This book explores how popular cultural artifacts, literary texts, commemorative practices and other forms of remembrances are used to convey, transmit and contest memories of mass atrocities in the Global South. Some of these historical atrocities took place during the Cold war. As such, this book unpacks the influence or role of the global powers in conflict in the Global South. Contributors are grappling with a number of issues such as the politics of memorialization, memory conflicts, exhumations, reburials, historical dialogue, peacebuilding and social healing, memory activism, visual representation, transgenerational transmission of memories, and identity politics.
Edited by Lungile Tshuma, Trust Matsilele, Shepherd Mpofu and Mbongeni Msimanga, Media, Social Movements, and Protest Cultures in Africa: Hashtags, Humor, and Slogans provides a rich array of protest cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, delving into the motivations for protests, how protests are carried out and how those targeted by protests try to undermine the protesting movements. Organized into three parts, this book examines social media and social movements, online protest strategies, and media texts used in various protest movements within Sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors shed light on the brutality of various post-colonial regimes in Africa while also giving the reader hope for the current movements that seek to wrestle their societies from the jaws of autocratic leaders. This book offers a theoretically rich and methodologically diverse engagement of protest cultures in countries like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The wide tapestry of how these protests are formulated and executed speaks to Africa's diversity and dynamism. This book makes an important intellectual contribution on social and political movements and is relevant to policy makers and researchers in the social sciences and digital humanities.
An enquiry into the social science of remembrance and forgiveness in global episodes of genocide and mass violence during the post-Holocaust era, this volume explores the ways in which remembrance and forgiveness have changed over time and how they have been used in more recent cases of genocide and mass violence. With case studies from Rwanda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, South Africa, Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Israel, Palestine, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, the United States, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Chechnya, the volume avoids a purely legal perspective to open the interpretation of post-genocidal societies, communities, and individuals to global and interdisciplinary perspectives that consider not only forgiveness and thus social harmony, but remembrance and disharmony. This volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in memory studies, genocide, remembrance, and forgiveness.
“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe. Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
"Pursuing Justice for Mass Atrocities: A Handbook for Victim Groups" is an educational resource for victim groups that want to influence or participate in the justice process for mass atrocities. It presents a range of tools that victim groups can use, from building a victim-centered coalition and developing a strategic communications plan to engaging with policy makers and decision makers and using the law to obtain justice.
Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. Exhibiting Atrocity documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world.
The Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) in Asia Minor and the Population Exchange that followed led to the forced displacement of more than 1.5 million people who became entangled in the nation-building processes of both Greece and Turkey. This book examines the memories that shaped Asia Minor refugee identity, focusing on the ways in which these memories continue to reverberate in contemporary Greek culture. It explores how memories of Asia Minor frame wider social debates, foster affective alliances, inform different notions of belonging and provide a toolkit for addressing contemporary concerns. Taking the reader across a wide range of cultural works—history textbooks, comics, theatre, documentary and fiction films, news footage and photography—the book shows how these works have become means for individuals and communities to contribute to the process of history-making. While keeping its focus on present-day Greece, Memories of Asia Minor joins wider global debates over contested pasts, legacies of war and refugeehood.
This book explores the border-transcending dimensions of public remembering by focussing on the triangular relationship between memory, monuments and migration. Framed by an introduction and conclusion, nine case studies located in diverse social and geo-political settings feature topical debates and contestation around monuments, statues and memorials erected by migrants or in memory of migrants, refugees and diasporas in host country societies. Written from different disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, art history, cultural studies and political science, the chapters consider displaced people as new, originally unintended audiences who bring transnational and transcultural perspectives to old monuments in host cities. In addition, migrants and diasporic communities are explored as ‘agents of memory’, who produce collective memory in tense environments of intra- and inter-group negotiation or outright hostility at the national and transnational level. The research is conceptually anchored in memory studies, notably transnational memory, multidirectional memory and other concepts emerging from memory studies’ recent ‘transcultural turn’.
Can a society, a culture, a country, be trapped by its own memories? The question is not easy to answer, but it would not be a bad idea to cautiously say: 'It depends'. This book is about one society - Rwanda - and its culture, traditions, identities, and memories. More specifically, it discusses some of the ways in which ethnic identities and related memories constitute a deadly trap that needs to be torn apart if mass violence is to be eradicated in that country. It looks into everyday cultural practices such as child naming and oral traditions (myths and tales, proverbs, war poetry etc.) and into political practices that govern the ways in which citizens conceptualise the past. Rwanda was engulfed in a bloody war from 1990 until 1994, the last episode of which was a genocide that claimed about a million lives amongst the Tutsi minority. This book - the first in the Memory Traps series - provides a new understanding of how a seemingly quiet society can suddenly turn into a scene of the most horrible inter-ethnic crimes. It offers an analysis of the complexities and dangers resulting from the ways in which memories are managed both at a personal level and at a collective level. The main point is that Rwandans have become hostages of their memories of the long-gone and the recent past. The book shows how these memories follow ethnic lines and lead to a state of cultural hypocrisy on the one hand, and to permanent conflict - either open and brutal, or latent and beneath the surface - on the other hand. Written from a memory studies perspective and informed by critical theory, philosophy, literature, [oral] history, and psychology, amongst others, this book deals with some controversial subjects and deconstructs some of the received ideas about the recent and the long-gone past of Rwanda. About the author: Olivier Nyirubugara is a lecturer of New Media and Online Journalism at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (Erasmus University Rotterdam). In 2011, he completed a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation entitled Surfing the Past: Digital Learners in the History Class, in which he empirically explored ways in which pupils use the Web to find historical information. Nyirubugara has also been practicing journalism since 2002 and has been training and coaching journalists in mobile reporting in Africa since 2007.
This book grapples with the potential impacts of collective trauma in war-rape survivors’ families. Drawing on inter-ethnic and inter-generational participatory action research on reconciliation processes in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, the author examines the risk that female survivors of war-related sexual crimes, now-mothers, will breed hatred and further division in the post-conflict context. Showing how the historical trauma of sexual abuse among survivors affects the ideas, perceptions, behavioural patterns and understandings of the ethnic and religious ‘Other’ or perpetrator, the book also considers the influence of such trauma on other attitudes rarely addressed in peacebuilding programmes, such as notions of naturalised gender-based violence, cultural scripts of sexuality and support for dangerous or violent aspects of the patriarchal social order. It thus seeks to sketch proposals for a curriculum of peacebuilding that takes account of the legacy of war rape in survivors’ families and the impact of trauma transmission. As such, Trauma Transmission and Sexual Violence will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology and gender studies with interests in peace and reconciliation processes and war-related sexual violence.
