South Africa possesses one of the richest popular music traditions in the world - from marabi to mbaqanga, from boeremusiek to bubblegum, from kwela to kwaito. Yet the risk that future generations of South Africans will not know their musical roots is very real. Of all the recordings made here since the 1930s, thousands have been lost for ever, for the powers-that-be never deemed them worthy of preservation. And if one peruses the books that exist on South African popular music, one still fi nds that their authors have on occasion jumped to conclusions that were not as foregone as they had assumed. Yet the fault lies not with them, rather in the fact that there has been precious little documentation in South Africa of who played what, or who recorded what, with whom, and when. This is true of all music-making in this country, though it is most striking in the musics of the black communities. Beyond Memory: Recording the History, Moments and Memories of South African Music is an invaluable publication because it offers a first-hand account of the South African music scene of the past decades from the pen of a man, Max Thamagana Mojapelo, who was situated in the very thick of things, thanks to his job as a deejay at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. This book - astonishing for the breadth of its coverage - is based on his diaries, on interviews he conducted and on numerous other sources, and we find in it not only the well-known names of recent South African music but a countless host of others whose contribution must be recorded if we and future generations are to gain an accurate picture of South African music history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance analyses the intricate connections between silence, acts of remembrance and acts of forgetting, and relates the topic of silence to the international research field of Cultural Memory Studies. It engages with the most recent work in the field by viewing silence as a remedy to the traditionally binary approach to our understanding of remembering and forgetting. The international team of contributors examine case studies from colonialism, war, politics and slavery from across the globe, as well as drawing examples from literature, philosophy and sites of memory to draw three main conclusions. Firstly, that the relationship between remembering and forgetting is relational rather than ‘hermetic’, and the space between the two is often occupied by silence. Secondly, silence is a force in itself, capable of stimulating more or less remembrance. Finally, that silence is a necessary and key element in the interaction between the human mind and the ‘outer world’, and enables people to challenge their understanding of art, music, literature, history and memory. With an introduction by the editors discussing Memory Studies, and concluding remarks by Astrid Erll, this collection demonstrates that acceptance and consideration of silence as having both a performative and aesthetic dimension is an essential component of history and memory studies.

This book provides a fresh perspective on the familiar belief that memory policies are successful in building peaceful societies. Whether in a stable democracy or in the wake of a violent political conflict, this book argues that memory policies are unhelpful in preventing hate, genocide, and mass crimes. Since the 1990s, transmitting the memory of violent pasts has been utilised in attempts to foster tolerance and fight racism, hate and antisemitism. However, countries that invested in memory policies have overseen the rise of hate crimes and populisms instead of growing social cohesion. Breaking with the usual moralistic position, this book takes stock of this situation. Where do these memory policies come from? Whom do they serve? Can we make them more effective? In other words, can we really learn from the past? At a time when memory studies is blooming, this book questions the normative belief in the effects of memory.

Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture. During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium. Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today. Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.

This anthology brings together the voices of both new and established Arab American writers in a compilation of creative nonfiction that reveals the stories of the Arab diaspora in styles that range from the traditional to the experimental. Writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, and Syria explore issues related to politics, family, culture, and racism. Coming from different belief systems and cultures and including first- and second-generation immigrants as well as those whose identities encompass more than a single culture, these writers tell stories that speak to the complexity of the Arab American experience.

Contributing to current debates on relationships between culture and the social, and the changing practices of modern museums, this important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late 19th century.

With stunningly precise formal, biographical, and cultural analysis, Laurence Lieberman turns his critical eye to American poets and confirms his prodigious talent not only as a narrative poet, but as a critic and essayist as well. What Lieberman aspires to do in Beyond the Muse of Memory, a collection of new and previously published essays, is to send the reader back to major poets for a fresh look and to neglected artists for close study. Lieberman's new studies of Robert Lowell illuminate the poems of Lowell's final period, "a sector of his work that has been wrongly undervalued by many of his critics". Other essays that have never before appeared in book form on James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, and Stephen Berg are gathered here with Lieberman's best and best-known earlier essays on W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, Derek Walcott, James Wright, and William Stafford, to name a few.

"The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD marked the beginning of a new era in Christianity. For the first time, doctrines were organized into a single creed. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers did most of their writing during and after this important event in Church history. Unlike the previous era of Christian writing, the Nicene and Post-Nicene era is dominated by a few very important and prolific writers. In Volume I of the 14-volume collected writings of the Nicenes and Post-Nicenes (first published between 1886 and 1889), readers will discover some of the writings of Saint Augustine, recognized as a great religious figure by many Christian sects. He is the patron of the Augustinian monks, who live their lives according to the values found in Augustines writings. In the Confessions, Augustine speaks honestly about his sins as a youth and the saving grace he discovered when he found God. In the Letters, the true personality of Augustine shines through. He is one of the major theological resources of his time, and so through his correspondences, audiences can see what issues plagued the newly unified Christian religion and come to know the man who helped shape Western religion as we know it."