Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society(Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

For those who study memory there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, that memory itself and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized can potentially hinder efforts to move forward. However, there are many memory scholars and practitioners who firmly believe that the study of memory is ultimately about and for the present and future. This view of memory as looking to the past as a way to shape the present and future is the basis for the increasingly relevant and pressing concerns about the relationship of memory to conflict and democratic politics: human rights and transitional justice, post-colonial memory, revenge and violence, testimony, imposture and forgery, social movements and utopian ideas, and the role of historical knowledge and testimony. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to examine the relationship between past and present, and especially past and future.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Note on the Contributors Introduction: Memory and the Future: Why a Change of Focus is Necessary; Y.Gutman, A.Sodaro & A.D.Brown PART 1: MEMORY THROUGH SPACE AND TIME The Internationalization of Memory - How Meanings and Models Travel the World Changing Temporalities and the Internationalization of Memory Cultures; D.Levy Misremembering the Holocaust; R.Poole Memory and History from Past to Future: A Dialogue with Dori Laub on Trauma and Testimony; A Conversation Between Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow: How the Current Paradigm of Memorialization Relies on Assumptions about the Relationship between Past and Future; L.Bickford Part 2: FORMS AND GENRES Narrative, Oral History and Visual Memory - How the Form Serves the Aim The Role of Conversations in Shaping Individual and Collective Memory, Attitudes and Behavior; J.Koppel & W.Hirst Re-Presenting Victim and Perpetrator: The Role of Photographs in US Service Members' Testimony Against War; K.Spring How Shall We Remember Srebrenica? Will the Language of Law Structure our Memory?; S.Leydesdorff PART 3: TEMPORALITY AND THE POLITICAL Temporality and the Political I: Utopia Refugees from Utopia: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of the Feminist Memoir Project; A.Snitow Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud: Utopia and Memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; L.Freeman Temporality and the Political II: Revenge Authorizing Death: Memory Politics and States of Exception in Contemporary El Salvador; G.Santamaria-Balmaceda Enacting Past and Future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan; D.P.Janes Afterword: J.Olick Index

About the Author :
YIFAT GUTMAN at the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA. She has published articles in the journals Memory Studies and International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, and has co-written an essay in The Handbook of Cultural Sociology. ADAM D. BROWN is Post Doctoral Fellow at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, USA. His research is in the cognitive and neural properties of psychiatric disorders, and in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He co-edited Interdisciplinary Analyses of Terrorism and Political Aggression (2010). AMY SODARO at the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA. Her research is on memorialization of genocide and atrocity. Her publications include Whose Holocaust: The Struggle for Romany Inclusion in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2008), and Sixteen Years Later: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide in the Kigali Memorial Center.