Historical Amnesia and the Work of Remembering

Opinion

By U. Dasin

Historical amnesia is often equated with forgetting the grand dates of history — the wars, treaties, and revolutions that populate official timelines. Yet even within these tokenised dates, names, and events, nations — especially young nations — run a deeper risk of amnesia. They have not yet fully learned that identity, whether regional, national, or cultural, does not arise spontaneously. It is forged through the repetition of narratives and their gradual internalisation as ideas, ethics, moral frameworks, and social attitudes.

“With the unfurling of what McLuhan famously called the global village — first through television and later through digital media – this process of internalisation has been profoundly disrupted. Appadurai’s five “scapes” of globalisation (1) help explain how national borders have become increasingly porous, not only economically but symbolically and imaginatively…” Pic – devx.com

With the unfurling of what McLuhan famously called the global village — first through television and later through digital media – this process of internalisation has been profoundly disrupted. Appadurai’s five “scapes” of globalisation (1) help explain how national borders have become increasingly porous, not only economically but symbolically and imaginatively. Alongside this erosion has come the systematic bankrolling of national traditions by the diffusion of American cultural codes, disseminated through both traditional and non-traditional media.

The French have long been acutely aware of this phenomenon and have debated extensively the erosion of French culture through Americanisation. It is unclear whether the rest of the world has been equally prescient. The impact appears to have been harsher on poorer nations – particularly those that were already struggling to insert themselves into the narrative of modernity. Mauritius is a case in point: a country that has known persistent economic and social difficulties since before independence.

Unsurprisingly, public discourse today centres almost entirely on the economy – on how to kick-start growth again after a decade of state looting under the MSM government. We are reminded that Moody’s is watching that structural reforms and fiscal restraint are necessary to keep us “on track,” lest we fall into the grey zone and scare off investors. I do not claim sufficient economic expertise to contest these arguments on their own terms.

What concerns me, however, is how this hypervisibility of economic imperatives conceals, nullifies, and erases other realities. National rebuilding is not merely an economic exercise; it is also a symbolic and narrative one. It requires the rebuilding of shared memory – not from scratch, but through remembrance.

I have been struck by the astonishing amnesia among young people regarding events that occurred only five or ten years ago. This suggests not indifference, but the absence of durable mechanisms of memory. We need to give ourselves the means to archive collective experience through film, song, dance, ritual — yes, even secular rituals – and to recycle these forms back into public life.

If Hollywood can produce a new version of Cinderella every two years, what prevents us from retelling and reworking the stories of our collective past? Such repetition does not imprison us in nostalgia; it builds awareness of where we come from. And crucially, this remembrance must extend beyond grand historical events to include small, local, and personal truths – those fragments of lived experience through which a nation slowly learns to recognise itself.

(1) Arjun Appadurai’s five “scapes” of globalisation describe the different, overlapping flows through which globalization operates. They emphasise that globalization is uneven, fluid, and shaped by power and imagination rather than moving in a single, uniform direction.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 23 January 2026