« Forgetful settlers (by design): Paulina R. Johnson, ‘Settler-colonialism’s ability to forget Nêhiyawak memory’, Memory Studies, 19, 5, 2026, pp. 1475-1484

Foreclosing settler colonialism (also dishonestly): Rosanne Kennedy, ‘Decolonial memory frictions: Tracking the tent in activism, art and memory from Indigenous Australia to Palestine’, Memory Studies, 19, 5, 2026, pp. 1500-1524

29Oct26

Abstract: To explore the frictions of decolonising Memory Studies, a field which originated in Europe and has been driven, in part, by the study of Holocaust memory, I turn to Documenta, a prestigious German art festival. Held in Kassel in 2022, documenta fifteen marked a transition in the festival’s history, for the first time curated by a Global South artist collective. The festival, however, was derailed by controversies over antisemitism. In this article, I contribute to decolonialising the study of memory through three interconnected arguments. First, I argue that Germany’s overly broad understanding of antisemitism trivialised the decolonial initiatives pioneered at documenta fifteen and instead recentred European Holocaust memory and protected Israel’s settler colonial practices in Palestine. Second, I argue that settler colonialism offers a productive analytic frame for decolonising memory studies, enabling researchers to identify connections between histories and memories of dispossession and resistance that are often on the periphery of the field. Third, using a settler colonial analytic, I identify the tent as a recurrent symbol of dispossession and a commemorative form in anticolonial memory activism and art. To ground these arguments, I take First Nations Australian artist Richard Bell’s Embassy (2013–) installation at documenta fifteen, which features a canvas tent commemorating the Aboriginal land rights movement, as an entry point for analysing cultural memories of dispossession and resistance to settler colonialism. I then track Embassy’s (2013–) connections with Palestinian memories of dispossession, including a Palestinian festival in Jerusalem (2016), and with Emily Jacir’s (2001) Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948, and Dina Mattar’s Summer Day in Gaza (2017). I argue that the tent, as a portable commemorative form, brings into view surprising connections between memories of dispossession and resistance to settler colonialism that we miss if we start from the Global North.


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