Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches

by Brett Ashley Kaplan (Editor)

Overview

Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma.

Organised around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analysing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350519701
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/06/2025
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.65(w) x 9.61(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is a Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her novel, Rare Stuff, was published in 2022 and she is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Brett Ashley Kaplan

PART I Race-ing Memory
1. Critical Black Memory as Curatorial Praxis and Collective Care
La Tanya S. Autry
2. The Memory of Race
Sonali Thakkar
3. The Memory of Racial Terror: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum
Marita Sturken

PART II Environmental Memory
4. Toward Slow Memory Studies
Jenny Wüstenberg
5. Ecological Mourbaning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene
Stef Craps
6. Memory and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States
Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson
7. Widow's Walk
Caroline Morris

PART III Conceptualizing Memory Studies
8. Memory in Liquid Time
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer
9. A Case for Melancholy
Angelika Bammer
10. Memory Images, between Discourse and Representation
Philippe Mesnard

PART IV Monuments, Memorials, Museums, Memoirs
11. Negative Spaces and the Play of Memory: The Memorial Art of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz
James E. Young
12. Spiral Memory: Mike Nelson's The Coral Reef (2000), The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent (2001), and The Amnesiacs (1996–)
Helen Hughes
13. Hanka
Miryam Sas
14. Breathe Me Home: A Remembrance via Thomas Andrew Dorsey's “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”
Amy Hassinger
15. Belonged
Audrey Petty

PART V Memory, Memoriam
16. Memory
Sayed Kashua
17. Chasing Glowworms
Steve Stern
18. Disappearer
Dina Guidubaldi
19. In Memoriam
Chase Dimock

PART VI Enacting Memory Studies
20. Memory, Allegory, and the Plague: Albert Camus on Covid-19
Debarati Sanyal
21. Soviet 1960s Cinema and the Nuclear Catastrophe: Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism and Nine Days of One Year
Lilya Kaganovsky
22. Mapuche Hunger Strikes as a Performance of Re-membering
Ethan Madarieta
23. Hölderlin's Memory, and Keats: Reading “Andenken” and “Mnemosyne”
Jeremy Tambling
24. When All Else Seems Lost, There Is Memory: Poetry and Politics in Kashmir and India
Suvir Kaul
25. Sunny
David Wright Faladé

PART VII Digital Memory
26. Digital Afterlives
Julia Creet and Silke Arnold-de Simine
27. Cartographies of Suffering: Mapping Holocaust Memory
Sharon B. Oster

Afterword
Noni Carter

Works Cited
Contributor Bios
Index

Editorial Reviews

Engaging chapters ... This is an important book for those who work, teach, and conduct research within the field of memory studies.” —CHOICE

“This important volume shows the diversity of contemporary cultural memory studies. It opens new avenues for the field by bringing together scholarly and artistic work in a way that invites us to reflect on the fluidity between fictional and theoretical approaches to cultural memory.” —Hanna Meretoja, Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku, Finland

“Brett Ashley Kaplan has put together an innovative and appealing collection that opens up a dynamic, multipronged vision of memory studies. With fiction and memoir placed side-by-side with essays by scholars, activists, and practitioners, Critical Memory Studies offers new directions for a field rapidly becoming institutionalized. Its global scope, interdisciplinary range, and attention to urgent areas of concern, such as ecology and race, make it a must read for all those concerned with the future of the past.” —Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

“Critical Memory Studies opens up a wide spectrum of new approaches to memory in culture. The essays collected in this anthology address a range of current challenges to memory – from racism and environmental degradation to monument wars and digital transformation. Critical Memory Studies demonstrates that what brings together scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds in the field of memory studies is their keen sense of the necessity and the possibilities of an ongoing critique of memory.” —Astrid Erll, Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany

“Unique in its combination of creative and scholarly approaches to memory, this rich collection presents the cutting-edge of memory studies. Absolutely essential reading.” —Susanne C. Knittel, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, Netherlands

From the Publisher