Critics’ Forum
Literature

An Archive in a Footnote: The Legacy Project
By Hovig Tchalian

Now that the tumult of events surrounding Genocide commemoration has
subsided, it is worth taking pause and considering the aftermath.
The inevitable moment after (especially once the celebrations of May
28th are also past) brings up the difficult but enduring question-
“What now?” or, more skeptically, “Is this all there is?”

An ambitious project, sponsored by the Hamburg Institute for Social
Research and The Rockefeller Foundation, offers perhaps the most
satisfying and propitious answer – allowing the act of remembrance
to outlive the moment of its inception. The Project consists
primarily of a website () that, as the site’s
own description puts it, “will build a global exchange on the
enduring consequences of the many historical tragedies of the 20th
century.”

In essence, the site archives the various reactions to the
historical tragedies of the previous century, in the hope of
preventing their future occurrence, or at least dampening their
detrimental effects on society. The website’s “events index”
provides a comprehensive alphabetical list of the nearly 25 “events”
included in the archive-from “African Conflicts,” Apartheid, the
Armenian Genocide and the “Cambodian Killing Fields,” through the
Holocaust and the struggles of “indigenous peoples,” to the two
World Wars.

Admittedly, the strand tying all these “events” together – the issue
of social injustice, broadly conceived – is somewhat tenuous. And
the categorization scheme may be suspect. (What about “indigenous
peoples” constitutes a set of “events”?) Perhaps a better way of
linking these various themes together is under the even broader
theme of remembrance, the complex “legacy” that gives the project
its name. According to the website, “the Legacy Project offers a
channel for mutual recognition across generations and geography.
Through scholarly research and innovative presentation, The Legacy
Project will create new – and shared – frameworks for cultural
expressions of loss, drawn from Africa, the Americas, Asia and
Europe. Our work will help define the language of human loss – its
forms, its symbols, its grammar. . . . The Legacy Project seeks a
collective, retrospective reflection on the losses that constitute
the legacy of the last century.”

The real value of the project – the genuine goal of active
remembrance and comparative historical study facilitated by the
creation of a central archive of various human injustices – is
overshadowed by the quite ambitious but nonetheless diffuse goal of
defining “the language of human loss,” a goal arguably more akin to
academic studies than to historical reality. The site nonetheless
admirably achieves its more modest goal of preserving the poems,
plays, speeches, films, historical commentary, and a host of other
reactions to the tragedies that have defined our century and the
prior one.

Unlike the more strictly historical mission of, say, the Zoryan
Institute, which carries out the important work of preserving the
commentaries of Genocide survivors and legal and historical
documents related to the event itself, the Legacy Project preserves
the reactions of the generations that succeeded them. By doing so,
it carries out the equally important work of archiving in one place
what would otherwise constitute a scattered series of footnotes,
the “secondary” memory of the historical events that record the
shock registered in the minds and hearts of more than a century’s
worth of indirect witnesses. In this sense, the website performs
the much-needed function of commemorating the act of commemoration
itself – testimony to the enduring will of those who would see the
tragedies halted and continual fodder for all of us looking for a
viable answer to the question with which we began, “What now?”

The selections included on the site are nothing short of
remarkable. As of the last viewing, the website includes virtual
exhibitions of “Frank Stella, the Polish Village Series;” “The “Art
of Afterwards;” and a study of “Echoes of the Guernica.” There is
also a “Virtual Symposium” of Holocaust-related issues, as well as
the discussions of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The
site also includes a searchable database of the various literary,
artistic and film materials included on the site. Excerpts of the
work of Armenian poet and writer Peter Balakian are represented, as
are the enigmatic and powerful historico-philosophical ruminations
of the German-Jewish cultural critic, Walter Benjamin.

Despite the Legacy Project’s sophistication and the breadth and
depth of its archives, there are nonetheless some glaring omissions
in its website content. A search for Atom Egoyan or his
film, “Ararat,” for instance, will return no results. And there is
a noticeable dearth of items about the Genocide more generally.
Luckily, the remedy is readily available. The website provides the
following email address for feedback and suggestions: legacy@legacy-
project.org. What better way to make one’s voice heard while
helping transform the footnotes of the Genocide and other historical
tragedies into a growing archive that will survive the few weeks of
their commemoration?

All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006

Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

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