Global Memoryscapes


Book Description

Global Memoryscapesis a collection of eight essays examining the effects of a global society on the collective memories and identities of individual cultures.




Memory and Complicity


Book Description

Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect based discourses of trauma, shame and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.




Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media


Book Description

This collected volume is the first to study the interface between contemporary social movements, cultural memory and digital media. Establishing the digital memory work practices of social movements as an important area of research, it reveals how activists use digital media to lay claim to, circulate and curate cultural memories. Interdisciplinary in scope, its contributors address mobilizations of mediated remembrance in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, India, Argentina, the UK and Russia.




Regional Rhetorics


Book Description

Regionalism is a term that has been used to describe many different kinds of phenomena, including political, geographical, architectural, and literary. This collection examines "rhetorical regionalism," or the relationships we have to physical regions and the idea of regionality. Regional rhetorics are more than simply the fact of local conditions in certain spaces. They are the ways people produce feelings of belonging and discourses of normalcy within those spaces. The authors in this collection bypass familiar narratives of nationality and localism in order to imagine regions as interfaces that help us to negotiate everyday life. Regions are more than physical spaces, therefore. Regional rhetorics can provide different narratives in order to help us invent new kinds of connections to place and publics. They give us new descriptions of relationships, a power that merges together the tectonic (spatial) and the architectonic (discursive) impulses of rhetoric. The book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.




Figures of Memory


Book Description

Explores how the USHMM and other museums and memorials both displace and disturb the memories that they are trying to commemorate. Figures of Memory examines how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, uses its space and the design of its exhibits to “move” its visitors to memory. From the objects and their placement to the architectural design of the building and the floor plan, the USHMM was meant to teach visitors about the Holocaust. But what Michael Bernard-Donals found is that while they learn, and remember, the Holocaust, visitors also call to mind other, sometimes unrelated memories. Partly this is because memory itself works in multidirectional ways, but partly it’s because of decisions made in the planning that led to the creation of the museum. Drawing on material from the USHMM’s institutional archive, including meeting minutes, architectural renderings, visitor surveys, and comments left by visitors, Figures of Memory is both a theoretical exploration of memory—its relation to identity, space, and ethics—and a practical analysis of one of the most discussed memorials in the United States. The book also extends recent discussions of the rhetoric of memorial sites and museums by arguing that sites like the USHMM don’t so much “make a case for” events through the act of memorialization, but actually displace memory, disturbing it—and the museum visitor—so much so that they call it into question. Memory, like rhetorical figures, moves, and the USHMM moves its visitors, figuratively and literally, both to and beyond the events the museum is meant to commemorate.




Social Movements, Memory and Media


Book Description

Cultural factors shape the symbolic environment in which contentious politics take place. Among these factors, collective memories are particularly relevant: they can help collective action by providing symbolic material from the past, but at the same time they can constrain people's ability to mobilise by imposing proscriptions and prescriptions. This book analyses the relationship between social movements and collective memories: how do social movements participate in the building of public memory? And how does public memory, and in particular the media’s representation of a contentious past, influence strategic choices in contemporary movements? To answer these questions the book draws its focus on the evolution of the representation of specific events in the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, through qualitative interviews to contemporary student activists in both countries, it investigates the role of past waves of contention in shaping the present through the publicly discussed image of the past.




Moving Memory


Book Description

Moving Memory is an ethnography of remembrance in the field of tension between post-dictatorship Chile and occupied Palestine that offers new insights into memory politics as a globally resurgent and increasingly transnational phenomenon. It tells a largely untold story of a Palestinian diaspora: how a predominantly Christian, conservative, and wealthy elite has come to form the backbone of a diasporic community to which the Palestinian struggle remains a central mobilizing force. Schwabe explores how Palestinian diaspora politics play into larger attempts to obscure the recent Chilean past and its consequences, all the while working to counter Zionist efforts to negate and erase Palestinian existence. Despite considerable efforts to contain them, memories move. They travel across porous and ever-changing geographical and socio-political boundaries, reconfiguring realities in the process. In exploring the paradoxes of remembering and forgetting between Palestine and Chile as intertwining nodes in the complex field of global memory politics, the book demarcates the limits and possibilities of forging solidarity at the fault lines of memory.




Family Memory


Book Description

In Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective, researchers from five different continents explore the significance of family memory as an analytical tool and a research concept. Family memory is the most important memory community. This volume illustrates the range and power of family memories, often neglected by memory studies dealing with larger mnemonic entities. This book highlights the potential of family memory research for understanding societies’past and present and the need for a more comprehensive and systematic use of family memories. The contributors explain how family memories can be a valuable resource across a range of settings pertaining to individual and collective identities, national memories, intergenerational transmission processes and migration, transnational and diasporic studies. This volume presents the past, present and future of family memory as a prospective field of memory studies and the role of family memory in intergenerational transmission of social and political values. Family memory of violent events and genocide is also looked at, with discussions of the Armenian Genocide, Russian Revolution and Rwandan Genocide. This book will be an important read for cultural and oral historians; family historians; public historians; researchers in narrative studies, psychology, politics and international studies.




Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities


Book Description

This book is about the ways U.S. cities have responded to some of the most pressing political, cultural, racial issues of our time as agentic, remembering actors. Our case studies include New York City’s securitized remembrances at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum; Charlottesville’s Confederate monument controversies in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right Rally; and Montgomery’s “double consciousness” at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum. By tracing the genealogies that can be found across three contested cityscapes—New York, Charlottesville, and Montgomery—this book opens up new vistas for research for communication studies as it shows how cities are agentic actors that can wage “war” on urban landscapes as massive actor-networks struggling to remember (and forget). With the rise of sanctuary cities against nativistic immigration policies, “invasions” from white supremacists and neo-Nazis objecting to “the great replacement,” and rhizomic uprisings of Black Lives Matter protests in response to lethal police force against persons of color, this timely book speaks to the emergent realities of how cities have become battlegrounds in America’s continuing cultural wars.




Memory Spaces


Book Description

Jewish identity, memory, and place deftly revealed through the lens of Jewish women's graphic narratives. An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place—that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons argues that Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with embodied memory: the way the body materializes memory. This monograph investigates how memory manifests in the drawn shape of the body as an expression of the weight of personal and collective histories. Aarons explores Jewish identity, diaspora, mourning, memory, and witness in the works of Sarah Lightman, Liana Finck, Anya Ulinich, Leela Corman, and more. Memory Spaces begins by framing this research within contemporary discourse and reflects upon the choice to explore Jewish women graphic novelists specifically. In the chapters that follow, Aarons relates the nuanced issues of memory, transmission of trauma, Jewish cultural identity, and the gendered self to a series of meaningful and noteworthy graphic novels. Aarons’s insight, close readings, and integration of contemporary scholarship are conveyed clearly and concisely, creating a work that both captivates readers and contributes to scholarly discourse in Jewish studies, women’s literature, memory studies, and identity.