A Proposition for Remembering Activism: A Toolkit for Assemblage Memory

Abstract

Instead of mourning or celebrating feminism’s loss or return, narratives that operate as powerful grammars within the stories repeatedly told about feminist pasts, ‘A Proposition for Remembering Activism: A Toolkit for Assemblage Memory’ outlines how activist memories are composed through the intersections of discourses, material culture, bodies and affects, tracked across the axes of duration and intensity. This framework decentres the privileged focus on narrative and identity that organises wider social movement treatments of collective memory. In an original contribution to understanding feminist activist memory—and social movement memory more widely—this chapter sets out the key tenets of an assemblage memory approach. In doing so, this chapter provides an accessible introduction to assemblage theory for the reader interested in thinking through the complexities of cultural memory and activist practices.