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Abstract
In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now “spectacle” can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin’s plea to “explode the continuum of history” and bring our attention to now-time.
Lindsey A. Freeman is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia and a co-editor of The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures from Poe to Punk.
“This is an extremely interesting collection of essays on a wide variety of memory practices from across the globe.” · Jo Labanyi, New York University
Rachel Daniell is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY and works with the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF). Her research examines everyday social practices around data and documents that contribute to the visibility of human rights violations.
Benjamin Nienass is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University San Marcos. His research is concerned with the politics of memory in postnational contexts, particularly in the European Union.
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contents | v | ||
| Illustrations | vii | ||
| Acknowledgments | ix | ||
| Introduction — Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information | 1 | ||
| Part I — Spectacular Memory: Memory and Appearance in the Age of Information | 15 | ||
| Chapter 1 — Haunted by the Spectre of Communism: Spectacle and Silence in Hungary's House of Terror | 17 | ||
| Chapter 2 — Making Visible: Reflexive Narratives at the Manzanar U.S. National Historic Site | 38 | ||
| Chapter 3 — The Everyday as Spectacle: Archival Imagery and the Work of Reconciliation in Canada | 59 | ||
| Part II — Screening Absence: New Technology, Affect, and Memory | 75 | ||
| Chapter 4 — Viral Affiliations: Facebook, Queer Kinship, and the Memory of the Disappeared in Contemporary Argentina | 77 | ||
| Chapter 5 — Learning by Heart: Humming, Singing, Memorizing in Israeli Memorial Videos | 95 | ||
| Chapter 6 — Arcade Mode: Remembering, Revisiting, and Replaying the American Video Arcade | 118 | ||
| Part III — Silence and Memory: Erasures, Storytelling, and Kitsch | 135 | ||
| Chapter 7 — Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina | 137 | ||
| Chapter 8 — The Power of Conflicting Memories in European Transnational Social Movements | 163 | ||
| Chapter 9 — Memories of Jews and the Holocaust in Post-Communist Eastern Europe | 183 | ||
| Chapter 10 — 1989 as Collective Memory \"Refolution\": East-Central Europe Confonts Memorial Silence | 213 | ||
| Conclusion — Comments on Silence, Screen, and Spectacle | 239 | ||
| Contributors | 244 | ||
| Index | 247 |