1st Edition
Famines and the Making of Heritage
Famines and the Making of Heritage is the first book to bring together groundbreaking research on the role of European famines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in relation to heritage making, museology, commemoration, education, and monument creation.
Featuring contributions from famine experts across Europe and North America, the volume adopts a pioneering transnational perspective, and discusses issues such as contestable and repressed heritage, materiality, dark tourism, education on famines, oral history, multidirectional memory, and visceral empathy. Questioning why educational curricula and practices in schools and on heritage sites are region- or nation-oriented or transnational, chapters also consider whether they emphasise conflict or mutual understanding. Contributions also consider how present issues of European concern – such as globalisation, commodification, human rights, poverty, and migration – intersect with the heritage and memory of modern European famines. Lastly, the book considers what role emigrant and diasporic communities within and outside Europe play in the development of famine heritage and educational practices – and whether famine heritage is accessible to them.
Famines and the Making of Heritage provides a crucial resource for museum and heritage scholars, students and professionals working on or with difficult or dark heritages, as well as those interested in the study of famines and legacies of troubled pasts.
Introduction: Famines and the Making of Heritage
Marguérite Corporaal & Ingrid de Zwarte
Part I Education
1. Challenges and Opportunities in Teaching European Famines: A
Transnational Comparison
Lindsay Janssen, Anne van Mourik, Gloria Roman Ruiz and Ingrid de Zwarte
2. Conveying Soviet Famines: Representations of Hunger as Mass
Atrocity during the Holodomor and the Leningrad Blockade in Post-War
USSR Textbooks
Anne-Lise Bobeldijk
3. New Futures for Famine Pasts? Teaching Ireland’s Great Famine in
Ontario and Quebec
Marguérite Corporaal and Jason King
Part II Memory & Commemoration
4. Relative Absence: Dutch Memory Culture and Monuments of the Hunger
Winter of 1944-45
Ingrid de Zwarte and Lotte Jensen
5. ‘We Went Through a Lot That… Cannot be Discussed, Cannot be
Written: Remembering the Greek Famine of the Early 1940s
Violetta Hionidou
6. Holodomor Monuments on the Battlefield: Monuments and Memorials of
the Great Famine (1932-33) in Post-Maidan Ukraine
Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek
Part III Musealisation
7. Famine Clearances in the Scottish Highlands: The Musealisation of
the Past and the Socio-Political Function of Museums
Laurence Gourievidis
8. Famine Landscapes: Finland’s ‘Skeleton Track’ in Memorials and Museums
Charley Boerman
9. Spain’s ‘Hunger Years’: A Lack of Musealisation of a Traumatic Past
Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco and Deborah Madden
Afterword
Cormac Ó Gráda
Biography
Marguérite Corporaal is a Full Professor of Irish Literature in Transnational Contexts at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Ingrid de Zwarte is an Assistant Professor of Economic and Environmental History at Wageningen University.
