Contested and Shared Places of Memory

Contested and Shared Places of Memory

Author: Jorg Hackmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1317989635

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The Baltic–Russian debates on the past have become a hot spot of European memory politics. Violent protests and international tensions accompanying the removal of the "Bronze Soldier" monument, which commemorated the Soviet liberation of Tallinn in 1944, from the city centre in April 2007 have demonstrated the political impact that contested sites of memory may still reveal. In this publication, collective memories that are related to major traits of the 20th century in North Eastern Europe – the Holocaust, Nazi and Soviet occupation and (re-)emerging nationalisms – are examined through a prism of different approaches. They comprise reflections on national templates of collective memory, the political use of history, cultural and political aspects of war memorials, and recent discourses on the Holocaust. Furthermore, places of memory in architecture and urbanism are addressed and lead to the question of which prospects common, trans-national forms of memory may unfold. After decades of frozen forms of commemoration under Soviet hegemony, the Baltic case offers an interesting insight into collective memory and history politics and their linkage to current political and inter-ethnic relationships. The past seems to be remembered differently in the European peripheries than it is in its centre. Europe is diverse and so are its memories. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.


Contested and Shared Places of Memory

Contested and Shared Places of Memory

Author: Jorg Hackmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1317989643

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The Baltic–Russian debates on the past have become a hot spot of European memory politics. Violent protests and international tensions accompanying the removal of the "Bronze Soldier" monument, which commemorated the Soviet liberation of Tallinn in 1944, from the city centre in April 2007 have demonstrated the political impact that contested sites of memory may still reveal. In this publication, collective memories that are related to major traits of the 20th century in North Eastern Europe – the Holocaust, Nazi and Soviet occupation and (re-)emerging nationalisms – are examined through a prism of different approaches. They comprise reflections on national templates of collective memory, the political use of history, cultural and political aspects of war memorials, and recent discourses on the Holocaust. Furthermore, places of memory in architecture and urbanism are addressed and lead to the question of which prospects common, trans-national forms of memory may unfold. After decades of frozen forms of commemoration under Soviet hegemony, the Baltic case offers an interesting insight into collective memory and history politics and their linkage to current political and inter-ethnic relationships. The past seems to be remembered differently in the European peripheries than it is in its centre. Europe is diverse and so are its memories. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.


Contested Histories in Public Space

Contested Histories in Public Space

Author: Daniel J. Walkowitz

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-01-16

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0822391422

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Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador. Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism. Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz


Commemorating and Forgetting

Commemorating and Forgetting

Author: Martin J. Murray

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1452939578

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When the past is painful, as riddled with violence and injustice as it is in postapartheid South Africa, remembrance presents a problem at once practical and ethical: how much of the past to preserve and recollect and how much to erase and forget if the new nation is to ever unify and move forward? The new South Africa’s confrontation of this dilemma is Martin J. Murray’s subject in Commemorating and Forgetting. More broadly, this book explores how collective memory works—how framing events, persons, and places worthy of recognition and honor entails a selective appropriation of the past, not a mastery of history. How is the historical past made to appear in the present? In addressing these questions, Murray reveals how collective memory is stored and disseminated in architecture, statuary, monuments and memorials, literature, and art—“landscapes of remembrance” that selectively recall and even fabricate history in the service of nation-building. He examines such vehicles of memory in postapartheid South Africa and parses the stories they tell—stories by turn sanitized, distorted, embellished, and compressed. In this analysis, Commemorating and Forgetting marks a critical move toward recognizing how the legacies and impositions of white minority rule, far from being truly past, remain embedded in, intertwined with, and imprinted on the new nation’s here and now.


The Politics of Regret

The Politics of Regret

Author: Jeffrey K. Olick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1135909814

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In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.


Places of Memory and Legacies in an Age of Insecurities and Globalization

Places of Memory and Legacies in an Age of Insecurities and Globalization

Author: Gerry O'Reilly

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 3030609820

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In this book, practitioners and students discover perspectives on landscape, place, heritage, memory, emotions and geopolitics intertwined in evolving citizenship and democratization debates. This volume shows how memorialization can contribute to wider inclusive interpretations of history, tourism and human rights promoted by the European Project. It's geographies of memories can foster cooperation as witnessed throughout Europe during the 2014-18 WWI commemorations. Due to new world orders, geopolitical reconfigurations and ideals that emerged after 1918, many countries ranging from the Baltic and Russia to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece, eastern and central Europe to Ireland are continuing with commemorations regarding their specific memories in the wider Europe. Shared memorial spaces can act in post conflict areas as sites of reconciliation; nonetheless `the peace' cannot be taken for granted with insecurities, globalization, and nationalisms in the USA and Russia; the UK's Brexit stress and populist movements in Western Europe, Visegrád and Balkan countries. Citizen-fatigue is reflected in socio-political malaise mirrored in France's Yellow Vest movement and elsewhere. Empathy with other peoples' places of memory can assist citizens learn from the past. Memory sites promoted by the EU, Council of Europe and UNESCO may tend to homogenize local memories; nevertheless, they act as vectors in memorialization, stimulating debate and re-evaluating narratives. This textbook combines geographical, inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary approaches and perspectives on spaces of memory by a range of authors from different countries and traditions offers the reader diverse and holistic perspectives on cultural geography, dynamic geopolitics, globalization and citizenship.


A European Memory?

A European Memory?

Author: Małgorzata Pakier

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0857454307

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An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe--with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences--was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.


Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts

Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts

Author: Tibor Frank

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan

Published: 2011-01-15

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13:

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National historical writings in Europe traditionally deal with acts of aggression, hostile neighbours and international conflicts across borders, presenting history as a narrative of suffering and victories. For centuries, national histories have been constructed as sequences of battles and wars, with war heroes playing key roles. Yet, major victories for any one nation invariably cause tragedies for others. Historians in different national communities have written comparable histories about their shared pasts in contested territories: it is this phenomenon that we call 'overlapping national histories' in this book. Disputed Territories, Shared Pasts focuses on the historiographical overlaps in Europe, presenting many of the contested areas alongside state borders, in historical regions between states, and among ethnic groups and nations within states. Sponsored by the European Science Foundation, the present volume is part of the Writing the Nation series, a major international project on the history of historiography in Europe. -- Back cover.


Places of Memory in Modern China

Places of Memory in Modern China

Author: Marc Andre Matten

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-12-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 9004219013

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The book offers a new approach to the discussion on the issue of Chinese national identity, providing new insights in how identity is constructed and contested. These issues are of vital concern for the understanding of contemporary China and its national consciousness.


Handbook on the Politics of Memory

Handbook on the Politics of Memory

Author: Maria Mälksoo

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2023-01-20

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1800372531

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Providing a novel multi-disciplinary theorization of memory politics, this insightful Handbook brings varied literatures into a focused dialogue on the ways in which the past is remembered and how these influence transnational, interstate, and global politics in the present.