Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches

Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma. Organised around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analysing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Brett Ashley Kaplan PART I Race-ing Memory 1. Critical Black Memory as Curatorial Praxis and Collective Care La Tanya S. Autry 2. The Memory of Race Sonali Thakkar 3. The Memory of Racial Terror: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum Marita Sturken PART II Environmental Memory 4. Toward Slow Memory Studies Jenny Wüstenberg 5. Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene Stef Craps 6. Memory and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson 7. Widow's Walk Caroline Morris PART III Conceptualizing Memory Studies 8. Memory in Liquid Time Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer 9. A Case for Melancholy Angelika Bammer 10. Memory Images, between Discourse and Representation Philippe Mesnard PART IV Monuments, Memorials, Museums, Memoirs 11. Negative Spaces and the Play of Memory: The Memorial Art of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz James E. Young 12. Spiral Memory: Mike Nelson's The Coral Reef (2000), The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent (2001), and The Amnesiacs (1996–) Helen Hughes 13. Hanka Miryam Sas 14. Breathe Me Home: A Remembrance via Thomas Andrew Dorsey's “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” Amy Hassinger 15. Belonged Audrey Petty PART V Memory, Memoriam 16. Memory Sayed Kashua 17. Chasing Glowworms Steve Stern 18. Disappearer Dina Guidubaldi 19. In Memoriam Chase Dimock PART VI Enacting Memory Studies 20. Memory, Allegory, and the Plague: Albert Camus on Covid-19 Debarati Sanyal 21. Soviet 1960s Cinema and the Nuclear Catastrophe: Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism and Nine Days of One Year Lilya Kaganovsky 22. Mapuche Hunger Strikes as a Performance of Re-membering Ethan Madarieta 23. Hölderlin's Memory, and Keats: Reading “Andenken” and “Mnemosyne” Jeremy Tambling 24. When All Else Seems Lost, There Is Memory: Poetry and Politics in Kashmir and India Suvir Kaul 25. Sunny David Wright Faladé PART VII Digital Memory 26. Digital Afterlives Julia Creet and Silke Arnold-de Simine 27. Cartographies of Suffering: Mapping Holocaust Memory Sharon B. Oster Afterword Noni Carter Works Cited Contributor Bios Index

About the Author :
Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is a Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her novel, Rare Stuff, was published in 2022 and she is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth.

Review :
Unique in its combination of creative and scholarly approaches to memory, this rich collection presents the cutting-edge of memory studies. Absolutely essential reading. This important volume shows the diversity of contemporary cultural memory studies. It opens new avenues for the field by bringing together scholarly and artistic work in a way that invites us to reflect on the fluidity between fictional and theoretical approaches to cultural memory. Brett Ashley Kaplan has put together an innovative and appealing collection that opens up a dynamic, multipronged vision of memory studies. With fiction and memoir placed side-by-side with essays by scholars, activists, and practitioners, Critical Memory Studies offers new directions for a field rapidly becoming institutionalized. Its global scope, interdisciplinary range, and attention to urgent areas of concern, such as ecology and race, make it a must read for all those concerned with the future of the past. Critical Memory Studies opens up a wide spectrum of new approaches to memory in culture. The essays collected in this anthology address a range of current challenges to memory – from racism and environmental degradation to monument wars and digital transformation. Critical Memory Studies demonstrates that what brings together scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds in the field of memory studies is their keen sense of the necessity and the possibilities of an ongoing critique of memory. Engaging chapters ... This is an important book for those who work, teach, and conduct research within the field of memory studies.