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This edited volume addresses memory practices among youth, families, cultural workers, activists, and engaged citizens in Lebanon and Morocco. In making a claim for 'the social life of memory,' the introduction discusses a particular research field of memory studies, elaborating an approach to memory in terms of social production and engagement. The Arab Spring is evoked to draw attention to new rifts within and between history and remembrance in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East. As authoritarian forms of governance are challenged, official panoramic narratives are confronted with a multiplicity of memories of violent pasts. The eight chapters trace personal and public inventories of violence, trauma, and testimony, addressing memory in cinema, in newspapers and periodicals, as an experience of public environments, through transnational and diasporic mediums, and amongst younger generations.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Memory between Lieu and Milieu.- Chapter 2. A Life of Waiting: Political Violence, Personal Memory, and Enforced Disappearance in Morocco.- Chapter 3. The Civil War's Ghosts: Events of Memory Seen through Lebanese Cinema.- Chapter 4. Transforming Memories: Media and Historiography in the Aftermath of the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission.- Chapter 5. Testimony and Journalism: Moroccan Prison Narratives.- Chapter 6. Sites of Memory in Lebanon: The Hariri Mosque in Martyrs Square.- Chapter 7. Ressouvenirs in Dialogue: University Students Tell Their War Stories.- Chapter 8. ReMemory in an Intergenerational Register: Social and Ethical Life of Testimony.- Chapter 9. Memory as Protest: Mediating Memories of Violence and the Bread Riots in the Rif.
About the author
Norman Saadi Nikro has an Australian-Lebanese background, and holds a PhD (1998) from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and a Habilitation degree (2013) from the University of Potsdam, Germany. His book
The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon came out in 2012.
Sonja Hegasy is the Vice Director of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. She studied Arabic and Islamic studies at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and at Columbia University in New York, USA. In 1996 she received her PhD from the Free University of Berlin, Germany with a thesis on
State and Civil Society in Morocco (in German).
Summary
This edited volume addresses memory practices among youth, families, cultural workers, activists, and engaged citizens in Lebanon and Morocco. In making a claim for ‘the social life of memory,’ the introduction discusses a particular research field of memory studies, elaborating an approach to memory in terms of social production and engagement. The Arab Spring is evoked to draw attention to new rifts within and between history and remembrance in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East. As authoritarian forms of governance are challenged, official panoramic narratives are confronted with a multiplicity of memories of violent pasts. The eight chapters trace personal and public inventories of violence, trauma, and testimony, addressing memory in cinema, in newspapers and periodicals, as an experience of public environments, through transnational and diasporic mediums, and amongst younger generations.
