De/territorialising Les Lieux de Mémoire : Trauma,Nation and Diaspora

Abstract

At the heart of global politics, there is a struggle over territory and memory. International Relations (IR) are made possible by the prior territorialisation of memory: the division of the planet into separate nation-states each with their ‘own’ collective memories. These memories are institutionalised in what Pierre Nora terms les lieux de me´moire: the places, institutions and cultural phenomenon which have shaped the way the past is remembered in the present. However, it is argued that memories of cultural trauma have the potential to traverse this nationalist imaginary by deterritorialising les lieux de me´moire. Drawing briefly on the role which the Shoah plays in Jewish collective memory and more substantively on the role which the storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984, referred to as a Ghallughara or ‘holocaust,’ plays in the Sikh collective consciousness, I argue that the memory of the cultural trauma makes possible not only nationalist narratives based on the territorialization of memory in an ancestral homeland but the articulation of a post-nationalist diaspora consciousness that plays upon collective traumatic experiences. This has implications for understanding memory and collective identities in IR as embodied, multidirectional and de/territorialised rather than as the exclusive property of the nation-state.