Apresentação: Memórias ambíguas: modulações narrativas e gestão do passado

The field of memory politics shows a range of concepts from the social and human sciences and narrative forms that are shaped by literary and artistic production. This introductory article to this dossier traces the interpretive turn that has understood language as an operative machine for world-making, adopting an approach attuned to the lines of force that sustain or strain memorial inscriptions and actions. We center our analysis on territories in their historicities and conflicts, highlighting situations in which remembering becomes a means of taking a stand and in which narrating and listening emerge as pathways via the interdicted — whether such actions and inscriptions unfold around disputes over historical narratives, processes of restitution of objects, interventions in museum collections and archives, the creation or demolition of memorial infrastructures, or the heritagization of past symbols. We take particular interest in recognition and preservation policies that mobilize “ambiguous memories” to unsettle social consensus and enunciative authority, challenging classificatory logics that fix subjects, territories, and meanings within stable categories such as culture, nation, society, and identity. We argue that narratives marked by ambiguity, contradiction, and fracture, by insisting on overflow, detour, and subversion, open space for invention and political intervention.