This volume focuses on the uses of collective memory in transatlantic relations between the United States, and Western and Central European nations in the period from the Cold War to the present day. Sitting at the intersection of international relations, history, memory studies and various "area" studies, Memory in Transatlantic Relations examines the role of memory in an international context, including the ways in which policy and decision makers utilize memory; the relationship between trauma, memory and international politics; the multiplicity of actors who shape memory; and the role of memory in the conflicts in post-Cold War Europe. Thematically organized and presenting studies centered on the U.S., Hungary, France, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the authors explore the built environment (memorials) and performances of memory (commemorations), shedding light on the ways in which memories are mobilized to frame relations between the U.S. and nations in Western and Central Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and historians with interests in memory studies, foreign policy and international relations.

The book investigates processes and strategies of remembering the so-called Georgia Salzburger exiles, German-speaking immigrants in the 18th century British colony of Georgia. The longitudinal study explores the construction of Georgia Salzburger memory in what is today Austria, Germany and the United States from the 18th to the 21st century. The focus is set on processes of memoria throughout three centuries at the intersections between the creation of German-American, Lutheran, U.S.-American and `Southern' identity, memories of migration, nativism and Whiteness.

How wounds from a previous generation may weigh on children and grandchildren contain much of interest. Yet if we unpack the ghostly, the eerie, and the spectral in transgenerational hauntings, if we allow for the suffering or the disturbed to forge social links, such contacts may enable breaking into reconnections and afterlives. … One only needs to think of the near epidemic of rape in South Africa to sense violent hypermasculinity erupting as madness, mediated by a history of brutal, racialised reduction. But it is also important to move beyond the brutalities and madness, to consider the individual and collective refigurations surfacing out of layers of catastrophe. Nancy Rose Hunt: Conference Keynote Address, “Beyond Trauma? Notes on a Word, a Frame, and a Diagnostic Category.” Historical Trauma and Memory: Living with the Haunting Power of the Past is based on essays presented at a conference with the same name which was held in Kigali, Rwanda in April 2019. The book gives readers front row seats as an interdisciplinary group of scholars from law, psychology, history, the arts, anthropology, theology, and philosophy address the complex matrix of the emotional legacies of historical trauma, cultural legacies, people interacting with their social and political environment, and the interplay of these factors in different post-conflict societies.

War Memories explores the patchwork formed by collective memory, public remembrance, private recollection, and the ways in which they form a complex composition of observations, initiatives, and experiences. Offering an international perspective on war commemoration, contributors consider the process of assembling historical facts and subjective experiences to show how these points of view diverge according to various social, cultural, political, and historical perspectives. Encompassing the representations of wars in the English-speaking world over the last hundred years, this collection presents an extensive, yet integrated, reflection on various types of commemoration and interpretations of events. Essays respond to common questions regarding war memory: how and why do we remember war? What does commemoration tell us about the actors in wars? How does commemoration reflect contemporary society’s culture of war? War Memories disseminates current knowledge on the performance, interpretation, and rewriting of facts and events during and after wars, while focusing on how patriotic fervour, resistance, conscientious objection, injury, trauma, and propaganda contribute to the shaping of individual and collective memory. Contributors include Joan Beaumont (Australian National University, Canberra), Gilles Chamerois (University of Brest, France), Subarno Chattarji (University of Delhi, India), Nicole Cloarec (Rennes 1 University, France), Corinne David-Ives (European University of Brittany – Rennes 2, France), Jeffrey Demsky (San Bernardino Valley College, California), Sam Edwards (Manchester Metropolitan University), Georges Fournier (Jean Moulin University, France), Annie Gagiano (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa), David Haigron (Rennes 2 University, France), Judith Keene (University of Sydney, Australia), Melissa King (San Bernardino Valley College, California), Christine Knauer (Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany), Liliane Louvel (University of Poitiers), Michelle P. Moore (Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre, Kingston, Ontario), John Mullen (University of Rouen, France), Lorie-Anne Duech-Rainville (Caen University, France), Elizabeth Rechniewski (Australian Research Council Discovery Project), Raphaël Ricaud (University ‘Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense’, France), Laura Robinson (Royal Military College of Canada), and Isabelle Roblin (Université du Littoral-Côte d’Opale, France).

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 subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?’ The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.

This book investigates the transnational dimensions of European cultural memory and how it contributes to the construction of new non-, supra, and post-national, but also national, memory narratives. The volume considers how these narratives circulate not only within Europe, but also through global interactions with other locations. The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures responds to recent academic calls to break with methodological nationalism in memory studies. Taking European memory as a case study, the book offers new empirical and theoretical insights into the transnational dimensions of cultural memory, without losing sight of the continued relevance of the nation. The articles critically examine the ways in which various individuals, organizations, institutions, and works of art are mobilizing future-oriented memories of Europe to construct new memory narratives. Taking into account the heterogeneity and transnational locations of commemorative groups, the multidirectionality of acts of remembrance, and a variety of commemorative media such as museums, film, photography, and literature, the volume not only investigates how memory discourses circulate within Europe, but also how they are being transferred, translated, or transformed through global interactions beyond the European continent.

Since the end of the Cold War, and especially following the US decision to invade Iraq, the once strong partnership between the US, Canada, and the European allies has faced the serious possibility of significant change, or even dissolution. At the very least, fundamental differences have emerged in the ways that many of the partners, perceive the issues that are most important to them—from perceptions of the threat of terrorism and attitudes to the use of force, to expectation about the future nature of the NATO Alliance—and in the ways in which those perceptions have become translated into policy decisions. In this book, experts from both sides of the Atlantic seek to explain why there has been so much divergence in the approach the various countries have taken. And it seeks to raise questions about what those divergent paths might mean for the future of transatlantic relations.

What can the life writing of post-famine Irish immigrants tell us about Irish diasporic memory? Of Memory and the Misplaced considers the endurance and nature of Irish American memory across the twentieth century. Guided by 30 memoirs written between 1900 and 1970, Sarah O'Brien shows the prevalence of intimate and taboo themes in ordinary immigrants' writing, such as domestic violence, same-sex love, and famine-induced trauma. Importantly, Of Memory and the Misplaced critiques the role of the Irish landscape as a site of memory and shows how the interiority of the domestic world has provided Irish women with the language needed to reclaim their own lives. Combining literary and historical theory, Of Memory and the Misplaced highlights voices that have traditionally been silenced and offers a rare and unexplored collection of primary source autobiographical texts to better understand the experiences of Irish immigrants in the United States.

Asking whether a genuinely shared European memory is possible while addressing the dangers of a single, homogenized European memory, Gluhovic examines the contradictions, specificities, continuities and discontinuities in the European shared and unshared pasts as represented in the works of Pinter, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Muller and Artur Zmijewski.

Memories of historical events like the Holocaust have played a key role in the internationalization of human rights. Their importance lies in their ability to bridge the universal and the particular—the universality of human values and the particularity of memories rooted in local human experiences. In Human Rights and Memory, Levy and Sznaider trace the growth of human rights discourse since World War II and interpret its deployment of memories as a new form of cosmopolitanism, exemplifying a dynamic through which global concerns become part of local experiences, and vice versa.