308 books match the query 'Memory' and 19 start with s

cover of Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present

Salt in the Sand

Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present

Lessie Jo Frazier

Duke University Press, 2007

Salt in the Sand is a compelling historical ethnography of the interplay between memory and state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state. The historian and anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier focuses on northern Chile, which figures prominently in the nation’s history as a site of military glory during the period of national conquest, of labor strikes and massacres in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, and of state detention and violence during World War II and the Cold War. It was also the site of a mass-grave excavation that galvanized the national human rights movement in 1990, during Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Frazier analyzes the creation of official and alternative memories of specific instances of state violence in northern Chile from 1890 to the present, tracing how the form and content of those memories changed over time. In so doing, she shows how memory works to create political subjectivities mobilized for specific political projects within what she argues is the always-ongoing process of nation-state formation. Frazier’s broad historical perspective on political culture challenges the conventional periodization of modern Chilean history, particularly the idea that the 1973 military coup marked a radical break with the past.

Analyzing multiple memories of state violence, Frazier innovatively shapes social and cultural theory to interpret a range of sources, including local and national government archives, personal papers, popular literature and music, interviews, architectural and ceremonial commemorations, and her ethnographic observations of civic associations, women's and environmental groups, and human rights organizations. A masterful integration of extensive empirical research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Salt in the Sand is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on human rights, democratization, state formation, and national trauma and reconciliation.

[more]
cover of Scarred Landscapes: Place, Trauma, and Memory in Caribbean Latinx Art

Scarred Landscapes

Place, Trauma, and Memory in Caribbean Latinx Art

Stephanie Lewthwaite

University of Arizona Press, 2025

Scarred Landscapes is a groundbreaking exploration of the rich and complex works of Caribbean Latinx artists. Scholar Stephanie Lewthwaite documents the work of ten influential artists of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent, based in New York City from the 1970s to the present. Through their diverse practices, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, these artists confront the legacies of colonial trauma and their own experiences of diasporic unbelonging and artworld marginality.

The book combines formal analysis with artist testimony, exhibition histories, and theoretical frameworks from trauma, memory, and archipelagic studies, to offer a multifaceted examination of Caribbean Latinx art. Lewthwaite explores how these artists practice “archipelagic memory,” a generative, decolonial, and coalitional form of memory work that envisions alternative modes of belonging in difference and solidarity with others. By connecting different people, pasts, and places, Caribbean Latinx artists expose the reverberations of trauma while imagining other worlds beyond it. 

This work puts Caribbean Latinx artists at the center of debates about the exclusions of dominant memory narratives and contemporary art worlds, highlighting their contributions to a wider decolonial project of remembrance. By revealing the interconnectedness of traumatic histories and the potential for art to foster empathy and justice, Lewthwaite’s work underscores the importance of relational and decolonial thought for imagining a better society.
 
[more]
cover of Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts

Selective Remembrances

Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts

Edited by Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda

University of Chicago Press, 2008

When political geography changes, how do reorganized or newly formed states justify their rule and create a sense of shared history for their people? Often, the essays in Selective Remembrances reveal, they turn to archaeology, employing the field and its findings to develop nationalistic feelings and forge legitimate distinctive national identities.

Examining such relatively new or reconfigured nation-states as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, India, and Thailand, Selective Remembrances shows how states invoke the remote past to extol the glories of specific peoples or prove claims to ancestral homelands. Religion has long played a key role in such efforts, and the contributors take care to demonstrate the tendency of many people, including archaeologists themselves, to view the world through a religious lens—which can be exploited by new regimes to suppress objective study of the past and justify contemporary political actions.

The wide geographic and intellectual range of the essays in Selective Remembrances will make it a seminal text for archaeologists and historians.
[more]
cover of Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory

Selenidad

Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory

Deborah Paredez

Duke University Press, 2009

An outpouring of memorial tributes and public expressions of grief followed the death of the Tejana recording artist Selena Quintanilla Pérez in 1995. The Latina superstar was remembered and mourned in documentaries, magazines, websites, monuments, biographies, murals, look-alike contests, musicals, drag shows, and more. Deborah Paredez explores the significance and broader meanings of this posthumous celebration of Selena, which she labels “Selenidad.” She considers the performer’s career and emergence as an icon within the political and cultural transformations in the United States during the 1990s, a decade that witnessed a “Latin explosion” in culture and commerce alongside a resurgence of anti-immigrant discourse and policy.

Paredez argues that Selena’s death galvanized Latina/o efforts to publicly mourn collective tragedies (such as the murders of young women along the U.S.-Mexico border) and to envision a brighter future. At the same time, reactions to the star’s death catalyzed political jockeying for the Latino vote and corporate attempts to corner the Latino market. Foregrounding the role of performance in the politics of remembering, Paredez unravels the cultural, political, and economic dynamics at work in specific commemorations of Selena. She analyzes Selena’s final concert, the controversy surrounding the memorial erected in the star’s hometown of Corpus Christi, and the political climate that served as the backdrop to the touring musicals Selena Forever and Selena: A Musical Celebration of Life. Paredez considers what “becoming” Selena meant to the young Latinas who auditioned for the biopic Selena, released in 1997, and she surveys a range of Latina/o queer engagements with Selena, including Latina lesbian readings of the star’s death scene and queer Selena drag. Selenidad is a provocative exploration of how commemorations of Selena reflected and changed Latinidad.

[more]
cover of Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life

Sense of History

The Place of the Past in American Life

David Glassberg

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001

As Americans enter the new century, their interest in the past has never been greater. In record numbers they visit museums and historic sites, attend commemorative ceremonies and festivals, watch historically based films, and reconstruct family genealogies. The question is, Why? What are Americans looking for when they engage with the past? And how is it different from what scholars call “history?” 

In this book, David Glassberg surveys the shifting boundaries between the personal, public, and professional uses of the past and explores their place in the broader cultural landscape. Each chapter investigates a specific encounter between Americans and their history: the building of a pacifist war memorial in a rural Massachusetts town; the politics behind the creation of a new historical festival in San Francisco; the letters Ken Burns received in response to his film series on the Civil War; the differing perceptions among black and white residents as to what makes an urban neighborhood historic; and the efforts to identify certain places in California as worthy of commemoration. Along the way, Glassberg reflects not only on how Americans understand and use the past, but on the role of professional historians in that enterprise. Combining the latest research on American memory with insights gained from Glassberg's more than twenty years of personal experience in a variety of public history projects, Sense of History offers stimulating reading for all who care about the future of history in America.

[more]
cover of Shaping Losses: CULTURAL MEMORY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Shaping Losses

CULTURAL MEMORY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Edited by Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkovitz

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Shaping Losses explores how traumatic loss affects identity and how those who are shaped by loss give shape, in turn, to the empty place where something--relationships, family, culture--was and is no longer. Taking the example of the decimation of European Jewry during the Nazi era, Shaping Losses confronts the problem of transforming trauma into cultural memory.
 
This eloquent volume examines how memoirs, films, photographs, art, and literature, as well as family conversations and personal remembrances, embody the impulse to preserve what is destroyed. The contributors -- all distinguished women scholars, most of them survivors or daughters of survivors--examine classic memorializations such as Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah and Roman Vishniac's photographs of prewar Jews as well as several less-well-known works. They also address ways in which children of survivors of the Holocaust--and of other catastrophic traumas--struggle with inherited or vicarious memory, striving to come to terms with losses that centrally define them although they experience them only indirectly.
 
Shaping Losses considers the limitations of Holocaust representations and testimonies that capture shards of the experience but are necessarily selective and reductive. Contributors discuss artistic efforts to "preserve the rawness" of memory, to resist redemptive closure in Holocaust narratives and public memorials, and to prevent the Holocaust from being sealed in "the cold storage of history." The authors probe the nature of memory and of trauma, studying the use of language within and outside a traumatic context such as Auschwitz and pinpointing the qualities that make traumatic memory ineffable, untransmittable, and perhaps unreliable. Within the "haunted terrain of traumatized memory" that all Holocaust testimonies inhabit, the impulse to give form to emptiness--to shape loss--emerges as a necessary betrayal, a vital effort to bridge the gap between history and memory.
 
 
[more]
cover of Shifting Sands: Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China's Contemporary Borderlands

Shifting Sands

Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China's Contemporary Borderlands

Xiaoxuan Lu

University of Texas Press, 2023

How China’s borderlands transformed politically and culturally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

China’s land borders, shared with fourteen other nations, are the world’s longest. Like all borders, they are not just lines on a map but also spaces whose histories and futures are defined by their frontier status. An ambitious appraisal of China’s borderlands, Shifting Sands addresses the full scope and importance of these regions, illustrating their transformation from imperial backwaters to hotbeds of resource exploitation and human development in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Xiaoxuan Lu brings to bear an original combination of archival research, fieldwork, cartography, and landscape analysis, broadening our understanding of the political economy and cultural changes in China’s borderlands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While conventional wisdom looks to the era of Deng Xiaoping for China’s “opening,” Lu shows the integration of China’s borderlands into national and international networks from Sun Yat-sen onward. Yet, while the state has left a firm imprint on the borderlands, they were hardly created by China alone. As the Chinese case demonstrates, all borderlands are transnational, their physical and socioeconomic landscapes shaped by multidirectional flows of materials, ideas, and people.

[more]
cover of Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past

Shuva

The Future of the Jewish Past

Yehuda Kurtzer

Brandeis University Press, 2012

Modern Jews tend to relate to the past through “history,” which relies on empirical demonstration and rational thought, rather than through “memory,” which relies on the non-rational architectures of mythology. By now “history” has surpassed “memory” as a means of relating to the past—a development that falls short in building identity and creates disconnection between Jews and their collective history. Kurtzer seeks to mend this breach. Drawing on key classical texts, he shows that “history” and “memory” are not exclusive and that the perceived dissonance between them can be healed by a selective reclamation of the past and a translation of that past into purposefulness.
[more]
cover of Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery

Silent City on a Hill

Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery

Blanche Linden-Ward

The Ohio State University Press, 1900

[more]
cover of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Sites of Slavery

Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Salamishah Tillet

Duke University Press, 2012

More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"—contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery—such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post–civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.
[more]
cover of Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting

Slips of the Mind

Poetry as Forgetting

Jennifer Soong

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions?   

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.
[more]
cover of Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past

Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse

Uses and Meanings of the Past

Bernd Steinbock

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Prompted by the abundant historical allusions in Athenian political and diplomatic discourse, Bernd Steinbock analyzes the uses and meanings of the past in fourth-century Athens, using Thebes’ role in Athenian memory as a case study. This examination is based upon the premise that Athenian social memory, that is, the shared and often idealized and distorted image of the past, should not be viewed as an unreliable counterpart of history but as an invaluable key to the Athenians’ mentality. Against the tendency to view the orators’ references to the past as empty rhetorical phrases or propagandistic cover-ups for Realpolitik, it argues that the past constituted important political capital in its own right. Drawing upon theories of social memory, it contextualizes the orators’ historical allusions within the complex net of remembrances and beliefs held by the audience and thus tries to gauge their ideological and emotive power. 
 
Integrating literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence with recent scholarship on memory, identity, rhetoric, and international relations, Social Memory in Athenian Public Discourse: Uses and Meanings of the Past enhances our understanding of both the function of memory in Athenian public discourse and the history of Athenian-Theban relations. It should be of interest not only to students of Greek history and oratory but to everybody interested in memory studies, Athenian democracy, and political decision making.
[more]
cover of Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism

Southern Heritage on Display

Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism

Edited by Celeste Ray

University of Alabama Press, 2002

How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American South

W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves.
 
The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically “Solid South.” Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich “creole” of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism.
This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.
 
[more]
cover of Southern Stages: Space and Memory in US Performance

Southern Stages

Space and Memory in US Performance

Hopkins, Chandra

University of Iowa Press, 2025

Each day, countless southerners pass symbols and monuments dedicated to white supremacy and the “Old South”: statues, cemeteries, plantations, downtown squares, and even regional theatre stages. Some may only glance at them, ignorant to their history, while others recall the physical and psychological trauma embedded by generations of enslavement.

Through the eyes of actors and everyday people, Southern Stages offers an engaging new model for interrogating the performance of southernness, as well as how memory and imagination intersect in spaces that have shaped hundreds of years of American history. Chandra Owenby Hopkins employs cultural memory and lived realities of Black and white communities to examine the earliest and most enduring southern stages: the playhouse and the public square.
[more]
cover of Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging

Sown in Earth

Essays of Memory and Belonging

Fred Arroyo

University of Arizona Press, 2020

Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Arroyo’s memories of his father. Arroyo recollects his father’s anger and alcohol abuse as a reflection of his place in society, in which his dreams and disappointments are patterned by work and poverty, loss and displacement, memory and belonging.

In Sown in Earth, Arroyo often roots his thoughts and feelings in place, expressing a deep connection to the small homes he inhabited in his childhood, his warm and hazy memories of his grandmother’s kitchen in Puerto Rico, the rivers and creeks he fished, and the small cafés in Madrid that inspired writing and reflection in his adult years. Swirling in romantic moments and a refined love for literature, Arroyo creates a sense of belonging and appreciation for his life despite setbacks and complex anxieties along the way.

By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer. Sown in Earth is a shocking yet warm collage of memories that serves as more than a memoir or an autobiography. Rather, Arroyo recounts his youth through lyrical prose to humanize and immortalize the hushed lives of men like his father, honoring their struggle and claiming their impact on the writers and artists they raised.
 
[more]
cover of State Repression and the Labors of Memory

State Repression and the Labors of Memory

Elizabeth Jelin

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A timely exploration of the nature of memory and its political uses

Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for “the disappeared” in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance.

Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelin’s work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory.
[more]
cover of States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection

States of Memory

Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection

Jeffrey K. Olick, ed.

Duke University Press, 2003

States of Memory illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative perspective. The essays collected here emphasize that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory—its place in social relations and the forms it takes—varies over time. Integrating theories of memory and nationalism with case studies, these essays stake a vital middle ground between particular and universal approaches to social memory studies.

The contributors—including historians and social scientists—describe societies’ struggles to produce and then use ideas of what a “normal” past should look like. They examine claims about the genuineness of revolution (in fascist Italy and communist Russia), of inclusiveness (in the United States and Australia), of innocence (in Germany), and of inevitability (in Israel). Essayists explore the reputation of Confucius among Maoist leaders during China’s Cultural Revolution; commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States Congress; the “end” of the postwar era in Japan; and how national calendars—in signifying what to remember, celebrate, and mourn—structure national identification. Above all, these essays reveal that memory is never unitary, no matter how hard various powers strive to make it so.

States of Memory will appeal to those scholars—in sociology, history, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and art history-who are interested in collective memory, commemoration, nationalism, and state formation.

Contributors. Paloma Aguilar, Frederick C. Corney, Carol Gluck, Matt K. Matsuda, Jeffrey K. Olick, Francesca Polletta, Uri Ram, Barry Schwartz, Lyn Spillman, Charles Tilly, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Eviatar Zerubavel, Tong Zhang

[more]
cover of Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative

Stories of Our Lives

Memory, History, Narrative

Frank de Caro

Utah State University Press, 2013

In Stories of Our Lives Frank de Caro demonstrates the value of personal narratives in enlightening our lives and our world. We all live with legends, family sagas, and anecdotes that shape our selves and give meaning to our recollections. Featuring an array of colorful stories from de Caro’s personal life and years of field research as a folklorist, the book is part memoir and part exploration of how the stories we tell, listen to, and learn play an integral role in shaping our sense of self. 
 
De Caro’s narrative includes stories within the story: among them a near-mythic capture of his golden-haired grandmother by Plains Indians, a quintessential Italian rags-to-riches grandfather, and his own experiences growing up in culturally rich 1950s New York City, living in India amid the fading glories of a former princely state, conducting field research on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico, and coming home to a battered New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
 
Stories of Our Lives shows that our lives are interesting, and that the stories we tell—however particular to our own circumstances or trivial they may seem to others—reveal something about ourselves, our societies, our cultures, and our larger human existence.
[more]
cover of Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia

Systemic Silencing

Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia

Katharine E. McGregor

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. For decades, transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II–era system, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” with major movements in South Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and elsewhere. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system’s history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself. Katharine E. McGregor untangles the history of the system during the war and unpacks the context surrounding the slow and faltering efforts to address it. With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, she uncovers a crucial piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye. Critically, she establishes that the transnational part of activism surrounding victims of the system is both necessary and fraught, a complexity of geopolitics and international relationships on one hand and a question of personal networks, linguistic differences, and cultural challenges on the other.
[more]