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This study sheds light on competitive lieux de memoire in the south-east of Slovenia that are directly related to significant social changes of the twentieth century. The aim is to evaluate the perceptions of influential domestic stakeholders, including experts and media, representing (different) perspectives of the transformation of sites of memory into national and transnational spaces of memory in the dark tourism context. We carried out 10 interviews and a qualitative inductive content analysis, and a subsequent qualitative deductive content analysis of 16 news media articles. Creating an Euler diagram, we compared real social and media-created reality and found inconsistencies: only three main categories are common. We found that development issues are highlighted within social reality, while the media mainly report on what was observed on the ground, at sites or events. Despite the polarised Slovenian post-socialist atmosphere, competitive memories gradually become multidirectional with the potential for the commodification of lieux de memoire within international dark tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by an idea that occurred to me during a walking holiday in Scotland, this article identifies a new dimension to place memory: namely, the way in which we can be unexpectedly reminded of one place in another that is, on first inspection, very different. Reflecting on this phenomenon has led me to propose (similar to Hayden Lorimer) that topographical features such as slope, camber and terrain are key to embodied memories and help explain why they are, on occasion, transportable. This thesis then becomes the springboard for a dialogue with the post-phenomenological approaches to landscape developed by John Wylie and others regarding the existential (im) possibility of there being any 'coincidence' between 'self and world'. My counter-argument proceeds via an exploration of different models of memory – in particular, Henri Bergson's work on déjà-vu – which helps explain our fleeting sensations of familiarity and belonging to particular locations. By this means, the notional indifference of the landscape (as construed by the post-phenomenologists) is emplaced. These conclusions return the discussion to wider debates in cultural geography about what we stand to lose, and exclude, through the move from phenomenological to post-phenomenological frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on representations of the city in 20th- and twenty-first-century Moroccan literature. In particular, this work concerns itself with the different social, historical, and political forces that together contribute to the construction of urban spaces, and it draws on a number of critical and theoretical fields, including cultural memory studies and literary studies, while at the same time considering different contemporary Moroccan urban structures from a spatio-temporal perspective. More precisely, this article addresses the city in Medieval, colonial, and postcolonial Morocco as a territory of individual and collective memory in Fās ... Law cĀdat Ilayh (2003) (If Fez Returned to Him), a novel by Aḥmad al-Madīnī, and Le griot de Marrakech (2005), (The Griot of Marrakesh), a collection of short stories by Mahi Binebine. This study examines various cultural monuments, including the imperial city gates, the Mellah (Jewish quarter), texts both North African and Andalusi, and historical personalities, insofar as they function as lieuxdemémoire according to Pierre Nora's usage of the term. These components of Moroccan cultural heritage function as manifestations of history through memory, rooted both in material and immaterial figures, and constitute national identity: an interfaith, multiethnic, and pluri-linguistic Morocco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, the orientation toward economic and social history of France's new history weakened the traditional national history narrative. A series of major social and political changes in French society of the 1970s reduced consciousness of the nation-state, and individualized historical memory and counter-memories and identities became increasingly prominent as the historical memory of the Lavissian nation-state fragmented. It was in this context that les lieux de mémoire emerged; Pierre Nora seeks to pursue a national consciousness without nationalism by recalling the realms of memory. Although inspired by Ernest Lavisse's L'histoire de France, this study, more inclusive than Lavisse's, is a reflective "second-degree history" that attempts to seek identity in the "inheritance" of national memory following the decay of nationalist ideology. The proposed lieux de mémoire implies a profound change in the past, present and future relationships of French national history, a change that undermines historical continuity. This can be regarded as a new marker for a historical system: "presentism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of the Spanish director José Luis Guerin's “documental ficticio” titledEn construcción(2001). In particular, I will examine the filmic representation of urban and architectonic spaces within post-industrial Barcelona, as well as the relationship of space and place to the construction of historical (post)memory in post-Francoist Spain, as “lieux de memoire.” While contemporary Spanish film has tended toward the engagement of Franco's lingering specters, I contend that Guerin's filmic discourse rather focuses on the new totalitarian state imposed by the emergence of social democracy and free-market capitalism in post-Francoist Spain, as inscribed via the urban architecture within Barcelona's public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sophiatown has often been presented as a symbol of a vibrant interracial urban culture that was destroyed by the racial segregationist policy of the apartheid regime. In reality, however, there are many ‘Sophiatowns’. By using Pierre Nora's well-known concept oflieux de mémoireand the related notion of ‘placemaking’, this article deals with the issue how different people imagine the space and place they live or have lived in, in order to make claims, shape identities and define belonging. Three historical phases are identified in the history of Sophiatown: as unknown place (up to about the 1910s), place of conflict (from the 1910s to 1955), and place of forgetting and nostalgia (the post-1955 period). By underlining the process of remembering and forgetting, of inclusion and exclusion, Nora's concept helps us to question the presuppositions and representations of the existing histories of Sophiatown. Instead of ‘celebrating’ the old Sophiatown or duly presenting the familiar ‘grand narrative’ of its history, this article analyses what Sophiatown meant in the past and still means today. It infuses urban history with a new dimension, that of history- and memory-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that literary texts can serve as 'lieux de mémoire' of the Central European dictatorships of the twentieth century. The study considers literary representation of features common to the dictatorships of the last century, in particular the trauma of 'forced disappearance'. It analyses the memory strategies used by the selected authors with a particular focus on the use of photography. The article demonstrates the cathartic function of writing as it is represented in the chosen texts. It considers the following authors and works: German author W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001), Czech author Jiří Kratochvil's The Pledge: Requiem for the 1950s ('Slib: Requiem za padesátá léta', 2009), Slovak author Pavel Vilikovský's The Autobiography of Evil ('Vlastný životopis zla', 2009), and Polish author Pawel Huelle's Mercedes Benz: From Letters to Hrabal ('Mercedes Benz: Z listów do Hrabala', 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once overwhelmingly inhabited by Jews, the Austro-Galician border town of Brody, in present-day Western Ukraine, has retained an important place on Ashkenazi mental maps until today, even though scholarly studies on Brody are scarce. The present article tries to capture the elements that allowed Brody to inscribe itself so successfully in Jewish memory. Therefore, this paper analyses several lieux de mémoire underlining Brody's enduring perception as a town closely related to Jewish issues. These places, however, are not only physical spots in the cityscape, like the ruins of the synagogue and the cemetery, but also images of and texts about Brody. Whether intended or not, pictures and postcards also have an impact on how Brody has been remembered; and so do memory books, be they written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish or Ukrainian. This study argues that Brody appears on the mental maps of Eastern European Jewry as an amalgam of physical places, icons and texts linked to a multi-layered and multifaceted urban history [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]