Performativity And The Representation Of Memory

The age of digital culture has not only brought significant transformations in how we perceive memory, history, and heritage, but it has also raised pressing questions about authenticity and ownership of memory. The role of digital technologies in shaping collective identities is a topic of intense scrutiny. Moreover, contemporary societies grapple with complex issues in the politics of memory, especially with the proliferation of diverse narratives and the manipulation of public spaces. The book's content is therefore highly relevant, offering critical reflection and scholarly analysis to these societal challenges. Performativity and the Representation of Memory: Resignification, Appropriation, and Embodiment offers a comprehensive exploration of these issues, examining how contemporary practices of re-enactment intersect with digital contexts to shape our understanding of memory and heritage. The book analyzes the processes of memory creation and transmission in digital environments, providing a nuanced understanding of how memory is constructed, shared, and contested in the digital age. It also explores the role of arts-based research and participatory practices in documenting and preserving collective memories, offering insights into new forms of memory sharing and identity formation.

Karin Tilmans is an historian, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, Florence. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Jay M. Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale. --

Eber and Neal address some of the theoretical issues connected with symbolic constructions of reality through human memory and its subsequent representation. Linkages between what we remember and how we represent it give humans their distinctive characteristics. We construct our reality from how we perceive the events in our lives and, from that reality, we create a symbol system to describe our world. It is through such symbolic constructions that we are provided with a usable backdrop for shaping our memories and organizing them into meaningful lines of action. These case studies present a new and creative synthesis of the multiple meanings of memory and representation within the context of contemporary perceptions of truth.

This book charts the performative dimension of the Holocaust memorialization culture through a selection of representative artistic, educational, and memorial projects. Performative practice refers to the participatory and performance-like aspects of the Holocaust memorial culture, the transformative potential of such practice, and its impact upon visitors. At its core, performative practice seeks to transform individuals from passive spectators into socially and morally responsible agents. This edited volume explores how performative practices came into being, what impact they exert upon audiences, and how researchers can conceptualise and understand their relevance. In doing so, the contributors to this volume innovatively draw upon existing philosophical considerations of performativity, understandings of performance in relation to performativity, and upon critical insights emerging from visual and participatory arts. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

This volume pursues a new line of research in cultural memory studies by understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture. Here authors combine a methodological focus on memory as performance with a theoretical focus on art and popular culture as practices of remembrance. The essays in the book thus analyze what is at stake in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis, that make up cultural memory.

This book explores belonging as a performative achievement. The contributors investigate how identities are embodied and effected, and how lines of allegiance and fracture are produced and reproduced. Questions of ′difference′ are tackled from a perspective that attends to the complexities of history and politics. Drawing on sociology, philosophy and anthropology, this collection brings together leading commentators, including Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a range of new scholars. It examines questions of visuality, political affiliation, ethics, mimesis, spatiality, passing, and diversity in modes of embodied difference. The volume advances conceptual and theoretical issues through testing various propositions around specific examples or questions. What emerges is a rich engagement with the complexity of contemporary forms of belonging.

From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wresteled with what "performance" is all about. At the same moment, "performativity"--a new concept in language theory--has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies. This volume grapples with the nature of these two key terms whose traces can be found everywhere: in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, and in the sentences we speak.

The subject of cultural memory, and of the body's role in its creation and dissemination, is central to current academic debate, particularly in relation to performance. The ten essays brought together in this book address this subject from a unique diversity of perspectives, focusing on a variety of topics.