Italy’s Divided Memory

Italy’s Divided Memory
Author: J. Foot
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2009-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230101836

This book argues that contemporary Italian history has been marked by a tendency towards divided memory. Events have been interpreted in contrasting ways, and the facts themselves often contested. Moreover, with so little agreement over what happened, and why it happened, it has been extremely difficult to create any consensus around memory. These divisions have been seen at all levels, but take on particular importance when linked to the great traumatic and life-changing events of the Twentieth century - war, terrorism, disaster - but can also be applied to more cultural fields such as sport and everyday life. Social change also has an impact on memory. This book will take the form of a voyage through Italy (and into Italy's past), looking at stories of divided memory over various periods in the twentieth century. These stories will be interwoven with analysis and discussion.

Working Through Memory

Working Through Memory
Author: Ofelia Ferrán
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838756584

Studies various constructions of memory in contemporary Spanish literature, evoking different aspects of a past of repression, from both the civil war and the Franco regime. This book analyzes narrative texts published between the 1960s and 1990s that present memory and the recuperation of a traumatic past as their main theme.

Citizens of Memory

Citizens of Memory
Author: Silvia R. Tandeciarz
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 161148846X

Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The material, visual, narrative, and pedagogical interventions it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. Two theoretical principles structure the book’s approach to cultural recall: the first follows from an understanding of memory as a social construct that is always as much about the past as it is of the present; the second from the observation that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. These principles guide the study of iconic sites of memory in the city of Buenos Aires; photographic essays about the missing and the dictatorship’s legacies of violence; documentary films by children of the disappeared that challenge hegemonic representations of seventies’ militancy; a novel of exile that moves recollection across national boundaries; and a human rights education program focused on memory. Understanding recollection as a practice that lends coherence to disparate forces, energies, and affects, the book approaches these spatial, visual, and scripted registers as impassioned narratives that catalyze a new attentiveness within those they hail. It suggests, moreover, that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like these can help advance the cause of transitional justice and contribute to the development of new political subjectivities invested in the construction of less violent futures.

Memory

Memory
Author: Dmitri Nikulin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199793956

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history.

A European Memory?

A European Memory?
Author: Małgorzata Pakier
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857454307

An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe--with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences--was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.

Energy and Sustainable Development in Mexico

Energy and Sustainable Development in Mexico
Author: John R. Moroney
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 160344324X

John R. Moroney and Flory Dieck-Assad cogently assess Mexico's goals of sustainability and the major policy changes that will be required to achieve them.

History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity

History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity
Author: Aline Sierp
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2014-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317662059

This book questions the presupposition voiced by many historians and political scientists that political experiences in Europe continue to be interpreted in terms of national history, and that a European community of remembrance still does not exist. By tracing the evolution of specific memory cultures in two successor countries of the Fascist/Nazi regime (Italy and Germany) and the impact of structural changes upon them, the book investigates wider democratic processes, particularly concerning the conservation and transmission of values and the definition of identity on different levels. It argues that the creation of a transnational European memory culture does not necessarily imply the erasure of national and local forms of remembrance. It rather means the creation of a further supranational arena where diverging memories can find their expression and can be dealt with in a different way. Through the triangulation of agents of memory construction, constraints and opportunities and actual portrayals of the past, this volume explores the difficulties faced by a multinational entity like the EU in reaching some kind of consensus on such a sensitive subject as history.

Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music

Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music
Author: Delia Pamela Fuentes Korban
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2023-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793648352

Memory and History in Argentine Popular Music examines Argentine popular music of the 1990s and early 2000s that denounced, immortalized, and reflected on the processes that led to the socioeconomic crisis that shook Argentine society at the end of 2001. It draws upon the three most popular genres of the time—tango, rock chabón, and cumbia villera, a form of cumbia from the shantytowns. The book analyzes lyrics from these three genres detailing how they capture the feel of daily life and the changes that occurred under the neoliberal economic model that ravaged the country throughout the ‘90s. The contention is that these are canciones con historia, songs that depict historical events and tell personal stories. Therefore, the lyrics from all three genres serve as accounts of historical events and social and economic changes, denouncing the social inequalities caused by neoliberal economic policies. Furthermore, the book explores how the process of remembering and forgetting takes place on the Internet. It examines how users navigate video-sharing portals and use music to create “virtual sites of memory,” a term that extends Winter’s conception of physical sites of memory to digital environments as virtual sites of commemoration.

Post-Dictatorship Argentinian Cinema as a Renarration of Collective Memory

Post-Dictatorship Argentinian Cinema as a Renarration of Collective Memory
Author: Carla Grosman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2023-07-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527519775

This book reflects on the role of Argentinean cinema in the construction of social memory. It observes the melancholic scene of Argentina’s first decade post-dictatorship as a context without the necessary social understanding to frame the traumatic experiences of the 1976-1983 military repression. Hence, it interprets such conditions as facilitating processes of intersubjective forgetting, fostered by sociopolitical institutions organizing the discourse of truth within a neoliberal re-democratization endeavor. The book proposes that the non-hegemonic cinema of 1985-1996 operated as a symbolic mediation with which a post-dictatorial, poetic, negotiated truth emerged within the historical process of collective memorialization of social trauma. The book draws from research on Latin American cinema and popular culture, subaltern studies, memory and trauma studies, and the notion of cultural hegemony.

What We Remember

What We Remember
Author: Mariana Achugar
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2008-10-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027289956

This interdisciplinary monograph explores the discursive manifestations of the conflict over how to remember and interpret the actions of the military during the last dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985). Through the exploration of the discursive ways in which this powerful group represents past events and participants, we can trace the ideological struggle over how to reconstruct a traumatic past. By looking at memory as a social and discursive practice, the analysis identifies particular semiotic practices and linguistic patterns deployed in the construction of memory. The discursive description of what is remembered, how it is remembered, and who remembers serves to explain how the institution’s construction of the past is transformed and maintained to respond to outside criticism and create an institutional identity as a lawful state apparatus. This book should interest discourse analysts, historians, sociologists and researchers in the field of transitional justice.