Collective Memory: Remembrance and Representation

Cultural Memory

This reading list is designed to indicate some key texts in the new and ever-growing field of Cultural Memory. If you wish to do some background reading, this would be a good place to start.

Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH & London: University Press of New England, 1999)

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995)

J. Candau, Anthropologie de la mire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996) [unfortunately only available in French]

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Sigmund Freud, ?Mourning and melancholia?, in On Metapsychology, vol 11 Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1984)

Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996)

Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); French original La Mire collective (Paris, 1950)

Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass: & London: Harvard University Press, 1997)

Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995)

Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Oxford: Berg, 1999) (gives some useful models for writing about different kinds of cultural artefect in relation to memory)

Laura Marcus (ed.), Sigmund Freud?s ?The Interpretation of Dreams? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) (especially Marcus?s introductory chapter, pp. 1-65)

Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996-8); French original Les Lieux de mire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)

Robert Perks and A. Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997)

Susannah Radstone (ed.), Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000) (read especially Radstone's introduction)

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994)

Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Viking, 1986)

Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997)

James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (London: Yale University Press, 1993)

More links for thinking about Collective Memory:

Collective Memory

Hunting and Gathering in the Information Society

The Difference Between Remembering and Analyzing the Past

The White House Has Disinvited the Poets: Politics of Poetics

Memory Hole: Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information

What is So Threatening About Reading Out Loud the Names of US Military Killed in Iraq

Making the Myth, Forgetting the Man

How Do You Reach The Truth If Lying Has Become a Habit

What World Events Are Remembered and Why?: On the 10th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide

What People Are Remembered—What People are Forgotten?: The Architect of Black Power

How Are Our Busy Lives Making Remembering More Difficult

Human Ecology of Memory

Tropical America: Can a Video Game Teach Us About Traumatic History?

The Social Mind

Cleveland Memory Project

Race and Collective Memory Bibliography

H-Museum’s Online 9/11 Memorial: Memory—Remembrance—Museum

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Docile: Institutionalized Forgetting