Narrating Historical Injustice: Political Responsibility and the Politics of Memory

• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Author: David Myer Temin,Adam Dahl
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912917718636
• Date: 01 December 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917718636

Political Research Quarterly

2017, Vol. 70(4) 905 –917

© 2017 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912917718636

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Article

Memory and justice are intricately linked. To adequately

address historical wrongs, contemporary liberal democra-

cies must engage the past. Historical memory provides a

connective tissue between past wrongs and present injus-

tices. Without the agony of historical memory, liberal

societies slide into a politics of national forgetting, where

the innocence of the present is affirmed through a dis-

avowal of the past. As W. J. Booth (2008, 237) explains,

collective responsibility for historical injustice requires

attention to temporal continuities that make “possible the

community as a subject of justice, specifically as a sub-

ject of attribution, a body responsible for its past and

(relatedly) able to commit itself to a future.” Memory is

important to collective responsibility because it allows us

to construct our identity in such a way that past wrongs

persisting through time are seen as “ours.” Collectivities

or individuals who do not remember the past, or who con-

struct rigid divisions between past and present, cannot be

responsible agents (W. J. Booth 2008, 237–39).

Yet the question that arises with the politics of mem-

ory and its usefulness for addressing historical injustice

resides precisely in the process by which we create his-

torical memory. More than just a depiction of the past,

collective memory is constructed through a range of nar-

rative and memorial practices that impart meaning to past

events. We might think of the politics of memory in terms

of a two-step process. The first step involves acknowl-

edging the existence of past injustices as well as their

causal connection to the present. The second step, in turn,

involves paying attention to the narrative practices by

which past injustices are given collective meaning. Put

differently, the first step might be understood as the ques-

tion of whether we remember historical injustices or

instead slide into the “politics of forgetting” or a condi-

tion of “national amnesia” (Behdad 2005; Wolin 1990,

32–46).1 Once a collectivity has actually acknowledged

the past, the second step involves the question of how we

remember historical injustice, which in turn affects how

we conduct politics in the present. In late modernity, what

Lawrie Balfour (2005, 786–90) has called the “age of

apology,” liberal states are with increasing frequency

acknowledging past national crimes in an attempt to

718636PRQXXX10.1177/1065912917718636Political Research QuarterlyTemin and Dahl

research-article2017

1University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

2University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Myer Temin, Department of Political Science, University

of Michigan, 5700 Haven Hall, 505 South State St., Ann Arbor, MI

48109-1045, USA.

Email: dtemin@umich.edu

Narrating Historical Injustice: Political

Responsibility and the Politics of Memory

David Myer Temin1 and Adam Dahl2

Abstract

Memory and justice are intricately linked. To adequately address historical wrongs, liberal democracies must engage

the past. Historical memory provides a connective tissue between past wrongs and present injustices. Yet the question

that arises with the politics of memory and its usefulness for addressing historical injustice resides precisely in the

process by which we create historical memory. More than just an acknowledgment of past events, collective memory

is constructed through narrative and memorial practices that impart meaning to past events. This paper amends the

politics of memory by attending to the complex relationship between the narrative figuration of historical wrongs and

present attributions of collective responsibility. By viewing memory of historical wrongs as narrative constructions of

the past, we argue that the narrative form of historical injustice shapes contemporary notions of political responsibility.

In elaborating this claim, we examine how different narrative representations of historical injustice engender different

understandings of collective responsibility. Through a reading of the Native American political theorist Vine Deloria

Jr.’s famous work, Custer Died for Your Sins, we then explore how irony and satire help expose the limitations of tragic,

romantic, and comedic narratives in conceptualizing political responsibility for historical injustice.

Keywords

historical injustice, narrative, settler colonialism, decolonization, Vine Deloria Jr., Hayden White