Memory Studies as an academic field of cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debates, buttressed by the fragmentation of nation states and their traditional narratives, have greatly accelerated. Societies are today pregnant with newly unmediated memories, once sequestered in broad collective representations and their ideological stances. But, the ‘past in the present’ has returned with a vengeance in the early 21st Century, and with it an expansion of categories of cultural experience and meaning. This new series explores the social and cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally. It welcomes studies of migrant memory from failed states; micro-histories battling against collective memories; the mnemonic past of emotions; the mnemonic spatiality of sites of memory; and the reconstructive ethics of memory in the face of galloping informationalization, as this renders the ‘mnemonic’ more and more public and publically accessible.
Edited
By Linda Pillière, Karine Bigand
May 27, 2024
This book examines the ways in which ghosts haunt and shape cultural identities and memory, considering the manner in which the fluctuations of such identities sometimes imply the rethinking or rewriting of the past. Drawing on case studies in historical, political, literary and linguistic studies,...
By Miguel Cardina, Inês Nascimento Rodrigues
May 27, 2024
Remembering the Liberation Struggles in Cape Verde: A Mnemohistory takes as its reference from the anti-colonial struggles against the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and the ways this period has been publicly remembered. Drawing on original and detailed empirical ...
By Jan Borowicz
January 31, 2024
Perverse Memory and the Holocaust presents a new theoretical approach to the study of Polish memory bystanders of the Holocaust. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, it examines representations of the Holocaust in order to explore the perverse mechanisms of memory at work, in which surface a series of...
By Meghan Tinsley
September 25, 2023
Commemorating Muslims in the First World War Centenary engages with the explosion of public commemorations in Britain and France in the wake of the First World War centenary, alongside the hyper-visibility of British and French Muslims in political and popular discourse. Bringing these two ...
Edited
By Miguel Cardina
September 14, 2023
The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles: Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past presents a critical and comparative analysis on the memory of the colonial and liberation wars that led to a regime change in Portugal and to the independence of five new African countries: ...
By Thomas Van de Putte
May 31, 2023
This book presents an innovative theoretical and empirical approach to the present attributions of meaning to the past. Based on the author’s fieldwork in the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim – Auschwitz, in German – it observes the manner in which residents remember and narrate the past of ...
Edited
By Tomasz Stryjek, Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin
May 31, 2023
Bringing together the work of sociologists, historians, and political scientists, this book explores the increasing importance of the politics of memory in central and eastern European states since the end of communism, with a particular focus on relations between Ukraine and Poland. Through ...
Edited
By Anne Bazin, Emmanuelle Hébert, Valérie Rosoux, Eric Sangar
May 22, 2023
This volume suggests a model of collective memory that distinguishes between two conceptual logics of memory fragmentation: vertical fragmentation and horizontal fragmentation. It offers a series of case studies of conflict and post-conflict collective memory, shedding light on the ways various ...
Edited
By Samira Saramo, Ulla Savolainen
April 21, 2023
This book explores the ways in which memories of Stalin-era repression and displacement manifest across times and places through diverse forms of materialization. The chapters of the book explore the concrete mobilities of life stories, letters, memoirs, literature, objects, and bodies reflecting ...
By Jeremy Brooke Straughn
January 09, 2023
This book examines the paradox of collective identity in eastern Germany in the wake of German reunification. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, citizens of the former German Democratic Republic were confronted with a dilemma: Were they already Germans without qualification, like their ...
By Robin Maria DeLugan
May 30, 2022
This volume examines the ways in which the violent legacies of the twentieth century continue to affect the concept of the nation. Through a study of three societies’ commemoration of notorious episodes of 1930s state violence, the author considers the manner in which attention to the state ...
Edited
By Ajlina Karamehić-Muratović, Laura Kromják
April 29, 2022
An enquiry into the social science of remembrance and forgiveness in global episodes of genocide and mass violence during the post-Holocaust era, this volume explores the ways in which remembrance and forgiveness have changed over time and how they have been used in more recent cases of genocide ...