INTRODUCTION

Consider the current world-historical landscape: the wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria; the political unrest in Peru and Venezuela; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; protests in Iran, Tunisia, and China; or the past and present worldwide critique of imperialism, settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism. They are ideological, politically motivated, and imbued with historical interests, biases, and aims. So is the way they are presented in the news and social media, in film and other forms of mass media, by politicians and political agencies, in museums and theatres. The way these events are ‘staged’ draws attention to the fact that staging difficult pasts (or presents, for that matter) are never neutral acts. One of the most vehement examples of this claim in the twenty-first century is Vladimir Putin and his administration’s resuscitation of the legacy of Joseph Stalin through the lens of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ whose years are encased between 1941 and 1945, thus eschewing the Soviet Union’s pact with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941 - the year Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded Russia. Putin’s staging of this past reflects his arrogant treatment of the people in his Realpolitik, imposing forms of public forgetting and amnesia, and the harnessing of patriotic pride and nostalgia through erasures of the historical records. Equally important, Putin’s staging of this past justifies the war by placing it in the historical context of Russia’s continued fight against US/NATO imperialism and its particular claims to the states and territories formerly in the Soviet orbit. 1 Putin has placed memory of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ centre stage from the very outset of his premiership in order to consolidate his power, emphasising Russian heroism and suffering not only for the citizens of Russia but also for the world at large and the new Eurasian geo-political alliance and regimes of power. A similar rhetoric was used by Putin in his article, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ (12 July 2021 - thus about half a year before a full-scale Russian offensive on 24 February 2022), wherein he voices his convictions that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’, while blaming the collapse in bilateral historical ties on the West/United States and its interventionalist politics. The controversial essay is an ominous final ultimatum to Ukraine being one step short of a declaration of war. Contrary to such rhetoric of historical disinformation promoting thinly veiled threats, this book argues that the public staging of difficult pasts in a manner that promotes contestation over consensus and open debate over perceived acquiescence is crucial to the reparative labour necessary to foreclose ideological - and, ultimately, totalitarian - ambitions to maintain power, dislodge civil resistance, or counteract emancipatory efforts. Working on memory in an open-ended, non-totalising, or evaluative manner, as we propose here, corroborates a political subject’s agency and relies on intellectual curiosity, emotional vulnerability, and shared determination. Memory is thus never complete or closed but a multilayered and agonistic process, much like democracy, to be navigated in ways that recognise the different lived experiences and complex political histories that configure to shape societies.