Combative Memory. Mnemonic Hegemony Theory and the History of Tricontinentalism

Berthold Molden

15.00-15.30 (BST)

Whoever looks at the history of anticolonialism, deals with twofold resistant pasts: On the one hand, it is a history of resistance against colonial rule; on the other, it contains historical perceptions that resist their incorporation into the grand narratives of the colonizers. This diagnosis holds equally true for postcolonial agency, and particularly for Tricontinentalism with its diverse range of protagonists, networks, platforms of ideational dissemination, as well as textual and visual media.

The central hypothesis of this paper suggests that anticolonial activists have highly particular ways of referring to, and interpreting, their own pasts, oscillating between victimhood and revolutionary agency. I propose to analyze these relations of discursive forces through the framework of mnemonic hegemony theory (Molden 2016).

This theoretical approach highlights the relations of forces between powerful, hegemonic leitmotifs, counter-hegemonic narratives, and “silent” communities of experience whose interpretations of the past remain largely unuttered beyond their own realms. This focus is specifically useful to understand the agency of activists, politicians, and intellectuals from the Tricontinental world within the history of political ideas, and the way they have employed the history and memory of colonialism as legitimizing factors for their political projects. Against the backdrop of what has recently been analyzed as “Left-Wing Melancholia” (Traverso, 2017), the memory politics of (post-)Tricontinentalism stand out as a characteristic practice: The memory of defeat becomes a motor for further action.

A key example is the mobilization of the Global South itself, from Bandung to Havana and beyond, in which the heterogeneous experiences of colonial exploitation and repression succeeded in integrating, at least partly, a diverse set of actors from very different backgrounds. A more circumscribed moment would be the history of the New International Economic Order, which featured a specific historical image of justice; although overcome by the neoliberal backlash of the 1970s and 1980s, echoes of this powerful moment in the history of global governance can be identified in many social movements since. Both examples also demonstrate the South-North transfers of ideas in counter-hegemonic activism in the context of the Cold War and beyond.

I will show how mnemonic hegemony theory, by focusing on the relations of forces between actors and the means and strategies of discursive dissemination, can help us grasp who Tricontinental Pasts have impacted our world.

Berthold Molden is currently Visiting Professor for Global History at the University of Vienna. His research interests are the theory and history of social memory; the intellectual history of the Cold War and decolonization, particularly in Latin America, Europe, and the USA; the political history of neoliberal economics; as well as media history. In 2005, he was a founding member of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres, in Vienna, where he served as project director for memory studies until 2010. In 2014, He published the monograph Politics of History in Guatemala, 1996–2005.  A list of further publications can be found here.