THE CITY OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY Dianne Chisholm H ow does the city figure in narratives of memory and history forthcoming from that loose group of individuals whose social existence is a product of the city itself? If lesbians, gays, and queers of all sorts owe their emergence to the modern metropolis, where they were hailed as a new “city type” in police and newspaper reports and, no less scandalously, in the first urban poetry (Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), then how do they figure the city in genealogies of their own telling? How do they see themselves arising and endur- ing within urban culture but without the traditional means of social reproduction afforded by family, ethnicity, nationality, and religion? If the city is the site of the “coming out” of vaguely constellated desires into a community of love that dare speak its name, is this erotic society not then radically susceptible to the shocks and catastrophes that structure urban modernity? Can social belonging be estab- lished by something as volatile as the modern metropolis? Memory is possible because it is collective. An individual knows herself or himself as a being of enduring, if evolving, character because she or he possesses memories that are collectively articulated, revised, and confirmed. Thus Maurice Halbwachs contended in La mémoire collective, published in Paris in the wake of World War II when memory, traumatic memory, and memory’s very survival became an urgent concern among sociologists. Though schooled in Bergson, Halb- wachs departed from the idea that memory is a matter of durée, the persistent recognition of images, dually facilitated by neurophysiology and phenomenology of brain/mind. Halbwachs argued that memory is much more material than that, that it is a matter not just of consciously lived time but of socially lived space and the collective representation of that space. Older districts of foreign cities, cities we have never traveled, are able to recall us to ourselves—“indeed, the scene GLQ 7:2 pp. 195 – 243 Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press GLQ 7.2-01 Chisholm 4/20/01 5:58 PM Page 195