Kashmir Road

Abstract

In this article, I argue that an attention to the absent past, and its demands, is very much part of what we do when we do justice. I also urge that identity, the sense of a shared something, is dependent on memory as an ingathering of the past. Where the community sees grave injustice in that past, that too can come to be an active force in the present. The ways in which this often benign and familiar part of politics metamorphoses into memory-fueled political violence is at the centre of that analysis. My task here is not to judge that violence, either in general or in the particular (Northern Irish) illustrations I draw on. Rather, my goal is to move beyond a view of memory politics, including its violent dimensions, that sees it from the outset as a kind of profound irrationality or madness.