Read more
The yearning for historical justice has become one of the defining features of our age. Governments, international bodies and civil society organisations address historical injustices through truth commissions, tribunals, official apologies and other transitional justice measures. Historians produce knowledge of past human rights violations, and museums, memorials and commemorative ceremonies try to keep that knowledge alive and remember the victims of injustices. In this book, researchers explore the various attempts to recover and remember the past as a means of addressing historic wrongs. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Historians and the yearning for historical justice 2. The disappearing museum 3. Stumbling blocks in Germany 4. The ethics of nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa 5. Excavating Tempelhof airfield: objects of memory and the politics of absence 6. Jewish Haifa denies its Arab past 7. Ghosts and compañeros: haunting stories and the quest for justice around Argentina’s former terror sites 8. The desire for justice, psychic reparation and the politics of memory in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland
About the author
Klaus Neumann is a trained historian who works as a research professor at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, in Melbourne, Australia. Recent titles include
Across the Seas: Australia's Response to Refugees: A History (2015) and
Historical Justice (ed., with Janna Thompson, 2015). He is currently researching issues of historical justice, the policy response to refugees, asylum seekers and other irregular migrants, and the politics of compassion.
Summary
The yearning for historical justice – that is, for the redress of past wrongs – has become one of the defining features of our age. Governments, international bodies and civil society organisations address historical injustices through truth commissions, tribunals, official apologies and other transitional justice measures. Historians produce knowledge of past human rights violations, and museums, memorials and commemorative ceremonies try to keep that knowledge alive and remember the victims of injustices.
In this book, researchers with a background in history, archaeology, cultural studies, literary studies and sociology explore the various attempts to recover and remember the past as a means of addressing historic wrongs. Case studies include sites of persecution in Germany, Argentina and Chile, the commemoration of individual victims of Nazi Germany, memories of life under South Africa’s apartheid regime, and the politics of memory in Israel and in Northern Ireland. The authors critique memory, highlight silences and absences, explore how to engage with the ghosts of the past, and ask what drives individuals, including professional historians, to strive for historical justice.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.
