’ and ‘we have 4 million unemployed and 4 million immigrants’. This rhetoric triggered protests and one young person was killed during the student demonstrations. He was of North African origin and was beaten to death on the street where I was living. There was a grassroots form of memorial down the street, so you could not avoid these questions of memory in your everyday life. Although I had all these different historical interests like the Holocaust, I became aware of how immigration was a huge topic in France, especially relating to North Africans. Eventually I drifted away from Vichy France and the Holocaust and moved across to looking at North Africans, though I saw lots of parallels with those two histories.

WR: You have mentioned your interest in North Africa and France and the connection between France’s imperial past and immigration. Was there anything in particular aside from these sorts of personal encounters that drew you to this area?

RD: I had an interest in France and French literature, and there was only one bookstore in Boston that you could go to look at French books. I was looking through that section, and I bumped into this guy who was working there. He was of North African descent, and I started explaining my interest. He pulled some books off the shelf, and that became my introduction to the children of mainly Algerian immigrants who grew up in France and were writing books about their past. Memory was a huge part of it. All of this cultural production was to do with recalling their past, recalling a larger immigration history and narrating a French-Algerian present.

A lot of the scholarship that came out at the time in history was influenced by Pierre Nora and concerns about the nature of memory, how fleeting memory is in the media age, and what needs to be done to preserve sites of national memory. People were criticising Nora in France, asking how much he was leaving out of national memory, including the experiences of Algerians. The biggest name in French immigration studies was Gérard Noiriel. This guy did the pioneering scholarship, writing a lot about memory in the process. There were places where immigrants had transited through in large numbers, but it was not taught in schools, it was not memorialised, and his scholarship was to try to write this history and to create an awareness of France’s immigration past.

Decades later, it is still a political issue and Marine Le Pen is very popular. If France had a national election today, [the National Rally, formerly the National Front] could very well win on a platform that has not changed a whole lot since her father’s time in charge. The irony of it all was that they needed workers – here is a country that had its population decline in the 19th century, and they needed people to grow and rebuild. France got them from Europe up until the interwar years, and then they got them from their former colonies, specifically North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, after World War II. This was not part of their national history, but it is still what happened.

WR: Speaking of ancestry, the Realms of Memory website notes that you are the grandson of a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Has this family connection impacted the way that you, as a scholar, have approached questions of postmemory and intergenerational trauma?

RD: I do not know the extent to which it has influenced the way I approach these topics, but I definitely think we are living in a time where there is a lot more attention to traumatic histories. I recognise that this is also a criticism of memory studies too. Typically, countries remember their past more in terms of celebrating victories and achievements, but in more recent history, there is more work being done on memories of different communities, difficult histories that have not received a lot of attention or have been buried. This is where I would locate myself. I grew up with this Armenian past, and my grandmother was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. My grandfather’s father left at the end of the 19th century with the rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, and he came from this town called Adana. This is sometimes referred to as the testing ground of the Armenian genocide. I had grown up with stories from my grandmother of her town of Erzurum being razed and her father getting killed. She was only five years old, and her brother was seven. They dressed him up as a girl, they marched these people long distances, and they were preyed upon along the way. I was aware of the fact that this is a history that was not recognised by the Turkish government or by the United States (US). My interest is connected to my own family history, and maybe the orientation is influenced by that as well. How much bearing does that have on what I read and the conversations I have? It is hard to say.

WR: I am also curious about podcasting as a medium to discuss memory, as these are often quite big and sometimes quite heavy topics. I think the general perception is that, although podcasting has obviously existed for a long time, it has exploded and become really mainstream since the COVID-19 pandemic. There are lots of interesting history podcasts, but there are also a couple of memory-focused ones. Of course, Realms of Memory is one; the Slow Memory podcast was a great project, and there is also Vis-a-Vis out of Columbia University. What is it about the podcast as a format that you think enables such fruitful conversations about memory?

RD: It is definitely nice to have time. It is the luxury of the format that they have time to reflect, and usually, even if it is an hour and a half long, the time goes by fast. There is a bigger question with a lot of these long-form podcasts, whether it is Joe Rogan, Dan Carlin, or somebody else who goes on for hours, which is – how much of that do people actually listen to? You can look at your analytics and look at retention, but the other interesting thing about this is people can discover you at any point in time. I had an episode on the Rwandan genocide where I interviewed this guy who is a big name at Boston University and was the man on the ground for Human Rights Watch. That episode took off a long time after it came out.

One of my most downloaded episodes is on the memory of the civil war in El Salvador. I think there is a big Salvadorian community in the US (United States), but somehow that information got out and gained traction. Podcasting makes these topics accessible to a general audience and allows these stories to get retold to people outside of academia and/or to communities that have forgotten them. Finally, the exciting thing about podcasting is that there is a global audience for these stories. I can see people in Nigeria or Rwanda downloading episodes that are connected to the histories of those countries that maybe have not been done justice, and regular listeners in the US, France, and elsewhere have the potential to encounter stories that they would not have learned about in school.

Theoretical trends

WR: You have already touched on some bigger theoretical points, but I wanted to drill down into some of these in a bit more detail. I am struck by the name of the podcast, and I can spy over your left shoulder the full trilogy of Nora’s books. These were famously about national identity and the maintenance of a discursive framework that would underpin Frenchness. Given what we have seen in terms of the seeming proliferation of disputes over culture and memory, do you think that in our current historical moment memory can still help provide a sense of sort of national identity or is it too disputed now?

RD: The assumption behind your question is that nations need a unifying memory, and the assumption beyond that is that this memory has to be something uplifting. Jeffrey Olick talks about the ‘politics of regret’, and in the US, we are seeing this play out as we are gearing up for the 250th anniversary of the start of the American revolution. I live 15 minutes away from Lexington, where the ‘shot heard around the world’ took place. The Trump Administration wants to focus solely on celebrating our accomplishments or achievements. We are going to have a garden of heroes with 250 lifelike statues of Americans who have achievements that we can feel proud of. Institutions like the Smithsonian are being pressured to drop anything out of line with that agenda. It is really a 19th-century approach: top-down, where the state orchestrates the past for you. But how can such a memory be unifying today? There are just so many competing memories fighting for time and space – everyone wants to tell their story and often those stories are kind of depressing.

The danger with such an approach is that we go the way of a Yugoslavia or a Lebanon where we are just going to be divided with memories that fail to relate to other groups. I did interview David Reiff (Reference Reiff2016), where he spoke in praise of forgetting. Reiff was a war correspondent in places like Bosnia, and he saw memory being kept alive for the purpose of inciting violence. So, I try to look at this pluralisation as more the democratisation of memory rather than a ‘fragmentation’ or ‘splintering’ of memory into tribalised populations warring over whose story gets told.

WR: On that point, as someone who lives in the United Kingdom, there is an ongoing debate in Northern Ireland about how different communities remember events in completely different ways. One such example is the year 1917. For Republicans and Nationalists, this is the year of the Easter Rising and the subsequent British crackdown. However, for Unionists this year is dominated by memories of loss at the Battle of the Somme, where Ulstermen died in their thousands under a British flag. Although these different emphases might be fine in isolation, it becomes more challenging when you try to build a demos or shared civic entity when you are disagreeing on such fundamental things.

RD: And of course the role of governments complicates this further. When memory becomes official and incorporated, it can become thin, especially when it gets performative. Jenny Wüstenberg (Reference Wüstenberg2017) has a book on memory activists, and that was her point. The Holocaust becomes official memory in Germany, then Germany reunites, and you get a lot of people who live through the experience of the dictatorship in East Germany. They have this first-hand experience, but the memory establishment, who did not live through Nazi Germany, still emphasise the Nazi period. To focus on life in East Germany or to highlight what the Stasi did is effectively a distraction.

WR: You mentioned Wüstenberg’s work. I have been recently thinking about her idea of slow memory and how individuals and groups remember long-standing processes like deindustrialisation or globalisation (Wüstenberg Reference Wüstenberg and Kaplan2023). Is it actually possible to create memorials or monuments to processes? Can you have a memorial to the victims of something that is so abstract?

RD: It is almost like when people talk about a frog that is slowly being boiled to death as it does not notice the temperature increasing. How do you memorialise that frog slowly being boiled to death? It is a way of looking at climate change. You may not see all the horrendous things that are happening, but the impact and trauma are still very real. I interviewed Sonja Pieck, who had written a book on the green belt in Germany. In Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation Along the Former Iron Curtain (Pieck Reference Pieck2023) she takes the formerly militarised space of the Berlin Wall and looks at German environmentalism. These activists notice there are a lot of species and complex ecosystems that exist on both sides of the border, and this also happens in the demilitarised zone between the Koreas, where there are stories of survival of endangered species.

Cut to German unification, and the question became – are you just going to let developers just grab this land and pulverise everything that is there? Are you going to preserve these species that have survived in this area where you cannot build? Pieck’s point is that an environmentalist may take an interest in the habitat of a particular songbird, but the ordinary person does not necessarily care about this or that endangered species. They care about an area because it is tied into real memories that they have, and so environmentalists must recognise that they have to engage people who live in these areas and memorialise that landscape in ways that are meaningful so as to actually protect the natural world.

How do you memorialise slow changes like glaciers melting or forests disappearing? That is a more difficult one. I have heard examples of people holding funerals for glaciers as a way of trying to mark a loss by humanising nature. People are doing that work, although it is a difficult process.

WR: On that idea of slow processes, I have been wanting to look into more is the notion of economic trauma, which seems inherently more nebulous than acts of physical violence. For example, in the US, the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the Great Depression are, of course, well studied, but when we think about the Great Depression in terms of memory, these recollections are often centred around Franklin Roosevelt as an individual or the programmes of the New Deal. The hardship is depicted in literature and culture, with Steinbeck springing to mind, but as a medium, physical memorials appear less able to encapsulate this more abstract cause of trauma and loss.

RD: If you look at the episode on Liverpool, I interviewed Jessica Moody on the memory of the slave trade; a lot of that was on the economics of the city (Moody Reference Moody2020). Liverpool became a significant city because of the wealth of the slave trade, and then that collapsed, and her whole point was the persistence of memory. How do people talk about Liverpool? The whole story becomes one of overcoming the collapses. It is not the horrors of the slave trade they remember. If anything, people in Britain remember abolition and the role that Liverpool played in that feel-good part of the story. For Liverpool as a city, the founding of the modern urban space overlaps with its entanglement with slavery and a big part of the architecture comes from the economic benefits that came from that trade. Thankfully, people are starting to talk about slavery, but we are not as free to remember as you might think. We are stuck in a certain way of talking that shapes our thinking. From my own life, American exceptionalism is such a prominent paradigm that is hard to break out of, and for people in Liverpool I am sure that the slow process of enrichment has, until now, been uncoupled from the actual realities of enslavement.

WR: I have only got one more theoretical question which is completely unrelated to everything we talked about, but it is about something that is increasingly prominent in these discussions – artificial intelligence (AI). AI is increasingly playing a role in politics but also perceptions of the past. Memory, Media, Mind has done a special issue fairly recently about AI and the impact it could have on memory studies. How do you think AI could play a role in disrupting memory narratives or indeed reinforcing them?

RD: You are kind of getting into the realm of The Matrix! You can take elements of the past and reformulate them however you want, and this can be frightening in a context where you have, say, a fragmented media landscape and people are already picking and choosing what they want to believe. In the US, we have had this event that happened recently where cities have become more militarised and a woman, Renee Good, was recently shot. Everyone may have a camera now, but there was still a national debate about whether the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officer was doing legitimate self-defence or whether this officer put himself in harm’s way and killed her for no legitimate reason. As a result of this proliferation of visual resources, people can pick and choose depending on the media landscape in which they want to live.

The question of AI only further complicates this because then you can just create whatever you want and thus manipulate people’s emotional reactions to make partisan points. This can, of course, add to the fragmentation of the past as these, often quite realistic, images can reinforce myths and assumptions about a given nation or group. If you wanted to, you could draw quite a catastrophic picture of the present and contrast this with an idealised image of the past. That does not mean it is all bad for historians. Digital archives could try to make use of AI to try to create an immersive experience of the past such that you can draw people in and try to get them to feel something in a different way. What was it like to be in the community of Tulsa in the lead up to the massacre that happened in 1921? AI could bring testimonies and sources to life and create immersive films that you can be part of. So yes, you could fabricate a past based on everything you want to be true of some sort of political objective, but well-intentioned curators could really try to educate and implicate people in what was happening in a given time or place.

WR: Something that caught my eye in the New York Times (Grant Reference Grant2024) was looking at the circulation of AI images on social media. As well as some images that were playfully edited, there were some that the AI was not aware were historically inaccurate, like Black Nazis or Popes of various different genders. It is clearly a matter of historical literacy, but the danger for memory studies would be that mass uncritical acceptance of AI as an abstracted intellectual authority may create a situation not only where memories do not correspond with the past in very obvious ways. At a time of social acceleration (Rosa Reference Rosa2013; Ranger Reference Ranger2020), memories are subject to such rapid change to the point that correcting these falsehoods becomes nearly impossible. This is probably more of a pedagogical or digital citizenship point, but the implications of AI for memory seem potentially profound.

RD: Well, you are basically creating this superintelligence that is going to learn and continue to evolve its own with a mode of thinking. The frightening part is the super intelligence where you think you are creating the pet that you can use, but it could end up eating you in the end or you could become its pet in the future. Clearly, I have seen way too many Terminator movies for my own good!

Concluding remarks

WR: To conclude, I have two more quick-fire questions about the podcast itself. First of all, is there anything that you have covered on the podcast that you found unexpectedly interesting?

RD: There was one on the Mississippi Burning murders. I had seen the film about these civil rights workers that go down to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and got killed by the police and the [Ku Klux] Klan. I was struck by Clare Whitlinger’s (Reference Whitlinger2020) book Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi. We typically will look at efforts to commemorate a difficult past, but we often fail to focus on how it can lead to lasting changes. Whitlinger went into this community and lived there for a stretch of time, interviewing people who were involved in efforts to commemorate these murders. The community itself had tried to forget and bury it, but they held big commemorative events decades later, and eventually that led to the prosecution of one of the murderers. It also led to changes in the education system, illustrating the transformative power of rediscovered memories of the past. I guess that is as close as I have come to, but linking back to the potential over-emphasis on tragic memory, this is now a feel-good memory in that there was a positive outcome of it. The campaign did not just deal with a difficult past; it transformed these memories into lasting civic change.

WR: And finally, on a related theme, is there anything that you have yet to come across on the podcast that you are hoping to cover in future?

RD: You mentioned economics, and it would be interesting to do more on those different crises. I did have one idea about the Great Depression, so that would be fascinating to get into. I would love to find something on the memory of mental health and memories of the criminal justice system, and indeed how these can overlap. I interviewed a woman who wrote a biographical story on a homeless person who became an activist in San Francisco. And there is a memory element to that which opened my eyes to what is being done on how we remember the marginalised. But you have definitely suggested a lot of things that I have not read into, particularly how you memorialise these slow changes.