Conflicting Memories is a study of historical rewriting about Tibetans' encounter with the Chinese state during the Maoist era. Combining case studies with translated documents, it traces how that experience has been reimagined by Chinese and Tibetan authors and artists since the late 1970s.

This volume investigates the mechanisms (artworks, treatises, and other forms of cultural patronage) that the Marquises of Villena and their opponents used to operate in the cultural battlefield of the time with the aim of understanding how their conflicting historical memories were constructed and manipulated. Concentrating on the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the book examines these two aristocrats and demonstrates that political tensions led not only to military conflicts during this period but also to conflicts fought on cultural grounds, through the promotion of artistic, religious, and literary programmes. Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin investigates why the Marquises of Villena lost in both the military and cultural battlefields and explains how the negative historical memories forged by their opponents in the late fifteenth century managed to become the official historical truth that has remained unchallenged to this day. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural history, medieval studies, Renaissance studies, Iberian studies, literary studies, and patronage studies.

The 2014 centenary of the outbreak of World War One has resulted in a noticeable increase in the number of publications devoted to this conflict. A question thus arises what makes Conflicting discourses, competing memories: Commemorating The First World War stand out among similar volumes. Indeed, it is the cinematic scope that distinguishes it, as the collected articles comprise a wide spectrum of research, including prose, poetry and film as well as painting dedicated to the Great War. Simultaneously, the book propose an interesting trans-historical purview, combining discussions of the cultural representation of the Great War both from the interwar period and from the contemporary post-memory perspective. The volume as a whole emphasises the significance of the Great War within the context of international cultural memory, as it includes Polish, Romanian, Italian, British, Canadian and American perspectives. From the review by Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, PhD, DLitt

This book discusses a number of ways in which the dialogue about Europe’s past and future could be rendered more inclusive, such as the promotion of critical and sentimental education and the creation of virtual and actual social spaces in which citizens and organised identity groups can participate. The discussion about European memory is far from being a “merely” symbolic issue with no political consequences. Imagining Europe and its past in different ways will lead to different real political outcomes. For instance, thinking about European integration as an embodiment of the values of the Enlightenment (such as human rights, liberal democracy, and reason), as a guarantor of peace on the continent, as a guarantor of prosperity, or as a guarantor that massive human rights violations like genocide will “never again” be committed on its soil, all entail different political objectives. Similarly, conflicting understandings of European memory as either a thing or a social construct, as either one memory or a plurality of memories, as either the end point of deliberation or a dialogical process, represent not merely inconsequential cultural “froth on the tides of society,” but crucially important issues with real political consequences. The book is intended to contribute to this discussion about the common European approach to the past (and thus to the future).

Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe discusses processes of memory construction associated with the realities of war and genocide, totalitarianism, colonialism as well as trans-border dialogues in the overcoming of conflict memories. It is based on the premise that there are no available clear-cut or definite positions to approach the problematic issues of conflict, memory and history. Consequently, it examines and articulates across several different media discourses, problems, contexts and considerations of value. Its scope is thus deliberately interdisciplinary, drawing on the cross-fertilization of diverse research methods. The book addresses a number of issues and raises questions that have been crucial to our modern thought, and problematic or even inexplicable to any cultural theory that approaches history with an ethical approach. It works through and evaluates ongoing representative processes, strategies and practices, next to longstanding constraints, dilemmas and taboos regarding discussions of contentious matters. The different perspectives from which the issues of conflict, identity and memory are examined, in authoritarian, new European and (post-) colonial contexts, provide examples of power and conflict memory intervening in discourse and areas of cultural practice, destabilizing fixed or encoded meaning. It examines how the “making sense” of our memories—so vital for the qualification of culture and social practices—is about concepts and ideas, as well as emotions and attachments, i.e. meaning resulting from effective social exchange framed by specific contexts of interpretation. As such, the book is also a contribution to a memory culture that is pushing forward the clarification of conflicts, crystallizations of tension and all sorts of threads that bind us, very often invisibly, to the past.

What insights can we gain from the social sciences about the role memory plays in creating or re-creating the many conflicts threatening global peace in the twenty-first century? Indeed, can knowledge about the relationship between memory and conflict help resolve intergroup conflicts and heal individual hurts? This book presents a series of essays both theoretical and empirical that approach these questions from a variety of disciplines that will highlight a much-neglected aspect of one of the major problems facing the world today.

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now "spectacle" can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin's plea to "explode the continuum of history" and bring our attention to now-time.