Unsettling Memories

Tarlo provides and account of India's Emergency of 1975-97, when Indian democracy was temporarily suspended in favor of authoritarian rule, from the perspective of ordinary people.

Settling and Unsettling Memories analyses the ways in which Canadians over the past century have narrated the story of their past in books, films, works of art, commemorative ceremonies, and online. This cohesive collection introduces readers to overarching themes of Canadian memory studies and brings them up-to-date on the latest advances in the field. With increasing debates surrounding how societies should publicly commemorate events and people, Settling and Unsettling Memories helps readers appreciate the challenges inherent in presenting the past. Prominent and emerging scholars explore the ways in which Canadian memory has been put into action across a variety of communities, regions, and time periods. Through high-quality essays touching on the central questions of historical consciousness and collective memory, this collection makes a significant contribution to a rapidly growing field.

Settling and Unsettling Memories analyses the ways in which Canadians over the past century have narrated the story of their past in books, films, works of art, commemorative ceremonies, and online. This cohesive collection introduces readers to overarching themes of Canadian memory studies and brings them up-to-date on the latest advances in the field. With increasing debates surrounding how societies should publicly commemorate events and people, Settling and Unsettling Memories helps readers appreciate the challenges inherent in presenting the past. Prominent and emerging scholars explore the ways in which Canadian memory has been put into action across a variety of communities, regions, and time periods. Through high-quality essays touching on the central questions of historical consciousness and collective memory, this collection makes a significant contribution to a rapidly growing field.

In the early 1990s North America was the vibrant centre of an increasingly democratic and revitalized western hemisphere. The United States and Canada were close allies working together to implement a bilateral free trade agreement and build an integrated manufacturing and export economy. By the late 2000s, the economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries were strained as policies stagnated or slipped backward and passports were needed to cross the border for the first time in history. By 2017 the US planned to wall off its border with Mexico and NAFTA was slated for renegotiation. In Strangers with Memories John Stewart combines an insider’s knowledge, a mole’s perspective, and a historian’s consciousness to explain how two countries that spent the twentieth century building a world order together drifted so quickly apart in the early years of the twenty-first - and how that world order began its current shift. Assessing the major forces and events in North America’s development between 1990 and 2010, this book also details changes at the US embassy in Ottawa during those years and its relationship with US consulates in Canada and with the State Department’s Canada desk. Explaining how Canada's influence in the world depends on the US and has radically diminished with the decline in US diplomacy under presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Stewart gives valuable advice on how Canada should handle its foreign policy in a much less stable world. From the viewpoint of a Canadian with a front-row seat to two decades of US-Canada relations, Strangers with Memories chronicles Canada at the apogee of American power.

In 2008 the Canadian government apologized to the victims of the notorious Indian residential school system, and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose goal was to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that engineered the system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation, non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization. They must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. Today’s truth and reconciliation processes must make space for an Indigenous historical counter-narrative in order to avoid perpetuating a colonial relationship between Aboriginal and settler peoples. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers all Canadians – both Indigenous and not – a new way of approaching the critical task of healing the wounds left by the residential school system.

Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film reframes nostalgia to analyze how writers and filmmakers have responded to 20th-century dictatorial violence and loss in Spain and Chile. By reaching beyond reductive definitions that limit nostalgia to a conservative desire to defend traditional power hierarchies, Lisa DiGiovanni captures the complexity of a critically conscious type of longing and form of transmission that she terms “unsettling nostalgia.” Using literature and film, DiGiovanni illustrates how unsettling nostalgia imbues representations of pre-dictatorial mobilization during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the Chilean Popular Unity (1970–1973), as well as depictions of clandestine resistance to the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and the Pinochet regime (1973–1989). Positive memories of efforts to upend power hierarchies coexist with retrospective critiques that fissure romanticized views of revolutionary struggle. Unsettling nostalgic works engender deeper understandings of the complexities of political movements and how stories of resistance are meaningful today. By calling attention to the parallels between nostalgic modes that resist multiple injustices based on gender, class, and sexuality, this book traces an evocative continuity between Spain and Chile that goes beyond the initial work that links forms of militaristic authoritarianism. Scholars of Latin American studies, film studies, literary studies, history, women's and gender studies, memory studies, and rhetoric will find this book particularly useful.

Through high-quality essays touching on the central questions of historical consciousness and collective memory, this collection makes a significant contribution to a rapidly growing field.