The politics of cultural memory

Abstract

This edited collection explores the political dimensions of cultural memory work in its varied forms of representation, from public monuments to literary texts. Addressing the different ways that cultural texts represent the past in the present, the collection demonstrates that cultural memory is something actively made: the site of a struggle over meanings that can serve a range of political and cultural purposes.

The collection offers essays that discuss the politics of cultural memory both in theory and in practice, and features work by some of the leading scholars in the field including Susannah Radstone, Graham Dawson, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis. Contributors explore the ways in which memory comes to be articulated through particular cultural practices, from film and photography to literature and public monuments, all of which have their own codes and conventions, modes of address and audiences. As such this volume brings together scholars working in a range of disciplines (literary studies, history, art history, film studies) and in so doing seeks to establish a dialogue between different disciplines and methodologies and to explore cultural memory work in a range of different intellectual fields, cultural forms and political and historical contexts, for instance, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, Australia, Palestine, and the former Soviet Bloc.

The collection will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars working in the area of cultural memory studies, for whom it will represent an invaluable collection of current work in the field. It will also interest scholars working in the particular areas with which it engages, for instance, postcolonial studies, Holocaust studies, Eastern European Studies, Irish Studies, Art History and English Studies.