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This introduction aims at defining how Postcolonial Realms of Memory builds upon Pierre Nora’s seminal collection Les Lieux de mémoire (1984-92) while fostering a new perspective on the French past actively informed by the memorial legacy of colonialism. After contextualizing Nora’s project, analysing his ground-breaking paradigm and exploring the concept’s complex afterlives with a particular emphasis on the criticism that has been levelled at it over the past three decades, the editors illustrate their conceptual framework and scope of investigation — the ‘Republic’ in its broadest sense — by introducing several representative realms including the Panthéon, seen as a metonymic example of a postcolonial realm of memory. This introduction’s objective is therefore to lay the ground for understanding the rationale behind the will to postcolonialize the French Republic’s lieux de mémoire whilst at the same time presenting the tools mobilized to do so. It ultimately highlights how the volume is imagined as a disruptive challenge to current nationally-focused understandings of sites of memory, a call to integrate colonialism and its legacy more actively into the practices and study of collective memory, but also an invitation to take in new directions the current debate at the intersection of memory studies and postcolonialism.

This chapter links the theoretical foundations and politics of social memory in relation to the building blocks of the current ‘memory turn’ in the social sciences to social memory in the Israeli context. It also places memory as social, constructed and mediated and it is divided into three main themes, theorising memory in spatial, temporal and social terms. It then pursues a temporal line of inquiry, beginning from Marianne Hirsch's notion of ‘postmemory’. It reiterates memory as a social process. Collective memory is often equated with official memory, popular memory and cultural memory. Claiming the authenticity of collective memories is very evident in Pierre Nora. The Nakba embodies an unbridgeable gap between two qualitatively different periods, pre- and post-Nakba, making generational time a third key element of memory time for Palestinians. It is suggested that it is more apt to think of Nakba commemoration by Israeli Jews as co-memory.

This chapter argues that the sense of historical rupture and corresponding interest in sites of memory as a means of reconfiguring our relationship to history diagnosed by Pierre Nora in the 1980s (in Realms of Memory) is analogous to the filming of sites within architectural documentaries of the 1930s. Architectural modernists August Perret and Le Corbusier appear in various architectural documentaries (including Jean Epstein’s Popular Front-era militant film Les Bâtisseurs). These films deploy the commemorative function of monumental sites in the service of contemporary ideology and the architecture of the urban everyday is raised to the status of monument or site of memory.

As a means of clarifying the conception of collective memory that has been elaborated in the previous four chapters, this excursus subjects to critical scrutiny a number of contemporary theories which, from very different perspectives, have played a significant role in defining contemporary concepts of collective memory. Three theoretical orientations, above all, have served as matrices for the study of collective memory in the contemporary human, natural, and cultural sciences, encompassing hermeneutics, the neuro-cognitive, and socio-historical disciplines. In this excursus, critical analysis of the conception of collective memory in the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricœur is followed by a critical appraisal of applications by Gerald Edelman of neuro-biological and evolutionary theory to the domain of collective experience and collective memory and by an analysis of the concept of collective memory in the historical writings of Pierre Nora. If each of these methodologies presents an approach to collective memory which is difficult to reconcile with the others, critical engagement with them is necessary to elaborate the distinction of the specific realm of collective memory if it is not to be confused with that of psychology, natural evolution, history or tradition.

This chapter examines Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “Rodman the Keeper” (1877). It considers Northern sentiment about national cemeteries for the Union dead, and investigates the ways in which Pierre Nora’s “sites of memory” were fashioned once historical events began to fade.

This introductory chapter discusses how nostalgia is commonly understood as the opposite of utopia. Whereas utopia is the projection of a better world in the future, nostalgia is a longing for something in the past; yet there is a strong affinity between the two—a common rejection of the present. The image of nostalgia has remained amnesiac and reactionary, as it keeps circulating in art history and theory, demonstrated by the “historiographic” turn in contemporary art. Over time, negative evaluations of nostalgia have been developed by intellectuals from both the political Left and the political Right, with both sides stating that nostalgia acts as a screen for anxieties about emergent political trends. The chapter examines two influential indictments of nostalgia: Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Memoire (1984–1992), which represents right-wing conservativism, and Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), which offers a Marxist version of the nostalgia critique.

This chapter discusses one of Claude Simon's works, Le Jardin des Plantes. It further notes that Simon' s novels are criticisms of history and history-memory. The chapter also provides critiques of Antoine Compagnon and Pierre Nora as they explain that Simon's writings provides an alternative site of memory and representations of the past.

During the late twentieth century, France witnessed the emergence of a series of commemorations, the most significant of which was the Bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989. This increasing focus on memory was reflected in literature, cinema, popular culture, public life, and intellectual debate. In his article on the 1989 celebrations, Laurent Dubois explains how the Haitian Revolution continues to have an ideological impact on discussions of race and ethnicity in contemporary France. This chapter examines the complexities of recollection and memorialisation, as well as the problematising legacies of empire and its various manifestations. In particular, it discusses the competing, often contradictory, traditions that characterise postcolonial memory and how it can be better understood through postcolonial thought. The chapter first considers the French national commemoration of slavery and Pierre Nora's essay Lieux de mémoire, and then describes the October 1961 massacres in Paris involving the police chief Maurice Papon.

Drawing on Pierre Nora’s ideas of lieux de mémoire, this chapter examines the Tiber and the site of Rome as palimpsestic sites of memory. After considering the presentation of the site of Rome in the Annales, which already links Rome’s urban topography to its historical memory in sophisticated ways, the chapter moves on to look at the ways in which the Aeneid revisits Ennian territory. Bringing his hero in primeval time to the evocative landscape as if it were a ‘new world’ and presenting a version of Rome ‘before’ Rome on the banks of the Tiber, Virgil plants the Aeneid ‘first’ on the soil of Rome as the Ur-epic of the city’s foundation.

This chapter looks at how Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (places of memory) emphasized the need to revive queer identity, queer cultural collectivity, and marked environments during the post-AIDS onslaught. Queer spaces were initially identified as areas that are not built, only implied, and usually invisible. However, this issue somehow gained attention after the commissioning of two prominent lieux de mémoire: the Gay Liberation monument in New York and the Homomonument in Amsterdam. The chapter also examines Charles Jencks’“Gay Eclectic” style of house architecture, gay neighborhoods, and gay culture iconizing the character of Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz.

This chapter traces similarities and differences with past methods of History from ancient Greece—Herodotus and Thucydides both infuse subjectivity and present influence into their writing—through the French Revolution and the later influence of the Annales School. Throughout is the theme that history should be used as lessons for the present. Despite similarities, the chapter shows that varying perceptions of time in past eras make the notion of “contemporary” difficult to compare across the ages: in ancient Greece past and present were on a continuum; in Medieval times past and present both existed in an “eternal present” as part of the divine course of nature; with the modern age time is a progression and breaks with the past are theorized. The modern era brings a focus on mediate history and written sources and professionalization of academic History serves to both cast doubt on the study of contemporary history and to serve as the point that helps define it as a practice—an idea first put forth by Pierre Nora.

This chapter explores the role of site-specific projections in the digital remediation of family and personal history and their role in memorial work and remembrance. The chapter refers primarily to the mixed-media performance/installation Bark and Butterflies by the author (palkadiaries.com). Drawing on the work of Marianna Hirsch, the chapter explicates the notion of post-memory, which complicates and extends family history through the idea of inherited traumatic memory. The concept is applied to Bark and Butterflies and accordingly the chapter offers a case study, amplified with theoretical reflections, on the role of projection in the creation of mixed-media memorial works and their dissemination. Bark and Butterflies was the artistic result of a research trip to Siberia following in the footsteps of an inherited wartime diary, which narrates the exile to the Gulag of the author’s father and grandfather. The chapter outlines and demonstrates the role of site-specific projections in a series of action-research performance interventions en route and examines the potential they offer for the visual interrogation and remediation of symbolic space. The chapter argues that site-specific projections produce a ‘phantasmagoric’ counter-world in which the experience of time and space becomes collapsed and that through this temporal and spatial overlap Bark and Butterflies enacts an immersive process of ‘self-sacralization’, using projections to re-enact paradigmatic devotional forms (Turner), in a type of secular ‘aesthetic redemption’ (Kristeva). In this case, the chapter concludes, the art of projection acts as a contemporary procedure within a personal ritual of pilgrimage and remembrance.