Memory Studies as an academic field of cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debates, buttressed by the fragmentation of nation states and their traditional narratives, have greatly accelerated. Societies are today pregnant with newly unmediated memories, once sequestered in broad collective representations and their ideological stances. But, the ‘past in the present’ has returned with a vengeance in the early 21st Century, and with it an expansion of categories of cultural experience and meaning. This new series explores the social and cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally. It welcomes studies of migrant memory from failed states; micro-histories battling against collective memories; the mnemonic past of emotions; the mnemonic spatiality of sites of memory; and the reconstructive ethics of memory in the face of galloping informationalization, as this renders the ‘mnemonic’ more and more public and publically accessible.
Edited
By Trude Fonneland, Rossella Ragazzi
December 09, 2024
With a focus on Sápmi – the transcultural and transnational homeland of the Sámi people – this book presents case studies and theoretical frameworks which explore the ways in which memory institutions such as museums, archives, and festivals participate in and guide processes of appropriation, ...
By Stephen Vizard
December 02, 2024
This book examines the role played by national myths in the performance of national identity through a detailed examination of Australia and its national myth of Gallipoli. This work is an original, multi-disciplinary examination of the highly contested, little understood yet vital role of ...
By Tomasz Żukowski
November 25, 2024
During the Holocaust, Polish bystanders were witnesses not only to Nazi crimes but also to their own collective violence towards Jewish neighbours. This book shows how these memories continue to be distorted and silenced in Polish culture. Considering the ways in which Polish culture displays ...
Edited
By Laura Kromják, Ajlina Karamehić-Muratović
November 08, 2024
This volume explores intergenerational trauma among refugee communities displaced throughout the world. Considering patterns and findings across disciplines, cultural contexts, and methodologies, it addresses the manner in which trauma is passed from one generation to the next among populations ...
Edited
By Linda Pillière, Karine Bigand
May 27, 2024
This book examines the ways in which ghosts haunt and shape cultural identities and memory, considering the manner in which the fluctuations of such identities sometimes imply the rethinking or rewriting of the past. Drawing on case studies in historical, political, literary and linguistic studies,...
By Miguel Cardina, Inês Nascimento Rodrigues
May 27, 2024
Remembering the Liberation Struggles in Cape Verde: A Mnemohistory takes as its reference from the anti-colonial struggles against the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and the ways this period has been publicly remembered. Drawing on original and detailed empirical ...
By Jan Borowicz
January 31, 2024
Perverse Memory and the Holocaust presents a new theoretical approach to the study of Polish memory bystanders of the Holocaust. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, it examines representations of the Holocaust in order to explore the perverse mechanisms of memory at work, in which surface a series of...
By Meghan Tinsley
September 25, 2023
Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary engages with the explosion of public commemorations in Britain and France in the wake of the First World War centenary, alongside the hyper-visibility of British and French Muslims in political and popular discourse. Bringing these two ...
Edited
By Miguel Cardina
September 14, 2023
The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles: Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past presents a critical and comparative analysis on the memory of the colonial and liberation wars that led to a regime change in Portugal and to the independence of five new African countries: ...
By Thomas Van de Putte
May 31, 2023
This book presents an innovative theoretical and empirical approach to the present attributions of meaning to the past. Based on the author’s fieldwork in the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim – Auschwitz, in German – it observes the manner in which residents remember and narrate the past of ...
Edited
By Tomasz Stryjek, Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin
May 31, 2023
Bringing together the work of sociologists, historians, and political scientists, this book explores the increasing importance of the politics of memory in central and eastern European states since the end of communism, with a particular focus on relations between Ukraine and Poland. Through ...
Edited
By Anne Bazin, Emmanuelle Hébert, Valérie Rosoux, Eric Sangar
May 22, 2023
This volume suggests a model of collective memory that distinguishes between two conceptual logics of memory fragmentation: vertical fragmentation and horizontal fragmentation. It offers a series of case studies of conflict and post-conflict collective memory, shedding light on the ways various ...