War Memory and Commemoration
In a period characterised by an unprecedented cultural engagement with the past, individuals, groups and nations are debating and experimenting with commemoration in order to find culturally relevant ways of remembering warfare, genocide and terrorism.
This book examines such remembrances and the political consequences of these rites. In particular, the volume focuses on the ways in which recent social and technological forces, including digital archiving, transnational flows of historical knowledge, shifts in academic practice, changes in commemorative forms and consumerist engagements with history affect the shaping of new collective memories and our understanding of the social world.
Presenting studies of commemorative practices from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East, War Memory and Commemoration illustrates the power of new commemorative forms to shape the world, and highlights the ways in which social actors use them in promoting a range of understandings of the past. The volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, cultural studies and journalism with an interest in commemoration, heritage and/or collective memory.
Brad West is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages at the University of South Australia. He is the author of Re-enchanting Nationalisms: Rituals and Remembrances in a Post-modern Age (2015).
Memory Studies: Global Constellations
Series editor: Henri Lustiger-Thaler
Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France
The past in the present has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that migrant memories; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.
This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate - buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.
Titles in this series
The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity
Martyn Hudson
Forthcoming in this series
War Memory and Commemoration
Brad West
Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia
Peter Manning
Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era
The Ethics of Never Again
Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider
First published 2017
by Routledge
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2017 B. West
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: West, Brad, editor of compilation.
Title: War memory and commemoration / edited by Brad West.
Description: [1st edition] | New York, NY : Routledge, [2016] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016004029| ISBN 9781472455116 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315572802 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH War and society. | War memorials. | Memorialization. |
Collective memory. | MemorySociological aspects.
Classification: LCC HM554 .C63 2016 | DDC 303.6/6dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016004029
ISBN: 978-1-4724-5511-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-57280-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Peter Bishop is Adjunct Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. His research interests include media, transportation and new meanings of place; orientalism and postcolonialism; travel writing and reconciliation. He has recently been part of several large research projects, including the Australian Research Council-funded studies on Reconciliation Pedagogy, focusing on the Australian and South African contexts.
Kevin Blackburn is Associate Professor in History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research expertise is on the history of the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia. This work covers the themes of war, memory and the nation, oral history, as well as public history and heritage. The prisoner of war experience under the Japanese has been an enduring interest, as represented in his book, The Sportsmen of Changi (UNSW Press, 2012).
Serhat Harman is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Tourism at Adana Science and Technology University, Turkey. His teaching interests are tourism marketing and consumer behaviour in tourism. His research interests are independent travel, backpacking, secular pilgrimage and battlefield tourism.
Katrina Jaworski is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages, University of South Australia. Her research examines the philosophy of death and dying bodies, including as it relates to African genocide, violent extremism and suicide. Her most recent publication is the research monograph, The Gender of Suicide (Ashgate, 2014).
