Cudney, Z. (2025). Memory beyond monuments: Sebaldian space-time and the geographies of involuntary autobiographical memory. Social and Cultural Geography.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2025.2564633

While much of human geography’s interest in memory is on collective, monumental, and voluntary memory, there is an emerging tendency to consider individual, ephemeral, and involuntary modes of memory as well. In this article, I introduce the distinct, but often overlooked, mode of involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM) to human geography. There are many aspects of IAMs which geographers might be interested in, including their nonlinear spatial and temporal dimensions and their significance to studies of affect, embodiment, and everyday life. If the ‘monument’ symbolizes much geographic work on memory, an IAM is something of a ‘counter-monument’ with an ephemeral presence and apparent irrelevance. But a turn towards individual memories, rather than necessarily signalling a turn away from the social, instead illustrates and critically interrogates the way both are being reimagined in contemporary geographic scholarship. To illustrate this further, I turn to the work of W.G. Sebald. Often read as contributing to the study of ‘postmemory’, Sebald’s novels also advance a posthumanist understanding of IAM, and chime with negative geographies. I conclude by suggesting future research directions on IAM and by reiterating how a focus on the individual and autobiographical can actually advance more-than-human understandings of space, subjectivity and the social.