5.14. Memory Activism and Marginality

In 2018, a new government took power in Mexico. Amidst a human rights crisis with tens of thousands of disappeared people and hundreds of thousands of murdered and forcibly displaced people, the new President promised to end violence, to send the military back to their barracks and to end impunity. Contrary to this, human rights violations continue to take place every day in Mexico in a context of continued militarisation of civil life while the president continues to deny the crisis of more than 113,000 disappeared persons and more than 52,000 unidentified bodies, as he criticises human rights defenders and organised civil society at large. In this context, memorialisation practices are key to dispute the official narratives and to fight for justice and non repetition. This paper will analyse the efforts, risks and importance of working on memory, focusing on actions carried out by ARTICLE 19 in close relationship with survivors and relatives of victims of human rights violations in Mexico. 

The caste hierarchy in the Indian society has created a class of people who are ostracized owing to their birth in a certain caste. Generally referred to as 'Dalit', their writings talk about the pains, trials and tribulations that the society conferred upon them in the name of their low birth. Located at the fringes of the mainstream society, their writings talk about their struggle while also covering the dynamics of their social activism. The present paper looks at the challenges faced by dalit communities through the autobiographical writings of Om Prakash Valmiki's Joothan and Baby Kamble's The Prison We Broke and the portrayal of their memory in the form of resistance writings. 
These fragmented, creative and complex narratives are the attempts by the dalits to talk about their pathetic conditions while also highlighting their constant struggle and activism against the caste system. Besides this, the essay also focuses on the postcolonial literary tradition of social change. These works which are translated for international consumption also highlights the concept of the outsider-within that the dalits endure. The paper delves into the idea of how the memory formulates the struggle and social activism within the Indian society as a whole and dalit society in particular.

Since the brutal end of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009, a number of advocacy and memory projects have been organised - both in-person and online, in Sri Lanka and abroad, largely organised by the Tamil diaspora. This paper examines one such memory project - a 2019 exhibition organised in London by the Tamil Information Centre. The framework of memory activism is deployed to examine the cultural and political frames of memory presented in the process, and to examine the contestations around memory confronted throughout the organising process. Written as part of a participatory research project, this memory project centred resilience, Tamil narratives of struggle and the deep cultural resources available to the Tamil community in recovering from mass atrocity.