Memorialising 40 years since Idi Amin's expulsion: digital ‘memory mania’ to the ‘right to be forgotten’

Parmar, Maya (2014). Memorialising 40 years since Idi Amin's expulsion: digital ‘memory mania’ to the ‘right to be forgotten’. South Asian Popular Culture, 12(1) pp. 1–14.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2014.879420

Abstract

Forty years since Idi Amin's infamous 1972 expulsion order of the Indian community from Uganda, there has been a prolific peak in the online memorialisation of this deracination experience. This content, namely on the social networking phenomenon Facebook, has been disseminated by outreach projects seeking to mark the fortieth anniversary. Here an interpretation of this intervention is offered: using scholarship on new media, memorialisation, and the expulsion itself, this article contributes to these fields by examining the move away from the physical markers of remembrance, such as Holocaust memorials, to online spaces of remembrance. Demonstrating the peculiar nature of the virtual memorial, this critique foregrounds how such spaces enable a diaspora now displaced globally. Concluding with speculations on the way in which digital data might be managed in the future, the article emphasises how the need to remember is taking new forms, and the partnership physical and virtual memorials engender.

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