In the past year, the question of whether and how to remember American history has become an urgent one. The Confederate flag was removed from the state capital in Columbus, South Carolina. A commemoration of southern heritage for some, it remains a paean to slavery and racism for others. Students at Yale University likewise advocated that the university rename Calhoun College, named after John C. Calhoun, a defender of slavery, and Princeton University students want Woodrow Wilson’s name removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs because of his segregationist beliefs and actions. Meanwhile, the Equal Justice Initiative has begun the process of erecting markers at the sites where each of the 3,959 lynchings of African Americans took place between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950. Yet others worry that removing names from university buildings simply encourages amnesia about the conditions under which the enterprises were named, and that marking sites of lynching has the potential to incite resentment and more violence. How, then, should the United States deal with its unjust past? Can we remove the influence of a racist history by removing its symbols—its flags, statues, and memorials? Or does removing the symbols allow that history to influence us all the more surreptitiously? Will documentations of past lynchings and anti-black riots allow Americans to finally come to terms with their past, or will it, instead, provoke further violence? What does it mean to come to terms with the past? Does it mean replacing one official history with another that may be equally incomplete? Or does it mean fostering an inclusive sense of the past, open to revision?

P.J. Brendese’s valuable book, The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics, notes the fundamental tension between facing up to the past and letting it bind us, between the amnesia or amnesty that allows for a fresh slate and the duty to remember those we have wronged, between, as he puts it, remembering to forget and, citing Pablo de Grieff, remembering “what our fellow citizens cannot be expected to forget” (p. 65.) Brendese’s focus is democracy. On the one hand, he writes, “amnesty and amnesia appear to be a precondition of democratic engagement free of violent retribution and division.” On the other hand, an “inclusive public commemoration is integral to the very identity of the polis” (p. 7). How then are we to think of public memory in a democracy?

First, what do we mean by democracy? Brendese sets it between two poles of possibility and impossibility, where democracy as possible is democracy as a stable institutional form and democracy as impossible is utopian. Radical democracy, the democracy he favors, amounts to the possibility of the impossible. Here, he follows Sheldon Wolin for whom democracy is “inherently unstable, inclined toward anarchy, and identified with revolution … resistant to the rationalizing conceptions of power and its organization” (p. 21). The importance of public memory to democracy, on this account, lies in recalling moments when the impossible became possible or, in other words, in fostering “memories of radical resistance to oppressive power, collective responses to grievances, and participation that does not rely on proxies” (p. 23).

If democracy is the possibility of the impossible, however, what is memory? Brendese notes three dimensions that it involves: active memory, referring to the memory of those parts of the past that can be consciously recalled and written into official histories; what William E. Connolly refers to as virtual memory, comprising inherited assumptions, orientations, and what Pierre Bourdieu calls “habitus,” or the muscle memory in which the past is written into our bodies and perceptions; and haunting memory, or the irruption of flashbacks and traumas that occur unbidden and irrepressibly. How these different facets of memory interact and play out is the focus of Brendese’s multilayered reflections. He begins with Sophocles’ play, Antigone and moves on to consider the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the essays of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Mexico’s dirty war, and ongoing mass incarceration in the United States.

While Thebes is no democracy, Brendese’s interest in Antigone centers, on the one hand, on Antigone’s love of the impossible as manifested in her commitment to burying her brother and, on the other hand, on the tragedy of Creon’s attempt to control active memory by condemning her to death. Creon’s actions lead, of course, to the death of his son and wife, but Brendese is just as interested in their ineffectuality, for Antigone cannot be forgotten: “Even before her physical death, her memory comes back as a past that ‘rebites’ the demos when the city mourns her” (p. 31). Brendese finds the same ambiguity in the South African TRC. He argues that in allowing for a public disclosure of atrocities during apartheid, the TRC undid apartheid’s master narrative and achieved a goal widely deemed impossible: a peaceful transition to democracy without vengeance. Nevertheless, although the TRC may have been at least partially successful in remembering to forget, it imposed its own master narrative of reconciliation and left behind the wounds of what was irreconcilable.

The author is most interested in the nonactive dimensions of memory as they haunt the American attempt to disavow its past by downplaying slavery and its legacy. He looks to James Baldwin to note the “stigma” of blackness that affects the actions of both whites and blacks above and beyond their willing, and he looks to Toni Morrison’s Beloved to explore Sethe’s being haunted by the child she killed to avoid a life of slavery. As Brendese reads Beloved, it is “a tragedy that resists triumphalism to ask how to remember when ‘remembering seemed unwise,’ how to bury the dead who resist interment, and how to live amidst the mnemonic traces signaling debts to one’s ancestors’ unredeemed, and perhaps unredeemable suffering” (p. 88). In his chapter on Mexico’s dirty war, Brendese extends such questions to a discussion of the haunting memories of the disappeared, while in his last chapter, he reemphasizes the connection between the way in which the United States can simply disown a past consisting of slavery and segregation and the way it is able to condone and enforce mass African American incarceration.

When it comes to the United States, the author agrees with Thomas McCarthy that “until legal, institutional, normal, everyday racism is publicly and widely understood to have been integral to our history and identity as a nation, we will … continue to encounter major obstacles to developing the degree of transracial injustice that are its continuing legacy” (p. 98). Yet while Brendese invokes the idea of more democratic relation to time and asks that we look to memory to recall the possibility of the impossible, his book dwells most forcibly on the ghosts and specters of history’s victims. He thus raises the question of whether the attempts of active memory at a better history and better national self-understanding will be enough, or whether the best we can do is hope with Stephen Dedalus to wake up from the nightmare that our history has turned out to be.