Abstracts Archive

The identity construction and heritage making of postcolonial cities are mainly about dealing with the difficult and sometimes conflicting memories related to their colonial pasts, which are largely determined by the interaction between the colonised and colonisers, both during the colonial period a...

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...

The aim of the paper is to identify main topics and patterns of description and analysis adopted in recent studies dedicated to the memory/-ies in Istria. The region in question is a peninsula situated in Slovenia and Croatia, previously being a part of Austria-Hungary, Italy, and finally Yugoslavia...

Material objects can function as carriers of social knowledge, specific values, or memories of past violence. With their unique feature of being haptic, they convey direct experiences and impressions of permanence. The active use and the physical presence of material objects can perpetuate feelings ...

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...

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...

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 question of how to write the history of the CEE Jewry after 1989/91 remains crucial for all the so-called 'bloodlands'. The problem of how – as a majority – to address the past and tell the story of the exterminated diaspora is part of that question. I intend to examine ...

The city council of Barcelona has in place since 2015 a program of memory actions to address both local memories as well as historical events including those related to pending past issues such as the remembrance of the victims of the Spanish civil war. Our contribution focuses on three case studie...

The paper discusses memories and representations of ownership changes in post-war Poland. The beginnings of the People's Poland were associated with communist ideas and a radical re-evaluation of the status of material goods. How one should understand and define various types of property needs to be...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacies of Cuba's 1959 Revolution and its promised utopia fell under renewed scrutiny. During its post-Cold War "Special Period in Times of Peace" in the 1990s, the island was thrust into a climate of scarcity that demanded its inhabitan...

This paper examines a unique period in the early twenty-first century when Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian community members in Australia cooperated to attain genocide recognition. Unlike the Armenian genocide, the lesser-known Greek and Assyrian experiences of violence in the late Ottoman Empire (191...

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...

Appropriate for consideration by the Museums and Memory Working Group."We are all born into stories that began long before we arrived,and we become self within their borders." Marie TondreauI grew up in the shadow of a story recounted often and to anyone by my mother. She told of her arranged marria...

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...

It is striking that the series of Black Lives Matter protests, triggered in early summer 2020 by the murder of George Floyd, quickly turned to targeting public forms of commemoration. Statues of problematic figures of esteem where roundly assailed across the US, in the UK and in Europe. The phenomen...

This paper results from research the memory landscape of Buru, a small island in the Moluccas used as a prison for 10.000 political prisoners following the mass killings of an estimated 500.000 to one million a million real or suspected Communists in the mid-1960s in Indonesia. Since then, the state...

Imperialism, with its emphasis on 'heroes', conquest and colonialism has been subject to intense criticism in recent years. This paper utilises Laura Basu's 'memory dispositif' construction to explore how the expression of the memory of an 'imperial hero' can change over time and space so that it ha...

Shame is a ubiquitous part of the discourse around sexual violence; one of the most pervasive images of sexual violence within patriarchal cultures is that women are ashamed of having been raped. This paradigm has also dominated research approaches to sexual violence and the Holocaust. Scholars have...

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 examines the role of brick and mortar museum spaces in shaping public memory of conflict through two case studies: Beit Beirut in Beirut, Lebanon, and the Partition Museum in Amritsar, India. Both museums commenced operations in 2017, and have since charted diverging trajectories as ins...

It seems to be a classical assumption that memory is not as much about the past than about our way to recall and use it in the present (Halbwachs, 1925). Numerous contributions study this relation from the present to the past. What some authors call an "ethics of never again" (Baer & Sznaider, 2016)...

In the last 20 years, more than 35 memorial museums of emigration have been inaugurated in Italy, including a «national» one. This growth has gone together with a marked increase in a variety of memorialization practices involving the topic. This new attention to past emigration, however, has resu...

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...

Different authors coincide in affirming that, in transitional contexts, the construction of collective memory should not be oriented to establishing a common, unified or, official account of past events but rather to composing a plural account in which different narratives could have a place. Howeve...

After independence in 1947 and the turn towards a secular India, Coronation Park became a monument graveyard. Colonial era statues across the city were dumped at the North Delhi park, where they remain to this day. Now, the park is actively used for recreation by residents of North Delhi while the m...

 For some decades, the Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France (CRAN), Representative Council of France's Black Associations, has championed the memory of, and acted the collective organic intellectual, for a movement of French people of African heritage to return to ...

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 presentation discusses the process of establishing a symbolic definition of contemporary Polish statehood in the post-1989 official memory. Based on the analysis of the memory struggle over the National Independence Day – one that occurred in the Polish parliament in the late 1990s – the pre...

This paper will explore convergences between memory studies, the posthumanities, and film studies in the context of films that reference Polish Catholic violence towards Jewish people in provincial spaces, which I refer to as an 'aftermath cinema'. Within a number of scholarly fields, there have rec...