The children of the Colonial War: post-memory and representations

Abstract

Twentieth-century western history and its political and cultural imaginary are dominated by a legacy of conflicts: two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the under narrated colonial European wars in the South, be they in Asia or Africa, the more recent war in the former Yugoslavia, dictatorships, torture, concentration camps. We must never forget is the phrase currently associated with these events. However, the production of these never forget processes takes on different public and private expressions. What is visible in this never forget is linked to monuments, commemorations, laws, but also to representations – to literature, film, historiography, pedagogic, political and media discourse, that is to public narratives which make up public memory; that which is invisible in these histories is linked to the stories of families drawn up from a standpoint of subjectivities and objects such as letters, photographs, souvenirs which together provide the material with which to construct the family memory of the event.