Introduction

Abstract

This special issue responds to Jenny Wüstenberg’s (2023) call to rethink memory through what she calls ‘slow memory’. Taking this epistemology of slowness, the Introduction asks us to think with Marcel Proust’s notion of involuntary memory as something that is not consolidated through monuments and state rituals but unfolds gradually through everyday experience and that can be given literary form. Across diverse geopolitical contexts, contributors examine how literary devices – analepsis, repetition, ellipsis – slow down the process of remembering, foregrounding uncertainty and resistance to official narratives. The authors of the articles pursue literature’s specificity as an aesthetic form that works on the memory of recent conflict whether in the Balkans or Egypt, Ethiopia or Algeria, Sri Lanka or Gaza. We ask how literature exposes historical silences, resists the erasures wrought by both nation-states and time and prompts us to ask how literature can transform the past in ways that are deeply meaningful and that move towards justice.