Remembering Social Movements

Activism and Memory

Stefan Berger, Sean Scalmer, Christian Wicke, Stefan Berger, Sean Scalmer, Christian Wicke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000390193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

Remembering Social Movements offers a comparative historical examination of the relations between social movements and collective memory.

A detailed historiographical and theoretical review of the field introduces the reader to five key concepts to help guide analysis: repertoires of contention, historical events, generations, collective identities, and emotions. The book examines how social movements act to shape public memory as well as how memory plays an important role within social movements through 15 historical case studies, spanning labour, feminist, peace, anti-nuclear, and urban movements, as well as specific examples of 'memory activism' from the 19th century to the 21st century. These include transnational and explicitly comparative case studies, in addition to cases rooted in German, Australian, Indian, and American history, ensuring that the reader gains a real insight into the remembrance of social activism across the globe and in different contexts. The book concludes with an epilogue from a prominent Memory Studies scholar.

Bringing together the previously disparate fields of Memory Studies and Social Movement Studies, this book systematically scrutinises the two-way relationship between memory and activism and uses case studies to ground students while offering analytical tools for the reader.

1

Memory and social movements

An introduction

Stefan Berger, Sean Scalmer and Christian Wicke

Social movements rely on collective memories to assert claims, mobilize supporters and legitimize their political visions. Social movements also help to shape collective memories. But though frequently intertwined in practice, scholars have rarely pondered the relationship between ‘memory’ and ‘activism’ in any depth. Individual scholars have certainly identified the import of ‘memory activists’¹ or ‘heroes of memory’² in the transformation of shared understandings of the past. Likewise, the role of memory in the maintenance of an insurgent movement’s collective identity has also been widely recognized, even if few studies have begun to consider its actual place in mobilization.³ Overall, there has been, until very recently, little attempt to consider ‘memory’ and ‘activism’ in an integrated, systematic and comparative fashion.⁴

In part, this failure is a product of the distinct history of the separate institutionalization of scholarship on ‘activism’ and ‘memory’. Scholars working on ‘activism’ have often been inspired by the dissent of the 1960s and 1970s. The sub-discipline of social movement studies, with a strong focus on the new social movements emerging in the wake of 1968, has been the key arena for research on activism. ‘Memory studies’, by contrast, emerged out of the cultural turn in the humanities during the 1980s. Its original concentration on national memory is indebted to the crisis of national historical master narratives. Pierre Nora’s concept of the ‘realms of memory’ is a cunning attempt to resurrect a national historical master narrative after poststructuralism had effectively undermined such master narratives.⁵ Even where memory scholarship was not tied to attempts to stabilize or re-invent national history, it was fascinated by traumatic events such as wars and genocides that had led to major national and transnational debates and controversies, and thus to some extent democratized official interpretations of the past. Social movement studies and memory studies have over the last three decades developed as distinctive sub-disciplines. Each is defined by exclusive scholarly associations and journals. Each has their canons of exemplary scholarship. Each uses their own ‘master concepts’ and hegemonic methods. All of this has ensured that studies of ‘memory’ and ‘social movements’ have been pursued in parallel rather than connected fashion; there has so far been little mutual borrowing or intellectual exchange across borders that at times appeared rather impermeable. This is somewhat surprising, as social movements have had great agency in shaping historical cultures and public memory.

‘Social movement studies’ boasts three dedicated international journals in the English language alone: Mobilization, founded in 1996; Social Movement Studies, launched in 2002; and Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements, an online journal that has been published since 2009. Two research committees of the International Sociological Association (ISA) – RC47: Social Classes and Social Movements, and RC48: Social Movements, Collective Action and Social Change – were formally recognized by the ISA in the early 1990s. Major English-language publishers have established book series – for example, Cambridge University Press, University of Minnesota Press, University of Chicago Press, Amsterdam University Press. A succession of textbooks has been published, and major universities (as well as many minor ones) now offer courses in the field, undergraduate and postgraduate.

The consolidation of social movement studies as a sub-discipline has, however, also been accompanied by an intellectual narrowing. Interest in collective action and social movements has a very long lineage, and has been widely shared among historians, as well as social scientists. In celebrated works published from the later 1950s, British Marxist scholars Edward Thompson, George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm identified the importance of collective action as a motor of history, and ventured influential hypotheses on the long-term trajectory of protest forms.⁶ As ‘social movement studies’ has developed, however, it has cohered much more closely and exclusively within the disciplines of sociology and political science. Historical studies have become increasingly marginal. There have been exceptions to the rule, such as the work of historical sociologists like Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly and Craig Calhoun.⁷ However, the study of social movements is in need of a much deeper historical perspective. Reflecting this need, historians interested in social movements have recently established a distinctive book series, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, edited by Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring, and their own academic journal, Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements, edited by Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer.

The ‘fathers’ of ‘social movement studies’ (despite the presence of important female scholars, above all, Donatella della Porta, the recognized ‘founders’ are all men) were all sociologists of various kinds. Broadly speaking, research initially developed around two competing approaches. First, a ‘European’ school, best exemplified by Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, was distinguished by its interest in so-called ‘new social movements’ (such as environmentalism and feminism) that were alleged to succeed the labour movement as primary social actors.⁸ Students concerned with these movements were marked by close interest in consciousness and in the constitution of the subject. Distinct from this European approach, there also developed an ‘American’ school, propelled by the Stakhanovite productivity of Charles Tilly and by his leading collaborators such as Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam.⁹ It was wider in its temporal range but less concerned to trace the underlying social basis and phenomenology of collective actors, and much more concerned with political organizations, relationships and processes.

The combination of competition and cooperation among these scholars and their peers has propelled a series of splits, regroupings and reconfigurations. In consequence, the investigation of social movements has for some years principally been organized around a handful of central processes: the mobilization of protest (through formal organizations and alternative political structures); the production of collective identities; the ‘framing’ of protest demands and arguments; the interactions between movements and other pertinent actors (especially opponents and the state); the presence and influence of movement networks (often transnational in scope); the nature and transformation of contentious performances; or some combination of part or all of the above. Even if collective identity has been considered as an important feature of social movements in this crowded field, the study of ‘memory’ has only recently begun to find a place of its own. Nicole Doerr has asked how social movement activists have constructed collective memories in order to further their activism in wider society and build strong internal collective identities.¹⁰ The analysis of forms of collective action can benefit enormously from paying attention to the role of subjectivities and memory in underpinning the activities of social movements.¹¹ Ron Eyerman has produced a preliminary survey of the work on how social movements use memory and history in order to build strong collective identities in 2015.¹² Lorenzo Zamponi has been looking at the role of memory in the construction of media narratives of Spanish and Italian student movements.¹³ Priska Daphi has been exploring the relationship between identity, narrative and memory in the European Global Justice Movement.¹⁴ Priska Daphi and Lorenzo Zamponi have published a special issue of Mobilization on the topic of social movements and memory.¹⁵ Donatella della Porta and her collaborators have looked at the impact of memory on forms of democracy in contemporary southern Europe.¹⁶ Lara Leigh Kelland has published an account of how forms of memory work have been crucial for a great variety of US-based social movements, including civil rights, black power, women’s, gay liberation and red power movements.¹⁷ A comparison of right-wing populist movements in contemporary Europe has shown that the success or failure of those movements is strongly linked to public memory cultures commemorating fascist movements in the twentieth century.¹⁸ Ann Rigney’s current project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (REACT) is trying to further fill this gap.¹⁹ Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg, whose work in this field has been mentioned,²⁰ are currently preparing a handbook of memory activism that will for the first time attempt to present an overview of scholarship concerned with protest and its relationship with memory.

Why has it taken so long for social movement studies to discover memory? The acknowledged founders of sociology – so-called ‘classical’ thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim – were remarkable not simply for distinguished works of analysis, but for their minting of specialized concepts to explain social processes. Later work claiming authority within the discipline has typically sought to extend these concepts, or else to develop some rival conceptual language. The most prestigious thinkers concerned with ‘social movements’ have largely conformed to this pattern: positioning their studies within broader intellectual traditions (for example, emphasizing a challenge to Marxian approaches),²¹ developing relatively elaborate conceptual schema or sometimes drawing upon and adapting recent theoretical approaches (Latour’s ‘actor network theory’; Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’, Deleuzian analysis; Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis).²² Memory plays no major explanatory role in this wider sociological canon, regardless of the fact that one of the founding fathers of memory studies, Maurice Halbwachs, was a sociologist.²³ Deprived of strong theoretical legitimacy, the import of memory into social movement studies has, for a long time, escaped the attention of students of particular movements and campaigns.

There are other reasons too. Since the rise of the ‘survey’ and then of procedures of statistical sampling, the field of app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Memory and social movements: an introduction
• 2 The ascension of ‘comfort women’ in South Korean colonial memory
• 3 The past in the present: memory and Indian women’s politics
• 4 History as strategy: imagining universal feminism in the women’s movement
• 5 ‘The memory of history as a leitmotif for nonviolent resistance’ – peaceful protests against nuclear missiles in Mutlangen, 1983–7
• 6 Atomic testing in Australia: memories, mobilizations and mistrust
• 7 ‘The FBI Stole My Fiddle’: song and memory in US radical environmentalism, 1980–95
• 8 Memory ‘within’, ‘of’ and ‘by’ urban movements
• 9 Memory as a strategy? – dealing with the past in political proceedings against communists in 1950/60s West Germany
• 10 ‘We believe to have good reason to regard these comrades, who died in March, to be ours.’ The remembrance of the Märzgefallenen by workers’ organizations during the Weimar Republic
• 11 Memory as political intervention: labor movement life narration in Australia, Jack Holloway and May Brodney
• 12 Remembering the movement for eight hours: commemoration and mobilization in Australia
• 13 The memory of trade unionism in Germany
• 14 Protest cycles and contentious moments in memory activism: insights from postwar Germany
• 15 Social movements, white and black: memory struggles in the United States South since the Civil War
• 16 Afterword: the multiple entanglements of memory and activism
• Index