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Abstract
History is not simply a narrated story; it is a transgenerational melancholy revealed allegorically as a flattened and self-regarding past and imposed on future generations as an identitarian and nostalgic nexus. Melancholy for some is the calamity of others. When harmful dynamics are disseminated and false identitarian constructs are presented as the victor’s version of history, this creates, on many occasions, falsehoods where the victor benefits from past calamities. Literary representation, collective imagination and heraldic and institutional symbolism combine to create an intergroup schism and postcolonial social dominance, maintaining hegemony by associating harmful memory with the demonisation of the other. From these perspectives, this article proposes to empirically analyse these cases by attempting to index the instrumental demonetisation onto the scale of social dominance by defining these populist policies and those who promote them as harmful to intergroup dynamics through undermining and causing conflict within the group. Falsehoods and past truths rest upon this fictive identity. This article will conclude by proposing that such instruments are harmful creators of hollow identity.
