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This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory. In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent.
Taking as a key turning point the self-fashioning of the first Roman emperor Augustus, author Jennifer Finn revisits the idea of “universal history” in Polybius, Justin, and Diodorus, combined with the Stoic philosophy of determinism present in authors like Plutarch and Arrian. Finn endeavors to determine the ways in which Roman authors manipulated narratives about Alexander’s campaigns—and even other significant events in Mediterranean history—to artificially construct a past to which the Romans could attach themselves as a natural teleological culmination. In doing so, Contested Pasts uses five case studies to reexamine aspects of Alexander’s campaigns that have received much attention in modern scholarship, providing new interpretations of issues such as: his connections to the Trojan and Persian wars; the Great Weddings at Susa; the battle(s) of Thermopylae in 480 BCE and 191 BCE and Alexander's conflict at the Persian Gates; the context of his “Last Plans”;” the role of his memory in imagining the Roman Civil Wars; and his fictitious visit to the city of Jerusalem. While Finn demonstrates throughout the book that the influence for many of these narratives likely originated in the reign of Alexander or his Successors, nevertheless these retroactive authorial manipulations force us to confront the fact that we may have an even more opaque understanding of Alexander than has previously been acknowledged. Through the application of a mnemohistorical approach, the book seeks to provide a new understanding of the ways in which the Romans—and people in the purview of the Romans—conceptualized their own world with reference to Alexander the Great.
A pioneering and comprehensive study of the historical imagination in Kashmir, this book explores the conversations between the ideas of Kashmir and the ideas of history taking place within Kashmir’s multilingual historical tradition. Analysing the deep linkages among Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts contends that these traditions drew on and influenced each other to imagine Kashmir as far more than simply an unsettled territory or a tourist paradise. By offering a historically grounded reflection on the memories, narrative practices, and institutional contexts that have informed, and continue to inform, imaginings of Kashmir and its past, the book suggests new ways of understanding the debates over history, territory, identity, and sovereignty that shape contemporary South Asia.
Urban Heritage in Divided Cities explores the role of contested urban heritage in mediating, subverting and overcoming sociopolitical conflict in divided cities. Investigating various examples of transformations of urban heritage around the world, the book analyses the spatial, social and political causes behind them, as well as the consequences for the division and reunification of cities during both wartime and peacetime conflicts. Contributors to the volume define urban heritage in a broad sense, as tangible elements of the city, such as ruins, remains of border architecture, traces of violence in public space and memorials, as well as intangible elements like urban voids, everyday rituals, place names and other forms of spatial discourse. Addressing both historic and contemporary cases from a wide range of academic disciplines, contributors to the book investigate the role of urban heritage in divided cities in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. Shifting focus from the notion of urban heritage as a fixed and static legacy of the past, the volume demonstrates that the concept is a dynamic and transformable entity that plays an active role in inquiring, critiquing, subverting and transforming the present. Urban Heritage in Divided Cities will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, sociology, the political sciences, history, human geography, urban design and planning, architecture, archaeology, ethnology and anthropology. The book should also be essential reading for professionals who are involved in governing, planning, designing and transforming urban heritage around the world.
From nineteenth-century public baths to today's private backyard havens, swimming pools have long been a provocative symbol of American life. In this social and cultural history of swimming pools in the United States, Jeff Wiltse relates how, over the years, pools have served as asylums for the urban poor, leisure resorts for the masses, and private clubs for middle-class suburbanites. As sites of race riots, shrinking swimsuits, and conspicuous leisure, swimming pools reflect many of the tensions and transformations that have given rise to modern America.
The Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey was the site of one of the most tragic and memorable battles of the twentieth century, with the Turks fighting the ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corps) and soldiers from fifteen other countries. This book explores the history of its landscape, its people, and its heritage, from the day that the defeated Allied troops of World War One evacuated the peninsula in January 1916 to the present. It examines how the wartime heritage of this region, both tangible and intangible, is currently being redefined by the Turkish state to bring more of a faith-based approach to the secularist narratives about the origins of the country. It provides a timely and fascinating look at what has happened in the last century to a landscape that was devastated and emptied of its inhabitants at the end of World War One, how it recovered, and why this geography continues to be a site of contested heritage. This book will be a key text for scholars of cultural and historical geography, Ottoman and World War One archaeology, architectural history, commemorative and conflict studies, European military history, critical heritage studies, politics, and international relations.
This book explores the reinterpretations of Poland’s past which have been undertaken by Polish national and local elites since the fall of communism. It focuses on remembrance practices and traces the de-commemorating of communism to examine the ways in which collective remembering and forgetting shapes present power constellations in Poland and impacts on foreign and domestic policy. The book outlines the detail of the new hegemonic national myths which are being established but also investigates fragmentation and diversification of commemorative practices at the local level that has the most potential to challenge the dominant vision of national Polish identity, historically centred on martyrdom, heroism and independence, as less relevant to Poland’s new aspirations for the future.
2020 Brendan Gill Prize finalist For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in 1967, displacing thousands of low-income people of color with the promise that they would soon return to new housing—housing that never came. Over decades, efforts to keep out affordable housing sparked deep-rooted enmity and stalled development, making SPURA a dramatic study of failed urban renewal, as well as a microcosm epitomizing the greatest challenges faced by American cities since World War II. Artist and urban scholar Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani was invited to enter this tense community to support a new approach to planning, which she accepted using collaboration, community organizing, public history, and public art. Having engaged her students at The New School in a multi-year collaboration with community activists, the exhibitions and guided tours of her Layered SPURA project provided crucial new opportunities for dialogue about the past, present, and future of the neighborhood. Simultaneously revealing the incredible stories of community and activism at SPURA, and shedding light on the importance of collaborative creative public projects, Contested City bridges art, design, community activism, and urban history. This is a book for artists, planners, scholars, teachers, cultural institutions, and all those who seek to collaborate in new ways with communities.
Essays looking at heritage practices and the construction of the past, along with how they can be used to build a national identity. The preservation of architectural monuments has played a key role in the formation of national identities from the nineteenth century to the present. The task of maintaining the collective memories and ideas of a shared heritage often focused on the historic built environment as the most visible sign of a link with the past. The meaning of such monuments and sites has, however, often been the subject of keen dispute: whose heritage is being commemorated, by whom and for whom? The answers to such questions are not always straightforward, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, the recent history of which has been characterized by territorial disputes, the large-scale movement of peoples, and cultural dispossession. This volume considers the dilemmas presented by the recent and complex histories of European states such as Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Examining the effect ofthe destruction of buildings by war, the loss of territories, or the "unwanted" built heritage of the Communist and Nazi regimes, the contributors examine how architectural and urban sites have been created, destroyed, or transformed, in the attempt to make visible a national heritage. Matthew Rampley is Professor of History of Art at the University of Birmingham. Contributors: Matthew Rampley, Juliet Kinchin, Paul Stirton, SusanneJaeger, Arnold Bartetzky, Jacek Friedrich, Tania Vladova, George Karatzas, Riitta Oittinen
Myths are a major, universal sociological mechanism which is still rather poorly understood Demonstrates the relevance and the potential of myths as a research area Provides a timely shift in the usual focus of national studies, which typically centers on ethnicity, immigration, integration, citizenship, cultural diversity and nationalism Demonstrates the nature and the functioning of myths in contemporary societies, as a nexus of meanings that feed identities, memory and utopias Contributions from international authors