In Remembering Genocide an international group of scholars draw on current research from a range of disciplines to explore how communities throughout the world remember genocide. Whether coming to terms with atrocities committed in Namibia and Rwanda, Australia, Canada, the Punjab, Armenia, Cambodia and during the Holocaust, those seeking to remember genocide are confronted with numerous challenges. Survivors grapple with the possibility, or even the desirability, of recalling painful memories. Societies where genocide has been perpetrated find it difficult to engage with an uncomfortable historical legacy. Still, to forget genocide, as this volume edited by Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean shows, is not an option. To do so reinforces the vulnerability of groups whose very existence remains in jeopardy and denies them the possibility of bringing perpetrators to justice. Contributors discuss how genocide is represented in media including literature, memorial books, film and audiovisual testimony. Debates surrounding the role museums and monuments play in constructing and transmitting memory are highlighted. Finally, authors engage with controversies arising from attempts to mobilise and manipulate memory in the service of reconciliation, compensation and transitional justice.

Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter by highlighting shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories, and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized.

The first comprehensive examination of the Catholic Church’s role in the genocide against the Tutsi and its attempts at reconciliation From April to July 1994, more than a million people were killed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered by Hutu extremists in churches and school buildings, and their lifeless bodies were left rotting in these sacred places under the deep silence of church authorities. Pope Francis’s apology more than twenty years later presents the opportunity to reimagine the essence of the Church, the missionary enterprise, theology in its multiple dimensions, the purification of memory, and the place of human dignity in the Catholic faith. Reinventing Theology in Post-Genocide Rwanda critically examines the Church’s responsibility in Rwanda’s tragic history and opens the dialogue to construct a new theology. Contributors to this volume offer moving personal testimonies of their journeys to reconciling the evil that has marred the Church’s image: bystanders’ indifference to the suffering, despite their claim as members of the Church. The first volume of its kind, Reinventing Theology in Post-Genocide Rwanda is a necessary step toward the Rwandan Catholic Church and humanity’s restoration of fundamental peace and lasting reconciliation. Catholic clergy, lay people, and human rights advocates will benefit from this examination of ecclesial moral failure and subsequent reconciliatory efforts.

Divided societies, tormented pasts, and unrepentant perpetrators. Why are some countries more intent on vanquishing uncomfortable pasts than others? How do public and often unsightly attempts at memorialisation both fail the victims and valorize their oppressors? This book offers fresh and original perspectives on dictatorship, fascism and victimization from the bloodiest decades in Europe’s, Australia’s and Central America’s colonial and modern history. Chapters include analyses of Francoist memorials in Spain, assessments of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the forgetting of frontier colonial violence in Tasmania, Romania’s treatment of its Roma populations in the midst of Holocaust memorialisation in Bucharest’s urban development, and whether or not the Holocaust continues to serve as an instructional model or impossible aspiration for cross-cultural genocide memorialisation strategies. In an era of ongoing political, ethnic and religious conflict, and unrepentant insurgent activity around the world, this collection reminds readers that genocidal actions, wherever and whenever they occurred, must be held to account by more than rhetoric and concrete memory. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust representations have influenced and structured how other genocides are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream representations – the majority – largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations – often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide – tend to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence.

This book addresses the conflicts, myths, and memories that grew out of the Great War in Ottoman Turkey, and their legacies in society and politics. It is the third volume in a series dedicated to the combined analysis of the Ottoman Great War and the Armenian Genocide. In Australia and New Zealand, and even more in the post-Ottoman Middle East, the memory of the First World War still has an immediacy that it has long lost in Europe. For the post-Ottoman regions, the first of the two World Wars, which ended Ottoman rule, was the formative experience. This volume analyses this complex configuration: why these entanglements became possible; how shared or even contradictory memories have been constructed over the past hundred years, and how differing historiographies have developed. Remembering the Great War in the Middle East reaches towards a new conceptualization of the “long last Ottoman decade” (1912-22), one that places this era and its actors more firmly at the center, instead of on the periphery, of a history of a Greater Europe, a history comprising – as contemporary maps did – Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman world.

In Intergenerational Equity: Environmental and Cultural Concerns, the editors have produced an important, broad-based volume on intergenerational equity. The authors explore the principle of intergenerational equity in many dimensions, from the theoretical to the practical. While the primary focus is on intergenerational equity in the context of environmental resources and cultural heritage, the principle is also addressed in a broad array of other contexts. The final section of the volume considers intergenerational justice as it applies to indigenous peoples, genocide, migration, sovereign wealth funds and foreign investment. The chapters also provide a critical analysis of the issues and a consideration of the difficulties in implementing intergenerational equity.

Remembering the Cold War examines how, more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War legacies continue to play crucial roles in defining national identities and shaping international relations around the globe. Given the Cold War’s blurred definition – it has neither a widely accepted commencement date nor unanimous conclusion - what is to be remembered? This book illustrates that there is, in fact, a huge body of ‘remembrance,’ and that it is more pertinent to ask: what should be included and what can be overlooked? Over five sections, this richly illustrated volume considers case studies of Cold War remembering from different parts of the world, and engages with growing theorisation in the field of memory studies, specifically in relation to war. David Lowe and Tony Joel afford careful consideration to agencies that identify with being ‘victims’ of the Cold War. In addition, the concept of arenas of articulation, which envelops the myriad spaces in which the remembering, commemorating, memorialising, and even revising of Cold War history takes place, is given prominence.

Over the past four decades, East and Southeast Asia have seen a proliferation of heritage sites and remembrance practices which commemorate the region’s bloody conflicts of the period 1931–45. Remembering Asia’s World War Two examines the origins, dynamics, and repercussions of this regional war “memory boom”. The book analyzes the politics of war commemoration in contemporary East and Southeast Asia. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars, the chapters span China, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, covering topics such as the commemoration of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” system, forms of "dark tourism" or commemorative pilgrimages (e.g. veterans’ tours to wartime battlefields), and the establishment and evolution of various war-related heritage sites and museums. Case studies reveal the distinctive trajectories of new and newly discovered forms of remembrance within and across national boundaries. They highlight the growing influence of non-state actors over representations of conflict and occupation, as well as the increasingly interconnected and transnational character of memory-making. Taken together, the studies collected here demonstrate that across much of Asia the public commemoration of the wars of 1931–45 has begun to shift from portraying them as a series of national conflicts with distinctive local meanings to commemorating the conflict as a common pan-Asian, or even global, experience. Focusing on non-textual vehicles for public commemoration and considering both the local and international dimensions of war commemoration within, Remembering Asia’s World War Two will be a crucial reference for students and scholars of History, Memory Studies, and Heritage Studies, as well as all those interested in the history, politics, and culture of contemporary Asia.

Genocide and Mass Violence brings together a unique mix of anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and historians to examine the effects of mass trauma.