The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

With respect to individual identity, manipulated memory is particularly useful in helping us understand popular memory works by former Red Guards and educated youths who were mobilized by Chairman Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Similarly, the discursive formation of collective memory by museums, state commemorations, national memorial rites, commercial media, and the like is also a manifestation of manipulated memory at work. But this is not to suggest that collective memory is thus totally in thrall to institutional hegemony. Andreas Huyssen reminds us that these public mnemonic forums can also provide an entrance through which individuals can engage with their own accounts and expressions:

For it is precisely the function of public memory discourses to allow individuals to break out of traumatic repetitions. Human rights activism, truth commissions, and juridical proceedings are better methods for dealing with historical trauma. Another is the creation of objects, artworks, memorials, public spaces of commemoration.…Here the analysis of how memory and forgetting pervade real public space, the world of objects, and the urban world we live in becomes crucial.²⁶

The memory works that Huyssen talks about lead us to Ricoeur’s third level of memory abuse, obligated memory. The primary concern with regard to this form of historical traumatic memory is justice. Justice, a relation between self and other, is understood as the self’s duty to others, debt to others, and moral obligations to others (victims). Abuses of memory occur through how justice is mishandled, which introduces the question of how agenda, motivation, and perspective interfere with remembering and forgetting.²⁷

Marc Augé offers a beautiful metaphor explaining the relationship between remembering and forgetting, or, in his terms, memory and oblivion: “Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea.”²⁸ Following Ricoeur and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Augé explains that what we call “forgetting” is not so much our cognitive