Importing Memory: Using Other Nations' Collective Memory in Political Speeches
Author: Tracy Adams, tracy.adams625@gmail.com
Department: Sociology and Anthropology
University: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Supervisor: Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi
Year of completion: 2020
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Collective Memory
, Political Speech
, Globalization
, Importation
Areas of Research:
Comparative Sociology
, Communication, Knowledge and Culture
, Political Sociology
Abstract
In a globalized age, in which ideas, images, and cultural products travel incessantly, the notion of “traveling memories” (Erll 2011) now occupies center stage. Due to the blurring of boundaries, memories can also travel, not only through time but also across cultural and national borders. Research has focused on traveling memories, mainly in the realm of cultural products and mediated settings. However, little to no research has examined how collective memories travel in political speech. This dissertation fills this lacuna. This research examines how memories from beyond the border are imported and incorporated in one of the arguably most national of all spaces, i.e., political speech. Building on the politics of memory and positioned within the third wave of memory studies, I raise new concerns about the political implications and agency involved in the transnationalization of mnemonic practices. Specifically, this research focuses on four different countries (Israel, Germany, England, and the United States) and the timeframe of 1945-2018 to qualitatively analyze and compare how their heads of state use memories of other nations.
The findings show how collective memories travel in political speech in a globalized era. The findings point to the centrality of the nation’s considerations in motivating and influencing this practice. Memories that manage to cross the border are bound by specific circumstances and agenda. Strategically utilized, not any memory can cross over to be accepted into the national context of speech; instead, only a selected few are enabled to enter. Furthermore, those memories that manage to travel, to be incorporated in political speech directed at the local public, do so at a cost. They must undergo a process of domestication or localization, appropriation in the American case, and thus are transformed. The “foreign” is no longer foreign, and the domestic is no longer the exclusive domain of the national, and these multinational memories circulate constantly and are recycled and reused.
To put it differently, while the progressing transnationalization may have expanded the repertoire of memories available for public speakers to use when addressing the nation, the use of memories from across the border remains firmly rooted within the national context. Thus, this dissertation contributes to ongoing discussions over the progressing transnational and transcultural transformation of collective memories, unpacking and highlighting critical processes in their re-negotiation and appropriation within political discourse. Importantly, the analysis establishes the connection between how memories are constructed in political speech and current ongoing challenges to illuminate how the nuanced utilization of imported memories transcends a global mnemonic trope. Significantly, then, this dissertation not only establishes the sociology of traveling memories in political speech by translating this notion into practice but also challenges the current understanding of the transnationalization of this practice, bringing back the nation and its considerations to the forefront of this discussion.
