One point of contention in which debates about multiculturalism have taken shape in the United States and the Netherlands is the public memory of slavery. Since the early 1990s, numerous people of African descent in these and other former slave-holding and slave-trading nations have mobilized around commemorations of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The two memorial projects I will discuss in this essay – the African Burial Ground in New York and the Netherlands National Slavery Monument in Amsterdam – and the public debates they have sparked provide insight into the ways in which multiculturalism functions in these two nations. The call for the remembrance of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic has not only brought to light painful and shameful national histories, but has also laid bare some of the complex conflicts connected with the social and cultural integration of minority groups in these two societies – conflicts which have only intensified since 9/11.

The two slavery memorial projects I will discuss are part of what French historian Pierre Nora has critically called a “tidal wave of memory.” According to Nora, we live in an “era of commemoration”: we indiscriminately “stockpile” traces of the past in archives, libraries, and museums, and fulfill our self-imposed “duty to remember” by celebrating anniversaries, building monuments, and organizing commemorations. Whereas in the past, collectively remembered values bound diverse groups and competing ideologies together as a nation, we now feel compelled self-consciously and artificially to construct lieux de mémoire to buttress group identities no longer securely grounded in the idea of the nation. It is no coincidence, however, that Nora's collaborative, multivolume history of French national memory, Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984-1992), was itself conceived and produced in a time in which traditional constructions of national unity, history, and identity were increasingly challenged by mass migration and globalization. In fact, as the metaphorical title of his 2001 essay suggests, Nora sees a causative link between the “tidal wave of memory” and the massive influx of immigrants in Western Europe that threatened to render national borders and traditional definitions of the nation-state obsolete in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Postcolonial migrants, Nora suggests, formed the vanguard of the modern culture of commemoration, followed by other newly emancipated minorities.