Books in the Cultural Memories series

The most recent member-state of the European Union, Croatia, has been shaped by a culture of war commemoration since the Homeland War of the 1990s that secured independence. These commemorative practices, including museums, memoirs and satirical cartoons, are the subject of study in this book, offering insights into Croatia's place in Europe today.

What should we do with places that were theatres of mass suffering and atrocity? Should we keep them as they were, to remind us of the past, or transform them? This volume addresses these questions by discussing selected key trauma sites, analysed with an innovative semiotic methodology that sheds new light on the notions of trauma and memory.

This book explores the Trevi Fountain through the prism of cultural memory to reveal the processes that make it so iconic and performative. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that includes imagery in art, literature, film, music and the e-Trevi of the internet, this volume looks at how memory travels between media.

When Europe fell prey to totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, the Slovene artist Tone Kralj expressed resistance through his paintings in Catholic churches on the Slovene-Italian ethnic border, which show Hitler and Mussolini as villainous Biblical characters. This highly illustrated volume traces the anti-fascist messages in his work.

What is a memory of the future? This book speculates on the connections between memory and futurity in a variety of fields, including counter-histories, women's studies, science fiction, art and design, technology, philosophy and politics. Topics include technology and fashion, reinventions of monetary exchange and memories of adolescence.

Migrant Memories provides an innovative perspective on the power of cultural memory and the influence of cinema on the Italian diaspora in Britain. Based on extensive interviews with Southern Italian migrants and their children, this study offers a fresh understanding of the migrants' journey from Italy to Britain since the early 1950s. The volume examines how the experience of contemporary Italian identity has been mediated through film, photography and popular culture through the generations. Beginning with an analysis of the films of Frank Capra and Anthony Minghella, the book goes on to address the popular melodramas of Raffaello Matarazzo and ultimately argues that cinema, and the memory of it, had a significant influence on the identity formation of first-generation Italians in Britain. Coupled with this analysis of cinema's relationship to migration, the cultural memory of the Italian diaspora is explored through traditions of education, religion, marriage and cuisine. The volume highlights the complexities of cultural history and migration at a time when debates about immigration in Britain have become politically and culturally urgent.

This innovative volume examines First World War commemoration in an international, multidisciplinary and comparative context, combining new studies of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific to illuminate the fluid and oft-contested relationships amongst nation, history and memory.

Networked Remembrance is the first book to explore questions of urban memory in the underground railways of the contemporary city. Using London's and Berlin's underground railways as comparative case studies, this book reveals how social memories are spatially produced within the everyday and concealed places in these networks.

Fragile Memory, Shifting Impunity is an interdisciplinary study of commemorative sites related to human rights violations committed primarily during dictatorial rule in Argentina (1976-1983) and Uruguay (1973-1985). Taking as a departure point the 'politics of memory' - a term that acknowledges memory's propensity for engagement beyond the cultural sphere - this study shifts the focus away from exclusively aesthetic and architectural readings of marches, memorials and monuments to instead analyse their emergence and transformation in post-dictatorship Argentina and Uruguay. This book incorporates the role of state and societal actors and conflicts underpinning commemorative processes into its analysis, reading the sites within shifting contexts of impunity to explore their relationship to memory, truth seeking and justice in the long aftermath of dictatorship.

The Cold War left indelible traces on the city, where polarities on the global stage intersected with existing political and social dynamics. This collection taps into the rich fabric of memories, histories and cultural interactions of urban communities in thirteen cities worldwide, countering many myths about the Cold War era.

This volume explores the synergies and tensions between memory studies and postcolonial studies across literatures and media from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and intersections with Asia. It makes a unique contribution to this growing international and interdisciplinary field by considering an unprecedented range of languages and sources.

West vs East, antifascism vs fascism, capitalism vs communism: these are the symbolic boundaries that have divided Europe. Focusing on the Adriatic and central European regions, this collection of essays explores ruptures and continuities in memory cultures, commemorative practices and the varying politics of the past in European borderlands.

This book offers new perspectives on transnational citizenship, memory and strategies of development. Beginning with an exploration of belonging and cultural memory, the book turns to a series of case studies in order to examine the ways in which citizens actively engage with their state of origin through narratives of remembrance. In the Haitian case, community engagement is primarily a grassroots movement in spite of the early creation of a Ministry of Haitians Abroad (MHAVE). The Jamaican case, however, differentiates itself by having a top-down structure promoted by an administration that actively seeks to engage Jamaicans abroad by way of solidarity funds. By treating simultaneously two geopolitical entities, Francophonie and the Commonwealth, this study offers a unique, comparative perspective on a complex web of family networks, spiritual bonds and entrepreneurial cross-border practices at the core of a common Caribbean culture of resilience and self-reliance. The findings on the relationship between memory, citizenship and the State challenge the existing assumption that communities abroad become increasingly assimilated into the new society, whereas, in fact, the idea of a transnational citizenship has become increasingly prevalent. This evolution is enhanced by memory, which acts as a powerful dynamic engine to deconstruct citizenship while connecting beyond borders.

In 1945, the Soviet Union annexed the East Prussian city of Königsberg, later renaming it Kaliningrad. Left in ruins by the war, the home of Immanuel Kant became a Russian city, a source of historical and cultural fascination for settlers, former inhabitants, visitors and observers alike. New settlers replaced the German population in the years that followed. This book looks at three aspects of Kaliningrad¿s relationship to the memory of Königsberg through cultural and literary sources and visual representations. First, it addresses the symbolism of Königsberg as a memory site in German culture and nostalgia for the city after 1945. Second, it discusses imagined and satirical literary-cultural adaptations and deconstructions of the idea of «Kant and Königsberg» during the Cold War and afterwards. Third, it explores and reflects on discourses of memory, history and nostalgia in representations of the city by poets, photographers and filmmakers visiting Kaliningrad from the 1960s onwards. The book provides an introduction to the memory debates relating to Königsberg-Kaliningrad, as well as new critical readings of literary texts, films and photographic works.

The Great War set in motion all of the subsequent violence of the twentieth century. This volume offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, exploring the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions.