Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe

Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe discusses processes of memory construction associated with the realities of war and genocide, totalitarianism, colonialism as well as trans-border dialogues in the overcoming of conflict memories. It is based on the premise that there are no available clear-cut or definite positions to approach the problematic issues of conflict, memory and history. Consequently, it examines and articulates across several different media discourses, problems, contexts and considerations of value. Its scope is thus deliberately interdisciplinary, drawing on the cross-fertilization of diverse research methods. The book addresses a number of issues and raises questions that have been crucial to our modern thought, and problematic or even inexplicable to any cultural theory that approaches history with an ethical approach. It works through and evaluates ongoing representative processes, strategies and practices, next to longstanding constraints, dilemmas and taboos regarding discussions of contentious matters. The different perspectives from which the issues of conflict, identity and memory are examined, in authoritarian, new European and (post-) colonial contexts, provide examples of power and conflict memory intervening in discourse and areas of cultural practice, destabilizing fixed or encoded meaning. It examines how the making sense of our memories-so vital for the qualification of culture and social practices-is about concepts and ideas, as well as emotions and attachments, i.e. meaning resulting from effective social exchange framed by specific contexts of interpretation. As such, the book is also a contribution to a memory culture that is pushing forward the clarification of conflicts, crystallizations of tension and all sorts of threads that bind us, very often invisibly, to the past.