Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing examines the ways in which memory furnishes important source material in the three distinct areas of critical theory, memoir, and memorial art. The book first shows how affect theorists have increasingly complemented more traditional archival research through the use of “academic memoir.” This theoretical piece is then applied to memoir works by Caribbean writers Dionne Brand and Patrick Chamoiseau, and the final case study in the book interprets as memorial art Kara Walker’s ephemeral 80,000 pound sugar sculpture of 2014. Memory as method; memory as archive; memorial as affect: this book looks at the interplay between archival sources on the one hand, and the affective memories, both personal and collective, that flow from, around, and into the constantly shifting record of the past.

This book illustrates how a dominant political party, the Mapai, under the leadership of P.M. David Ben-Gurion, chose to ‘hug,’ honor and commemorate ‘Her Fallen’ and ‘Her Bereaved Families,’ whilst simultaneously ignoring the fallen that were identified with the rival political party, Herut, led by Menachem Begin. Designing legislation and cultural policy designated for Teaching the public that those who sacrificed themselves in the Israeli War of Independence – were Hagana Members, one of three Israeli undergrounds movements, associated with Mapai specific ideological viewpoint. By that - the Israeli state created political legitimacy and dominance for Mapai – which was framed as the only political party which were involved with the struggle for national independence. "Her" fighters, battles and casualties became part of the collective memory and national ethos. This project was implemented by refusing to acknowledge "the Other" casualties of the Eztel and Lehi underground movements wich were ideological identified with Herut Party. The state excluded their bereaved families from the wider official military bereavement circle and forced them to experience "disenfranchised grief", With no access to official commemoration or to rehabilitative support. It was only after the Likud's (ex-Herut) victory in the 1977 elections that enabled P.M. Menachem Begin to correct this "exile from national identity" and to initiate the inclusion of "His" fighters and casualties to the military cemeteries, to the history books and to the state commemorations, as recognizing their families as part of the National Military Bereavement circles entitled to Honors and support. A thought provoking study about the dark side of the Israeli nation building era, Politics of Memory explores the politics of historiography, bereavement and military commemoration, and the confrontation over boundaries of national pantheon, examining the effects of these factors on Israeli national identity and politics. With introductions by Moshe Arens, former Israeli Minister of Defense and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and by Yehiel Kadishai, P.M. Menachem Begin’s chief of staff, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Israeli history; military studies; memory and heritage studies; the study of loss and bereavement, and politics in general.

War memory and commemoration have had increasingly high profiles in public and academic debates in recent years. This volume examines some of the social changes which have led to this development, among them the passing of the two World Wars from survivor into cultural memory. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, the book illuminates the struggle to install particular memories at the centre of a cultural world, and offers an extensive argument about how the politics of commemoration practices should be understood.

The destruction of monuments during the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 shows how many nations are being forced to grapple with their national histories. It is clear that the things which make up our streets form a core part of our historical, political and cultural identity. Here, Eloise Florence turns to Berlin and the deeply entrenched English-language narratives about World War II to explore the complicated relationship between violence, place and memory in the Anglo-American consciousness. Centered upon Teufelsberg – a hill in Berlin born from the rubble caused by Allied bombing – and other sites of violence across Germany's capital, this interdisciplinary study unpicks the use and abuse of area bombing and its cultural memory in Anglo-American audiences. Grounded in theories of new materialism and post-humanism, and drawing on extensive empirical and auto-ethnographic data, the issues addressed include: moving through urban landscapes as an embodied means of memorializing war and trauma; remembering destruction as a means to advance or challenge traditional war mythologies; and curation as an entry point for tourists to reconsider the impact of British and American aerial raids, including modern drone warfare. This innovative volume shines an important light on both the dark legacy of the aerial bombing of Berlin and the ways in which we record and read violent histories more generally. As such, Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin will be an invaluable resource for all scholars of World War II, memory culture and public history.

When the past is painful, as riddled with violence and injustice as it is in postapartheid South Africa, remembrance presents a problem at once practical and ethical: how much of the past to preserve and recollect and how much to erase and forget if the new nation is to ever unify and move forward? The new South Africa’s confrontation of this dilemma is Martin J. Murray’s subject in Commemorating and Forgetting. More broadly, this book explores how collective memory works—how framing events, persons, and places worthy of recognition and honor entails a selective appropriation of the past, not a mastery of history. How is the historical past made to appear in the present? In addressing these questions, Murray reveals how collective memory is stored and disseminated in architecture, statuary, monuments and memorials, literature, and art—“landscapes of remembrance” that selectively recall and even fabricate history in the service of nation-building. He examines such vehicles of memory in postapartheid South Africa and parses the stories they tell—stories by turn sanitized, distorted, embellished, and compressed. In this analysis, Commemorating and Forgetting marks a critical move toward recognizing how the legacies and impositions of white minority rule, far from being truly past, remain embedded in, intertwined with, and imprinted on the new nation’s here and now.

This edited collection offers an empirical exploration of social memory in the context of politics, war, identity and culture. With a substantive focus on Eastern Europe, it employs the methodologies of visual studies, content and discourse analysis, in-depth interviews and surveys to substantiate how memory narratives are composed and rewritten in changing ideological and political contexts. The book examines various historical events, including the Russian-Afghan war of 1979-89 and World War II, and considers public and local rituals, monuments and museums, textbook accounts, gender and the body. As such it provides a rich picture of post-socialist memory construction and function based in interdisciplinary memory studies.

The growth of scholarship on the pressing problem of genocide shows no sign of abating. This volume takes stock of Genocide Studies in all its multi-disciplinary diversity by adopting a thematic rather than case-study approach. Each chapter is by an expert in the field and comprises an up-to-date survey of emerging and established areas of enquiry while highlighting problems and making suggestions about avenues for future research. Each essay also has a select bibliography to facilitate further reading. Key themes include imperial violence and military contexts for genocide, predicting, preventing, and prosecuting genocide, gender, ideology, the state, memory, transitional justice, and ecocide. The volume also scrutinises the concept of genocide - its elasticity, limits, and problems. It does not provide a definition of genocide but rather encourages the reader to think critically about genocide as a conceptual and legal category concerned with identity-based violence against civilians.

This book introduces a new research agenda for visual peace research, providing a political analysis of the relationship between visual representations and the politics of violence nationally and internationally. Using a range of genres, from photography to painting, it elaborates on how people can become agents of their own image.

Collective Memory, Volume 274 in the Progress in Brain Research series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on a variety of interesting topics, including Deriving testable hypotheses through an analogy between individual and collective memory and updated information on Collective future thinking: Current research and future directions. - Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors - Presents the latest release in Progress in Brain Research series - Updated release includes the latest information on Collective Memory