The 'Memorial to the Victims of Communism-Canada, a Land of Refuge' is scheduled to be unveiled in spring 2020 in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Situated between the Supreme Court and the National Archives, this material act of commemoration is best conceptualized as a form of 'memory enclosure,' one that performs the dual function of erasing subjective experience and rewriting historical memory.
We use the concept of 'memory enclosure' to recuperate the political economic dimensions of collective trauma and elaborate the broader social structures within which traumatic memory becomes a site of both moral and economic production and contestation. The genealogy we develop takes us from Marx's claim that '[b]y the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and communal property had [...] vanished' (Capital: Volume 1, 889) to Silvia Federici's argument that saving memories of dispossession and resistance are crucial to imagining futures beyond capitalism. From this vantage point, 'memory enclosure' refers to the ways in which erasures of collective and cultural memory participate in the processes of 'accumulation by dispossession'-those contemporary acts of dispossession that contribute to cycles of accumulation through neoliberal practices of privatization, financialization and redistribution. In short, memory enclosure is a form of social enclosure that registers the privatization of social relations through erasures of collective memory.
Our case study leverages the concept of memory enclosure to examine the ways in which this recent joint commemorative act by state and private actors reveals complex entanglements of memory's collective preservation and dispossession in the production of both moral and economic value. We are especially interested in tensions between public and private in the production of Canadian multicultural subjects. With this in mind, we situate this commemorative act within a treatment of Soviet refugees in 1989 and the historical production of Canadian multicultural subjectivity. Our analysis reflects on the relationship between an original memorial 'Crucified Again' (located on private property used primarily by the Czech and Slovak diaspora) and the 'Memorial to the Victims of Communism' (the national public monument it inspired). We argue that reading these relationships through the lens of 'memory enclosure' demonstrates the ways in which the original Marxian categories of commons-labourer-bourgeoisie must be amended to reflect the moral character of value production in the era of neoliberal, democratic capitalism. Further, we urge critical memory studies to guard against the tendency toward memory enclosure.
