Abstract
I inquire into how memory-work can be a decolonial praxis by looking at Moro Islamic Liberation Front adherents’ will to remember atrocities committed against Muslims in the Philippines as well as stories of survivance, and how these shape their struggle for the right to self-determination. I discuss how memory-work plays a significant role in their struggle, which can be seen as a movement towards what Adolfo Albán calls “re-existence.” I further suggest that one way to consider the decolonial potential of memory-work is to be attentive to the co-implication of the past, present, and future in people’s narratives and lives, and the dynamics of collective memory formation. This attentiveness would necessitate looking into the entanglement of memory with imagination, and how this entanglement implicates temporality, fellow-feeling, and action. Coming from anthropology, I look as well at some convergences between community psychology and anthropology in understanding the decolonial praxis of memory-work.
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Notes
- 1.
I use fellow-feeling rather than empathy because the former allows for slippages between compassion, sympathy, pity, and empathy without a priori bracketing them from each other. Additionally, fellow-feeling is, unlike empathy, necessarily directed towards doing something good. For a more thorough discussion, see Castillo (2017).
- 2.
Names of my interlocutors are pseudonyms to protect their identities.
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Castillo, R.C.A. (2022). The Past, Present, and Future Entangled: Memory-Work as Decolonial Praxis. In: Kessi, S., Suffla, S., Seedat, M. (eds) Decolonial Enactments in Community Psychology. Community Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75201-9_13
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