Memory and Social Movements in Modern and Contemporary History

Remembering Past Struggles and Resourcing Protest

Stefan Berger, Christian Koller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9783031528187
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031528194
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Reflecting the growing interest of historians in memory studies, this edited collection examines the relationship between memory and global social movements from 1848 to the present. For a long time, there has been little attempt by historians to consider memory and social activism in an integrated, systematic, and comparative way. However, in recent years, scholars have demonstrated that social movements rely on collective memories to assert claims, mobilize supporters, and legitimize their political visions, while also helping to further shape collective memories. This book delves into the synergies between memory studies and social movements, exploring how social movements have been constructing and creating memories of their own activity, how specific landscapes of memory have influenced social movements, and how activists have used memory as a cultural resource to further their own goals and ambitions. The case studies presented cover a range of different types of political activism, including the fights for workers', gay, feminist, and pacifist rights, as well as ecological, urban, and far-right movements across the globe, portraying the diverse interrelations that exist between social movements and collective memory.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Memory Studies Meets Social Movement Studies
• 2. Framing the ‘Collective Memory’: The Politics of Mobilisations Against Hydropower Projects in Maharashtra, India (1980–2004)
• 3. Seeds as a Site for Humanistic Inquiry: Mapping Memory and Movement Through the “Sovereign Forest”
• 4. Constructing the History of Working-Class Neighbourhoods: Communicative and Cognitive Reference to the Past in Conflicts Over Urban Redevelopment in West-German Cities in the 1970s and 1980s
• 5. Memory of Serfdom and the Peasant Rebellion in Lesko Powiat
• 6. Revolutionary Memory and the Genesis of the State: A Failed “Dress Rehearsal” and Changed Scripts in Polish Socialist Movements 1905–1920
• 7. Martyrs of the Labour Movement? Commemoration of Protest Casualties in Switzerland
• 8. Negotiations Over the Past: 2009’s General Strike in the French Caribbean and the Colonial Past
• 9. Mind the Gap: Gay Activism and the Remembrance of Gay Victims at the Dachau Memorial Site
• 10. Imoinda in Berlin: Feminists and the Cultural Memory of Slavery After 1848
• 11. Remembering Tolstoyans: The Soviet/Russian Independent Peace Movement, in Search of a Russian Historical Tradition of Pacifism
• 12. Spain, Munich, Auschwitz: The Role of Historical Analogies in the Protest Movements in Europe Against the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992–1995
• 13. History, Memory, and the Populist Right in Germany from the Second World War to the Present Day
• Back Matter