The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (Routledge History Handbooks)

This Handbook is the first systematic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies. From Charlottesville to Cape Town, from Santiago to Sydney, we have recently witnessed protesters demanding that symbols of racist or colonial pasts be dismantled and that we talk about histories that have long been silenced. But such events are only the most visible instances of grassroots efforts to influence the meaning of the past in the present. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling different disciplinary traditions, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence from across the globe, this Handbook establishes important questions and their theoretical implications arising from the social, political, and economic reality of memory activism. Memory activism is multi-faceted, takes place in a variety of settings, and has diverse outcomes – but it is always crucial to understanding the constitution and transformation of our societies, past and present. This volume will serve as a guide and establish new analytic frameworks for scholars, students, policymakers, journalists, and activists alike. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Figures Contributors Acknowledgments Foreword Changing attitudes to the past in western democracies The history of memory activism The past is not past Bottom-up and top-down - memory activism is precarious Open questions Introduction: The Activist Turn in Memory Studies Theoretical foundations Memory Activism Addressing inequalities and exclusions in the study of memory activism Reading this Handbook Debates Actors Institutions Spaces Sites and Practices Normative Dilemmas Key Themes Additional Resources Part I: Debates Introduction: Contentions over Memory Activism 1. Decomissioning Monuments, Mobilizing Materialities Notes Additional Resources 2. Populism and the Collective Past: Revisionism or Memory Activism? Additional Resources 3. Unlocked Memory Activism: Has Social Distancing Changed Commemoration? Memorializing lockdown: A bottom-up process Towards a more participatory state-sponsored commemoration How the Covid-19 pandemic boosts counter-memory and non-state alternative commemorations Memory, power and inequalities: Covid-19 and neoliberalism Notes Additional Resources 4. Memory vs. History: The Politics of Temporality Additional Resources 5. Regimes of Temporality Changing regimes of historicity Plural temporalities Regimes of engaging with past and future Conclusion Additional Resources 6. Memory Activism in History National activists Anti-modernizers Veterans Concluding remarks Additional Resources 7. Transnational Memory Activism and Performative Nationalism Transnational memory activism and multicultural nationalism The global-cum-national memories in East Asia Still ambivalent Additional Resources 8. Intersectionality and Memory Activism Understanding intersectionality: Co-imbrications of recognition and erasure Intersectionality and careful encounters with memory activism An intersectional memory praxis: Moving beyond single-axis recognition Intersectionality and memory activism: A misaligned approach? Conclusion Additional Resources 9. Activist Voices: What Is at Stake - A Short Manifesto for Activist Memory Studies Remember Your Value Sing Cut Fences Be Inhuman Shake and Stir Addional Resources Part II: Actors and Agency Introduction: Agent, Structure, and Subjectivity 10. Implicated Subjects Notes Additional Resources 11. Extreme Right The rise of Generation Identity Performing the Rituals of Mourning Occupying the Theater of Victimhood Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 12. Communities Bircza, or preserving the truth Wielkie Oczy, or picking and choosing vernacular memory Rymanów, or "just us" Space(s) as actors Note Additional Resources 13. Coalitions Additional Resources 14. Scholars Situating reflexive borders Current works and the future Additional Resources 15. Conservatives Reagan, the New Right, and the dilemma of race The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday King as opposition Conclusion Note Additional Resources 16. Border-Crossers Camp Armen occupation: Mobilizing memory Civil disobedience and mobilizing memory Notes Additional Resources 17. Ghosts The figure of the ghost The ghost as memory activist Conclusions Additional Resources 18. Anti-Neoliberals Becoming hegemony: Human rights codification Generational change and narrative disruptions Neoliberalism in Chile Students' protests and the narrative turn Performative level of anti-neoliberal memory activism Anti-neoliberal activism: An emotional way of connecting with traces of the past Additional Resources 19. Activist Voices: Post Heroes Additional Resources 20. Activist Voices: Museum Entrepreneurs The Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Center - Goals, scope, and themes The JHGC as a catalyzer for change - Promoting active citizenship Additional Resources Part III: Institutions and Institutionalization Introduction: Definitions and Contestations 21. Administration Administrating 'Policy-Memory-Scapes' Governing memory Bureaucracy and memory activism Administrative memory activism and governing people Notes Additional Resources 22. Law Law and memory: A reciprocal relationship Memory-shaping legislation Memory laws Truth-seeking initiatives Mnemonic mobilization and historical justice Constitutional memories Concluding remarks Notes Additional Resouces 23. States Defining states States and diaspora Returning to the language of publics Conclusion Additional Resources 24. Political Parties Notes Additional Resources 25. International Organizations Memory activism related to colonial violence Memory activism related to Cold War violence: The tentative role of international organizations Memory activism related to women subjected to enforced military prostitution during the Asia Pacific War Conclusions Additional Resources 26. Redress Economies The long road to redress for forced laborers in the Third Reich Conclusions Additional Resources 27. Activist Voices: Education - Interview with Tanja Vaitulevich Additional Resources 28. Class A moral economy sparks memory activism Generation and milieu Ethnicity, race, and gender Additional Resources 29. Family Additional Resources 30. Religion Memory activists Church, state, and society Spaces of religious memory activism Concluding remarks Additional Resources 31. Slavery Additional Resources 32. Empire Silencing and speaking back to empire Empire, memory activism, and the World War I centenary Conclusion Additional Resources 33. Colonialism Defining Africa The lingering effects of colonialism today Poverty Proving Copying Additional Resources 34. Museums Notes Additional Resources Part IV: Spaces Introduction: Constructing Spaces of Memory Activism 35. Migrant Spaces Notes Additional Resources 36. Urban Spaces Cities and memory politics Urban activism over postcolonial and postindustrial urban memory Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 37. Queer Spaces Additional Resources 38. (De)Colonial Spaces Activism, place, and the land Activism: A place in the gallery Reclaiming space and stories Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 39. Post-conflict and Mid-conflict Spaces Notes Additional Resources 40. Deindustrialized Spaces Additional Resources 41. Sacred Spaces The Liquiçá Church massacre commemorations: Secular and sacred space Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 42. Indigenous Spaces Additional Resources 43. Mediated Spaces Bedouin media memory activism Mizrahi media memory activists in Israel Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 44. Clandestine Spaces Researching genocide memory in clandestine spaces in the digital age Digital media, postmemory, and forgetting Additional Resources 45. Activist Voices: Singing Spaces - Interview with Rana Sulaiman Additional Resources 46. Post-Soviet Spaces Memorial Themes: War, nation, repressions Forms and methods Memory activism and the state Additional Resources 47. Latin America Note Additional Resources 48. North America Reproductive memory activism Transformative memory activism Additional Resources 49. The Arctic Additional Resource 50. Africa Memory, activism, Africa Maps Objects Museums Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 51. Middle East and North Africa Memory Between Lieu and Milieu Activating Anfal AnArchic Archives Pilgrimage and Memory Activism Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 52. Southeast Asia The specter of modernity The remains of the day Amongst skulls Counter-modernity Note Additional Resources 53. East Asia "Sonyeosang" and memory activism Sonyeosangs, the changes in representation and memory solidarity The transnational politics of the memory of Japanese military sexual slavery Notes Additional Resources 54. Oceania Memory of colonial rule: Reflections and resistance Conclusion Additional Resources 55. East-Central Europe Main features and points of division Main themes: The legacy of nazism and communism Types of activists Additional Resources 56. Post-German Spaces Additional Resources Part V: Sites and Practices Introduction: Memory Activism as Embodied Practice 57. Memory Sites Additional Resources 58. Mapping Memory Seeing and Feeling Performance and Visuality Visuality, performance, and memory Notes Additional Resources 59. Activist Voices: Nomadic Monuments - Interview with Aida Šehović Additional Resources 60. Museums and "Curatorial Activism" Critical museology Direct protest Calling out and moving in Artists' interventions: Institutional critique and beyond A self-critical museum? Notes Additional Resources 61. Tours and Tourism Building reconciliation through post-war/post-conflict tours in the absence of state efforts Diaspora communities constructing counter-narratives Hegemonic state narratives challenged by heritage tourism Transborder memory activism and nationalism Note Additional Resources 62. Performance The case of forced sterilizations in Peru Somos 2,074 y muchas más (We are 2,074 and many more) Additional Resources 63. Reenactment Additional Resources 64. Activist Voices: The 1965 Events in Indonesia What happened in 1965? How the Indonesian government suppressed the memory of 1965? How do Indonesian memory activists deal with the repression? Who is involved in memory activism in Indonesia? Closing notes Additional Resources 65. #memoryactivism and Online Commemoration Hashtag memory activism #Sedamhiljada: From hashtag to banned commemorative event #MyNakbaStory: Hashtag memory activism and online commemorations as an advocacy tool Notes Additional Resources 66. Digital Campaigns, Forums, and Archives Global hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, #MeToo, #SayHerName - Digital activism, collective protest, and collective memory The limitations Digital memory activism campaign: The abortion referendum in Ireland Archiving the digital Notes Additional Resources 67. Literary Memory Activism Introduction: The Refugee Tales Project Strategy 1: Collaborative storytelling and relational remembering Strategy 2: Literary memory across media: Plurimedial engagement Strategy 3: Authors as "(multi-)cultural capital" Strategy 4: The literariness of the Refugee Tales: "Automatization kills" Strategy 5: Dialogues with the deep literary past: Refugee Tales meets the Canterbury Tales Discussion Additional Resources 68. Anniversaries and National Holidays A contested past in the colonial present: Activating Indigenous traditions and idioms Local governments as memory activists Limits of #changethedate Conclusion Additional Resources 69. Activist Voices: Art Additional Resources 70. Exhumations Notes Additional Resources Part VI: Normative Dilemmas Introduction: Democratizing the Past Notes 71. Memory and Illiberalism The far right, populism, and memory Germany, far-right memory activists, and sediments of time: The case of Dresden Memories of change and solidarity vs memories of repression and chaos From critical to sacralizing memory Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 72. Memory, Pluralism, and White Supremacy Notes Additional Resources 73. Memory Activism and the Global Production of Knowledge Activist, practitioner, scholar: What's in a name? Note Additional Resources 74. Between Conflict and Consensus Additional Resources 75. Between Ownership and Appropriation Re-collecting the East German past State appropriation of the "Military Comfort Women" Conclusion Notes Additional Resources 76. Between Agency and Suspension Mood and Memory films Memories from home: An intervention across space Additional Resources 77. Activist Voices: From Civil Revolt to Established Institutions A brief overview of the commemoration of Nazi crimes and the memorial movement Dilemmas of professionalization Notes Additional Resources 78. Activist Voices: Memory Activism with and against the State - Interview with Sergio Beltrán-García Notes Additional Resources References Index "This handbook is the first systematic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies. From Charlottesville to Capetown, from Santiago to Sydney, we have recently witnessed protesters demanding that symbols of racist or colonial pasts be dismantled and that we talk about histories that have long been silenced. But such events are only the most visible instances of grassroots efforts to influence the meaning of the past in the present. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling different disciplinary traditions, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence from across the globe, this handbook establishes important questions and their theoretical implications arising from the social, political, and economic reality of memory activism. Memory Activism is multi-faceted, takes place in a variety of settings, and has diverse outcomes - but it is always crucial to understanding the constitution and transformation of our societies, past and present. This volume will serve as a guide and establish new analytic frameworks for scholars, students, policy makers, journalists, and activists alike"-- Provided by publisher