1st Edition

Transcultural Memory

Edited By Rick Crownshaw Copyright 2014

    Memories are not static or frozen, remaining in particular sites or places, within and belonging to particular groups, cultures or nations; rather, memory travels. Broadly speaking, memory has travelled because of the demographic displacements brought about by modernity’s extremes – slavery, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide – and also because of the trade, travel and migration made possible by globalisation. Whether social movement is violent, exilic, migratory, emancipatory or oppressive, it is accompanied by memory. With the movement of people, memories of modernity’s histories and postmodern legacies meet, correspond and often become mutually constitutive. Even where memories compete with each other for cultural dominance, mutual dialogue and recognition is implicit if not explicit. Memories travel through and across cultures and national boundaries, a process increasingly facilitated by mass media technologies.

    This collection explores a range of case studies of transcultural memory as well as theorising the mobility of memory as it travels. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal parallax.

    Introduction: Transcultural Memory Rick Crownshaw

    1. Traveling Memory Astrid Erll

    2. Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn Andrew Hoskins

    3. Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz

    4. From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy Terri Tomsky

    5. Transcultural Memory in Conflict: Israeli-Palestinian Truth and Reconciliation Yifat Gutman

    6. Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory Rick Crownshaw

    7. Genocide and the Terror of History Dirk Moses

    8. What place is this? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies Susannah Radstone

    Biography

    Rick Crownshaw is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where he teaches American literature. He is the author of The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Fiction and Culture (2010).