Following the Well-trodden Paths of the Past: Memory, continuity and slowness

The event-based focus of much memory studies scholarship appears to centre the field on ruptures, and yet theories of cultural memory also consider how those ruptures are used to foster continuities of meaning and experience. In this paper, we aim to draw out this apparent tension between rupture and continuity and connect this to the emerging concept of “slow memory” (Wüstenberg 2023). We advance a political-cultural understanding of this concept and operationalise it for the study of the role of the past in the continuities of the present. We argue that slow memory can be understood as an unvoiced and unacknowledged aspect of cultural memory, which, when embedded into cultural imaginaries can sustain the continuity of meaning in individual experience despite processes of change. Our case studies are “slow memories” of the Cold War and colonialism in the everyday sense-making processes of Ukrainian movers to the UK, and the use of the Holocaust as a referent by actors remembering mass violence in Mozambique.