The Relationship between Nationalist and Anti-Nationalist Memories - Essay Example

History repeats itself and Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it are two clichés that represent the two sides of the debate over the representation of history and the role of memories in shaping the present and guiding the future. It is often said that the past is a place where they do things differently. The reason for starting the paper with these aphorisms is to remind the reader that the representation of history and the memories of the past are both subjective and something that lends itself to interpretation (Todorova, 12). The role of historians, journalists, and demagogues, NGOs’ ad statesmen in invoking the past in a selective or all inclusive manner is indeed crucial in shaping the public discourse over what the past means. Since the topic of the paper is about exploring the connections between nationalist and antinationalist memories, this introduction is to set the context for the paper by alluding to the myriad ways in which the past can both be a source of inspiration as well as a source of conflict. Hence, memories can be nationalistic for a sect or ethnic group and the same memories can be antinationalistic for another sect or ethnic group. It is only when the shared memories lend themselves to commonality and objective interpretation can there being true peace in the world (Wimmer, 28). The Balkans is often cited by researchers for the prevalence of memories that are nationalistic and antinationalistic. The reason for choosing the Balkans by these researchers can be fathomed from the fact that the Balkans was a place where there were instances of the collective memory of a shared experience giving way to fractious and fissiparous memories mainly due to the internecine civil strife that plagued the region in the 1990’s. The Balkans and the various ethnicities present there are representative of the way in which fragmented memories often take hold when a nation composed of different ethnicities and bound together by slender threads of commonalities give way to strife when the threads cannot hold any more. The way in which some citizens of the erstwhile Yugoslavia remember fondly the times under Tito and the others speak optimistically about the future are emblematic of the memory tricks that the mind can play on people who had a shared past but are now living in divided and fragmented ways (Todorova, 13). Similar is the case with the Partition of India following the exit of the British from Imperial India following World War Two. Once the British departed, there was an outbreak of civil war in Punjab (on both sides of the India Pakistan border) and an exodus of refugees from one side to the other and vice versa (Legg, 187). The prevalence of nostalgia by the refugees who hark wistfully to their old times is a powerful indicator of how memories can be considered nationalistic on one side of the border and how they can be considered antinationalistic on the other side. The politics of memory is such that they are subject to manipulation and misrepresentation as well as use of selective amnesia by demagogues represents both divisive and unifying tendencies that memory can play (Marinov, 17). The following quote from Fanon’s two memories is a useful point of discussion as far as the way in which nationalistic and antinationalistic memories are used by politicians to further their own interests is concerned: “Politics is arguably always driven by the play of memory, whether in the cruel nationalist rally against the Other or the revolutionary passion of the disenfranchised.” (Fanon, 7) Fanon’s work on the “Two Memories” constitutes the representation of memories of the disenfranchised which are antinationalistic in nature and for the dominant elites for whom the memories that they possess are deemed nationalistic. As Fanon puts it, the class of enraged that emerges out of suffering and grievance is indeed a potent force for action and that which is skillfully tapped into for mass mobilization and action by the powers that be (Conway, 311). Fanon goes on to describe the categorization of the Arab and Black experiences as anti colonial and the elites whom they seek to overthrow as those whose memories are nationalistic and hence not subject to state suppression and subjugation (Fanon, 19). Eric Hobsbawm is another historian who dwells a lot on the corners of the mind when he describes the “imagined communities” that people construct from their mental experiences and Hobsbawm particularly dismisses the construction of the national sovereignty as a fiction of the mind and hence the appropriation of the national and patriotic symbols by the left during and after World War Two by the Left was nothing sort of “refusing the devil’s armies” the best of the marching tunes (Hobsbawm, 3). It is this mad scramble to “own” the artifacts, symbols, leitmotifs and slogans by the Left and the Right at each “tipping point” in history which makes anthropologists think about the real intentions of the “gatekeepers” of history and their role in shaping the memories of the conquerors as well as the conquered (García, 8). As the cliché goes, History is written by the Victors. Hence, any representation of history that we get panders to a certain section of society for whom the exploits of war and conquest offer connections with their past, whereas for the other sections, this very representation brings back memories of surrender and humiliation. This is the classic dichotomy that the Balkans (studied to such great detail in the readings that this paper quotes) and the people in the various states of what was once Yugoslavia have faced and are facing even now. The use of music as a means of expression of the glorious past as well as to evoke nostalgia for the years gone by among minority communities has been documented to a great extent in the readings. Of particular interest are the emergence of Rap from African American ghettos and the rise of Hip-Hop as a cultural phenomenon in Croatia. This indicates that the memories of the past are handed down from generation to generation by use of art forms like Music, Literature and Paintings and again, this is subject to the quintessential human trait of flawed understanding and remembering (Baker, 38). The reading by Stef Jansen provides an analysis of how the triad of victim-underdog-rebel can play itself out in different ways according to the context of the situation and is by itself a fluid concept since the contradictory memories of nationalism and antinationalism can themselves change according to the situation. When one considers the protests of 1996-97 against Slobodan Milosevic and the 1999 protests against the NATO, the classification of the triad of victim-underdog-rebel becomes antinationalist during the former and nationalist during the latter. Jansen quotes the legendary Michael Foucault who says that, “There is not, on the one side a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another opposing strategy (Jansen, 80). This indicates the fluidity of nationalist sentiments at one point in time that can be easily manipulated to anti nationalist sentiments and vice versa depending on the situation and the dominant elites who are driving the protests. As can be seen from the protests in 1996-97 and 1997, it was the citizens as victims-underdogs-rebels in the former and it was the Serbians as victims-underdogs-rebels during the latter (Jansen, Victims, Underdogs and Rebels : Discursive Practices of Resistance in Serbian Protest, 401). What the preceding paragraph indicates that human memory is subjective, contextual and amenable to power discourses and what is considered nationalistic at one point can be antinationalistic at another point and vice versa. And when the Balkans are considered (again), the initial war and conflicts were against the monolith of communism (hence antinationalistic) to begin with and once independence of the individual regions was obtained, the war and conflict were over ethnicities and tribal relations and hence the theater was nationalistic with each ethnicity claiming the moral high ground against the other. The fact that rival militias invoked power discursive narratives in rousing the different ethnicities added to the complexity of the situation. it is this very nature of history being represented differently at different times and nationalism and antinationalism being interchangeable that appeals to me as the topic of fascinating study of how we as humans shape our future with perceptions of the past and the identities that we assume and inherit along with choose intermingle in a mélange of conflicting and contradictory impulses (Baker, 40). When the reading by Jansen is contrasted with that of Palmberger, the feeling is that citizens of divided countries feel their memories being subject to conflicting and contradictory pulls and pressures with nostalgia for the relatively stable economic past that they had being the case with Aida (one of the subjects) and the optimism for the future being the case with Sanja (the other subject) which reflects the age, circumstance and the handed down memories of the past that determine their relative perceptions of the past and the outlook for the future (Palmberger, 362). The point here is that in regions that have had a shared past and are no longer united, there tends to be a certain confusion about what nationalism and antinationalism mean and the thin line between the two is also tenuous and unsustainable for everlasting peace to reign (Jansen, 84). The discussion so far has been woven together around the threads of remembering, recollecting and handing down of events and incidents in the past and how power discourses play one memory against the other. In this context, it is indeed the case that what one considers nationalistic memory is indeed subjective and open to interpretation by another who might have a different take on the past. Further, the same person who has protested in a wave of nationalistic fervor might find himself or herself drawn to rebelling against the very cause that he or she fought for because of changed economic, political and social circumstances. It is this fluid and interchangeable memories that have formed the basis of the recent “Arab Spring” where citizens so long content with their lot have suddenly discovered that nationalism and a certain Arab identity is no longer enough. Hence, the protests and the civil war that has rocked most of the Arab world is yet another indication that we are yet to cogently and lucidly differentiate between nationalism and antinationalism. In conclusion, the events of the last three years around the world and in the last one year in the Arabian countries might become the subject of this continuing topic in the same way the Balkans and the events there occupied the attention of the researchers cited in this paper. References BAKER, CATHERINE. "War Memory and Musical Tradition:Commemorating Croatia’s Homeland War through Popular Music and Rap in Eastern Slavonia." Journal of Contemporary European Studies (2009): 35-45. Conway, Brian. "Active Remembering, Selective Forgetting,and Collective Identity: The Case of Bloody Sunday." IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH (2003): 305-323. Fanon, Frantz. "Fanon’s Two Memories." Caribbean Discourse (2006): 1-23. García, Montserrat Martínez. "Anti-Nationalism in Scotts Old Mortality." Comparative Literature and Culture (2010): 1-9. Hobsbawm, E. J. NATIONS AND NATIONALISM SINCE 1780: PROGRAMME. MYTH, REALITY. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Jansen, Stef. "The Violence of Memories: Local narratives of the past after ethnic cleansing in Croatia." Rethinking History (2002): 77-94. —. "Victims, Underdogs and Rebels : Discursive Practices of Resistance in Serbian Protest." Critique of Anthropology (2000): 393-419. Legg, Stephen. "Sites of Counter-Memory:The Refusal to Forget and the Nationalist Struggle in Colonial Delhi." Historical Geography (2005): 180-201. Marinov, Tchavdar. "Historiographical Revisionism and Re-Articulation of Memory in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." Societes, Politiques, Comparees (2010): 1-18. Palmberger, Monika. "NOSTALGIA MATTERS: NOSTALGIA FOR YUGOSLAVIA AS POTENTIAL VISION FOR A BETTER FUTURE." SOCIOLOGIJA (2008): 355-370. Todorova, Maria. Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory. London: Hurst and Company, 2006. Wimmer, Andreas. Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict. London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Read More