It’s Complicated: Our Conflicted Relationship with the Historical Past

• In Event: The Challenges of Interpreting and Preserving the Past

Abstract

Reflection is a well for human wisdom; it can teach us about ourselves and pave the way for a future devoid of past mistakes. However, what happens when a nation’s past is filled with atrocities, civil rights violations, genocides, dictators, slavery and other events that it desires to and actively keep hidden? How does one teach future generations not to repeat the mistakes of the past if nations cloak and ignore it? This question is more relevant today than ever due to recent educational policies in the UK regarding teaching imperialism and the British Empire proposing to not “directly” teach it as well as Texas’ rewritten public school textbooks that have sanitized many American historical events. Many nations, in particular America and Britain, share contested often dark and violent historical pasts which while unreflective of their current national state, are often couched in politically correct language or completely ignored or worse sterilized and rewritten positively. But why do we hide from our pasts? The answer lies in the politics of memory. Nowhere is this more apparent than in societal discourse on the American Indian and the frontier , British Imperialism and Japanese “comfort women” and the “Rape of Nanking” . In our desire to construct a memory that sidesteps atrocities and the brutality in American, British, and Japanese pasts, a selective, mythologized, and sanitized version of history has been allowed to settle into their citizen’s memories because this is more acceptable and tolerable. As this paper will explore, the reason behind this lies not only in the politics of memory but more specifically in the belief that there is no reason to continue the guilt of negative historical experiences. Sanitation and to a smaller extent mythicization occurs as a direct result of nationalism, collective trauma, and social amnesia; we need to sanitize and mythicize because it is directly tied to national identity, unity, and psyche. Through sanitizing and mythicizing, we have to create a false memory that has to serve its purpose of facilitating a positive national identity and unity as well as healing our collective national trauma.

Author

• Priscilla Kilili, San Jose State University