Collective trauma is a cataclysmic event that shatters the basic fabric of society. Aside from the horrific loss of life, collective trauma is also a crisis of meaning. The current paper ...systematically delineates the process that begins with a collective trauma, transforms into a collective memory, and culminates in a system of meaning that allows groups to redefine who they are and where they are going. For victims, the memory of trauma may be adaptive for group survival, but also elevates existential threat, which prompts a search for meaning, and the construction of a
-generational collective self. For perpetrators, the memory of trauma poses a threat to collective identity that may be addressed by denying history, minimizing culpability for wrongdoing, transforming the memory of the event, closing the door on history, or accepting responsibility. The acknowledgment of responsibility often comes with disidentification from the group. The dissonance between historical crimes and the need to uphold a positive image of the group may be resolved, however, in another manner; it may prompt the creation of a new group narrative that acknowledges the crime and uses it as a backdrop to accentuate the current positive actions of the group. For both victims and perpetrators, deriving meaning from trauma is an ongoing process that is continuously negotiated within groups and between groups; it is responsible for debates over memory, but also holds the promise of providing a basis for intergroup understanding.
Nested Nationalism is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of ...such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of "their" republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, Krista A. Goff argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. Goff pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, Nested Nationalism explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.
The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity analyzes representations of the Algerian War in French-language comics published since 1982. Throughout this ...book, Howell investigates the ways in which marginalized memory communities resist, rewrite, and/or repair institutionalized history in popular culture. This is achieved by applying Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to postcolonial comics, by exploring comics as a multimodal medium uniquely positioned to engage with the complexity of postcolonial memory, history and subjectivity, and by problematizing current teaching practices in secondary education.
Displaced Memories Wylegala, Anna
Polish Sociological Review,
2019, 2019-08-15, 20200101, Letnik:
26, Številka:
212
eBook, Book Review
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The book is a comparative case study of collective memory in two small communities situated on two Central-European borderlands. Despite different pre-war histories, Ukrainian Zhovkva (before 1939 ...Polish Żółkiew) and Polish Krzyż (before 1945 German Kreuz) were to share a common fate of many European localities, destroyed and rebuilt in a completely new shape. As a result of war, and post-war ethnic cleansing and displacement, they lost almost all of their pre-war inhabitants and were repopulated by new people. Based on more than 150 oral history interviews, the book describes the process of reconstruction of social microcosm, involving the reader in a journey through the lives of real people entangled in the dramatic historical events of the 20th century.
For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization ...to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.
The years 2014-2022 witnessed dynamic changes in Ukraine's social, political and symbolic landscape. In its conflict against Ukraine, the Russian Federation employed methods of hybrid warfare that ...extended into the realms of communication, ideology, and historical discourse. In response, Ukraine sought to emphasize the distinctiveness and divergence of its symbolic sphere. Decommunization efforts included renaming streets and systematic removal of monuments associated with the communist era. The full-scale war that commenced after February 24, 2022, added deeper meaning to this process. The removal of monuments now extends beyond those commemorating figures and events from the communist period (decommunization), and extends to the tsarist and post-1991 Russian periods (deimperalization and derussification). The current article examines the dynamics of the monument removal process and the government's endeavors to organize and institutionalize spontaneous public action. Prior to February 2022, decommunization in Ukraine focused on the Ukrainian collective memory, but now the "war of monuments" is directed against Russia. The analysis draws upon Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory.
The paper is devoted to the study of the institutionalization of collective memory features in the Chechen Republic after the completion of a full-scale military operation in 2000. However, armed and ...terrorist attacks took place in the context of the formation of a new republican government that sought to change the memorial space of Chechnya. The regime abolition of the counter-terrorist operation (CTO) on the republic territory on April 16, 2009 led not only to the end of the acute phase of the guerrilla war. It simultaneously updated the issue of the need to overcome the conflict in the memory of the republic population, associated with active stages of hostilities in 1994–1996 and 1999–2000. The lack of historiographical sources highlighting changes in the collective memory of the Chechen Republic territory increase the study relevance. Three main features of the institutionalization of collective memory have been revealed in the region, and its hegemonization specifics has been identified.
In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on ...which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.
The book offers a new approach to the discussion on the issue of Chinese national identity, providing new insights in how identity is constructed and contested. These issues are of vital concern for ...the understanding of contemporary China and its national consciousness.
How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not ...have?
Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg – a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism – to explore these questions and their implications. Using an original in-depth research, using archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fascinating new material and perspectives, but also more general original theorizing of the relationship between heritage, identity and material culture.
The book looks at how Nuremberg has dealt with its Nazi past post-1945. It focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the city’s architectural heritage, in particular, the former Nazi party rally grounds, on which the Nuremburg rallies were staged. The book draws on original sources, such as city council debates and interviews, to chart a lively picture of debate, action and inaction in relation to this site and significant others, in Nuremberg and elsewhere. In doing so, Difficult Heritage seeks to highlight changes over time in the ways in which the Nazi past has been dealt with in Germany, and the underlying cultural assumptions, motivations and sources of friction involved.
Whilst referencing wider debates and giving examples of what was happening elsewhere in Germany and beyond, Difficult Heritage provides a rich in-depth account of this most fascinating of cases. It also engages in comparative reflection on developments underway elsewhere in order to contextualize what was happening in Nuremberg and to show similarities to and differences from the ways in which other ‘difficult heritages’ have been dealt with elsewhere. By doing so, the author offers an informed perspective on ways of dealing with difficult heritage, today and in the future, discussing innovative museological, educational and artistic practice.
"Sharon Macdonald deftly handles this complex terrain, offering a sophisticated theoretical analysis based on a well-grounded ethnographic study. In other words, this book is an exceptional piece of anthropology." - Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh , Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Current Anthropology , Volume 51, Number 3, June 2010
1. Negotiating Difficult Heritage: Introduction 2. Building Heritage: Words in Stone? 3. Demolition, Cleansing and Moving On 4. Preservation, Profanation and Image-Management 5. Accompanied Witnessing: Education, Art and Alibis 6. Cosmopolitan Memory in the City of Human Rights 7. Negotiating on the Ground(s): Guided Tours of Nazi Heritage 8. Visting Difficult Heritage 9. Unsettling Difficult Heritage
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