Abstracts Archive

Coined in France by historian Pierre Nora in the early 1980's, the concept of realm of memory (lieux de mémoire) became one of the most influential references in the growing field of memory studies. Thought as a conceptual framework able to renew French historiography and built on inquiries specif...

Tragically, nearly 5000 Americans, a large majority of them African Americans, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. These murders took place across the United States and not just in the states that traditionally make up the American South (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi,...

The paper examines migrant heritage in Nigeria. Nigeria in the 19th century witnessed the inflow of Africans slaves from Latin America especially Brazil. The returnee Africans were sheltered in Lagos Island and they imported Brazilian cultural values, namely, religion (Catholicism), architecture, dr...

Aleksandar Tišma's Kapo (1987) begins with a strange realization of error that creates a ripple effect of misunderstanding through the rest of the novel. In Bosnia, a mislaid newspaper in an incomprehensible yet familiar language will change the course of the newly freed Vilko L...

Mordechai Anielewicz (1919-1943), the commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, is amongst the most famous Jewish individuals in the history of the Holocaust. His bravery, determination, and devotion to the cause of Jewish resistance against the Nazis undoubtedly make him a hero. Yet, we still do not...

The memory of the World War II has an active role in the contemporary Croatian society, and especially of the conflict between Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH) founded by Ustasha movement and anti-fascist fighters led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Often heavily politicised, th...

Poland, ReexaminedIn memory studies, the category of 'second-generation' is well-established within the historiography of WW2. It encompasses the exploration of transgenerational trauma, broken narratives, commemoration and testimony as part of the legacy carried by those born to holoca...

As part of my PhD research, I am examining memory narratives of women who experienced the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the cultural representations of such narratives. In this paper, I seek to examine memory narratives that are presented in a documentary series entitled Mad, Bad and Dangerous&nb...

When religion and politics merge, it would be difficult to fight for personal rights. Residential schools in Canada were founded to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society. The Canadian federal government and the churches were responsible for Indigenous children at the residential ...

This joint paper addresses the methodological and epistemological nuances of conducting memory-focused research in Central and Eastern Europe as a researcher originating either from the region being studied, or outside of it. The authors share their contrasting experiences of researching the memor...

In this paper, I situate music as a way of remembering the past and bringing it to bear on the present. Jacques Attali suggests that music reflects and makes audible the "signs that make up society" (Attali 2012), while Sarah Pink observes that hearing is "part of how we understand our past, how we ...

The 'cursed soldiers', or post-war anti-communist resistance fighters, have become key figures in Polish memory politics after the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawidliwość, PiS) came to power in 2015. The exhumation of the remains of 'cursed soldiers' from numerous unm...

As David Leonard argued in his 2004 article "Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace," video games are not just games- they are "sophisticated vehicles inhabiting and disseminating specific ideologies." This project explores how 2019's Call of Duty: Modern ...

Coloniality – a power structure that is linked to the exploitation and unequal distribution of wealth – has a pivotal role in the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed on the racialised, non-European bodies. Whenever the concept is deployed, it is often reduced to the Imperia...

The paper is a case study illuminating the role of events in pushing forward a revisionist historical narrative that aims at legitimizing contemporary Bulgarian national populism. The event in mind, Lukov March, which started as a marginal commemoration of a pro-fascist interwar leader, has become a...

The paper explores convergences, relationships, and interactions between materialised forms of contested historical narratives and people, at the controversial Liberty square in Budapest. The square has been a site for the country's various regimes to set in stone their own narratives of Hungarian h...

Numerous multigenerational memorial strategies have been deployed by the global Armenian community as a direct response to the destruction of the Armenian genocide and contemporary denials of its occurrence. These myriad memorial schemas include archival efforts, the advancement of socio-religious t...

Afro–Asian Writers' Conferences (AAWC) were a series of transnational gatherings of literary figures from Asia, Middle East, and Africa that took place over two decades to counteract the mounting tensions of the Cold War, the effects of imperialism, colonial oppression, and to establish cr...

Contested narratives and contested identities have recently become a staple expression in Ukraine. The notion of contestation is included in the academic discourses across disciplines to underline various cultural and historical narratives that can compete for the dominance in the process of constru...

In Western news media, it is commonplace to show images of dead people only when these belong to another category than 'us', e g in reports from war scenes and disasters in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. However, it seems that the past can, indeed, be regarded "a foreign country" (Lowenthal 2015...

This paper explores the politicization of memory and commemoration surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia through an examination of the 1991-1995 Croatian War of Independence ("Homeland War" in Croatia) and the 1992-1993 Croat-Bosniak War.  These two conflicts represent the zenith of C...

The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, among other oral post-Holocaust initiatives, seeks to give voice to and remember the experiences of Holocaust survivors. During the interviews, many of the survivors opt to read poems that they have written, citing the artistic potential of poetry in comm...

Many scholars have pointed out the striking cultural and historical similarities between Poland and Ireland from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, resulting from the shared lack of sovereignty and the need to preserve an "imagined community" and reconstruct a cultural memory through lit...