Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age
Publication Year: 2011
The essays contained within the volume--by scholars from a wide range of disciplines including American studies, art history, political science, psychology, and sociology--each engage a particular instance of the practices of memory as they are complicated by globalization.
Subjects include the place of nostalgia in post-Yugoslavia Serbian national memory, Russian identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union, political remembrance in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the role of Chilean mass media in forging national identity following the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, American debates over memorializing Japanese internment camps, and how the debate over the Iraq war is framed by memories of opposition to the Vietnam War.
Published by: The University of Alabama Press
Title Page, Copyright
List of Illustrations
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Introduction: Surveying Global Memoryscapes: The Shifting Terrain of Public Memory Studies
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There can be little doubt that the study of pub lic memory has emerged as a rich and productive field for interdisciplinary research. This seems especially true within rheto rical studies where attention to the symbolic practices of remembering in pub lic has spawned dozens of essays and several books. Over...
1. The Persistence of Memory
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On March 11, 1947, Sant Raja Singh of Thoa Khalsa village in Rawalpindi district picked up his sword, said a short prayer to Guru Nanak, and then, with one swift stroke, tried to bring it down on the neck of his young daughter, Maan Kaur. As the story is told, at first he didn’t succeed: the blow wasn’t...
2. Russia’s Postcommunist Past: The Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Reimagining of National Identity
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Following the call of Benedict Anderson to regard nations as “imagined communities,” scholars across the humanities have sought to investigate the formation of pub lic memory and national identity.1 Although Anderson’s argument addressed nation building in the nineteenth century, his observations...
3. Making Up for Lost Time: Yugo-Nostalgia and the Limits of Serbian Memory
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The spring and summer of 2005 marked the conjunction of several heavily symbolic anniversaries of events from Serbia’s recent history. The formal dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 after forty-seven years of existence capped a decade of nationalist foment and gave...
4. The Mayrau Mining Museum: Preserving the Past as a Liminal Space in a Liminal Time
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On a cold windy day that interrupted autumn and announced the inevitability of winter, I visited the Mayrau Mine, an open- air museum in the Czech Republic (figure 4.1). While I did not anticipate it at the time, the seasonal in- between-ness of the day foretold how I have come to reconcile my...
5. Tule Lake: A Memorial to the Forgotten
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Driving on rural Highway 139 in northern California is similar to driving on many other rural highways in the western United States. The land is empty except for some scrub fir and hills in the distance. Small towns interrupt the barren landscape briefly before dissolving into remote national...
6. Remembering Winnie: Public Memory and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa
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According to Priscilla Hayner’s definitive Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions, a truth commission’s “primary objective . . . is to establish an accurate record of a country’s past, clarify uncertain events, and lift the lid of silence and denial from a contentious and painful history.”1 By...
7. Chilean Historical Memory, Media, and Discourses of Human Rights
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Since 2002, I have been observing the circulation of discourses about the violent legacy of the Pinochet regime (1973–90) as they move among media institutions, human rights organizations, public protesters, the government, the courts, and individuals in contemporary Chile.1 I consider how historical...
8. Material Memories of the Ottoman Empire: Armenian and Greek Objects of Legacy
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In his discussion of global cities and urban imaginaries, Andreas Huyssen argues that vanishing national territories and identities and endless encounters with other cultures through migration, urbanization, and media images have created urban imaginaries, “cognitive and somatic images” of a group derived...
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Page Count: 203
Publication Year: 2011
Series Title: Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique