This meant rather than re-representing thetraumatizing experiences of their deaths and how they got injured (which had already been streamed viasocial media), people could learn the stories of their family members while they were alive and the strugglesthey fought for protesting against the regime. In other words, we actively refuse to make visible andreproduce their cruel deaths. Instead, we emphasize their absence, making that absence into a politicalstatement and taking advantage of the affordances of digitality to modulate visibility

riesin each territory. The participation of relatives of other victims created a “mnemonic community,” with ashared past they all seemed to recall (Zerubavel, 2012, p. 4) among the territorial groups, thus generatingan interdiscursive narrative at the territory level. The shared knowledge of the spaces allowed for them tocreate a shared topography of the violent events. The meetings would end with a breathing exercise andrepeating the phrase, “I am here for me, as I am here for you,” a mantra-like phrase that invited victims tosupport one another. It was evident that this was a hard process for the members, but they receivedcollective strength from one another as well as the process of creating a shared social identity.

temporary

which human beings behaved nobly,” he asks? Because, Margalit contends,“the issue for us to sort out is what humanity ought to remember ratherthan what is good for humanity to remember” (M

What is it about modernity in the past century, much less the recent decades,that has allowed, or compelled the creation of spaces where these questionshave become so pressing and contested in the marketplace of ideas?

Perhaps many people for two and three decades now have been lookingbackward or inward, or for escapes into nostalgia and heritage they canpossess, when looking ahead is no longer a source of confidence.

in-de-siècle melancholia

travel

Washington

Cold

Memory often coalesces in objects, sites, monu-ments;

expression

urge

atrocities in history that were just as evil (Stalin’s mass murders for exam-ple)

revisionism”

whathistorians used to suspiciously or derisively refer to as “myth” transformedin the 1980s and 1990s into the study of memory

forget

Collective memories, writes Boym, provide the “common landmarksof everyday life.

Is all of thisequally true when memory takes on the collective, social, group form?

“Memory is knowledge from the past. It isnot necessarily knowledge about the past” (Margalit, 2004)