Dossier Introduction: Museums, Art, and the Politics of Memory in Latin America

No one owns the past, but this has never stopped people from trying to shape or foreclose our relationships with it. The stakes in forging certain relations with the past are always consequential, whether or not they appear to be, despite a lack of consensus surrounding the ends of remembering and forgetting. The terms of the debate about memory evolve as the past becomes institutionalized, branded, cultivated by social movements, courted by elites or the downtrodden, integrated into national(ist) mythologies or displaced by corporate aesthetics that disappear a sense of time and the terms of the political altogether. For Manuel Cruz, history and memory can never be understood outside of the political conditions that shape them. By this he means that we are under constant and shifting pressure to forget or remember in very specific ways, which are never reducible to remembering or forgetting. Cruz advocates “a more shaded perspective” that acknowledges there are pathological ways of remembering and healthy forms of forgetting. Cruz’s “more shaded perspective” complements Philip J. Brendese’s argument in favor of an agonistic approach to memory. Extending approaches to democracy that emphasise the imperative of pluralism, Brendese argues that “democratization [. . .] requires an agonistic engagement with multiple, often deeply conflicting, relationships to memory and time.” An agonistic approach to memory replaces the false dichotomy of forgetting or remembering, and the naïve assumption that memory is useful in order to not repeat the horrors of the past with an open-ended dialectic of ambiguity and multiplicity. After examining a range of (mis)uses of history, including that it can tell us something about the present or how not to repeat the past, Cruz reflects on the possibility that it could help us to live well. Helping us to live well means—depending on one’s social position—maintaining hegemony or offering the possibility of emancipation. In the case of the latter, living well is synonymous with imagining alternative futures, resisting, surviving, struggling. Remembering well entails remembering the terms of the political, and the political terms of memory itself, which open subjectivities of possibility and multiple paths to the future. For Herbert Marcuse, remembrance revives the possibility of difference, the radical potential of the future. Subjectivity and imaginaries of political possibility emerge out of memory. Memory is both the condition for subjectivity and possibility. In this sense, the politics of memory is always the memory of politics and a basis for the cultivation of future possibility.