Bøker i Heritage and Memory Studies-serien

When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of - as W.G. Sebald puts it - the "natural history of destruction", comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.

This book is about postcolonial memory in the Netherlands. This term refers to conflicts in contemporary society about how the colonial past should be remembered. The question is often: who has the right or ability to tell their stories and who do not? In other words: who has a voice, and who is silenced? As such, these conflicts represent a wider tendency in cultural theory and activism to use voice as a metaphor for empowerment and silence as voice‿s negative counterpart, signifying powerlessness. And yet, there are voices that do not liberate us from, but rather subject us to power. Meanwhile, silence can be powerful: it can protect, disrupt and reconfigure. Throughout this book, it will become clear how voice and silence function not as each other‿s opposites, but as each other‿s continuation, and that postcolonial memory is articulated through the interplay of meaningful voices and meaningful silences.

Growing Up Communist in the Netherlands and Britain: Childhood, Political Activism, and Identity Formation documents communists' attempts, successful and otherwise, to overcome their isolation and to connect with the major social and political movements of the twentieth century. Communist parties in Britain and the Netherlands emerged from the Second World War expecting to play a significant role in post-war society, due to their domestic anti-fascist activities and to the part played by the Soviet Union in defeating fascism. The Cold War shattered these hopes, and isolated communist parties and their members. By analysing the accounts of communist children, Weesjes highlights their struggle to establish communities and define their identities within the specific cultural, social, and political frameworks of their countries.

Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies: Unremembering Decolonization examines the afterlife of decolonization in the collective memory of the Netherlands. It offers a new perspective on the cultural history of representing the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies, and maps out how a contested collective memory was shaped. Taking a transdisciplinary approach and applying several theoretical frames from literary studies, sociology, cultural anthropology and film theory, the author reveals how mediated memories contributed to a process of what he calls "unremembering." He analyses in detail a broad variety of sources, including novels, films, documentaries, radio interviews, memoirs and historical studies, to reveal how five decades of representing and remembering decolonization fed into an unremembering by which some key notions were silenced or ignored. The author concludes that historians, or the historical guild, bear much responsibility for the unremembering of decolonization in Dutch collective memory.

This book explores Ottoman-Turkish involvement and interest in the subject between 1870, when Heinrich Schliemann began his excavations in search of Troy on Ottoman soil, and the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, which gave the Turks their own version of the heroic epic of Troy.

This book explores the protracted interest in Spain and its culture, and it exposes the co-existent ambiguity between scorn and fascination that characterizes Western historical perceptions, in particular in Britain and the Low Countries.

This book interrogates how people engage with their violent past, both within their families and as members of a national community, when living in an extremely complicated society with a short history of independence and a desire to belong to Europe.

Breaking new ground in the study of post-socialist memory culture, this book explains why former GDR cadres replicate GDR memory culture against their stigmatized status in unified Germany.

David Duindam examines how the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theatre in Amsterdam used for the registration and deportation of nearly 50,000 Jews, became a memorial museum, and how it will continue to be a meaningful site for future generations.

This book examines actual processes of experiencing the imagined community, exploring its emotive force in a number of case studies.

This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to offer perspectives on national identity formation in various European contexts between 1600 and 1815.

This book offers a critical analysis of modelscapes, using case studies from Israel, to show how miniature representations of contested physical space participate in the construction of a sense of national identity and appropriation of the land and its history.

This book considers the growing awareness in the wake of World War I that culture could play an effective political role in international relations.

This incisive volume brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia.