Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts

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In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial... Read more

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent. This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory.The chapters in this volume offer a complex awareness of the workings of memory, and the ways in which different or changing histories may be explained. They explore the relation between individual and social memory, between real and imaginary, event and fantasy, history and myth. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memory's own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book. Topics covered range from the Basque country to Cambodia, from Hungary to South Africa, from the Finnish Civil War to the cult Jim Jarmusch movie Dead Man, from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Australia. Part I, "Transforming Memory" is concerned primarily with the social and personal transmission of memory across time and generations. Part II, "Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History," brings the after-effects of catastrophe to the fore. Part III, "Patterning the National Past," the relation between nation and memory is the central issue. Part IV, "And Then Silence," reflects on the complex and multiple meaning of silence and oblivion, wherein amnesia is often used as a figure for the denial of shameful pasts. Read less

List of illustrations, Notes on contributors, Preface and acknowledgements, Introduction: Contested pasts, Part I: Transforming memory, 1 The massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine: history, myth, ritual and symbol, 2. Memories and histories, public and private: after the Finnish Civil War, 3. War, history, and the education of (Canadian) memory, 4. 'We would never have come without you': generations of nostalgia, Part II: Remembering suffering: trauma and history, 5. The traumatic paradox: autobiographical documentary and the psychology of memory, 6. Memories of violence in interviews with Basque nationalist women, 7. Sale of the century? Memory and historical consciousness in Australia, 8. 'Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid of me': trauma, history and the therapeutic imagination in the new South Africa, Part III: Patterning the national past, 9. Nationalism and memory at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 10. The death of socialism and the afterlife of its monuments: making and marketing the past i n Budapest's Statue Park Museum, 11. From contested to consensual memory: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, 12. 'Dead Man': film, colonialism and memory, Part IV. And then silence..., 13. Memories between silence and oblivion, Index

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Susannah Radstone

Memory, History, Nation Contested Pasts

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