Scholars have long contended that the late 1980s to the 1990s, marking the end of the Cold War and the dissolution or democratization of many authoritarian regimes, witnessed the re-emergence of formerly suppressed memories into the public sphere. This newfound “tellability,” describing stories that can/cannot be told due to different cognitive, psychological, cultural, or political reasons (Ulla Savolainen, 2017), accompanied by the displacement of previously prevailing narratives, created fertile ground for constructing novel identities. This panel complicates this claim, suggesting that the conclusion of the Cold War engendered both tellability and untellability, in various contexts. The evolving socio-political milieu rendered memories of WWII, colonization, genocide, and suppression under authoritarian rule more tellable, while historical narratives incongruent with the post-Cold War settlement remained or became untellable.

Our four panelists, representing diverse disciplines—history, political science, and literature—and focusing on different parts of the globe, employ a variety of approaches and sources, including newspapers, oral history, memoirs, personal narratives, and government records. Encompassing studies of China, France, Japan, Lithuania, Taiwan, and the United States, our collective efforts illuminate the varying political transitions during the late 1980s and the 1990s through diverse approaches, and the variable role of historical memories in them.

The first two panelists focus on East Asia. Dr. Arata Hirai examines how Huang Shunxing, a Taiwanese individual born during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan (1895-1945) and subjected to the suppression imposed by the authoritarian Kuomintang, comprehended the colonial and authoritarian past. By analyzing Huang’s works, alongside memoirs of other opposition activists and historical records, Dr. Hirai delineates Huang’s influence on Taiwan's political landscape and the broader implications of his life and actions on Taiwan's quest for democracy and identity. Hao-Wen Cheng also explores the formation of Taiwanese identity, utilizing newspapers published in Japan and Taiwan to examine how lawsuits against Japan by former Taiwanese Imperial Japan Servicemen in the 1980s and 1990s shaped memories and identity formation. Cheng underscores the limited impact of these lawsuits due to their evocation of the enduring stigma that these Taiwanese Servicemen were traitors, coupled with their incompatibility with both Taiwanese and Chinese identities.

The last two panelists delve into European perspectives while concurrently examining the U.S. and Africa. Dr. Ryo Fukushima scrutinizes the impact of the USSR's dissolution on Aimé Césaire, a Francophone poet, politician, and author, and his conception of the USSR as a decolonization paradigm. Through the analysis of interviews with Césaire and other digital records, Dr. Fukushima reveals the profound impact of the dissolution of the USSR on Césaire's decolonial perspective, which made his decolonial narratives untellable. Dr. Hisashi Shigematsu examines how Lithuanians developed the view that the USSR committed genocide in Lithuania before and after WWII. By examining the exhibitions held by Lithuanians in the U.S. with the cooperation of Republicans in the 1960s, Dr. Shigematsu asserts that this repurposing of historical memory was not developed by Lithuanians at home shortly before the 1990s but by diasporic Lithuanians in the U.S. in the 1960s.