The phenomenon of martyrdom is more than 2000 years old but, as contemporary events show, still very much alive. This book examines the canonisation, contestation and afterlives of martyrdom and connects these with cross-cultural acts and practices of remembrance. Martyrdom appeals to the imagination of many because it is a highly ambiguous spectacle with thrilling deadly consequences. Imagination is thus a vital catalyst for martyrdom, for martyrs become martyrs only because others remember and honour them as such. This memorialisation occurs through rituals and documents that incorporate and re-interpret traditions deriving from canonical texts. The canonisation of martyrdom generally occurs in one of two ways: First, through ritual commemoration by communities of inside readers, listeners, viewers and participants, who create and recycle texts, re-interpreting them until the martyrs ultimately receive a canonical status, or second, through commemoration as a means of contestation by competing communities who perceive these same people as traitors or terrorists. By adopting an interdisciplinary orientation and a cross-cultural approach, this book goes beyond both the insider admiration of martyrs and the partisan rejection of martyrdoms and concisely synthesises key interpretive questions and themes that broach the canonised, unstable and contested representations of martyrdom as well as their analytical connections, divergences and afterlives in the present.

This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve as an opening to a discussion of current social issues.

When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.