Full Description
This book bridges theoretical gaps that exist between the meta-concepts of memory, place and identity by positioning its lens on the emplaced practices of commemoration and the remembrance of war and conflict.
This book examines how diverse publics relate to their wartime histories through engagements with everyday collective memories, in differing places. Specifically addressing questions of place-making, displacement and identity, contributions shed new light on the processes of commemoration of war in everyday urban façades and within generations of families and national communities. Contributions seek to clarify how we connect with memories and places of war and conflict. The spatial and narrative manifestations of attempts to contextualise wartime memories of loss, trauma, conflict, victory and suffering are refracted through the roles played by emotion and identity construction in the shaping of post-war remembrances. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, social psychology, cultural and urban geography, to contextualise memories of war and their 'use' by national governments, perpetrators, victims and in family histories.
Contents
1. The Significance of Memory in the Present
Part I: Placing Memory in Public
2. Encountering Memory in the Everyday City
3. Personal Reflections on Formal Second World War Memorials in Everyday Spaces in Singapore
4. Multiple and Contested Geographies of Memory: Remembering the 1989 Romanian 'Revolution'
5. Wrecks to Relics Sha'ar HaGai, Israel: Battle Remains and the Formation of a Battlescape
Part II: Narrative Memorial Practices: Storytelling and Materiality
6. Who were the Enemies? The Spatial Practices of Belonging and Exclusion in Second World War Italy
7. Sound Memory: A Critical Concept for Researching Past Wartime Experiences.
8. Heralding Jericho: Narratives of Remembrance, Reclamation and Republican Identity in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
9. In the Shadow of Centenaries: Irish Artists go to War 1914-1918.
Part III: Commemorative Rituals of Remembering in Place
10. Embodied Memory at the Australian War Memorial.
11. Affective Atmospheres
12. Beyond Sentimentality and Glorification: Using a History of Emotions to Deal with the Horror of War.
13. Witnessing and Affect: Altering, Imagining and Making New Spaces to Remember the Great War in Modern Britain.
14. Places of Memory and Mourning in Nazi Germany.
