memory, coloniality, justice, temporality, utopia
Memory is a crucial driver of justice in postcolonial contexts, mediating the identities, temporalities and power relations embedded in colonial hierarchies. It bridges past atrocities, present inequities and future possibilities, offering both diagnostic insight and emancipatory potential. While memory studies and postcolonial studies have flourished, the conceptual link between memory and postcolonialism remains underexplored. Memory’s diagnostic, performative and projective dimensions collectively enable societies to confront enduring colonial legacies, cultivate hope, and construct politically and ethically grounded visions of the future.
Available in English: Youth Perspectives on Peace
ABSTRACT
Memory is a crucial driver of justice in postcolonial contexts, mediating the identities, temporalities and power relations embedded in colonial hierarchies. It bridges past atrocities, present inequities and future possibilities, offering both diagnostic insight and emancipatory potential. While memory studies and postcolonial studies have flourished, the conceptual link between memory and postcolonialism remains underexplored. Existing work documents colonial injustices and produces counter-memories challenging dominant narratives, but less attention has been given to memory’s broader role in confronting persistent hierarchies.
Memory operates in three interrelated dimensions. Diagnostically, it exposes colonial atrocities and the ongoing legacies of structural inequality, highlighting how colonial power continues to shape contemporary social, political and economic relations. Performatively, memory constructs collective identities and shared meanings, mobilising communities and social movements. Through storytelling, art and commemoration, memory produces solidarity and enables political advocacy, transforming recollection into action. Projectively, memory anticipates the future; recollecting past injustices motivates efforts to create alternative, more just and equitable societies. Memory is therefore not only retrospective but also forward-looking, linking historical trauma to aspirational possibilities and utopias.
In a postcolonial world still shaped by the ongoing legacies and power structures of colonialism, this temporal interconnection renders memory both a tool of resistance and a vehicle for transformation. By foregrounding silenced narratives and excluded histories, communities honour their past while shaping visions of justice-oriented futures. Utopia emerges not as an abstract ideal but as a dynamic, contested horizon that guides activism and imagination. Memory’s diagnostic, performative and projective dimensions collectively enable societies to confront enduring colonial legacies, cultivate hope, and construct politically and ethically grounded visions of the future.
introduction
Memory is an important driver for justice in a postcolonial world. Memory mediates the identities, temporalities and power relations that are central to postcolonial hierarchies. As a consequence, memory has the potential to serve as an emancipatory tool: by making the past relevant in the present memory can affect the present and also influence the future, rendering it more just. In order to achieve this memory needs to be activated and performed, paying attention to colonial legacies and structural injustice in the present and providing a vision for the future. Memory can thus serve as a reminder of past mistakes and injustices, motivating societies to take steps to prevent similar occurrences in the future. But how do memory and justice relate?
This entry approaches the topic of colonial legacies from the perspective of memory studies. The intention is not to provide an account of memory as a site of struggle about competing interpretations of the past, but rather to outline the social function of memory in general while making reference to colonial pasts. Importantly, in this article the focus is not so much on nationalist, top-down projects of memorialisation as it is on societal, emancipatory projects acting from below. With memory studies and postcolonial studies both flourishing as areas of research, it is surprising that memory and postcolonialism have rarely been linked conceptually in the existing academic literature. While there is an increasing body of research on remembering colonial injustices or providing counter-memory in order to challenge the hegemonic canon (Buckley-Zistel & Koloma Beck, ) , there are few studies at a conceptual level that draw out the relevance of memory for challenging postcolonial hierarchies in general (see also Rothberg, , p. 360). The importance of linking these two aspects is stressed by Göttsche, who states:
‘[p]ostcolonial discourse uses memory … to promote critical knowledge of the history of colonialism, raise awareness of its continuing impact in the present, and work towards political, social and cultural decolonization in a globalized, interconnected and yet conflict ridden world that continues to be marked by colonial legacies such as racism, asymmetrical power relations and uneven access to resources and opportunities’ (Göttsche , p. 1).
Memory thus affects past, present and future of colonial hierarchies and injustices. As a form of agency in the present it is temporally embedded, informed by the past but also oriented towards the future in the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities and projects (Emirbayer & Mische, ).
In this entry I argue first that from a diagnostic perspective regarding the past, recognising and acknowledging atrocities such as colonial crimes is essential for achieving justice. Collecting and preserving historical records, oral histories and survivor testimonies can help to ensure that the truth is uncovered and perpetrators are held accountable. Second, performatively, in a formerly colonised society or a society in which many people from former colonies live, memory is a powerful tool for them to construct a collective identity as the basis of advocacy and awareness-raising about injustices in the present. Through storytelling, art, documentation and the sharing of personal experiences, individuals and organisations can mobilise public support for justice-related causes. Third, regarding the future, memory functions projectively: social movements and advocates imagine a future that is more just, leading to campaigns to change policies and laws in ways that promote greater fairness and equality.
In short, I argue that memory is diagnostic since it reveals injustices, performative since it produces collective identities and new meaning, and projective since it shapes possible futures. Therefore, on a societal level memory can serve as a form of resistance and emancipation to correct the present and change the future. Let us look at each aspect in turn.
Memory sites in London, Tervuren (Brussels), Paris and Birmingham. Photos by Susanne Buckley-Zistel
The diagnostic dimension of memory (the past)
First, memory is diagnostic because it seeks to expose and display past injustices as well as demonstrating their persistence. Regarding colonialism, this diagnostic work begins by revealing what has been silenced in memory discourses (Lu, ; Rothberg, ). The colonisation of countries in the so-called Global South by countries predominantly in the so-called Global North has produced a wide array of injustices. Colonial powers enacted violence through forced labour and enslavement, deliberate killings including massacres and genocide, and the dispossession of land for economic exploitation, leading to the loss of livelihoods and the disruption of cultural practices. Local traditions were suppressed, languages and belief systems were stifled, and assimilation was enforced. Newly-established hierarchies of power and colonial administrations limited local political participation, undermined governance structures, divided communities, and marginalised specific groups. Divide-and-rule policies polarised ethnic identities and created unequal access to resources, while the exploitation of natural resources through forced labour damaged the environment and depleted land. This list of crimes, although extensive, is far from exhaustive.
These tangible past crimes cannot be separated from their enduring legacy in the present, which shapes the social milieux within which memory operates. A key argument of memory studies is that we remember our past through our present milieu (Halbwachs, ). This means that the meaning given to an atrocity is situated in the present; it is the present conditions that make us attribute this meaning and consider the past act to be a crime. Here, it is helpful to draw on discussions around colonialism and coloniality as introduced by Aníbal Quijano inter alia and further developed by Walter Mignolo (Mignolo & Walsh, , see also ). While colonialism as a practice of occupation and domination enshrined inequalities into social orders that continue to shape racial, political, gender and economic hierarchies, producing structural violence that endures long after formal colonial rule has ended (Lu, ), in contrast, coloniality is less tangible yet equally harmful. It encompasses the persistence of colonial practices and hierarchies in present-day societies, i.e. in the social milieu in which memory is situated. Quijano’s () concept of the ‘colonial matrix of power’ highlights how hierarchical systems established during colonialism continue to reproduce inequality and subordination, including the capacity to build knowledge – what Gayatri Spivak () has termed ‘epistemic violence’ (see also ; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, ) When considering memory and justice in a postcolonial context, it is therefore crucial to think of colonialism and coloniality together. It is not enough to document past crimes; one must also examine how coloniality continues to structure societies today, and influences the ways in which the past is remembered and mobilised in the pursuit of justice.
The performative dimension of memory (the present)
Memory is not only an interpretation of the past, a diagnosis of atrocities and their legacy; it is also performative, producing meaning, collective identities and a sense of belonging. It is memory’s relation to identity that makes it such a highly relevant topic in the context of the postcolonial world. Collective identities draw on memory to shape identity, but at the same time they produce memory in order to secure this identity (Buckley-Zistel, ; Mannergren et al., , p. 7). As Antze and Lambek (, p. xviii) suggest, ‘[w]e draw on our experience to shape narratives about our lives, but equally, our identity and character are shaped by our narratives.’ There is thus a dialectic relationship between memory and identity, since the ‘meaning of any individual or group identity, namely a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity’ (Gillis, , p. 3). Collective identities emerge as products of their memory just as much as their memory emerges from them. Through memory, collective identity thus emerges performatively from the stories we tell about ourselves, just as our stories emerge from our lives.
For this to happen, though, there needs to be some shared consensus about the relevance of an atrocity for the collective. An event needs to be recognised as cultural trauma, a ‘tear in the social fabric’ (Eyerman, , p. 61). In other words, atrocities are not automatically recognised as such, and thus do not automatically invoke memory. Rather, collectives choose to make a particular past event relevant for the present, and this involves agency in turning this event into a moment that is constitutive for the collective, shared by all. This choice – often implicit rather than deliberate – requires a process through which agents make claims about the form of the atrocity, its meaning for the social groups, and who is responsible for it (Alexander, , p. 11). This claim to a fundamental injury, an injustice, then becomes the basis of demands for memory and justice.
Making this claim into a fundamental injury has become especially relevant in the present milieu due to the general increase in awareness of the legacies of colonialism and coloniality, and how these structures affect people today. Global entanglements and their impact on continuing poverty and deprivation (Jelin et al., ; Young, , Chapter 6), as well as more localised yet historically rooted injustices such as racism (Grosfoguel, ), have given rise to local and global movements such as Rhodes Must Fall, Black Lives Matter and Land Back, all of which address highly present concerns with reference to the colonial past. As illustrated by in this Encyclopaedia, social movements use (in this case popular) memory and art as vehicles for decolonial transformation. In Chile protesters drew on memories of colonial dispossession and dictatorship for mobilisation, while in Colombia they used the narrative of inherited colonial hierarchies and state violence, turning streets from places of resistance to places where historical memory was reclaimed and reworked. Memory thus becomes a tool through which the meaning of justice itself is not fixed but ‘part of the collective’s political advocacy efforts’ ().
The projective dimension of memory (the future)
Importantly, memory is not just about past and present, but also “about the future as a ‘projective’ capacity to imagine alternative possibilities” (Emirbayer & Mische, , p. 962). This brings us to the notion of time and temporality in both postcolonial and memory studies (see also Antweiler, , p. 40; Avram et al., , p. 397). The notion of temporality does not only look back at the past atrocities but also asks what future we envisage, thereby dismantling the linearity of time and teleology. It is about acting in the present so that the future present looks different from the current one. In other words, how we recall the past is always conditioned by how we envisage our future (Buckley-Zistel, , p. 15). Projectivity thus turns into ‘an active concept [that] helps to view the future in terms of the imaginative work and practices that negotiate meanings and legitimacy, embed knowledge, engage publics and create relations of trust’ (Oomen et al., , p. 254).
This is important for the link between memory and justice because aspirations for a just future impact what kind of past is remembered. When we remember, we do not only turn to the past; we also project ourselves forward into a future horizon of possibilities. We are always between past and future.1This thought goes back to the hermeneutic writing of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, which I develop at greater length in Buckley-Zistel (2008). Following Ashcroft (), it is instructive to consider Homi Bahbda’s words when he states:
‘The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with “newness” that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, re-figuring it as a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present’ (Bhabha, , p. 10).
If we replace culture with memory, undoubtably a part of culture, and newness with future, we see how Homi Bhabha also links past, present and future in a mutually constitutive way. The present is a space in-between, a space where ‘past and future are equally present precisely because they become equally absent from our sense’ (Arendt, , p. 210). By analogy, in a postcolonial world we are in an equally liminal space: in-between injustice and justice, in-between inequality and equality, in-between misrecognition and recognition.
This creates the possibility of change. To project memory into the future means to anticipate a particular future, for instance a world that is less marked by colonial legacies. In a similar vein, Antweiler (, p. 68) argues that Holocaust memory ‘is not primarily invested in commemorating the victims but is rather about constructing a new shared or collective memory, … [that] transcends past and present in order to allow for future-looking politics’. It also resonates in the words of Adebayo (, p. 120) who suggests that ‘histories of violence need to be studied in a way that is forward looking and taught in a way that opens up conversations on how patterns of violence can be disrupted’. Here he is calling for a future-oriented memory of colonialism, since only remembering the past does not necessarily have an impact on the future. In this sense, ‘to remember means to transform’ [‘erinnern heißt verändern’], as a German victims’ organisation keeps reminding us.
A creative idea about a future, as writers like Mahmoud Darwish and Salman Rushdie suggest, may turn into a revolutionary force because it cultivates hope – hope for freedom, for change, and for futures that assert that ‘another world is possible’ (Ashcroft, ). Postcolonial imagination thus makes space for hope to become both a form of resistance and a blueprint for the future.
A word of caution in necessary, thought. The link between memory and justice outlined in this entry is highly normative and aspirational. In fact, remembering is not in itself a neutral and emancipatory tool; it can be used for various goals by a plethora of different actors (Mannergren et al., ). On a societal level this might lead to divisions and conflict, and on a national level to employing colonialism as a trope to claim power and promote nationalist ideals both internally and externally. Postcolonial memory politics may thus serve to build a state, foster a civic society and position a state internationally (Lim, ; Petrakov, ; ). In this entry, however, the objective is to emphasise the potential of memory as a driver for justice in a postcolonial world.
Conclusion
To return to the question posed at the outset of this entry, let me conclude with some reflections about how memory and justice relate. Memory and justice are relational in three ways. First, memory enables justice because it draws attention to past atrocities of colonialism and highlights coloniality in the present. Second, the act of remembering itself is performative and produces collective identities and meaning. This is a prerequisite for political activism and emancipatory politics that aims at changing the lingering legacy of colonialism. Third, memory and justice are relational because remembering the past in a particular way (e.g. as colonial injustice) calls for imagining a future in which justice can be realised. These essential dimenstions of memory – diagnostic, performative, projective – make memory an important driver for justice in a postcolonial world still marked by the legacy of violence. What justice looks like, beyond recognition and social transformation, is very much conditioned by the political and social context from which memory emerges. There is no single ideal of justice to be attained; rather, justice depends on concrete injustices experienced in a particular space and time.
Importantly, the construction of the future through memory discourse serves as a crucial tool through which postcolonial societies may link historical trauma to aspirational possibilities. By foregrounding these memories, silenced narratives and excluded histories, communities both honour their pasts and actively shape visions of more a just and equitable future. Here, then, utopia is not an abstract and romanticised ideal; instead it is a dynamic horizon that is constantly created, challenged and transformed while keeping the aim of justice in focus. In this sense, memory may become a tool of resistance as well as a vehicle for transformation, generating utopias that are at once grounded, aspirational, and politically charged.
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How to cite this entry:
Holanda Maschietto, R., Ferreira, M. A., Cortinhas, J. & Carvalho de Oliveira, G. (2026, May 13). Youth Perspectives on Peace: Insights from Brazil on the Role of Care, Empowerment and Social Change. Virtual Encyclopaedia – Rewriting Peace and Conflict. BMFTR – Network Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20184943. https://rewritingpeaceandconflict.net/youth-perspectives-on-peace/
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