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This chapter considers both public and personal memorialization of political violence, a form of violence that is afforded a high degree of visibility as opposed to the violence that took place within the Naxalite community. This visibility does not, however, guarantee the recognition or alleviation of individual suffering. On the contrary, the narratives of sacrifice and heroic resistance that infuse public forms of commemoration reinforce an imagined community in ways that preclude the possibility of individual mourning. This possibility is created, however, in other sites of memory such as poetry, reportage, fiction, and women’s memoirs. The final part of this chapter explores women’s testimonies of political violence suffered in police custody and prison in an attempt to theorize the complex labour of subjectivity, agency, and healing in the long afterlife of violence.

Chapter 3 contemplates the collective dimensions of testimonies by renowned victims of political violence, something that has been emphasized by previous studies. The analysis focuses on the literary devices and content Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir chose to merge their experience of political violence and resistance with the collective experiences of Moroccan women. The chapter questions the assumption that testimonial writing is an ‘extraliterary’ or ‘antiliterary’ discourse (Beverley, 2004, 42) and demonstrates the ethical and political limitations of the of the idea of a ‘collective testimonial self.’ It also integrates alternative testimonial documents that have not been previously analyzed, as well as recent studies on women and political violence and resistance during the Years of Lead. Because of this, this chapter revises and completes previous research on the Years of Lead in two major ways. First, it demonstrates that dividing resisters and victims in testimonies by renowned female political activists and former political prisoners can promote a simplistic account of women’s experiences, as well as articulate a very reductive representation of victimization and resistance. Second, it addresses how the narration and memorialization of violence are impacted by class, ethnicity, religion, language, and education level, important differentiating factors that intersect with gender.

The conclusion summarizes the interventions made by the preceding chapters on topics of memorialization and placemaking. It asks what “other stories” remain to be told about this conflict and its protracted legacies, and what kinds of sociocultural work are necessary to change public understandings of the past as well as the present. It briefly mentions a series of additional case studies that shed light on alternative dimensions of the war, including Native migrations to Quebec-area communities, and the recent unearthing and identification of the Monhantic Fort in Mashantucket Pequot tribal homelands. Altogether, it underscores the need to understand processes of commemoration within particular historical and geographical contexts, and the importance of revisiting seemingly “final” understandings of the Native Northeast.

This chapter investigates two different and recent artistic projects that commemorated the Tutsi Genocide of 1994 in Rwanda from an external perspective, twenty years after: the play by Senegalese intellectual, Felwine Sarr, Sur la barrière (2015) and the public mural by South African artist, Bruce Clarke, in 2014 'Upright Men', which is built collectively with the contribution of Rwandan artists. Sur la barrière depicts the complex relationships between a mother, Isaro, and his son's murderer, Faustin. Both artistic projects acknowledge civilian's memory of suffering and violence: by restoring words to the living but also to the dead, they raise the questions about whose stories to tell. They belong to what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory and thus renew the reflection on memorialization by situating the genocide of the Tutsi within a global and external perspective. Those artistic projects downplay the tragic story to focus on the present of the survivors, fostering human dignity and triggering conversation with young people that were born after the genocide, in Rwanda but also all around the world.

The epilogue focuses on the dilemmas of documenting memory for the Bracero History Archive and the reception of the National Museum of American History’s exhibit, “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program, 1942–1964.” The present-day political and social context in which these oral histories were collected left indelible marks on how the program is remembered. The retelling of bracero history also reveals contemporary concerns with the role that Mexican agricultural workers play in American society and sheds light on the national dilemma of immigration reform, which has been unable to address the concerns of indigenous, queer, and other deviant migrants. Indeed, reform efforts suggest that rights should be allocated unequally, based on conceptions of normativity that are currently contested within the United States as well as across borders. Thus, immigration policy serves to police not only immigrants, but also the boundaries of belonging for everyone.

This chapter explores the long presence of Nipmuc people such as the Wabbaquasset tribe in southern New England for millenia. It reaches back into the pre-contact period and acknowledges the culture change of Native people in this region over time and up to the present. A central topic is the memorialization of places connected to historic figures such as John Eliot, combined with the erasure of Native people who have had connections to this landscape deep into the past, long before European colonization. The history of the praying town period and Christianization of Nipmuc Indians through the efforts of John Eliot in the 17^th century and of the seminal King Philip’s War (or Metacom’s Rebellion), and its aftermath on Nipmuc people, are summarized.