In a lecture that Habermas gave on his 90th birthday he ironically, but with serious intent, called a good Kant a sufficiently Marxist educated Kant. This dialectical Kant is the only one of the many Kants who maintains the idea of an unconditioned moral autonomy but completely within evolution, history and in the middle of societal class and other struggles. The article tries to show what Kant could have learned from his later critics to enable him to become a member of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist theory of society.

This special issue builds on empirical research to provide new insights into the interrelations between collective memory and legacies of political violence in the Balkans. The contributions pay particular attention to two major issues: First, they explore the ways in which individuals and groups respond to and cope with violent pasts by investigating commemorative practices including public performances, narratives, and negotiations of counter-memories. Second, they make explicit how people select and reassemble collective memories through remembering violent pasts to create and disseminate novel forms of identity. Through interdisciplinary lenses, the studies reveal how the legacies of political violence and their lived experience become important means for people to create and mobilize collective memories that are influential enough to shape nationalistic and political realities on the ground. On a theoretical level, the articles demonstrate various ways in which collective memories enable critical discussions around a wider set of issues including national identity, nationalism, making of history, and local power games. By engaging with these concepts, the contributions question dominant framings of past events as they investigate how counter-memories and counter-powers emerge in the process of negotiating established versions of history, official narratives, and hierarchies of power.

This article explores the relationship between memory, political violence, and identity among the Roma minorities in Kosovo. In the aftermath of the 1998–1999 conflict in Kosovo, countless Roma were forced to escape Albanian retaliation, accused of being Serb collaborators. Many had to resettle in enclaves near Fushë Kosovë on the outskirts of Kosovo’s capital Prishtina, others left for Serbian-controlled northern Kosovo or to neighboring countries or to Western Europe. Through an ethnographic investigation with displaced Roma families around Prishtina and in Prizren, the article examines how the communities mobilize collective memories of the violent past to adapt to a new political situation, find their place, and navigate their present within Kosovo’s social, economic, and political landscape. It shows that the past is a constant reminder of compromised loyalties toward the majority group, which in turn dictates their (non)relations. Roma voices and narratives about the violent past are not part of the dominant and official discourse; they are counter-memories, telling a story that is silenced and unrecognized by the majority.

How will the author teach Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation in an undergraduate class on postcolonial literature and theory? With this pedagogical perspective in mind, this essay attempts a contrapuntal appreciation of the intertextual relationship between Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. On the basis of Daoud’s novel, this intervention critically rehearses and reformulates the many crises and dilemmas that constitute postcolonial theory: postcolonial asymmetry and counter-memory, the predicament of secular nationalism, decolonization of the mind, humanism and the relationship of ontology to politics, and the future of third world literature.

This article focuses on a particular monument in Tophane, the Workers' Monument, which has been subjected to destructions ever since the time it was put in place in 1973 and which still stands in the same place as a crippled and unidentifiable body. Many people have referred to it as a “monster.” The term “monster” points to unacceptable forms of life, cast aside as “abnormal,” and can be of use in tracing how certain memories are crushed or abandoned and become aberrant. Thus, I argue that the story of the destruction of the Workers' Monument cannot be read independently of the performative command of the state, best observed in erecting Atatürk monuments all over the country as visual embodiments of power and furthermore securing and protecting them against destruction by the force of law. Monuments contribute to the closure of the past as a dead body. However, they also forge a regime of memory and desire that serves power. I dwell on the issue of monuments in Turkey in that interstice between life and death, that is, in their “monstrosity,” so as to reflect on what remains unrepresentable within the complex history—in other words, to reflect on the problem of power, history, and memory/counter-memory.