| Abstract | This essay deploys the concept of cosmopolitan haunting to explore entangled relationships with the past, the role of minoritarian and ethnicized subjects of history and the emergence of horizontal post-national solidarities. I focus on two commemorative sites or practices that challenge the limits of transnational memory and its relationship with citizenship. The first is the story of William Cooper, an Aboriginal activist whose critique of the Nazi pogrom has been recognized by a number of commemorative events in Israel, and the second is a performative ritual enacted by migrant artists to honour Australia’s early Japanese history. The case studies demonstrate the affective contaminations that provoke not just feeling but also actions that both surpass but then get caught up again within the pressures of the nation state.
|
