Locations that resist telling: Making space for socioeconomic analysis in memory studies

Abstract

This special issue of Memory Studies draws on the nexus between mass violence and socioeconomic inequality. It emerged from an interdisciplinary workshop entitled “Memory at the Intersection of Mass Violence and Socioeconomic Inequality,” held at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, in 2018. The special issue assembles a diversity of interdisciplinary scholarship addressing various ways in which entrenched structural violence intersects with memories of atrocities. Contributors examine how economic precariousness, poverty, and marginalization based on class impede efforts toward remembering, reconciliation, and recovery from historic injustices. The field of Memory Studies has conventionally been interested in questions of identity, trauma, and the ethics of remembrance, while neglecting class and socioeconomic concerns. This issue interrogates the enduring material impacts of violence, such as poverty and inequality, and their influence on who is deemed “grievable” and whose pain is acknowledged or overlooked in collective memory practices. Drawing on Crenshaw’s intersectionality, the contributors show how identity and class intersect in differential positioning vis-à-vis violence and its memorialization, while also highlighting the silencing of marginalized voices in communities. The articles demonstrate that physical violence often transitions into structural violence, perpetuating harm long after conflicts ostensibly end. From indigenous women in Canada and Peru to South Africa’s “born free” generation and working-class neighborhoods in Baltimore and Belfast, the issue underscores the necessity of integrating socioeconomic analysis into memory frameworks. By addressing these dynamics, the issue advances a more inclusive and equitable approach to Memory Studies, offering a nuanced understanding of how societies remember and forget amid ongoing inequalities. In so doing, it communicates important knowledge about the ethical and practical dimensions of memory work in contexts of mass violence and structural inequality, thus feeding into academic debate and concrete social justice efforts.