1st Edition
Family Memory Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective
In Family Memory: Practices, Transmissions and Uses in a Global Perspective, researchers from five different continents explore the significance of family memory as an analytical tool and a research concept.
Family memory is the most important memory community. This volume illustrates the range and power of family memories, often neglected by memory studies dealing with larger mnemonic entities. This book highlights the potential of family memory research for understanding societies’past and present and the need for a more comprehensive and systematic use of family memories. The contributors explain how family memories can be a valuable resource across a range of settings pertaining to individual and collective identities, national memories, intergenerational transmission processes and migration, transnational and diasporic studies. This volume presents the past, present and future of family memory as a prospective field of memory studies and the role of family memory in intergenerational transmission of social and political values. Family memory of violent events and genocide is also looked at, with discussions of the Armenian Genocide, Russian Revolution and Rwandan Genocide.
This book will be an important read for cultural and oral historians; family historians; public historians; researchers in narrative studies, psychology, politics and international studies.
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Foreword by Alessandro Portelli
1 Family Memory as a Prospective Field of Memory Studies: Past, Present, Future
Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková
PART I
Private and Public Practices of Building Family Memory
2 Family Voices and the Practice of Memory: Five Generations of Women in Rome
Barbara Ronchetti
3 The Buarque de Holanda: Family Memory and Political Engagement in the Public Space in Brazil
Giselle Martins Venancio
4 The Ntsimane Family Traditions and Rituals in Pre- and Post-1994 South Africa
Radikobo Ntsimane
PART II
Intergenerational Transmission of Social and Political Values
5 Czech Family Stories of Communism: Family Memories at the Intersection of Family Values, Family Relations and National Memory
Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková
6 Family Memories for Communism in Bulgaria: Destiny and Resource
Ilia Iliev
7 Family Memories of Second-Generation Republican Women Exiled to Mexico
Pilar Domínguez Prats
PART III
Family Memory of Violent Events and Genocide
8 "Facts, not Emotions": Changing Generational Needs and New Meanings of the Memory of the Armenian Genocide
Öndercan Muti
9 Family Memories and the Development of the Genocide Ideology in Rwanda
Philippe Denis
10 Exile and Soviet Memoirs: Family Mansions in Aristocratic Family Memories after the Russian Revolution
Zbyněk Vydra
PART IV
Family Memory, Family Identity and Digital Media
11 Family Memories, Family Histories and the Identities of Settler Family Descendants in New Zealand
Anna Green
12 What do Family Memories Mean?: Navigating the Unfinished Archives after the Partition of India
Indira Chowdhury
13 "Got my Finn Tattoo!": Sharing Family Memories on Facebook
Anne Heimo
Biography
Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková is an Associate Professor of History at Palacký University Olomouc. She is the author of numerous publications on memory, oral history, gender and modern historiography.
Collective memory starts in the family. This rich and exciting collection provides deep insights into the dynamics of family memory across the globe. It is an indispensable companion for all those working in the field of transnational memory studies.
Astrid Erll, Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
This timely collection offers a rich history and a compelling argument for the study of family memory. It opens new and exciting paths for memory studies and beyond, and will become an instant touchstone for scholars across disciplines. The global take of this truly international volume is much-needed in a field that has often been national or euro-centric in focus.
Ashley Barnwell, Senior Research Fellow in Sociology, University of Melbourne, Australia
Family is the most important memory community’, writes the editor of this wide-ranging collection. The essays in this volume exemplify, complicate, and challenge this claim. What kind of community is a family? What kind of inheritance is memory? How is it fashioned, passed on, re-remembered? How do collective memories mesh with or contradict other social and political narratives? And how does relating memories differ from storytelling? These are some of the questions which an impressive group of international scholars address in their rigorous and sensitive analyses of the concept of family memory and its uses in a research context. This is a fascinating collection which takes us into the very heart of the different ways in which we make and re-make our selves across time. It gave me much food for thought and inspiration for future projects.
Alison Light, Senior Research Fellow in English and History, Pembroke College, Oxford, UK
