Offers the best essays from the acclaimed collection originally published in French. This monumental work examines how and why events and figures become a part of a people's collective memory, how rewriting history can forge new paradigms of cultural identity, and how the meaning attached to an event can become as significant as the event itself.
How do human societies leave their mark on the world so they are not forgotten? This is a collection of work by leading French intellectuals exploring the statutes, cathedrals, palaces, rituals, legends and events of history that form the architecture of the French collective consciousness.
Addressing the remarkable absence of colonial legacy from Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire, the present volume fosters a new reading of the French past by discerning and exploring an initial repertoire of realms that bridges the gap between traditionally instituted French memory and traces of the colonial on the Republic's soil, including its Outremer.
This thrilling YA fantasy debut follows seventeen-year-old Etta Lark as she navigates the underworld of Craewick to pull off the heist of a lifetime. A YALSA (The Young Adult Library Services Association) Teens' Top Ten Book for 2020, Mansy crafts a grim reality where memories are worth their weight in gold. In the city of Craewick, memories reign. The power-obsessed ruler of the city, Madame, has cultivated a society in which memories are currency, citizens are divided by ability, and Gifted individuals can take memories from others through touch as they please. Seventeen-year-old Etta Lark is desperate to live outside of the corrupt culture, but she grapples with the guilt of an accident that has left her mother bedridden in the city's asylum. When Madame threatens to put her mother up for auction, a Craewick practice in which a "criminal's" memories are sold to the highest bidder before being killed, Etta will do whatever it takes to save her. Even if it means rejoining the Shadows, the rebel group she swore off in the wake of the accident years earlier. To rescue her mother, Etta must prove her allegiance to the Shadows by stealing a memorized map of the Maze, a formidable prison created by the bloodthirsty ruler of a neighboring Realm. Etta faces startling attacks, unexpected romance, and, above all, her own past as she uncovers a conspiracy that challenges everything she knew about herself and the world around her. In a place where nothing is what it seems, can Etta ever become more than a memory thief? Perfect for fans of high-stakemagical heists such as: Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows) Victoria Aveyard (Red Queen) Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves) "Mansy's debut will delight fantasy readers who revel in fully developed settings and unusual powers."- Booklist "A welcome addition to the YA fantasy canon, The Memory Thief is a suspenseful page-turner, delightfully chock full of unexpected twists and turns."- Shelf Awareness
Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents—including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases—the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.
Due to their symbolic and iconographic meanings, expressions of ‘collective memory’ constitute the mental topography of a society and make a powerful contribution to its cultural, political and social identity. In Japan, the subject of ‘memory’ has prompted a huge response in recent years. Indeed, it has been and continues to be debated at many levels of Japan’s political, social, economic and cultural life. For the historian and social scientist the opportunity to access recorded memories is invariably welcomed as a valuable building block in research and a determinant in establishing balance and perspective. This volume brings together a selection of the most significant research on memory relating to modern Japan. Thematically structured (Politics and International Relations; Memorials, Museums, National Heroes; Popular and Intellectual Representations of Memory; Realms of Memory: Centre and Periphery) the subjects treated include the Nanjing massacre, comfort women, the fate of war monuments, the political use of national memory in post-war Japan and remembering the atomic bomb.
Fran�ois Hartog explores crucial moments of change in societyÕs Òregimes of historicityÓ or its way of relating to the past, present, and future. Inspired by Arendt, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, Hartog analyzes a broad range of texts, positioning the The Odyssey as a work on the threshold of a historical consciousness and then contrasting it against an investigation of the anthropologist Marshall SahlinsÕs concept of Òheroic history.Ó He tracks changing perspectives on time in Ch‰teaubriandÕs Historical Essay and Travels in America, and sets them alongside other writings from the French Revolution. He revisits the insight of the French Annals School and situates Pierre NoraÕs Realms of Memory within a history of heritage and our contemporary presentism. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on oneÕs position in society. There are flows and acceleration, but also what the sociologist Robert Castel calls the Òstatus of casual workers,Ó whose present is languishing before their very eyes and who have no past except in a complicated way (especially in the case of immigrants, exiles, and migrants) and no real future (since the temporality of plans and projects is denied them). Presentism is therefore experienced as either emancipation or enclosure, in some cases with ever greater speed and mobility and in others by living from hand to mouth in a stagnating present. Hartog also accounts for the fact that the future is perceived as a threat and not a promise. We live in a time of catastrophe, one he feels we have brought upon ourselves.
In his "utterly fascinating" (Book Smuggler) debut, The Adamantine Palace, Stephen Deas "restored [dragons] to all their scaly fire- breathing glory" (Daily Telegraph). Now, as the Realms teeter on the brink of war, the fate of humanity rests in the survival of one majestic white dragon. Prince Jehal has had his way-now his lover Zafir sits atop the Realms with hundreds of dragons and their riders at her beck and call. But Jehal's plots are far from over, for he isn't content to sit back and watch Zafir command the earth and sky. He wants that glory for himself- no matter who he must sacrifice to get it. The one thing Jehal fears is that the white dragon still lives-and if that is so, then blood will flow, on all sides...
Winner, 2023 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section, American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2023 Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section Outstanding Book Award, Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section, American Sociological Association Many years after the fall of Franco’s regime, Spanish human rights activists have turned to new methods to keep the memory of state terror alive. By excavating mass graves, exhuming remains, and employing forensic analysis and DNA testing, they seek to provide direct evidence of repression and break through the silence about the dictatorship’s atrocities that persisted well into Spain’s transition to democracy. Nicole Iturriaga offers an ethnographic examination of how Spanish human rights activists use forensic methods to challenge dominant histories, reshape collective memory, and create new forms of transitional justice. She argues that by grounding their claims in science, activists can present themselves as credible and impartial, helping them intervene in fraught public disputes about the remembrance of the past. The perceived legitimacy and authenticity of scientific techniques allows their users to contest the state’s historical claims and offer new narratives of violence in pursuit of long-delayed justice. Iturriaga draws on interviews with technicians and forensics experts and provides a detailed case study of Spain’s best-known forensic human rights organization, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. She also considers how the tools and tactics used in Spain can be adopted by human rights and civil society groups pursuing transitional justice in other parts of the world. An ethnographically rich account, Exhuming Violent Histories sheds new light on how science and technology intersect with human rights and collective memory.
Born into a Polish szlachta (noble) family, the extraordinary modern novelist Joseph Conrad maintained, even in exile, strong ties to his Polish heritage and culture. Yet the author earned renown by writing in English, often about nautical adventures in remote parts of the world. In Joseph Conrad's Polish Soul, G. W. Stephen Brodsky seeks to reclaim the essentially Polish sensibility of Conrad's groundbreaking oeuvre. He finds in Conrad's work a distinct Polonism that plays intriguingly with selfhood, freedom, and irony. For Brodsky, Conrad's outlook and writing betray numerous contradictions. Despite the novelist's practical realism, Conrad was drawn to romance, orientalism, and the exotic. Frequently sick, he nevertheless pursued a life at sea. He despised adventurers, yet loved risk. An instinctive skepticism, conservatism, and nationalism complicated his liberalism and respect for humanity, and though he resigned himself to Poland's tragic destiny, Conrad refused to despair over the terribleness of his times. In this incomparable study, Brodsky shows how these inherent aspects of Conrad's personality inform and guide his Polonism, along with the best attributes of his fiction.
