26.267 - The Stories a Community Chooses to Keep
“How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?”
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)
Quotation source
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Saidiya Hartman is a scholar and writer whose work examines Black life, the afterlife of slavery, and the violence built into historical archives.
In “Venus in Two Acts,” she confronts records of the Atlantic slave trade. Those records preserve the language of merchants, captains, courts, and enslavers while offering only fragments of the people whose lives those institutions controlled. Hartman describes her approach as critical fabulation. It works with archival evidence, conditional possibilities, and changes in narrative perspective, while refusing to pretend that the missing life has been fully recovered. That refusal matters. An absence can reveal something about the system that produced the record, but it does not give a later narrator unrestricted authority to speak for the person who is gone.
Hartman offers a demanding model of remembrance: pursue what has been obscured, examine how power shaped what survived, and remain honest about what the available evidence cannot restore.
The Photograph at the Edge of the Frame
Imagine a photograph hanging inside a neighborhood hall. Twelve people stand in front of the building on opening day, dressed for the occasion. Beneath the photograph, a small plaque names the founders: nine men whose names have been repeated at anniversary dinners for decades. The local story is familiar. They found an unused property, raised the money, repaired the building, and created a gathering place that outlasted them.
At the edge of the photograph, a woman holds a roll of papers. No one has written her name beneath the frame. When a volunteer begins digitizing boxes from a storage room, the same woman appears in meeting minutes, donation lists, and letters to the city. She organized the fundraising campaign, negotiated access to the property, and kept the project moving when several of the named founders wanted to abandon it. Her work was not entirely hidden. It was scattered across records that no one had considered central to the story.
The discovery does not make the old account wholly false. The men on the plaque contributed to the building. The problem is that repeated telling turned a partial account into the community's official memory. The named founders became the people through whom later members understood courage, generosity, and leadership. The unnamed organizer remained visible in the photograph and absent from its meaning.
Every community has versions of this frame. The choice is often distributed across many ordinary decisions about what gets labeled, repeated, funded, digitized, or allowed to disappear. A family tells the story of the relative who started the business but forgets who kept the household stable while it grew. A school celebrates a transformative principal while generations of teachers, custodians, parents, and students disappear into the background. An organization remembers the crisis it survived but edits out the people who warned about the danger before it arrived. The omissions may result from deliberate exclusion, unequal status, lost records, habitual shorthand, or a story becoming simpler each time it is repeated. Intent matters, but it is not the only thing that matters. The narrowed story still teaches people whose labor counts and whose presence is decorative.
Collective memory begins here, not as a perfect storehouse of everything a group has experienced, but as a working account of what the group keeps close enough to repeat. The question is not only whether a remembered story contains facts. It is also how those facts were selected, arranged, preserved, and made important.
Memory Is Built, Not Merely Kept
We often speak of memory as though a community possesses a shared cabinet. Events enter, wait, and can be retrieved when needed. But communal remembering requires activity. Someone records the minutes, labels the photograph, chooses the anniversary speaker, designs the monument, approves the curriculum, saves the email, conducts the interview, or decides which box belongs in the archive. Other people repeat what was selected until the account becomes familiar enough to feel inherited.
Different communities build memory through different forms. A family may rely on stories told around a table. A religious community may use ritual, commentary, sacred texts, music, and seasonal observance. A nation may use monuments, public holidays, museums, textbooks, and official apologies. A workplace may use founder stories, promotion decisions, onboarding materials, and private warnings passed between colleagues. A digital community may depend on searchable posts, screenshots, moderation rules, platform rankings, and links that eventually disappear.
None of these containers can preserve everything. Selection is unavoidable. A ceremony must have a duration. A plaque has an edge. A history course has limited weeks. An elder remembers some scenes more readily than others. The ethical problem is not that every account is incomplete. It is that incompleteness often becomes invisible once an account gains authority.
Power helps determine which version becomes durable. People with access to literacy, property, publication, institutional standing, safety, and preservation resources are more likely to leave records that survive.
Institutions also tend to preserve documents that serve their functions: transactions, rules, ownership, discipline, and official decisions. A record may therefore say a great deal about how a system classified a person while saying very little about how that person understood a day, a relationship, or a life.
Hartman's work addresses an extreme and historically specific form of this problem. The archive of Atlantic slavery was created largely through systems that treated human beings as property, evidence, labor, risk, or loss. Its silences cannot be understood as ordinary forgetfulness. The structure of the archive is part of the violence being studied. That context should not be flattened into a general metaphor for every missing family story or unlabeled photograph.
Yet the discipline Hartman brings to the archive offers a broader question. When we encounter an absence, do we rush to closure because uncertainty is uncomfortable? We may notice that the woman at the edge of the photograph was omitted and immediately turn her into the secret hero of the entire institution. That reversal can feel reparative, but it may reproduce the same habit that caused the problem: organizing a complicated history around one satisfying figure. A wider frame should make more of the record visible, not replace one total story with another.
Widen the Frame Without Inventing the Missing Life
A responsible revision begins by asking who selected the story. This is not always the same as asking who lied. Perhaps the plaque committee copied an earlier program, which copied a newspaper account, which quoted the people most comfortable speaking to a reporter. Tracing the route of a story can reveal where narrowing occurred and where another source might be found.
Then ask what was preserved and repeated. Which documents, photographs, songs, sayings, rituals, or objects carry the account? What details remain consistent across versions? What changes depending on who is speaking? A family story told by three siblings may have a shared outline and three different centers. The differences do not automatically invalidate the story. They show that people encountered the same household from different positions.
Ask who benefits from the familiar account. Benefit does not always mean money or conscious manipulation. A founder story may protect an institution's belief that leadership has always looked a certain way. A national story may turn conflict into inevitable progress and allow present members to inherit innocence. A family myth may preserve belonging while placing the cost of that belonging on the person who was expected to remain silent. The useful question is what the story permits the community to notice, excuse, celebrate, or avoid.
Finally, ask what changes when the frame widens. The answer may be a corrected name, a new oral history, an amended exhibit, a second account placed beside the first, or a note explaining what remains uncertain. Sometimes the responsible act is preservation rather than conclusion. You might record that a contribution is documented but its full extent is unknown. You might also note that a person appears only through records made by people who held power over them.
This work requires restraint. A person should not have to disclose private or painful experience so that a community can improve its story. A gap in the record does not authorize us to assign thoughts, motives, intimacy, or suffering to someone who cannot confirm them. Nor should every omitted person be made useful as a lesson for the present. A life has value beyond what later generations can extract from it.
Return to the photograph in the neighborhood hall. The community does not remove the nine names. It adds the organizer's name where the records support it, revises the account of the fundraising campaign, and places copies of the letters beside the photograph. It also adds a sentence explaining that the surviving records remain incomplete. The new display is less compact than the old plaque. It is also more trustworthy.
A community does not become honest by remembering everything. That is impossible. It becomes more honest by making the construction of memory visible, by allowing more than one witness to matter, and by naming the limits of what it can recover. The stories we keep will continue to teach. The next question is how those stories harden into rules, rewards, routines, and institutions that teach even when no story is being told.
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Practice: Audit the Story, Widen the Frame
Set aside five to ten minutes to examine one story that is regularly told by a family, workplace, school, organization, neighborhood, or other community you know. Choose a story you can approach without forcing anyone to disclose private experience or treating uncertainty as permission to speculate.
The worksheet will help you notice who tells the story, what it places at the center, what may be missing, and what lesson the familiar version transmits. You will finish by identifying one responsible way to widen, qualify, preserve, or repair the account. The goal is not to produce a complete history. It is to leave with a more accurate frame and a clear boundary around what you still do not know.
Scientific Summary
Wertsch and Roediger (2008) reviewed conceptual approaches to collective memory across psychology and other disciplines. They cautioned against treating a group as though it possessed a single mind and distinguished among several ways that memories can be shared, distributed, and organized. Their framework is useful here because a community's memory is not simply the sum of identical recollections. It can also be carried by narratives, cultural tools, public representations, and patterns of participation. The review does not provide a formula for deciding which communal account is ethically adequate. It helps clarify why the phrase collective memory names several related processes rather than one unified mental record. Review and publication record.
Coman, Momennejad, Drach, and Geana (2016) studied memory convergence in fourteen laboratory-created communities, each containing ten participants. Participants communicated through experimentally structured networks after learning information. The researchers found that the pattern of conversational connections influenced how much community members' memories came to overlap. Their analysis linked group-level convergence to local processes of reinforcement and suppression during recall. This supports a limited claim: who communicates with whom, and what gets retrieved in those exchanges, can help shape what a group later remembers in common. The study used short-term, computer-mediated laboratory communities. It does not reproduce the history, power, trauma, institutions, or generations involved in family, civic, or national memory. Study and publication record.
Hirst, Yamashiro, and Coman (2018) reviewed psychological research on collective memory and considered how shared representations are formed, maintained, and changed through communication and social interaction. Their account helps explain why repeated stories can become increasingly aligned across a group while other information receives less attention or repetition. It also emphasizes that collective memories can serve identity and social functions, not merely preserve factual detail. A review of psychological mechanisms cannot determine whose account should be centered or how an archival injustice should be repaired. Those questions require historical evidence, ethical judgment, participation from affected communities, and attention to power. Review and publication record.
Together, these sources support the conclusion that communal remembering is selective, socially organized, and influenced by patterns of communication. They do not establish that every omission is deliberate, that a repeated story is necessarily false, or that missing experience can be reconstructed with confidence. Hartman's work brings the ethical problem into sharper view: the record itself may have been produced by unequal power. Even so, the desire to repair it does not remove the obligation to respect what cannot be known.
Bibliography
Coman, A., Momennejad, I., Drach, R. D., & Geana, A. (2016). Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(29), 8171–8176. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1525569113
Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe, 12(2), 1–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115
Hirst, W., Yamashiro, J. K., & Coman, A. (2018). Collective memory from a psychological perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(5), 438–451. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.02.010
Wertsch, J. V., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2008). Collective memory: Conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches. Memory, 16(3), 318–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701801434
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