This book critically examines the ways that collective pasts are commemorated and contested in a wide variety of national locations, media and genres.
Collective remembering is a dynamic process, through which narratives about the past, about us and them as well as beliefs, values and affective conditions contained in these stories, are produced and reproduced. This facilitates room for not only the creation of unity but also the potential for contestation and conflict, given that different interpretations of the past are often vehicles for opposing political interests. This book reflects the geographical breadth and empirical depth of the field of collective remembering. Foregrounding the idea that collective remembering always entails contestation, individual chapters explore the field of remembrance and its various genres including murals, memorials, museums, newspaper reports, speeches, textbooks, tourist tours and the work of community activists in countries as diverse as Australia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, the UK and the USA.
This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in Critical Discourse Studies, Memory Studies, Rhetoric and Communications. The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Discourse Studies.
Collective remembering is a dynamic process, through which narratives about the past, about us and them as well as beliefs, values and affective conditions contained in these stories, are produced and reproduced. This book reflects the geographical breadth and empirical depth of the field of collective remembering.
Introduction Discourses of collective remembering: contestation,
politics, affect
1. Genealogy and critical discourse analysis in
conversation: texts, discourse, critique
2. Rhetoric, death, and the politics
of memory
3. Memory practices and colonial discourse: on text trajectories
and lines of flight
4. A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and
environmental justice in South Africas Sarah Baartman District
5. The place
of Palestinians in tourist and Zionist discourses in the City of David,
occupied East Jerusalem
6. A day that unites the nation: contestation of
history in national day discussions
7. Manipulating information and
manipulating people: examples from the 2004 Portuguese parliamentary
celebration of the April revolution
8. Twenty-first century discourses of
American lynching
9. Representing the (un)finished revolution in Belfast's
political murals
10. Memory, media, and museum audiences discourse of
remembering
11. Politics of memory, urban space, and the discourse of
counterhegemonic commemoration: a discourse-ethnographic analysis of the
Living Memorial in Budapests 'Liberty Square'
12. Responsibility for
justice in action: commemoration, affect and politics at Il Memoriale della
Shoah in Milan
John E. Richardson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research interests include critical discourse studies, rhetoric and argumentation, British fascism and commemorative discourse. He is Editor of the international journal Critical Discourse Studies.
Tommaso M. Milani is George and Jane Greer Professor of Applied Linguistics, Jewish Studies and Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. His research interests include critical discourse studies with a focus on space and time. He is Co-Editor of the international journal Language in Society.
