Contentious Memories

Memory is at the center of a diverse array of political conflicts, moral disputes, and power dynamics. This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study and explain profound conflicts rooted in the past. Addressing issues of racism, genocide, trauma, war, nationalism, colonial occupation, and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities. Featuring an international group of scholars, this book makes important contributions to social memory studies, but also shows how studying memory is vital to our understanding of enduring social problems that span the globe.

Who is remembering the German Democratic Republic, and how do they go about it? This volume of «contentious memories» brings together essays and critical responses in a look back at three aspects of GDR studies. It presents an opportunity for self-reflection on German Studies' past and ongoing engagement with the GDR and post-unification transformations. It seeks to evaluate old questions and raises new ones concerning the historical knowledge of GDR culture and our interpretations of it. Finally, it examines blindspots and self-deceptions of the past as well as those forming all too quickly in the present. Characterized by a self-awareness and historical understanding that is often neglected in the current tendency to write of the GDR, this collection marks a milestone in the (re)assessment of GDR studies in North America.

Contentious Lives examines the ways popular protests are experienced and remembered, individually and collectively, by those who participate in them. Javier Auyero focuses on the roles of two young women, Nana and Laura, in uprisings in Argentina (the two-day protest in the northwestern city of Santiago del Estero in 1993 and the six-day road blockade in the southern oil towns of Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul in 1996) and the roles of the protests in their lives. Laura was the spokesperson of the picketers in Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul; Nana was an activist in the 1993 protests. In addition to exploring the effects of these episodes on their lives, Auyero considers how each woman's experiences shaped what she said and did during the uprisings, and later, the ways she recalled the events. While the protests were responses to the consequences of political corruption and structural adjustment policies, they were also, as Nana’s and Laura’s stories reveal, quests for recognition, respect, and dignity. Auyero reconstructs Nana’s and Laura’s biographies through oral histories and diaries. Drawing on interviews with many other protesters, newspaper articles, judicial records, government reports, and video footage, he provides sociological and historical context for their stories. The women’s accounts reveal the frustrations of lives overwhelmed by gender domination, the deprivations brought about by hyper-unemployment and the withering of the welfare component of the state, and the achievements and costs of collective action. Balancing attention to large-scale political and economic processes with acknowledgment of the plurality of meanings emanating from personal experiences, Contentious Lives is an insightful, penetrating, and timely contribution to discussions of popular resistance and the combined effects of globalization, neoliberal economic policies, and political corruption in Argentina and elsewhere.

Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe explores the transmission of memories of 1970s protest movements in Italy, Germany, France and Great Britain. Focusing on Italy, it analyzes commemorative rituals, memory sites and other forms of 'memory work' performed by social groups in a city where a protester was killed by police in 1977.

Hoarding Memory looks at the ways the stories of the Algerian War (1954-62) have proliferated among the former French citizens of Algeria. By engaging hoarding as a model, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates the simultaneously productive and destructive nature of clinging to memory. These memories present massive amounts of material, akin to the stored objects in a hoarder's house. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography, art, and history that extensively use collecting, layering, and repetition to address painful war memories, Hubbell shows trauma can be hidden within its own representation. Hoarding Memory dedicates chapters to specific authors and artists who use this hoarding technique: Marie Cardinal, Leïla Sebbar, and Benjamin Stora in writing and Nicole Guiraud and Patrick Altes in art. All were born in Algeria during colonial French rule but in vastly different contexts; each suffered personal or inherited trauma from racism, physical or psychological abuse, terrorist or other violent acts of war, and exile in France. Zineb Sedira's artwork is also included as an example of traumatic memory inherited from her parents. Ultimately this book shows how traumatic experience can be conveyed in a seemingly open account that is compounded and compacted by the volume of words, images, and other memorial debris that testify to the pain.

Legacies and Memories in Movements addresses the long term effects of democratic transitions on social movements in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Donatella della Porta and her collaborators examine the concepts of historical legacy and memory, suggesting ways to apply them in analyses of the long-term effects of movements, movement participation, and movement strategies and tactics.

Few historical events have resonated as much in modern British culture as the Second World War. It has left a rich legacy in a range of media that continue to attract a wide audience: film, TV and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The enduring presence of the war in the public world is echoed in its ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with stories of the Second World War being recounted through the generations. This collection brings together recent historical work on the cultural memory of the war, examining its presence in family stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.

Instrumentalization of the wartime past for political gain is the subject of this study of eleven World War II commemorations. Using a comparative, conceptually original approach, Yoder identifies the actors who manipulate memory surrounding wartime anniversaries, such as the bombing of Dresden and ceremonies to honor fallen soldiers and fascist collaborators. The cases of memory contestation span three geographic regions, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia, recognizing that each developed distinctive interpretations of the war and different patterns of memory politics. This empirically rich study reveals the grievances that motivate memory challengers and their strategies for shaping the commemoration discourses and rituals. The memory challengers' toolkit includes varieties of emotional manipulation, subtle distortion, revisionism and full-scale denial. The study finds that, while there are differences in context and strategy across cases and regions, there are also areas of convergence. Moreover, a memory challenge in one country can spill over into others with serious consequences for foreign relations. While World War II Memory and Contested Commemorations in Europe and Russia deals with debates and narratives about events in the last century, its focus is on power, persuasion, and identity in the present.

From interpretations of the Holocaust to fascist thought and anti-fascists' responses, this book tackles topics which are rarely studied in conjunction. This is a unique collection of essays on a wide variety of subjects, which contributes to understanding the roots and consequences of mid-twentieth-century Europe's great catastrophe.

Beginning in the 1990s, the contentious “memory wars” divided psychologists into two schools of thought: that adults’ recovered memories of childhood abuse were generally true, or that they were generally not, calling theories, therapies, professional ethics, and survivor credibility into question. More recently, findings from cognitive psychology and neuroimaging as well as new theoretical constructs are bringing balance, if not reconciliation, to this polarizing debate. Based on presentations at the 2010 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, True and False Recovered Memories: Toward a Reconciliation of the Debate assembles an expert panel of scholars, professors, and clinicians to update and expand research and knowledge about the complex interaction of cognitive, emotional, and motivational factors involved in remembering—and forgetting—severe childhood trauma. Contrasting viewpoints, elaborations on existing ideas, challenges to accepted models, and intriguing experimental data shed light on such issues as the intricacies of identity construction in memory, post-trauma brain development, and the role of suggestive therapeutic techniques in creating false memories. Taken together, these papers add significant new dimensions to a rapidly evolving field. Featured in the coverage: The cognitive neuroscience of true and false memories. Toward a cognitive-neurobiological model of motivated forgetting. The search for repressed memory. A theoretical framework for understanding recovered memory experiences. Cognitive underpinnings of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Motivated forgetting and misremembering: perspectives from betrayal trauma theory. Clinical and cognitive psychologists on all sides of the debate will welcome True and False Recovered Memories as a trustworthy reference, an impartial guide to ongoing controversies, and a springboard for future inquiry.