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Demonstrates that cultural memory endures not in stone but in the living actions that continually reshape it.
Locations of Cultural Memory offers a comprehensive and incisive exploration of how societies and cultures both remember and forget. Drawing on global case studies and weaving together history, aesthetics, cultural studies, and sociology, this book is unique in revealing with critical acuity how and why monuments and architecture, often assumed to preserve cultural memory, instead prove to be fragile due to power shifts and changing contexts. In contrast, ephemeral practices—embodied actions and relationships—can transform personal memory into collective understanding, generating relational ties that extend beyond the individual and allowing personal memories and interpretations to coalesce into shared cultural memory. Bridging material and nonmaterial approaches, the volume's intention is to expand our idea of the monument and to reveal the magnitude of ethical concerns comprehended in representing and transmitting cultural memory.
"This ambitious collection seeks, through an eclectic and international array of case studies, to expand our 'idea of a monument.' In addition to examining tangible commemorative artifacts and their relationship to politics (especially colonialism and totalitarianism) and aesthetics, the book also treats monuments more metaphorically—as features of consciousness or even individual human beings. I know of no other collection on the theme of memorialization that theorizes quite so boldly in this direction." — Steven Trout, University of Alabama
Lenore Metrick-Chen is a curator, cultural critic, and Emeritus Professor of Art and Cultural History at Drake University. She is the author of Collecting Objects / Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830–1900, also published by SUNY Press, and the creator of the interactive website Black Iowa and the Nation: Transforming Historical Silences.
Acknowledgments
Preface Introduction
Part One: Deconstructing Monuments
1. The Shape of Memory: Transformations in American Memorials
Lenore Metrick-Chen
2. Of Memory and a "Masterpiece": A Boli between Mali and France
John Monroe
3. Expressions of Solidarity and Difference: The 'Comfort Women' Memorials in the U.S.
Mary M. McCarthy
4. Creating Cultural Memory Through Built Landscape, Portraits and Currency in Kenya
Karega-Mũnene
5. "Histories in Conflict": Excavating the Haus der Kunst
Mark W. Rectanus
6. Ruined Memories: Gordon Matta-Clark's Nonuments
Christian Hammes
Part Two: Ephemeral Monuments
7. The Scent of Chrysanthemums: Merit and Memorialization in Japanese Aesthetics
Leah Kalmanson
8. Cognitive Monuments: Lineage and Transmission in the Daoist Tradition
Louis Komjathy
9. Presentification of the Absented
Mariela Yeregui
10. Gender and Power in Cultural and Political Memory: Studies of Sudan and Eritrea
Sondra Hale
11. "Doing Memory" or Collecting Life Stories at the Hotel: Reflections on the Transmission of Dominated Memories between Ethnography and Literature
Claire Lévy-Vroelant
Part Three: New Shape of Monuments
12. How Wide is a Border? An Answerable Landscape
Lenore Metrick-Chen
Epilogue
Lenore Metrick-Chen
List of Contributors
Index