Corrosive comparisons and the memory politics of "saming": Threat and opportunity in the age of apology
| dc.contributor.author | James, Matt | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-04-29T19:09:25Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-04-29T19:09:25Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This article contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of memory and historical justice studies by analyzing one, particularly troublesome kind of competitive comparison that sometimes happens in memory politics in the so-called age of apology. The article calls this kind of competitive comparison, “saming”. Saming involves the attempt, via far-fetched or otherwise wrongheaded comparison, to exploit the recognition of some well-known case of historical injustice. Further, saming involves pursuing this comparison in ways that both trivialize the original injustice and undermine the framework from which the recognition of that injustice derives. The article develops its arguments and analysis by studying Budapest’s House of Terror museum and two Canadian redress campaigns, which sought historical recognition for the wartime internments of persons of Italian and Ukrainian ancestry, respectively. Saming is a recurrent problem, ubiquitous and probably inevitable in memory politics because the recognition of historical injustice brings with it unavoidable and indeed often valuable incentives to comparison. Thus, the overall aim of this article is to analyze the threat of saming in order to better defend the cause of comparison in introspective collective remembrance. | |
| dc.description.reviewstatus | Reviewed | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Faculty | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant number 895-2022-1000. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | James, M. (2024). Corrosive comparisons and the memory politics of “saming”: Threat and opportunity in the age of apology. Social Sciences, 13(3), 167. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13030167 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13030167 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/16417 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Social Sciences | |
| dc.rights | Attribution 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | populism | |
| dc.subject | historical justice | |
| dc.subject | comparison | |
| dc.subject | Holocaust | |
| dc.subject | House of Terror | |
| dc.subject | internment | |
| dc.subject | memory studies | |
| dc.subject | age of apology | |
| dc.subject.department | Department of Political Science | |
| dc.title | Corrosive comparisons and the memory politics of "saming": Threat and opportunity in the age of apology | |
| dc.type | Article |