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There is no limit to what constitutes heritage. By definition, heritage is the use of the past for present purposes. Yet, to any given group or population, heritage can be a multitude of things and can serve a variety of purposes. Based on shared memory, heritage can be tangible or intangible, boundless in variety and scope: it can be, for example, objects, landscapes, food or clothing, music or dance, sites or statues, monuments or buildings. Importantly, however, heritage also has many and varied uses and powers. It can be used to control, to unite, to engage, and to empower people, communities, and nations. In this interdisciplinary volume, authors from around the world explore how different communities, nations, and groups intentionally and creatively use heritage, both tangible and intangible, in a wide variety of ways to positively address social and environmental issues. Significantly, these studies demonstrate how heritage can be an exceptionally valuable tool for political, economic, and social change. Insightful studies are presented pertaining to heritage as social memory, including the nationalistic political use of heritage, heritage as resistance to political powers, traditional knowledge as environmental science, heritage for legal and community action, heritage for building peace, heritage for Indigenous and minority empowerment, and heritage for exploring the past through phenomenological methods. The goal of this volume is to move beyond seeing heritage as only social memory, a mere interpretation of static past events, people or places, and instead explores critically the variety of ways heritage is engaged in the present and can be in the future.

Psychological Borders in Europe and the United States: Contemporary Nationalism, Nativism, and Populism presents an integrative sociopolitical and psychological analysis model to examine contemporary sociopolitical rising ideologies in Europe and the United States; specifically, nationalism, nativism, and populism. Further, this book explores processes involved in the construction and sociopolitical mobilization of large, group identities. Political psychology is introduced to discuss the formation of national and psychological borders and their manifestations, including dynamics of identity driven aggression. The connection between the rise of ideologies, such as nativism and populism, and historical collective traumas is discussed, highlighting the role of social re-enactments, identity transformation, and large collective mourning to contemporary sociopolitical dynamics in Europe and the United States. Ethnic, racial, and intergroup conflict, and the role of immigration and asylum policy in maintaining, changing, and transforming existing collective identities is discussed, to then examine the war between Russia and the Ukraine. This book includes specific case applications to European countries and the United States, where nationalism, nativism, and populism have been on the ascendant.

Global Perspectives on Nationalism takes an interdisciplinary approach informed by recent theorisations of nationalism to examine perennial questions on the topic.The idea of nationalism centres on questions of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, and access to resources. What determines consciousness of nationalism? How is nationalism manifested, shaped, or countered through literary and cultural productions? The contributors highlight topical areas in studies of nationalism including ecology, natural resources, sustainability, globalisation, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, indigeneity, folklore, popular culture, and queer theory. They develop innovative perspectives on nationalism through in-depth analyses of the theoretical, political, literary, linguistic, cultural, and ecological dimensions of nationalism in Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Nepal, Nigeria, Poland, Scotland, Turkey, the United States, and elsewhere. This volume underscores the importance of generative dialogue between disciplines in assessing the implications of nationalism for everyday life through five thematic sections: (I) Ethnicity, Ideology, and Narration; (II) Religion, Identity, and Heritage; (III) Linguistics, Tradition, and Modernism; (IV) Music, Lyricism, and Poetics; and (V) Ecology, Environment, and Non-Human Lives.This book will be of particular value to students and researchers in philosophy, literary studies, and political theory with interests spanning ecology, ethnicity, folklore, gender, heritage, identity, linguistics, nationalism, nationhood, religion, and sexuality.

In his now classic Voices of Collective Remembering, James V. Wertsch (2002) examines the extent to which certain narrative themes are embedded in the way the collective past is understood and national communities are imagined. In this work, Wertsch coined the term schematic narrative templates to refer to basic plots, such as the triumph over alien forces or quest for freedom, that are recurrently used, setting a national theme for the past, present and future. Whereas specific narratives are about particular events, dates, settings and actors, schematic narrative templates refer to more abstract structures, grounded in the same basic plot, from which multiple specific accounts of the past can be generated. As dominant and naturalised narrative structures, schematic narrative templates are typically used without being noticed, and are thus extremely conservative, impervious to evidence and resistant to change. The concept of schematic narrative templates is much needed today, especially considering the rise of nationalism and extreme-right populism, political movements that tend to tap into national narratives naturalised and accepted by large swathes of society. The present volume comprises empirical and theoretical contributions to the concept of schematic narrative templates by scholars of different disciplines (Historiography, Psychology, Education and Political Science) and from the vantage point of different cultural and social practices of remembering (viz., school history teaching, political discourses, rituals, museums, the use of images, maps, etc.) in different countries. The volume's main goal is to provide a transdisciplinary debate around the concept of schematic narrative templates, focusing on how narratives change as well as perpetuate at times when nationalist discourses seem to be on the rise. This book will be relevant to anyone interested in history, history teaching, nationalism, collective memory and the wider social debate on how to critically reflect on the past.

“Quién olvida su pasado está condenado a repetirlo”. Este lema ha generado la multiplicación de políticas de memoria desde finales de la década de 1990, en todo el mundo. Estas políticas normalizadas deben permitir a todos los ciudadanos aprender “las lecciones del pasado” y construir sociedades pacíficas. En lugar de la tranquila cohesión social que esperaban, los países que han adoptado tales medidas, sin embargo, han enfrentado discriminaciones persistentes, populismos y terrorismos de todo tipo. Los estudios sobre memoria histórica tampoco cuestionan la necesidad y el impacto de las políticas de memoria en el comportamiento social. Este libro —publicado también en francés, inglés y árabe— rompe con la literatura existente y aporta una perspectiva crítica sobre la creencia demasiado consensuada de la eficacia de la política de la memoria para construir sociedades pacíficas, ya sea en una democracia estable o tras un conflicto político violento.

South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist dictatorship, turned to Marxian thought to explain his country's development, even as he came to struggle with its Eurocentrism. As a transnational scholar working in postcommunist Poland, Lim recognized striking similarities between Korean and Polish history and politics. One realization stood out: Both Korea and Poland—at once the “West” for Asia yet “Eastern” Europe—had been assigned the role of “East.”This book explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory, Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia. He draws out commonalities in their experiences of modernity, in their transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and in the shaping of collective memory. Ranging across Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea, Lim traces the global history of how notions of victimhood have become central to nationalism. He criticizes mass dictatorships of right and left in the Global Easts, considering Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of sovereign dictatorship and the concept of decisionist democracy. Lim argues that nationalism is inherently transnational, critiquing how the nationalist imagination of the Global East has influenced countries across borders. Theoretically sophisticated and conceptually innovative, this book sheds new light on the transnational complexity of historical memory and imagination, the boundaries between democracy and mass dictatorship, and the fluidity of East and West.

The Museum's Borders demonstrates that museum practices are deeply entangled in border making, patrol, mitigation and erasure, and that the border lens offers a new tool for deconstructing and reconfiguring such practices.Arguing that the museum is a critical institution for the operation of knowledge-based democracies, Knell investigates how they have been used by scientists, art historians and historians to construct our bordered world. Examining the role of museums in the Windrush scandal in Britain, the exclusion of Black artists in America, ideological and propaganda discourses in Europe and China, and the remembering of contested pasts in the Balkans, Knell argues for the importance of museums in countering unethical, nationalistic, post-fact political discourse.Using the principles of Knell's ‘Contemporary Museology', The Museum's Borders considers the significance of the museum for societies that wish to know and remember in ways that empower citizens and build cohesive societies. The book will be of great interest to students and academics engaged in the study of museums and heritage, art history, science studies, cultural studies, anthropology, memory studies and history. It is required reading for museum professionals seeking to adopt non-discriminatory practices.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Society for Army Historical Research's Templer MedalOperation Crusader, launched in November 1941, was the third and final British attempt to relieve the siege of Tobruk and break the German and Italian forces in North Africa. After tough initial fighting, the British made important gains, only to be countered by a stunning breakthrough overseen personally by Lt. General Erwin Rommel. As the British situation teetered, the commander of the 8th Army, Lt. General Alan Cunningham, was relieved of duty by his superior, General Claude Auchinleck. This decision changed the direction of the battle and perhaps the war itself. Why and how Cunningham was relieved has been the subject of commentary and speculation since it occurred. Using newly discovered evidence, Alexander Joffe rethinks the events that brought about the sudden relief of the operation's commanding officer, including insubordination. The book then discusses how narratives regarding the operation were created, were incorporated into British and Commonwealth official and unofficial historical writing about the war, and contributed to British historical memory. Based on a decade of archival work, the book presents a new and detailed analysis of a consequential battle and, importantly, of how its history was written and received in the context of post-war Britain.

This edited collection explores the political dimensions of cultural memory work in its varied forms of representation, from public monuments to literary texts. Addressing the different ways that cultural texts represent the past in the present, the collection demonstrates that cultural memory is something actively made: the site of a struggle over meanings that can serve a range of political and cultural purposes. The collection offers essays that discuss the politics of cultural memory both in theory and in practice, and features work by some of the leading scholars in the field including Susannah Radstone, Graham Dawson, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis. Contributors explore the ways in which memory comes to be articulated through particular cultural practices, from film and photography to literature and public monuments, all of which have their own codes and conventions, modes of address and audiences. As such this volume brings together scholars working in a range of disciplines (literary studies, history, art history, film studies) and in so doing seeks to establish a dialogue between different disciplines and methodologies and to explore cultural memory work in a range of different intellectual fields, cultural forms and political and historical contexts, for instance, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, Australia, Palestine, and the former Soviet Bloc.The collection will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars working in the area of cultural memory studies, for whom it will represent an invaluable collection of current work in the field. It will also interest scholars working in the particular areas with which it engages, for instance, postcolonial studies, Holocaust studies, Eastern European Studies, Irish Studies, Art History and English Studies.

Blick ins Buch This book explores the nexus of media and memory practices in contemporary Slovenia. In the age of mediatised societies, the country's post-socialist, post-Yugoslav present has become saturated with historical revisionism and various nostalgic framings of the past. Pušnik and Luthar have collected a wide range of case studies analysing the representation and reinterpretation of past events in newspapers, theatre, music, museums, digital media, and documentaries. The volume thus presents insights into the intricacies of the mediatisation of memory in contemporary Slovenian society. The authors engage with dynamic uses of media today and provide new analyses of media culture as archive, site of historical reinterpretation, and repository of memory.

This captivating volume brings together case studies drawn from four post-Soviet states—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. The collected papers illustrate how the events that started in 1985 and brought down the USSR six years later led to the rise of fifteen successor states, with their own historicized collective memories. The volume's analyses juxtapose history textbooks for secondary schools and universities, and how they aim to create understandings as well as identities that are politically usable, within their different contexts. From this emerges a picture of multiple perestroika(s) and diverging development paths. Only in Ukraine—a country that recently experienced two popular uprisings, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity—the people themselves are ascribed agency and the power to change their country. In the other three states, elites are, instead, presented as prime movers of society, as is historical determinism. The volume's contributors are Diana Bencheci, Andrei Dudchik, Liliya Erushkina, Marharyta Fabrykant, Alexandr Gorylev, Andrey Kashin, Alla Marchenko, Valerii Mosneagu, Alexey Rusakov, Natalia Tregubova, and Yuliya Yurchuk.

Deutsche Migranten in Argentinien: Ein historischer Beitrag zur Migrationsdebatte. Deutsche, österreichische und schweizer Einwanderer bildeten eine heterogene Gemeinde im Herzen der Metropole Buenos Aires. Sie entwickelten eine gemeinsame Erinnerungskultur, die ihnen Orientierung und Identität gab. Welche Charakteristika hatte diese Erinnerungskultur? Welche geschichtswissenschaftlichen Erklärungen gibt es für deren Herausbildung? Welche Erkenntnisse bringt uns dieser historische Fall für das Verständnis von Migration und Erinnerung in multiethnischen Gesellschaften in einer globalisierten Welt? Die Autorin zeigt, wie Aneignung und Abgrenzung von Geschichtsbildern in der Migrantengemeinde abliefen, die Entwicklung einer Meistererzählung und das Scheitern von geschichtspolitischen Projekten. Trotz vieler Bezüge zu den Herkunftsländern der Einwanderer war ihre Erinnerungskultur sehr stark von den Gegebenheiten in Argentinien, den Bedingungen vor Ort und der Zusammensetzung ihrer heterogenen Gemeinde abhängig.

This book provides original insight into the way we now engage and remember national history. Drawing on fieldwork and analysis of international case studies on state commemoration, memorialization, recreational and tourism and times of disaster and crisis, the author demonstrates that not only does the nation frequently retain a strong cultural relevance in our global world but that the emergence of new forms of ritual and remembrance means that in many instances we are seeing the re-enchantment of nationalism. Drawing upon and developing an empirically informed cultural sociology, the author charts the distinctive qualities of these new national rites and how they feed into and advance particular cosmopolitan and orthodox national politics. Because social science has so often wrongly assumed the end of nationalism, the insights of this of the book about the possibilities and limitations of contemporary nationalism demand serious consideration by academics and also by policy makers and the general public.

War and conflicts have always played a significant role in defining national identities, often with reference to events that happened centuries ago. The role of passing on collective memories of these types of events has become even more complex in a globalizing world, where new configurations of cosmopolitan memories challenge more locally and nationally based memories. The many aspects of societies'remembering and forgetting call for interdisciplinary studies.Conflicted Pasts and National Identities. Narratives of War and Conflict reflects this effort. With reference to current theories of cultural memory, it explores how memories of war and conflict are passed on from generation to generation, how these complex processes have transformed and shaped collective identities, and how they still inform national conversations.

Over the past sixty-five years, the Allied invasion of Northwestern France in June 1944, known as D-Day, has come to stand as something more than a major battle. The assault itself formed a vital component of Allied victory in the Second World War. D-Day developed into a sign and symbol; as a word it carries with it a series of ideas and associations that have come to symbolize different things to different people and nations. As such, the commemorative activities linked to the battle offer a window for viewing the various belligerents in their postwar years. This book examines the commonalities and differences in national collective memories of D-Day. Chapters cover the main forces on the day of battle, including the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France and Germany. In addition, a chapter on Russian memory of the invasion explores other views of the battle. The overall thrust of the book shows that memories of the past vary over time, link to present-day needs, and also still have a clear national and cultural specificity. These memories arise in a multitude of locations such as film, books, monuments, anniversary celebrations, and news media representations.