This text analyzes the practices involved in procuring human tissue, and examines how the German past and present-day situation within the European Union are key in understanding the form that medical practices take within various contexts.

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.

This edited collection explores the political dimensions of cultural memory work in its varied forms of representation, from public monuments to literary texts. Addressing the different ways that cultural texts represent the past in the present, the collection demonstrates that cultural memory is something actively made: the site of a struggle over meanings that can serve a range of political and cultural purposes. The collection offers essays that discuss the politics of cultural memory both in theory and in practice, and features work by some of the leading scholars in the field including Susannah Radstone, Graham Dawson, Felicity Collins and Therese Davis. Contributors explore the ways in which memory comes to be articulated through particular cultural practices, from film and photography to literature and public monuments, all of which have their own codes and conventions, modes of address and audiences. As such this volume brings together scholars working in a range of disciplines (literary studies, history, art history, film studies) and in so doing seeks to establish a dialogue between different disciplines and methodologies and to explore cultural memory work in a range of different intellectual fields, cultural forms and political and historical contexts, for instance, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, Australia, Palestine, and the former Soviet Bloc. The collection will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars working in the area of cultural memory studies, for whom it will represent an invaluable collection of current work in the field. It will also interest scholars working in the particular areas with which it engages, for instance, postcolonial studies, Holocaust studies, Eastern European Studies, Irish Studies, Art History and English Studies.

In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century. Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

In The Archive and the Repertoire preeminent performance studies scholar Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. The Archive and the Repertoire is a compelling demonstration of the many ways that the study of performance enables a deeper understanding of the past and present, of ourselves and others.

Essays in Memory of Jan-Georg Deutsch The volume observes some of the principles that drove Prof. Jan-Georg Deutsch's research: highlighting present-day politics for the way they shape historical remembrance, learning from people on the ground through fieldwork and oral history, and bringing various parts of the African continent into discussion with one another. From Cape Town to Charlottesville, many societies are grappling with historical consciousness and the production of public memory. In particular, how and why societies remember and forget, what should serve as symbols of collective memory, and whether there exists space for multiple memory cultures are questions being vigorously debated once again. These discussions present particular challenges not only to official memory bound to ideological constructions of nationhood but also to the teaching of history and its links to social justice movements. The volume re-centres Africa and African history in memory studies, with each chapter drawing parallels to comparable cases in Africa and the world. An underlying assumption is that what can be learned from the politics of historical memory in Africa will have relevance for contemporary politics globally and for understanding how memories can be mobilised for political ends.