The Political Life Of Memory

Situating Birsa Munda as the canon, the book demonstrates how political parties and civil societies mobilise and reproduce his memory.

This book examines the representation of Birsa's political life, memory politics and the making of anticolonialism in contemporary Jharkhand. It offers contrasting features of political imaginations deployed in developing memorial landscapes. Framing of Birsa in the heroic narrative through a grand scale of memorialisation, often in the form of the built environment, curates a selective version. This isolates the scope of elaborating his political ideas outside the confines of atypical historical records and their relevance in the contemporary context. The book argues that everyday politics through affective sites such as memorials and statues produce political visions, emotions, and opportunities. It shows how such symbolic sites are often strategically placed and politically motivated to inscribe ideologies. This process outlines how the state and Adivasi use memory as a political tool to lay claims to the past of the Birsa Movement.

More than sixty million people have been victims of genocide in the twentieth century alone, including recent casualties in Bosnia and Rwanda. Herbert Hirsch studies repetitions of large-scale human violence in order to ascertain why people in every historical epoch seem so willing to kill each other. He argues that the primal passions unleashed in the cause of genocide are tied to the manipulation of memory for political purposes. According to Hirsch, leaders often invoke or create memories of real or fictitious past injustices to motivate their followers to kill for political gain or other reasons. Generations pass on their particular versions of events, which then become history. If we understand how cultural memory is created, Hirsch says, we may then begin to understand how and why episodes of mass murder occur and will be able to act to prevent them. In order to revise the politics of memory, Hirsch proposes essential reforms in both the modern political state and in systems of education.

Providing a novel multi-disciplinary theorization of memory politics, this insightful Handbook brings varied literatures into a focused dialogue on the ways in which the past is remembered and how these influence transnational, interstate, and global politics in the present.

In this interesting study, Jenny Edkins explores how we remember traumatic events such as wars, famines, genocides and terrorism, and questions the assumed role of commemorations as simply reinforcing state and nationhood. Taking examples from the World Wars, Vietnam, the Holocaust, Kosovo and September 11th, Edkins offers a thorough discussion of practices of memory such as memorials, museums, remembrance ceremonies, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and the act of bearing witness. She examines the implications of these commemorations in terms of language, political power, sovereignty and nationalism. She argues that some forms of remembering do not ignore the horror of what happened but rather use memory to promote change and to challenge the political systems that produced the violence of wars and genocides in the first place. This wide-ranging study embraces literature, history, politics and international relations, and makes a significant contribution to the study of memory.

War memory and commemoration have had increasingly high profiles in public and academic debates in recent years. This volume examines some of the social changes which have led to this development, among them the passing of the two World Wars from survivor into cultural memory. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, the book illuminates the struggle to install particular memories at the centre of a cultural world, and offers an extensive argument about how the politics of commemoration practices should be understood.

The genre of political memoir has a long history, from its origins in classical times through its popularity in the age of courts and cabinets to its ubiquity in modern mass cultures where retired politicians increasingly attract large and eager readerships for their revelations. Yet there is virtually no scholarly criticism which treats this complex form of literature as a distinct genre, fusing autobiographical, historical and political elements. The essays in this book draw together the collaborative findings of a team of British, European, American and Canadian scholars to present a pioneering historical and critical study of the genre of political memoir, analysing the development of its distinct functions and assessing leading memoirists in European, American, Canadian, Indian and Japanese societies. The editor, George Egerton, introduces the volume and surveys the principal features of the genre over its long history. Otto Pflanze analyses the memoirs of Bismarck; Robert Young, Milton Israel, Joshua Mostow and Robert Bothwell study the memoir literature of France, India, Japan and Canada respectively. Barry Gough and Tim Travers look at naval and military memoirists, while Zara Steiner, B.J.C. McKercher and Valerie Cromwell assess the memoirs of diplomats and their families. Leonidas Hill examines the memoirs of leading Nazis. John Munro, Francis Heller and Robert Ferrell convey inside information on the making of memoirs - notably by the Canadian Prime Ministers Diefenbaker and Pearson and the American President Truman. Stephen Ambrose assays Nixon as memoirist, while Janos Bak portrays the status of memoirists under totalitarian regimes. Wesley Wark and John Naylor analyse theproliferation of intelligence memoirs and government efforts to protect official secrets from the revelations of the candid memoirist. The principal findings reached by the contributors in their study of this problematic but influential genre are set out by the editor in the concluding chapter.

Comparative case studies of how memories of World War II have been constructed and revised in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and the USSR (Russia).