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As the world negotiates immense loss and questions of how to memorialize, the contributions in this volume evaluate the role of culture as a means to promote reconciliation, either between formerly warring parties, perpetrators and survivors, governments and communities, or within the self. Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies reflects on a distinct aspect of mourning work: the possibility to move towards recovery, while in a period of grief, waiting, silence, or erasure. Drawing on ethnographic data and archival material from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Argentina, Palestine, Israel, Wales, Peru, Colombia, Hungary, Chile, Pakistan, and India, the authors analyze how memorialization and commemoration is practiced by communities who have experienced trauma and violence, while in the absence of memorials, mutual acknowledgement, and the bodies of the missing. This timely volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars with an interest in memory studies, sociology, history, politics, conflict, and peace studies
List of contents
Introduction: Absence and Trauma in Post-Conflict Memorialisation.- Articulating Presence of Absence: Everyday Memory and the Performance of Silence in Sarajevo.- Mourning in Reluctant Sites of Memory: From Afrophobia to Cultural Productivity.- Dust on Dust: Performing Selk'nam Visions, Tracing Absent Bodies.- Reading Absence, Gender, and the Land(scape) in Palestinian Art.- Monumenting Our Pasts: Monuments, what are they now?.- The Resolution of Doubts: Towards Recognition of the Systematic Abduction of Yemenite Children in Israel.- The Commemorative Continuum of Partition Violence.- Absent Bodies, Present Pasts: Forced Disappearance as Historical Injustice in the Peruvian Highlands.- Restoring the Human Dignity of Absent Bodies in Colombia.- The Wandering Memorial: Figures of Ambivalence in Hungarian Holocaust Memorialization.- Afterword: Mourning, Memorialising, and Absence During Covid-19.
About the author
Olivette Otele is Professor of Colonial History and Memory of Slavery at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, and a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Historical Society.
Luisa Gandolfo is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
Yoav Galai is Lecturer in Global Political Communication at the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London
