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.
By Jeremy Brooke Straughn
January 09, 2023
This book examines the paradox of collective identity in eastern Germany in the wake of German reunification. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, citizens of the former German Democratic Republic were confronted with a dilemma: Were they already Germans without qualification, like their ...
By Robin Maria DeLugan
May 30, 2022
This volume examines the ways in which the violent legacies of the twentieth century continue to affect the concept of the nation. Through a study of three societies’ commemoration of notorious episodes of 1930s state violence, the author considers the manner in which attention to the state ...
Edited
By Ajlina Karamehić-Muratović, Laura Kromják
April 29, 2022
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 ...
By Monica Ciobanu
April 29, 2022
This book examines how the process of remembering Stalinist repression in Romania has shifted from individual, family, and group representations of lived and witnessed experiences characteristic of the 1990s to more recent and state-sponsored expressions of historical remembrance through their ...
By Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun-Kyung Lee
April 01, 2021
Based on a transnational study of decommissioned, postcolonial prisons in Taiwan (Taipei and Chiayi), South Korea (Seoul), and China (Lushun), this book offers a critical reading of prisons as a particular colonial product, the current restoration of which as national heritage is closely related to...
By Siobhan Kattago
December 05, 2019
Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time examines different encounters with the past from within the present – whether as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof. Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s definition of the present as a time ...
By Nigel Young
December 05, 2019
This book examines the phenomenon of modern memory as a reaction to total war, an aspiration to truth-seeking provoked by the independent forces of modern war and collective violence which is transnational, or postnational, in character. Using examples from prose and poetry, film and theatre, ...
By Brad West
September 05, 2019
In a period characterised by an unprecedented cultural engagement with the past, individuals, groups and nations are debating and experimenting with commemoration in order to find culturally relevant ways of remembering warfare, genocide and terrorism. This book examines such remembrances and the ...
By Stuart Burch
June 17, 2019
This book provides an original, impassioned exploration of memory studies and the uses of the past in the present. It capitalises on London’s global appeal and Big Ben’s iconic status. Moving beyond this familiar facade the reader will journey around the hidden histories of Westminster’s streets, ...
By Alejandro Baer, Natan Sznaider
June 10, 2019
To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization ...
Edited
By Vjeran Pavlaković, Davor Pauković
May 22, 2019
This book analyzes top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation and collective identities through commemorative practices relating to events from the Second World War and the 1990s "Homeland War" in Croatia. With attention to media representations of commemorative events and opinion poll...
By Golnar Nabizadeh
April 23, 2019
This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged ...