Nina Schmidt (editor) - The Politics of Dementia: Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives

The Politics of Dementia

In public discourse and the day-to-day provision of health care, dementia often used as an umbrella term for different forms of memory loss that may or may not meet neuropsychological criteria is predominantly regarded as an illness afflicting individuals, and rightly so. Even though diseases of memory such as vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia and, above all, Alzheimers disease, have great impact on relatives, caregivers and communities as well as the person living with the condition themselves, dementia and the everyday stories that we tell about it are not commonly understood as entailing any wider political meaning in a sociohistorical sense. Issues of care, its affordability and its practice are, of course, important questions of social justice and therefore inherently political. However, although the ideological implications of certain types of narrative that circulate about dementia, and of the language used in both medical and popular accounts, have been addressed (e.g. ), dementia is not usually considered in relation to questions of national or global history, that of wars, genocides, colonialism or other atrocities and events, even by scholars of the (medical) humanities. In the present volume, we aim to expand upon the notion of a politics of dementia by analysing the condition as represented in literature and theory in the context of just such political history. The fact that authors, artists and intellectuals increasingly write dementia into their narratives of central historical episodes of violence and trauma is taken to be the result of deliberate choices, with all the cultural and social benefits, yet also the liabilities, that this entails. As the essays collected in this volume show, the notion of dementia is used in order to represent the involuntary and often paradoxical aspects of looking back at troubled or contested historical eras, in ways which ordinary forgetting or conscious suppression would not achieve.