There has been a renewed interest in collective
memory in the work of scholars in various humanities disciplines over
the past decade. Perceived as a field of activity in which past events
are always reconstructed, maintained, modified, and endowed with political
meaning, collective memory relates to forms of unending cultural
struggles over territories as much as over meanings. As Said puts
it, the art of memory for the modern world is both for historians as
well as ordinary citizens and institutions very much something to be
used, misused, and exploited in its concern with a specifically desirable
and recoverable past, and is subject to inventive reordering and redeploying.
Studies which expose such a refashioned memory scrutinize exclusiveness
of recent narratives of repatriation, national revival, independence,
re-emergence, etc. as well as excessive indulgence in trauma and its
exoticization, and in dismantling the memory’s ideological grounds
dismantle the ambiguities of pursuing collective interests that are
based on the imagery of fixed divisions between self and the Other and
on the suppression of singularity within groups.
In the light of this, the section aims to discuss some aspects of cultural
politics which, stemming from modified recollections and their demands,
collide with situations of the present and invoke a particularly
freighted and self-divisive future. We will discuss gender as an
understudied aspect of collective memory and its constructions relating
to the luring falsity of the past. Participants are invited to
submit the abstracts for their contributions, discussing these issues
with reference to literature, film, history and theory.
