This Handbook is the first systematic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies.
From Charlottesville to Cape Town, from Santiago to Sydney, we have recently witnessed protesters demanding that symbols of racist or colonial pasts be dismantled and that we talk about histories that have long been silenced. But such events are only the most visible instances of grassroots efforts to influence the meaning of the past in the present. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling different disciplinary traditions, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence from across the globe, this Handbook establishes important questions and their theoretical implications arising from the social, political, and economic reality of memory activism.
Memory activism is multi-faceted, takes place in a variety of settings, and has diverse outcomes – but it is always crucial to understanding the constitution and transformation of our societies, past and present. This volume will serve as a guide and establish new analytic frameworks for scholars, students, policymakers, journalists, and activists alike.
Author(s): Yifat Gutman, Jenny Wüstenberg, Irit Dekel, Kaitlin M. Murphy, Benjamin Nienass, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Kerry Whigham
Series: The Routledge History Handbooks
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 598
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Changing attitudes to the past in western democracies
The history of memory activism
The past is not past
Bottom-up and top-down - memory activism is precarious
Open questions
Introduction: The Activist Turn in Memory Studies
Theoretical foundations
Memory
Activism
Addressing inequalities and exclusions in the study of memory activism
Reading this Handbook
Debates
Actors
Institutions
Spaces
Sites and Practices
Normative Dilemmas
Key Themes
Additional Resources
Part I: Debates
Introduction: Contentions over Memory Activism
1. Decomissioning Monuments, Mobilizing Materialities
Notes
Additional Resources
2. Populism and the Collective Past: Revisionism or Memory Activism?
Additional Resources
3. Unlocked Memory Activism: Has Social Distancing Changed Commemoration?
Memorializing lockdown: A bottom-up process
Towards a more participatory state-sponsored commemoration
How the Covid-19 pandemic boosts counter-memory and non-state alternative commemorations
Memory, power and inequalities: Covid-19 and neoliberalism
Notes
Additional Resources
4. Memory vs. History: The Politics of Temporality
Additional Resources
5. Regimes of Temporality
Changing regimes of historicity
Plural temporalities
Regimes of engaging with past and future
Conclusion
Additional Resources
6. Memory Activism in History
National activists
Anti-modernizers
Veterans
Concluding remarks
Additional Resources
7. Transnational Memory Activism and Performative Nationalism
Transnational memory activism and multicultural nationalism
The global-cum-national memories in East Asia
Still ambivalent
Additional Resources
8. Intersectionality and Memory Activism
Understanding intersectionality: Co-imbrications of recognition and erasure
Intersectionality and careful encounters with memory activism
An intersectional memory praxis: Moving beyond single-axis recognition
Intersectionality and memory activism: A misaligned approach?
Conclusion
Additional Resources
9. Activist Voices: What Is at Stake - A Short Manifesto for Activist Memory Studies
Remember Your Value
Sing
Cut Fences
Be Inhuman
Shake and Stir
Addional Resources
Part II: Actors and Agency
Introduction: Agent, Structure, and Subjectivity
10. Implicated Subjects
Notes
Additional Resources
11. Extreme Right
The rise of Generation Identity
Performing the Rituals of Mourning
Occupying the Theater of Victimhood
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
12. Communities
Bircza, or preserving the truth
Wielkie Oczy, or picking and choosing vernacular memory
Rymanów, or "just us"
Space(s) as actors
Note
Additional Resources
13. Coalitions
Additional Resources
14. Scholars
Situating reflexive borders
Current works and the future
Additional Resources
15. Conservatives
Reagan, the New Right, and the dilemma of race
The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday
King as opposition
Conclusion
Note
Additional Resources
16. Border-Crossers
Camp Armen occupation: Mobilizing memory
Civil disobedience and mobilizing memory
Notes
Additional Resources
17. Ghosts
The figure of the ghost
The ghost as memory activist
Conclusions
Additional Resources
18. Anti-Neoliberals
Becoming hegemony: Human rights codification
Generational change and narrative disruptions
Neoliberalism in Chile
Students' protests and the narrative turn
Performative level of anti-neoliberal memory activism
Anti-neoliberal activism: An emotional way of connecting with traces of the past
Additional Resources
19. Activist Voices: Post Heroes
Additional Resources
20. Activist Voices: Museum Entrepreneurs
The Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Center - Goals, scope, and themes
The JHGC as a catalyzer for change - Promoting active citizenship
Additional Resources
Part III: Institutions and Institutionalization
Introduction: Definitions and Contestations
21. Administration
Administrating 'Policy-Memory-Scapes'
Governing memory
Bureaucracy and memory activism
Administrative memory activism and governing people
Notes
Additional Resources
22. Law
Law and memory: A reciprocal relationship
Memory-shaping legislation
Memory laws
Truth-seeking initiatives
Mnemonic mobilization and historical justice
Constitutional memories
Concluding remarks
Notes
Additional Resouces
23. States
Defining states
States and diaspora
Returning to the language of publics
Conclusion
Additional Resources
24. Political Parties
Notes
Additional Resources
25. International Organizations
Memory activism related to colonial violence
Memory activism related to Cold War violence: The tentative role of international organizations
Memory activism related to women subjected to enforced military prostitution during the Asia Pacific War
Conclusions
Additional Resources
26. Redress Economies
The long road to redress for forced laborers in the Third Reich
Conclusions
Additional Resources
27. Activist Voices: Education - Interview with Tanja Vaitulevich
Additional Resources
28. Class
A moral economy sparks memory activism
Generation and milieu
Ethnicity, race, and gender
Additional Resources
29. Family
Additional Resources
30. Religion
Memory activists
Church, state, and society
Spaces of religious memory activism
Concluding remarks
Additional Resources
31. Slavery
Additional Resources
32. Empire
Silencing and speaking back to empire
Empire, memory activism, and the World War I centenary
Conclusion
Additional Resources
33. Colonialism
Defining Africa
The lingering effects of colonialism today
Poverty
Proving
Copying
Additional Resources
34. Museums
Notes
Additional Resources
Part IV: Spaces
Introduction: Constructing Spaces of Memory Activism
35. Migrant Spaces
Notes
Additional Resources
36. Urban Spaces
Cities and memory politics
Urban activism over postcolonial and postindustrial urban memory
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
37. Queer Spaces
Additional Resources
38. (De)Colonial Spaces
Activism, place, and the land
Activism: A place in the gallery
Reclaiming space and stories
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
39. Post-conflict and Mid-conflict Spaces
Notes
Additional Resources
40. Deindustrialized Spaces
Additional Resources
41. Sacred Spaces
The Liquiçá Church massacre commemorations: Secular and sacred space
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
42. Indigenous Spaces
Additional Resources
43. Mediated Spaces
Bedouin media memory activism
Mizrahi media memory activists in Israel
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
44. Clandestine Spaces
Researching genocide memory in clandestine spaces in the digital age
Digital media, postmemory, and forgetting
Additional Resources
45. Activist Voices: Singing Spaces - Interview with Rana Sulaiman
Additional Resources
46. Post-Soviet Spaces
Memorial
Themes: War, nation, repressions
Forms and methods
Memory activism and the state
Additional Resources
47. Latin America
Note
Additional Resources
48. North America
Reproductive memory activism
Transformative memory activism
Additional Resources
49. The Arctic
Additional Resource
50. Africa
Memory, activism, Africa
Maps
Objects
Museums
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
51. Middle East and North Africa
Memory Between Lieu and Milieu
Activating Anfal
AnArchic Archives
Pilgrimage and Memory Activism
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
52. Southeast Asia
The specter of modernity
The remains of the day
Amongst skulls
Counter-modernity
Note
Additional Resources
53. East Asia
"Sonyeosang" and memory activism
Sonyeosangs, the changes in representation and memory solidarity
The transnational politics of the memory of Japanese military sexual slavery
Notes
Additional Resources
54. Oceania
Memory of colonial rule: Reflections and resistance
Conclusion
Additional Resources
55. East-Central Europe
Main features and points of division
Main themes: The legacy of nazism and communism
Types of activists
Additional Resources
56. Post-German Spaces
Additional Resources
Part V: Sites and Practices
Introduction: Memory Activism as Embodied Practice
57. Memory Sites
Additional Resources
58. Mapping Memory
Seeing and Feeling
Performance and Visuality
Visuality, performance, and memory
Notes
Additional Resources
59. Activist Voices: Nomadic Monuments - Interview with Aida Šehović
Additional Resources
60. Museums and "Curatorial Activism"
Critical museology
Direct protest
Calling out and moving in
Artists' interventions: Institutional critique and beyond
A self-critical museum?
Notes
Additional Resources
61. Tours and Tourism
Building reconciliation through post-war/post-conflict tours in the absence of state efforts
Diaspora communities constructing counter-narratives
Hegemonic state narratives challenged by heritage tourism
Transborder memory activism and nationalism
Note
Additional Resources
62. Performance
The case of forced sterilizations in Peru
Somos 2,074 y muchas más (We are 2,074 and many more)
Additional Resources
63. Reenactment
Additional Resources
64. Activist Voices: The 1965 Events in Indonesia
What happened in 1965?
How the Indonesian government suppressed the memory of 1965?
How do Indonesian memory activists deal with the repression?
Who is involved in memory activism in Indonesia?
Closing notes
Additional Resources
65. #memoryactivism and Online Commemoration
Hashtag memory activism
#Sedamhiljada: From hashtag to banned commemorative event
#MyNakbaStory: Hashtag memory activism and online commemorations as an advocacy tool
Notes
Additional Resources
66. Digital Campaigns, Forums, and Archives
Global hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, #MeToo, #SayHerName - Digital activism, collective protest, and collective memory
The limitations
Digital memory activism campaign: The abortion referendum in Ireland
Archiving the digital
Notes
Additional Resources
67. Literary Memory Activism
Introduction: The Refugee Tales Project
Strategy 1: Collaborative storytelling and relational remembering
Strategy 2: Literary memory across media: Plurimedial engagement
Strategy 3: Authors as "(multi-)cultural capital"
Strategy 4: The literariness of the Refugee Tales: "Automatization kills"
Strategy 5: Dialogues with the deep literary past: Refugee Tales meets the Canterbury Tales
Discussion
Additional Resources
68. Anniversaries and National Holidays
A contested past in the colonial present: Activating Indigenous traditions and idioms
Local governments as memory activists
Limits of #changethedate
Conclusion
Additional Resources
69. Activist Voices: Art
Additional Resources
70. Exhumations
Notes
Additional Resources
Part VI: Normative Dilemmas
Introduction: Democratizing the Past
Notes
71. Memory and Illiberalism
The far right, populism, and memory
Germany, far-right memory activists, and sediments of time: The case of Dresden
Memories of change and solidarity vs memories of repression and chaos
From critical to sacralizing memory
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
72. Memory, Pluralism, and White Supremacy
Notes
Additional Resources
73. Memory Activism and the Global Production of Knowledge
Activist, practitioner, scholar: What's in a name?
Note
Additional Resources
74. Between Conflict and Consensus
Additional Resources
75. Between Ownership and Appropriation
Re-collecting the East German past
State appropriation of the "Military Comfort Women"
Conclusion
Notes
Additional Resources
76. Between Agency and Suspension
Mood and Memory films
Memories from home: An intervention across space
Additional Resources
77. Activist Voices: From Civil Revolt to Established Institutions
A brief overview of the commemoration of Nazi crimes and the memorial movement
Dilemmas of professionalization
Notes
Additional Resources
78. Activist Voices: Memory Activism with and against the State - Interview with Sergio Beltrán-García
Notes
Additional Resources
References
Index
