By researching the “Genealogy of Amnesia” we propose to address the political, social, ideological, and cultural mechanisms that produce collective amnesia. Dominant structures of power use mechanisms — such as racialization, political and economic dispossession, gender discrimination, or hegemonic nationalism — in order to systematically change and alter a certain group’s political past. These mechanisms generate silence, oblivion, and amnesia and in connection with the un-reflected genocides of the past continue to serve current discourses of discrimination and exclusion. Michel Foucault’s concept of genealogy as a form of political counter-history is central for our project. In reference to Foucault, yet transcending his perspective, we are to map roots and traces of genocidal events that are disconnected from historical narratives, in order to uncover the hidden conflicts and contexts of structurally violent mechanisms (racialization, dispossession, exploitation, discrimination). This genealogical work makes the fabric of the exposed amnesia. Our standpoint is that the research of history poses one of the main fields within which the possibility of stopping the perpetuation and repetition of violent exploitative processes and induced amnesia over them can be reached.
