Interpreting Contentious Memory

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.

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.

Tell me what you remember and I'll tell tell you who you are.” With this challenge, psychologist/psychotherapist Patrick Estrade introduces his groundbreaking method to analyze and interpret childhood memories. Such memories are widely recognized as keys that unlock our internal world, direct our actions, and determine the choices we make. But unlike dreams, memories are often neglected because we have no clearly established system for interpreting them. You Are What You Remember delineates Estrade's techniques for bringing our memories to consciousness and understanding how they inform our existence-all to the end of developing a fuller, more satisfying life and relationships.

The chorus of the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace” reads, “I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind but now I see.” Composed by a minister who formerly worked as a slave trader, the song expresses his experience of divine intervention that ultimately caused him to see the error of his ways. This theme of personal awakening is a feature of countless stories throughout history, where the “lost” and the “blind” are saved from darkness and despair by suddenly seeing the light. In Seeing the Light, Thomas DeGloma explores such accounts of personal awakening, in stories that range from the discovery of a religious truth to remembering a childhood trauma to embracing a new sexual orientation. He reveals a common social pattern: When people discover a life-changing truth, they typically ally with a new community. Individuals then use these autobiographical stories to shape their stances on highly controversial issues such as childhood abuse, war and patriotism, political ideology, human sexuality, and religion. Thus, while such stories are seemingly very personal, they also have a distinctly social nature. Tracing a wide variety of narratives through nearly three thousand years of history, Seeing the Light uncovers the common threads of such stories and reveals the crucial, little-recognized social logic of personal discovery.

"To date no full-length studies of Colm Toibin's work have been published in Ireland or overseas, and only a few short essays have appeared in specialist academic journals and general surveys of recent Irish literature. This collection of essays fills this noticeable gap in contemporary criricisrn, and provides an illuminating exploration of many of the themes and concerns which have engaged Toibin ever since the publication of his first book, Walking Along the Border (1987). The collection provides a series of reflections and includes essays by some of the most prominent figures currently working in Irish Studies. The book also includes a lengthy interview of Toibin conducted by his former Magill associate, Fintan O'Toole."--BOOK JACKET.

This title explores the distinctly social logic of awakening narratives - autobiographical stories people tell about having once been contained in a world of darkness and ignorance and subsequently awakening to an enlightened understanding of their experiences and situations. It analyses a wide variety of stories spanning roughly ten thousand years of history and pertaining to various philosophical, religious, political, scientific, psychological, and sexual subject matters.

Tracing the impact of the "memory wars" on science and culture, Relational Remembering offers a vigorous philosophical challenge to the contemporary skepticism about memory that is their legacy. Campbell's work provides a close conceptual analysis of the strategies used to challenge women's memories, particularly those meant to provoke a general social alarm about suggestibility. Sue Campbell argues that we cannot come to an adequate understanding of the nature and value of memory through a distorted view of rememberers. The harmful stereotypes of women's passivity and instability that have repopulated discussions of abuse have led many theorists to regard the social dimensions of remembering only negatively, as a threat or contaminant to memory integrity. Such models of memory cannot help us grasp the nature of harms linked to oppression, as these models imply that changed group understandings of the past are incompatible with the integrity of personal memory. Campbell uses the false memory debates to defend a feminist reconceptualization of personal memory as relational, social, and subject to politics. Memory is analyzed as a complex of cognitive abilities and social/narrative activities where one's success or failure as a rememberer is both affected by one's social location and has profound ramifications for one's cultural status as a moral agent.