City Research Online

Abstract

This article theorizes connected memory, or in other words how people remember each other's memories, through the connected histories of territorial partition in different contexts. It claims that social memories can travel beyond their original context, pushing beyond efforts to understand supranational “mnemonic communities,” or to understand cosmopolitan memory as a thin memory community encompassing all humanity. It builds on the idea of “connected histories,” arguing that existing approaches to social memory in world politics either neglect connections across national and regional boundaries or scale up the national model to the global level. The article uses the history of territorial partitions as an illustration of three types of connected memory: sympathetic, vicarious, and modular. Partition has often been studied in comparative or aggregative ways, ruling out the possibility that partitions affect each other. But from the partitions of Poland to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, to Ireland, Palestine, and India, partitions have often been events remembered beyond the national context and in the plural. Such memories have, in turn, altered the imaginable possibilities of the future, for example, by providing precedents for or warnings about future partitions.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads