ABSTRACT
There has arguably been a major shift in focus from imagination to memory in globalisation discourse at the turn of the third millennium (Assmann and Conrad 1). A fundamental reason for this is that the “mnemoscape”, or the topography of social memory, is one of the domains of the human imagination that has been reconfigured most dramatically by the spatial turn in globalisation studies; the transformation of the mnemoscape, from national to cosmopolitan memory culture, is a symptom of an “internal globalisation” (Levy and Sznaider 87). Global memory space challenges the nation-state as the legitimate container of collective memories, and freed from national borders, memories become entangled, cohabitated, reconciled, contested, conflicted and negotiated across borders. In global memory space, memory activists are agents of world history. Because of the global movement and transaction of memories, unconnected historical actors and memory activists are linked mnemonically a posteriori in the global memory space, even if no de facto entangled history exists. It is thus not so much history that is entangled, as much as it is memory, particularly the memory of atrocity. This essay investigates the mnemonic confluence of memories in such atrocities as European colonial genocide, the Holocaust, Stalinist crimes in Eastern Europe, comfort women in East Asia, American slavery and the “stolen generations” of indigenous people in Australia in order to examine the dialectical interplay of globalisation and re-nationalisation of memories in the global memory space.
