About the Book

This groundbreaking study investigates defining themes in the field of social memory studies as they bear on the politics of post-Cold-War, post-apartheid Southern Africa.

Examining the government’s attempts to revise postcolonial Mozambique’s traumatic past with a view to negotiating the present, Alice Dinerman stresses the path-dependence of memory practices while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance.

Central themes include:

* the interplay between past and present
* the dialectic between remembering and forgetting
* the dynamics between popular and official memory discourses
* the politics of acknowledgement.

Dinerman’s original analysis is essential reading for students of modern Africa; the sociology of memory; Third World politics and post-conflict societies.