Suchergebnisse

The ongoing transformations of memory politics reflect the crumbling of the old world order. Opposing historical memories' conflicts are becoming normative ones. The article reviews the history of several such conflicts: the Nuremberg Consensus vs. the narrative of two totalitarianisms; postcolonial interpretations of the Holocaust vs. the politicization of victimhood and human-rights moralizing. Such debates indicate that attempts to globally impose and standardize "moral remembering" often have negative social and political consequences. Nevertheless, at present, historical memory is being made antagonistic, accompanied by its securitization, by the cleansing of national media of dangerous external influences, by stigmatization and cancelation of opponents (including domestic ones), and by binding memory politics to identity politics that increasingly rely on notions of one's own past victimization.

This article deals with the analysis of concepts of national identity and ethnicity (ethnic identity) as the "cluster of ideas" and/or concepts which have similar constitutive elements. This article intends to analyze the relationship between these concepts and the concept of (critical) memory culture. Finally, the author is attempting to discuss the concept of (critical) memory culture as the segment of cultural identity.

This volume examines the role of culture in developing social, cultural and political discourses of HIV/AIDS from a contemporary viewpoint. In doing so, the memory of HIV/AIDS is a powerful tool to examine representations of the past and connect them with future debates. This reassessment of HIV/AIDS explores the most appropriate way to come to terms with a past that involved a negative, stigmatised and marginalised representation. Therefore, remembering plays a key role in generating collective memory, which allows for the exchange of mnemonic content between individual minds, creates discourses on memory and commemoration, and disseminates versions of the past that may affect the representation of HIV/AIDS in the future. Indeed, rewriting about the past also means assessing our responsibility towards the present and the potential of transmission to future generations, especially in times of pandemics. Dr Alicia Castillo Villanueva is an Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies, Gender and Sexuality at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) in Dublin City University. She lectures and researches on the field of Feminist studies with a focus on the social and cultural representations of different forms of gender-based violence, conflict, and memory. She is the co-author of New Approaches to Translation, Conflict and Memory (Palgrave). Dr Angelos Bollas is Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Dublin City University. His research focuses on societal discrimination in relation to sexuality, cultural representations of masculinities, expressions of masculinities which challenge normative understandings of gender and sexuality, as well as pedagogical considerations around inclusion and diversity. He is the author of Contemporary Irish Masculinities and Sexualised Governmentalities (Springer)

This volume examines the role of culture in developing social, cultural and political discourses of HIV/AIDS from a contemporary viewpoint. In doing so, the memory of HIV/AIDS is a powerful tool to examine representations of the past and connect them with future debates. This reassessment of HIV/AIDS explores the most appropriate way to come to terms with a past that involved a negative, stigmatised and marginalised representation. Therefore, remembering plays a key role in generating collective memory, which allows for the exchange of mnemonic content between individual minds, creates discourses on memory and commemoration, and disseminates versions of the past that may affect the representation of HIV/AIDS in the future. Indeed, rewriting about the past also means assessing our responsibility towards the present and the potential of transmission to future generations, especially in times of pandemics

ABSTRACT: In the months since October 7, people around the world have looked on in horror as Germany has wielded the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel's war on Gaza. The German government's response to the conflict itself has not been all that different from that of the United States: both have increased their supply of weapons to Israel and supported Israel against South Africa in the International Court of Justice. But Germany has gone much further than the United States in persecuting protesters, artists, and intellectuals expressing sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinian people. It wields its responsibility for a barely distant genocide as a kind of moral authority.

The paper analyses the contemporary debate about memory culture and memory policy in Germany which are highly valid for Europe as well. They base on the political consensus that the memory of collective crimes committed in the past, especially of the Holocaust, and the honour to the victims, are a basic prerequisite for the protection of human rights. In the second part of the paper different critical views on the conception and practice of memory culture and memory policy in Germany are discussed.

After German unification, former officers of the GDR state security service united with GDR professors and cultural managers to establish the East German Committee of Associations (OKV). On the basis of encompassing oral history into this complex web of interest organizations and memory clubs, Bouma argues that these activists are driven by an epistemic nostalgia: a longing for the time when their political understanding of the world was seemingly unchallenged. Far from constituting a "second life of the Stasi", the main goal of OKV associations is to validate the personal biographies of their activists, against the now prevalent view that GDR was a "state of injustice". While OKV quickly adapted to the new legal procedures in post-socialist Germany, their staunch defence of the GDR heritage complicates their relation to the SED successor party Die Linke and other radical left parties and associations, even when they share practical goals.

Cultures of remembrance that are officially affirmed by national elites in the Western Balkan countries, that is in the former Yugoslavia, are a source of ongoing conflict. Various collective memories and mutually antagonized interpretations of the past, show that Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and others who lived together for centuries and decades within a single state, after all interpret and remember their common history in completely different ways. Their social narratives about the past and dominant cultures of memory are predominantly selective, one-sided, intolerant, exclusive. After a long time, they lived together members of different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds and their historically unfinished and unsuccessful attempt to form a common Yugoslav culture and unique Yugoslav identity, a difficult civil war occurred, ethno-nationalism escalated, and people who were very close and very similar to one another, tried to create as much difference and distance between themselves through violence. All national communities that participated in the wars of the 1990s, emphasized defending national culture as one of their main tasks. The warring parties sought to destroy everything that reminded them that different people, their neighbors and friends of a different religion were living there. Today, three decades after these conflicts, they are still prisoners of their attitude to history. The culture nevertheless brings them together and inspires them to understand themselves more and to cooperate better.

"This book explores questions surrounding material memory, culture, and technology and examines the active and constitutive role that technical artifacts play in our practices of memory. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book's argument includes themes unusual in memory studies, such as the production of technology and the concept of nature"--