Cultural memory and the construction of identity / edited by Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Ben-Amos, Dan

Weissberg, Liliane.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History--Philosophy.

History.

Memory (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

333 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Detroit : Wayne State University Press, [1999]

Summary:

How do we remember persons, objects, events? Memory seems so personal, but, at the same time, it is shaped by collective experience and public representations. Newspapers, television, and even celebrations and festivities mark for us not only who we are, but also who we were and how we lived. Cultural memory and the Construction of Identity brings together scholars of folklore, literature, history, and communication to explore the dynamics of cultural memory in a variety of contexts. Memory is a powerful tool that can transform a piece of earth into a homeland and common objects into symbols. The authors of this volume show how memory is shaped and how it operates in uniting society and creating images that attain the value of truth even if they deviate from fact. They point to the relationship between this memory and our notion of "culture." They also discuss this cultural memory on the level of everyday life.

Contents:

Worn worlds: clothes, mourning, and the life of things / Peter Stallybrass

Memory confined / Liliane Weissberg

From calendar custom to national memory: European commonplaces / Dorothy Noyes and Roger D. Abrahams

Sites of memory: discourses of the past in Israeli pioneering settlement museums / Tamar Katriel

The liberation of Buchenwald: images and the shape of memory / Barbie Zelizer

Custer loses again: the contestation over commodified public memory / Roberta Pearson

"You must remember this...": or libraries as a locus of cultural memories / Daniel Traister

Placing race at Jefferson's Monticello / Robert Blair St. George

Critical memory and the Black public sphere / Houston Baker, Jr.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-311) and index.

ISBN:

0814327532

OCLC:

39130393