Social memory and historical justice: Introduction

Memory …, 2012

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014

This chapter considers the definitional and disciplinary politics surrounding the study of memory, exploring the various sites of memory study that have emerged within the field of communication. Specifically, this chapter reviews sites of memory and commemoration, ranging from places such as museums, monuments, and memorials, to textual forms, including journalism and consumer culture. Within each context, this chapter examines the ways in which these sites have interpreted and reinterpreted traumatic pasts bearing great consequence for national identity. It concludes with a discussion of the challenges set forth by new media for scholars engaging in studies of the politics of memory and identifies areas worthy of future research.

This article outlines some recent achievements and new perspectives in contemporary memory studies. It first gives an overview of the recent handbooks and anthologies of memory studies, which testify to the institutionalisation of the young discipline. Then, it discusses the emergence of cultural memory studies, one of the most fruitful and promising trends in the memory studies of the last decade. And finally, it addresses the old debate over the relationship of history and memory, in order to propose an alternative conceptual framework for it and demonstrate the perspectives opened by a new avenue of research, mnemohistory. To conclude with, it argues that the rise of memory studies can be regarded as part of a broader change in how we nowadays see time and the interrelations of the past, the present and the future. It is plausible that these developments have irreversibly changed both the nature and outlooks of history writing.

The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right, 2021

THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY AND THE RETURN OF THE XENOPHOBIC RIGHT Translated by Alastair McEwen Copyright © Bompiani, 2019 USA Edition copyright © 2020 CPL EDITIONS All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-941046-32-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface For a Memory Culture Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. By Michael Rothberg. 9 Introduction What Went Wrong? 19 By Valentina Pisanty Chapter I, The Duty of Memory. 31 Chapter II, The Discourse of History 75 Chapter III, Collective Memories 109 Chapter IV, New Cinema of the Shoah 153 Chapter V, The Spectacle of Evil 201 Chapter VI, Denial and Punishment 229 Appendix 263 End notes 285 Bibliography 307 Filmography 329 Index 335

Teksty Drugie, 2016

Cognizing the other, us vs others or our own vs someone else's within a divided group, along with processes of diffusional intercultural permeation, hybridizing and fusing the heterogeneous (thus conditioning not only the imitative and dependent, but also the original and specific)-undoubtedly, these were the most fundamental problems for the humanities and culture of the previous century. It is not without reason that they have given rise to a wide range of studies, commentaries, philosophical and theoretical conceptualizations. It has long been obvious that debate over these matters has not been restricted to academia, but first and foremost in the cultural arena with all its conflicting historical, political and social issues. One could say that they constitute one of the few domains in which the humanities, broadly understood, can carry out research which is not only cognitively and substantially valuable, but also potentially good and socially useful, depending on the effects of implementing programmes which are (socially) corrective, formational and educational in nature.

Memory Studies, 2017

Memory Studies, 2019

This article serves as both an état présent of emerging scholarship in the interdisiplinary field of Memory Studies and a conference report following the first MSA Forward interactive workshop which preceded the second annual conference of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in December 2017. MSA Forward is the postgraduate arm of the Memory Studies Association and offers a platform for exchanging ideas amongst a cohort of emerging scholars engaging with recent developments in Memory Studies and interacting with key academics in the field. The idea of engagement, with its political undertone, draws attention to the political valence and ethical sensitivity of emerging research as evidenced in this article, which contends that if Memory Studies is to be moving forwards as well as looking back, then it is important for emerging scholars as well as established academics to be at the forefront of the field.

2015

Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on victims' families, and the significant role of "memory work" by survivors' children within the broader frame of cultural memory in the English-speaking countries of post-war Jewish diasporas. It studies how these authors explore the past in their literary texts – primarily life writing. By identifying key areas where memory manifests and can be traced – family objects, given names, bodies, food, the memorial uses of the Passover Seder, and the attacks of 9/11 – it shows how the Second Generation engages with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival. Departing from prevailing trauma studies approaches, Nina Fischer builds an argument for the positive achievements of memory work by Second Generation writers in reconnecting with their family's pre-Holocaust life, a "usable past", in spite of horrific loss.

Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2019

Self-serving hegemonic visions of history are institutionalised by dominant memory entrepreneurs, simultaneously imposing an authoritative version of 'what happened' and their right to articulate it. These visions and the hierarchies of honour they consecrate are cultivated trans-generationally, aiming to ensure the community's political cohesion, as well as the emotional attachments that can ensure its reproduction over time. This paper has three objectives. First, it brings insights from social epistemology to bear on a conceptualisation of political memory-making and proposes the concepts of 'hermeneutical dissidence' and 'hermeneutical seduction' to capture the critical interrogation of such mythologies. It highlight the obstacles facing any attempt at subverting them, particularly given the resilience of cognitive and emotional investments in particular schemas of perception and understanding in relation to the boundaries of the community and its history. Second, I transplant the descriptive concept of 'affair' formulated by pragmatic sociologists into debates about political memory, infusing it with a dose of normativity in order to shed critical light on various types of hermeneutical dissidence from dominant, emotionally-anchored, exclusionary imaginaries. Third, to render the theoretical proposal concrete, I introduce two 'memory affairs', both triggered by debates over the meaning and gender of political resistance. Key words: political memory, hermeneutical dissidence, hermeneutical seduction, affair, masculinist resistance, Louis Malle, Herta Müller