‘Don’t mourn, organise!’: remembrance and political activism
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2021-02-28

Political activists and movements frequently use engagement with specific practices of remembrance as a form of movement-building. My research with political activists in London focuses on unofficial commemorations of protest found in domestic environments and community spaces, and on the wider materialities of recent and contemporary political movements. I examine cultures of radical left-wing heritage as essential building blocks of politically contentious identities and communities — and as a way of managing individual and collective trauma in the face of violent conflict with the state. Commemorations of specific political movements are a way of reclaiming marginalised pasts, often with the aim of disrupting nationalistic historical narratives. Forms of left-wing remembrance — alternately of family histories, individual autobiographies or of spatially or temporally distant movements — create a slight inversion of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (1983), united by shared heritages and ideological aims rather than national or geographic unity. I outline the ways in which these connections are narrated, materialised and how they engender resilience, hopefulness and a sense of responsibility in the individuals and communities in question. Further, I suggest that these forms of remembrance play a significant role in the management of traumatic experiences such as state surveillance, arrests and tear gassing. Throughout, commemoration emerges simultaneously as a moral duty and as an affective need, and becomes materialised in a disparate archive of protest dotted across the city.

IIDA KÄYHKÖ, ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON