Radical remembering

Why do we forget those who contribute to our collective knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking? This is a complicated question to answer, partially because maintaining that forgetfulness may be important for canon creation and partially because it is so considerable as to be inexplicable. Yet, it remains an important question to ask and attempt to respond to. For to answer that question opens the possibility of remedy, and critically to not repeat our forgetting. For forgetting creates a void, an empty space where others, and their knowledge, skills and, perhaps – scholarly, diplomatic, or societal ways to be – should properly be. This space where others should be is desolate because it has been constructed as such. We have intentionally forgotten, there is an aphasia that has produced these silences which is not accidental (Murphy Citation2006, 65; Thompson Citation2013, 133, 135). Even where we might still have the international legal, political or philosophical ideas that they brought with them, without knowing where those ideas came from and, critically, why they came from where they did, we are lesser. And because we have lost both the individual and collective memory of how transformations occurred, we are reduced in our self-understanding of transformation itself. We are lesser because we have forgotten.