Divided societies, tormented pasts, and unrepentant perpetrators. Why are some countries more intent on vanquishing uncomfortable pasts than others? How do public and often unsightly attempts at memorialisation both fail the victims and valorize their oppressors?
This book offers fresh and original perspectives on dictatorship, fascism and victimization from the bloodiest decades in Europe’s, Australia’s and Central America’s colonial and modern history. Chapters include analyses of Francoist memorials in Spain, assessments of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the forgetting of frontier colonial violence in Tasmania, Romania’s treatment of its Roma populations in the midst of Holocaust memorialization in Bucharest’s urban development, and whether or not the Holocaust continues to serve as an instructional model or impossible aspiration for cross-cultural genocide memorialization strategies. In an era of ongoing political, ethnic and religious conflict, and unrepentant insurgent activity around the world, this collection reminds readers that genocidal actions, wherever and whenever they occurred, must be held to account by more than rhetoric and concrete memory.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Introduction Simone Gigliotti
1. Thinking comparatively about genocide memorialization Rebecca Jinks
2. Memorializing colonial genocide in Britain: the case of Tasmania Tom Lawson
3. Site of memory and dismemory: the Valley of the Fallen in Spain Andrea Hepworth
4. Holocaust commemoration in Romania: Roma and the contested politics of memory and memorialization Michelle Kelso and Daina S. Eglitis
5. Revisiting the El Mozote massacre: memory and politics in postwar El Salvador Rafael Alarcón Medina and Leigh Binford
Biography
Simone Gigliotti teaches in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of books, chapters and articles on the Holocaust and comparative genocide studies. Her current research projects focus on film activism and DPs in postwar Europe and Holocaust transmigrations in South-East Asia.
