Mihaela Mihai's interdisciplinary work on the politics of memory and the aesthetics of care addresses a disturbing lacuna regarding how some artistic renderings of the violent past can illuminate the intricacies of nonlinear resistance constellations and complicity in wrongdoings. The engagement with politics of memory through the lens of arts and aesthetics of care provides a theoretical vantage point into the convoluted debates about the human agents involved in the enactment of narratives of the aftermath of systemic violence. Mihai's astute exploration of novels and films reveals the propensity of certain artistic productions to disclose the “misdiagnosing of the past” (6), and the unnuanced, tripartite accounts of the agents involved in past violence (customarily acknowledged as victims, perpetrators, and resisters).
The book challenges the grand narratives of heroism (the “hero elect” idealized visions from cultural and political history), as well as the neat demarcations between villains, victims, and resisters. The author denounces the obliteration of complicity and its pervasiveness across persistent violent habits. In an argumentative tour de force, Mihai manages to dislocate petrified demarcation lines “between the good and the bad, to reveal the relationality that underpins even the most exemplary practices of resistance” (7). In doing so she engages in an academically unprecedented, systematic analysis of the “in-between area of widespread complicity with systemic violence” (23). The will to disentangle the murky complexities of memory politics, by focusing on the less explored constellations of “impure” heroism, competitive and hierarchical victimhood, and perpetrators who became victims/resisters constitutes the groundbreaking feature of Mihai's book. The theoretically perspicacious introduction and the first two chapters lay the groundwork for engaging with the analysis of the case studies (chapters 3–5). The three case studies are structured symmetrically, tackling succinctly the historical and political context, continuing with a detailed account of the official narratives, a critical analysis of the works of art selected to support the theoretical argument, and a concise conclusion. The brief conclusion of the book grapples with how and to what ends our political imagination can reconfigure the past in the light of more responsible futures.
Chapter 1 unpacks the argument that the hegemonic narratives of complex violence—materialized in official memory cultures across various national borders—are structured by a “double erasure.” The genealogy and traces of this double erasure are carefully addressed with a constant focus on the “grands récits” that “colonize a community's mnemonic space” (22). The first erasure consists of the official mnemonic renderings of the past that prioritize certain categories of victims and heroic resisters and hold accountable only certain perpetrators while keeping “the community's hermeneutical space closed” (23). The second erasure consists of idealized visions of (usually) men, heroes elect (canonized or self-canonized), which obscure the ambivalence and ambiguity of resistance to violence. The rest of the first chapter elaborates on the possibilities of enlarging the spectrum of involvement with a violent past by considering the “positionality and relationality of memory, hope and action” (45). While the simultaneity of the two erasures is addressed in detail and convincingly, there is less elaboration on instances of memories of violence that are neither fully official (hegemonic) nor fully vernacular (nonofficial public memory that escapes colonization). On the one hand, official memory can also be fragmented, conflicting, discontinued, and continuously altered regardless of changes in the power status quo. On the other hand, vernacular cultural memories may advance beyond their spontaneous open-endedness and highly localized nature, overshadowing the supposed official hegemonic memories about the troubled past. Thus, besides the highly innovative proposal to establish novel theoretical grounds to understand the “double erasure,” the chapter would have also benefited from a more systematic engagement with the two forms of public memory as porous, as well as from the identification of novel attributes and/or patterns of interaction and interplay between them.
Chapter 2 moves to the cultural format (the artistic milieu) regarded as a vehicle that can enable us to travel prosthetically in the past to amend the reductive visions inflicted by the double erasure. Mihai elaborates on the aesthetics of mnemonic care as a potential strategy for undoing the erasures while she also acknowledges that this strategy is not the only one, or the most efficient one, for unlocking a community's mnemonic horizon (46). Inspired by feminist work in care ethics, the author proposes to zoom in on those art pieces that problematize the double erasure by expanding the audiences’ political imagination (47). The next three chapters offer an in-depth critical analysis of literary and film productions from three different repressive contexts, notorious for their “messy histories” (65), that can be regarded as labors of mnemonic and aesthetic care. While the book overlooks other artistic media, as well as more collaborative contemporary artistic formats which involve the spectators in remembering the past, the quasi-exclusive focus on film and literature allows to reveal how some “caring refuseniks” engage in the work of mnemonic/epistemological care to prevent the ideational materialization of monopolizing narratives about victims, perpetrators, and heroes.
Chapter 3 zooms in on the troubled past of France with a focus on the interplay between complicity and resistance during and after the German occupation. After a careful presentation of official narratives accompanied by the cultural materializations meant to popularize them, the chapter analyzes instances of artistic interventions in the monolithic narratives about France under German occupation. Particularly revealing are the analyses of two well-known movies, Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), that delve into a meticulous unraveling of heterogeneous resistances and complicities. The most intriguing exploration of the chapter focuses on the disassociation of patriotism from masculinity. At the same time, Mihai presents a compelling picture of how gender “structured the social construction of both treason and heroism in the space of public memory” (121).
Chapter 4 focuses on the Romanians’ horizons of hope and despair in positioning themselves in constellations of resistance and complicity vis à vis the fascist past of collaboration with Nazi Germany and the communist regime. As in the preceding chapter, the investigation of the positionality of the characters represented in the art pieces (again literature and film) is structured along the crisscrossing axes of identity incorporating “ideology, ethnicity, religion, class, profession, gender, and geographical location” (123). After a diligent survey of how official narratives unfold in postcommunist Romania, the chapter engages in a sophisticated analysis of works by well-known artists, including Nobel laureate Herta Müller, and productions of less celebrated writers and filmmakers that address the grey zone of involvement with a violent past. Although the chapter does not consider all the caring refuseniks portrayed in Romanian cultural memory, the selected examples accomplish the task of contributing to a more nuanced picture of resistance and complicity to violence.
Chapter 5 deals with the spectrum of apartheid in South Africa. As in the previous two chapters, Mihai maps up the official narrative of the Truth and Reconciliation process from 1995 to 1999, and then challenges it with the narratives of four novels and two films. Like the French case study, the artistic productions analyzed in this chapter denounce triumphalist and masculinist memories and decenter their authoritative voices (203). Unlike the case studies on Vichy France and communist Romania, the example of apartheid South Africa foregrounds the importance and value of corrective mnemonic labor as essential to the possibilities of articulating alternative political projects (235).
