Performing The Past: Memory, History, And Identity In Modern

Description:
Performing the Past is an investigation of the multiple social and culture practices through which Europeans have negotiated the space between their history and their memory over the past 200 years. In museums, in opera houses, in the streets, in the schools, in theatres, in films, on the internet and beyond, narratives about the past circulate today at a dizzying speed. Producing and selling them is big business; if the past is indeed a foreign country, there are tens of thousands of tourist agents, guides, and pundits around to help us on our way, for a fee, to be sure.This collection of essays by renowned scholars from, among others, Yale, Columbia, Amsterdam Oxford, Cambridge, New York University and the European University Institute in Florence, is essential reading for anyone interested in today's memory boom. Drawing on different national and disciplinary traditions, the authors ultimately engage us with the ways in which Europeans continue a venerable tradition of finding out who they are, and where they are going, by performing the past.

Review: Performing the Past is a dazzling collection of essays by scholars who share a passion for the performative nature of history, memory, and identity. The volume offers refreshing insights for anyone interested in the past. Joanna Bourke, professor of History at Birkbeck College, London

Contents: Table of Contents - 6 Preface - 8 Acknowledgements - 10 CH1. The performance of the past: memory, history, identity - 12 CH2. Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past - 36 CH3. Repetitive structures in language and history - 52 CH4. Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past - 68 CH5. Co-memorations. Performing the past - 106 CH6. 'Indelible memories': the tattooed body as theatre of memory - 120 CH7. Incongruous images. 'Before, during, and after' the Holocaust - 148 CH8. Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theatre - 176 CH9. Music and memory in Mozart's Zauberfloete - 188 CH10. The many afterlives of Ivanhoe - 208 CH11. Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks - 236 CH12. Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation - 258 CH13. 'In these days of convulsive political change'. Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815 - 288 CH14. Restitution as a means of remembrance. Evocations of the recent past in the Czech Republic and Poland after 1989 - 306 CH15. European identity and the politics of remembrance - 336 About the Authors - 362 List of Illustrations - 368

Author Biography: Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University. Karin Tilmans is a cultural historian, fellow of the Department of History and Civilisation, and academic coordinator of the Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, both at the European University Institute. Frank van Vree is an historian and professor of journalism at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.