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.

In cultural and intellectual terms, one of the EU’s most important objectives in pursuing unification has been to develop a common historical narrative of Europe. Across ten compelling case studies, this volume examines the premises underlying such a project to ask: Could such an uncontested history of Europe ever exist? Combining studies of national politics, supranational institutions, and the fraught EU-Mideast periphery with a particular focus on the twentieth century, the contributors to History and Belonging offer a fascinating survey of the attempt to forge a post-national identity politics.

This open access book discusses political, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges that influence both how people deal with their past and how they build their identities in contemporary Europe. Ongoing debates on migration, on local, national, inter- and transnational levels, prove that it is a divisive issue with regards to understanding European integration and identity. At the same time, the European Union increasingly invests in projects related to European heritage, museums, and cultural memory networks, while having to take dissonant heritages into account. These processes in their combination offer an interesting dynamic and form the complex puzzle that poses challenging questions for anyone involved in academic research, heritage practices, and policy debates. With this puzzle at its core, this book explicitly focuses on slippery and transforming notions of Europe and critically discusses ongoing and transforming power structures of heritage and memory in today’s Europe. The book combines theoretical and methodological contributions to the debates on European heritage and memory studies and in-depth analyses of empirical case studies. Its main aim is to bring research fields concerning memory and heritage into a closer dialogue and thus explore the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Europe.

The Twentieth Century in European Memory investigates contested and divisive memories of conflicts, world wars, dictatorship, genocide and mass killing. Focusing on the questions of transculturality and reception, the book looks at the ways in which such memories are being shared, debated and received by museum workers, artists, politicians and general audiences. Due to amplified mobility and communication as well as Europe’s changing institutional structure, such memories become increasingly transcultural, crossing cultural and political borders. This book brings together in-depth researched case studies of memory transmission and reception in different types of media, including films, literature, museums, political debate printed and digital media, as well as studies of personal and public reactions. Contributors are: Ismar Dedović, Astrid Erll, Rosanna Farbøl, Magdalena Góra, Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Anne Heimo, Sara Jones, Wulf Kansteiner, Slawomir Kapralski, Zoé de Kerangat, Zdzisław Mach, Natalija Majsova, Inge Melchior, Daisy Neijmann, Vjeran Pavlaković, Benedikt Perak, Tea Sindbæk Andersen, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa examines the multiple and diverse manifestations of cultural heritage-based tourism in Africa from a regional, social science, and sustainability perspective. This book delivers a comprehensive treatise on the interdependent concepts of cultural heritage and tourism. Heritage is one of the most pervasive tourism assets worldwide and lies at the foundations of tourism in many localities, including Africa. However, despite its salience, there has not been a systematic examination of Africa’s heritage resources, markets, policies, practices, successes, and challenges in a tourism framework, despite the continent’s immense heritage value. This book reviews the different types of heritages that pervade the cultural environment of Africa and comprises its vast heritagescapes. It also examines the increasing potential for the growth of heritage tourism throughout the entire continent. The contributions in this volume delve into current thinking about space and place and their effects on heritage, mobilities, globalization, colonialism and indigeneity, conflict, identity and nation-building, connections with other regions through migration and the slave trade, and a greater emphasis on the ordinary heritage of Africa, which has long been ignored by tourism scholars and industry representatives. The chapters herein are authored by Africa specialists, most being from Africa, offering a truly African perspective. The chapters are conceptually rigorous and empirically rich with examples from all regions of the African continent. This unparalleled interdisciplinary glimpse at cultural heritage and tourism in Africa delivers strong value and is a vital resource for all students and researchers of tourism, cultural studies, heritage studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, history, and global studies.

This book addresses memory politics and their evolution as an academic discipline, including memory studies. It explores national and international debates about conflicting interpretations of the recent past, including WWII remembering, the annexation of Ukraine, the reformed history teaching in Putin’s Russia, Historikerstreit and the holocaust in Germany, and the legacy and role of nuclear weapons in international relations in the USA in the context of the so called New Cold War.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.

This book discusses the merits of the theory of agonistic memory in relation to the memory of war. After explaining the theory in detail it provides two case studies, one on war museums in contemporary Europe and one on mass graves exhumations, which both focus on analyzing to what extent these memory sites produce different regimes of memory. Furthermore, the book provides insights into the making of an agonistic exhibition at the Ruhr Museum in Essen, Germany. It also analyses audience reaction to a theatre play scripted and performed by the Spanish theatre company Micomicion that was supposed to put agonism on stage. There is also an analysis of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) designed and delivered on the theory of agonistic memory and its impact on the memory of war. Finally, the book provides a personal review of the history, problems and accomplishments of the theory of agonistic memory by the two editors of the volume.

Exploring the difficult and contested sites of deindustrialized society on the brink of transformation to either heritage or wasteland, this volume looks at the creative ways that such sites are (re)used and suggests that they are not always merely abject or abandoned. As a result, our understanding of the meanings given to left over spaces is enhanced by an examination of the ways they are used. Ambivalent heritage sites are not always recognized for their potential, although artists and people from different recreational activities, such as industrial sites and parkour, use and experience these places in different ways. The contributors introduce fresh ideas on how to approach these sites and the people invested in them, employing multidisciplinary methodologies from archaeology and heritage studies to ethnography and sociology. Through the use of Northern-European case studies such as a former sanatorium, a prison and the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the reader gains a new perspective on these sites of contestation, which are cherished despite their problematic status. The conclusion is that due to the rapid societal change we are experiencing in the contemporary world, heritage professionals must start to acknowledge and deal with the difficulties that ambivalent heritage sites pose.