How people remember the past is a crucial factor shaping their identity, perceptions of present reality, and ideas about a desired future. In the political arena, actors with varying interests thus have the incentives to construct and promote certain versions of the past and undermine others. Representations and narratives of the past are therefore often subject to contestation. Such contestation has a substantial impact on public opinion, policymaking, and the long-term political development of society.

These arguments are now well-established in the study of collective or social memory. An important strand of analysis in the literature has focused on how counter-memories – a concept often attributed to Foucault (1977) – can be developed to challenge a society's dominant collective memory (e.g., Gutman, 2017; Verberg & Davis, 2011; Walkowitz & Knauer, 2011; Whitlinger, 2015). In such analyses, a representation of the past is dominant in two senses simultaneously: it is the most widely circulated, accepted, or even canonized version of the past in the public arena, and it serves the interests of the dominant social group or the state. Beyond the dominant collective memory, there can be “an unarticulated system of communicative and cultural references to the past and common experiences” shared by members of subordinated groups (Molden, 2016: 136). These references and experiences are the materials for the production of counter-memories. In multicultural societies, counter-memories “offer socially excluded groups a sense of ownership […] [and also] transform dominant narratives and help produce a more nuanced and just understanding of the past” (Weedon & Jordan, 2012: 150). In the context of Gramscian hegemonic struggles, counter-memories are crucial weapons for challenging ideological domination (Misztal, 2003).