Contact:  Urs LINDNER

Project at the Centre:

Memory materialism: affects, artefacts, assemblages

Unlike many research fields in the humanities, there has been, so far, no ‘material turn’ in memory studies. Part of its so-called ‘fourth wave’ is an ‘environmental turn’, which, inspired by ‘post-humanist’ approaches, draws attention to the destruction of nature, ‘ecocides’ and the (anticipatory) memory of them. In the ‘third wave’ of the field, which dealt with transnationalization processes, there was already a ‘spatial turn’ that focused both on the geographical expansion of memory cultures and on the role of spatial object experience in memory processes. However, these approaches, which treat the material side of memory and non-human nature as their subject, have not coalesced into a corresponding ‘turn’. As a result, there is no systematic and synthesizing research on the materiality of memories yet.

The aim of the project is to use the concept of memory materialism to explore how such an investigation may proceed. Accordingly, its central questions are: What does memory materialism mean? What are the relevant material dimensions of memory processes and how can they best be understood? These questions will be addressed by analyzing how insights from ‘new materialisms’ as well as older socio-historical materialisms of (post)Marxist provenance have found their way into memory studies or where they have been ignored, and whether there is something like a ‘spontaneous materialism’ (Althusser) in memory studies and how it looks like. The hypothesis is that questions of the materiality of memory are best analyzed along three ‘axes’: affects, artefacts and assemblages, concerning the subjects, objects and wholes of memory processes.

Research Interests:

• Egalitarianism
• Affirmative Action
• Materialism/Realism
• Marx and Marxism
• Racism
• Memory politics