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This article explores the truth-telling practices of 'comfort women' memory activism through the lens of coloniality and decoloniality. It examines how the colonial legacy has silenced and marginalised the voice of survivors and activists in their past and ongoing pursuit of truth and justice. This study discusses the transnational and transgenerational aspects of truth-telling practices with a focus on memory activism in Australia. Australia's historical connections to 'comfort women' and diasporic space for decolonial encounters have enriched memory activism in Australia. The article highlights that truth-telling practices of survivors and activists have challenged the coloniality of power, knowledge and gender by valuing marginalised voices, contesting colonial imaginaries and constructing collective memory for the decolonial present and future. It suggests decolonial praxis as a direction for 'comfort women' memory activism in transnational and transgenerational spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research develops a new framework through which to understand vernacular de-commemoration, as one aspect of bottom-up reckoning with the past through material commemoration. The productivity of breaking with the past distances us away from monumentality and toward action. Vernacular de-commemoration is part of a broad bottom-up process that goes beyond the mere withdrawal of uncomfortable reminders of the past from the public space, or even the recontextualization of public markers. Analyzing and comparing two case studies in the United States, and the United Kingdom, this research examines how vernacular de-commemoration is performed. In some instances, following the destruction of the now-contested memory site, new and alternative sites are installed (i.e. "re-memorialization"); other times, there may be a considerable delay, and sometimes nothing new is installed. Seen in this way, re-memorialization is always preceded by de-commemoration, and, in turn, de-commemoration is not always the final word in the constant negotiation about the meaning of the past in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates unofficial memory projects that have arisen in Australia in response to the institutional abuse of children. While the role of activists in pushing for the enactment of state responses is beginning to be understood, activist demands for recognition have taken a multitude of forms beyond this. Unofficial memory projects are indicative of this, exemplified by a diverse range of publicly situated cultural forms that re-present abuse to wider audiences. Focusing on two examples that have arisen in Australia in recent years – the grassroots phenomenon known as Loud Fence that grew out of the Victorian town of Ballarat, and the Australian Orphanage Museum that was established by Care leavers in 2023 – I examine these as examples of memory activism which generate counter-archives of institutional violence against children. Loud Fence does so upon institutional fences at the level of the streetscape, while the AOM does so by curating a museum space that honours the experiences of childhood 'Care'. Seeking to decentre the state from this analysis, I demonstrate how such examples enliven the fast and slow violence of child abuse and neglect, and the role of non-state actors when it comes to the recalibration of collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the memory activism of three survivors of the Auschwitz resistance and explores the ways in which they linked fascism and genocide to economic exploitation. By doing so, our paper excavates a leftist-antifascist paradigm of postwar memory that waned with the advent of contemporary Holocaust culture. We analyse the memoirs of Oszkár Betlen, Bruno Baum, and Hermann Langbein, members of the international communist movement before, during, and after the Second World War. For these authors, calls to remember Auschwitz were inseparable from a struggle for social change in the present, and their memory practice was never restricted to writing. Therefore, our paper places their memoirs into the wider context of their political-organizational work, and shows that their efforts to commemorate Auschwitz responded to some pressing issues of their time, including the re-militarization and NATO-membership of the Federal Republic, reparations, amnesty and reintegration of former Nazis, and war crimes trials. Importantly, all these issues were intertwined with what they regarded as capitalist restoration and a looming resurgence of fascism. Our paper argues that the so-called economic case was central to their postwar campaigning because they believed that economic exploitation was central to fascism and had wide-ranging implications for postwar societies as well. Furthermore, we challenge the prevailing view on antifascism by demonstrating that for these authors the economic aspect of fascism did not eclipse the genocidal character of fascism and the specifically Jewish experience of it. In contrast to some Marxist historians, they did not see genocidal policies as merely derivative or secondary either. Rather, these leftist-antifascists commemorated Auschwitz in ways which regarded economic exploitation and genocide as interrelated and constitutive aspects of fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British colonization in India had devastating social, psychological, and political consequences for Sikhs in nineteenth-century Punjab. Still, much of the diasporic community remains nostalgic for this era of the Sikh "martial race"—a British-crafted racial category through which Sikhs were constructed as biologically and culturally suited for imperial service and consequently received privileged status within the colonial hierarchy. Today, this nostalgia emerges as a commemorative mechanism in US Sikh advocacy projects to incorporate the Sikh turban and unshorn hair into US military and police uniform. Through an analysis of community narratives around publicized Sikh deaths, this article explores the impact of martial race commemoration on Sikh subjectivity formation. Delineating when and how private grief is transformed into public remembrance, I argue such commemorative frameworks in US Sikh advocacy projects inform which Sikh bodies are worthy of collective mourning by suturing Sikh bodies' value to their service to US imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011 and New Zealand in 2019 have revealed that the far-right worldwide uses the memory of the Yugoslav wars for online mobilization. Scholars working on memory activism usually deal with the liberal, self-critical memory emerging from the bottom-up activism of human rights groups while neglecting the activism of the far-right. This article fills the gap by addressing the global circulation of two memes, Remove Kebab and Pepe the Frog, as examples of far-right memory activism. In order to address the transnational circulation of memes as memory activism, this article employs the concept of 'traveling memory' while relying on multimodal discourse analysis to unveil the processes of memetic transformation, imitation, iconization and narrativization. The analysis reveals an alternative memory of Yugoslav wars that depicts Serbia as the first case of 'white genocide' in Europe, reversing the roles of war criminals and victims while propagating violence and celebrating genocide. The article argues that memory studies can no longer ignore memory production of far-right communities and, at the same time, outlines the method for examining far-right digital memory activism, revealing a whole set of mnemonic practices developed among the anonymous fringe communities of the far-right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory activism can be understood as a type of activism that aims to promote a greater diversity of stories in the public sphere, assuming that strategic reflections on the past and memory are crucial ways of transforming society. These reflections can take place in the most diverse contexts, such as protests in the streets or through the media, based on the long-silenced stories of people and social groups who have been discriminated against. In this article, we reflect on how cinema can constitute a space for memory activism by representing narratives of otherness and shedding light on social issues of great importance, such as migratory experiences, which have currently taken centre stage in audiovisual productions. To do this, we carried out an exploratory analysis of publicly funded film production in Portugal from 2018 to 2022 in order to analyse its main themes. All the synopses of films and other audiovisual productions (359) published during this period in the catalogues of the Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA) and available online were collected. This textual material was analysed using Iramuteq software. The analysis indicated the absence of terms such as "racism" or "social discrimination" in the synopses, even in productions that addressed these issues when portraying migratory experiences. Among the main themes were (i) artistic production and the arts in general, (ii) daily life and interpersonal relationships (e.g., family, friendship, love) and (iii) historical memory and conflicts. We also explored in more detail the short films produced during this period (120), which allowed us to identify counter-hegemonic narratives, reinforcing the role that cinema can play in combating societal amnesias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the threefold categorisation of memory as antagonistic, cosmopolitan and agonistic, proposed by Anna Cento Bull and Hans Hansen, the article examines contemporary memory activism in the Republic of Moldova and how it contributes to creating historical narratives. Through an analysis of two memory initiatives, namely 'The Last Address' and 'Stolpersteine', designed to memorialise victims of Soviet repression and atrocities committed by the Romanian and Nazi German forces, respectively, the article uncovers the many challenges facing memory activists in Moldova where there is limited openness about these periods in recent history. Instead, different versions of the past and suppression of painful truths are subservient to contemporary political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of mnemonic reciprocity to examine the dynamics of exchanges between local memory activists and other community members after a Comfort Women statue was installed in 2016 on the grounds of Sydney's Ashfield Uniting Church. Contributing to the scholarship on grassroots memory activism and on the global travels of the Comfort Women statue, we take a feminist, decolonial approach that identifies points of connectivity between the disparate communities that have come together in the semi-public location of the church for selected commemorative events. Based on an analysis of the ways in which mnemonic reciprocity is fostered through exchanges between Korean-Australians and Indigenous Australians, we suggest that the statue's commemorative functions, when activated on the level of the local, are doubly decolonial. The Comfort Women statue activates the memory of Japan's imperialism in South Korea and beyond in the semi-public locality of suburban Sydney. In addition, when articulated critically, the Peace Statue can help to decolonise memory in Australia, contributing to intimate, small-scale acts of a reconciliatory and reparative nature. This case, we argue, demonstrates first that it is crucial to identify the particularities governing the place in which a carrier of memory, such as a statue, is re-territorialised. Second, by showing that localised acts of mnemonic reciprocity can strengthen community relations, it offers an alternative to the nationalist memory wars between South Korea and Japan that have been repeated in many diasporic communities where statues have been erected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging interest in the entanglements between memory, activism and social and political change is an exciting new direction in Memory Studies. This special issue aims to extend the repertoire of histories, cultural practices, and epistemologies from which theorizing about the memory-activism nexus is drawn through a focus on Asia and the Pacific, including diasporic communities in Australia. By centring engagements with memory in Asia as well as the Pacific, the issue opens new lines of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a public history practitioner's perspective on memory activism, critically engaging with the experiences and lessons learned in the implementation of two public history projects in Sri Lanka – the Herstories Project and the Community Memorialisation Project. It draws on personal reflections and observations made while returning to some of the women participants to renew their consent for a new public iteration of their narratives, nearly a decade after first documenting their histories. It examines some of the conceptual and practical questions that emerged while implementing memory projects with the 'public' purposes of peacebuilding and transitional justice outcomes. Through six vignettes, it explores the complicated nature of 'consent' through the lens of agency, identity and the construction of victimhood. I argue that memory initiatives need to be cognisant of how power asymmetries and 'macro-narratives' frame how stories are told, to whom, and for what purpose, and that when consent is given, it is not given in perpetuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the protest against the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke as an example of transnational memory activism. It analyzes from a transnational mobilization perspective how activists achieved a globally visible protest in Stockholm and what role memory played in the protest mobilization and framing. Genocide survivors and former refugees, human rights activists, journalists, and academics formed a transnational protest coalition. In this way, they drew international attention to their outrage at the honoring of an author who is criticized for denying the Bosnian genocide. The analysis shows that memories of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and genocide united the diverse protesters as a "memory community" and shaped their framing. The protesters warned of the potential repercussions of the Nobel Prize to Handke for the internationalization and normalization of genocide denial. They argued that locally, Serb nationalist politicians can find legitimation in it for divisive politics. Moreover, they put the prize in a larger context of globally rising right extremism and islamophobia that find inspiration in the very Serb nationalist ideology and its propagators of the 1990s conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of the instituting force of activist archives. It does so by analyzing the epistemological and ontological implications of describing and arranging archival materials, and narrativizing them in curatorial work, in the case of the Archivo de la Memoria Trans de Argentina—Trans Memory Archive of Argentina. On the one hand, the archival arrangement provides trans people with a frame of recognition for trans lives and transforms individual memories into collectable and usable cultural memories for activism. On the other hand, the appropriation of the language of the family in curatorial works incorporates trans memories into the framework of Argentinian post-dictatorship transition. This allows activists to gain access to, and adapt, an entire repertoire for trans causes and activist kinship. The article supports the analytical work and the presented theoretical hypothesis by creating a dialogue between cultural memory studies and critical archival studies, for the exploration of memory activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biblical entreaty zakhor – Hebrew for 'remember' – has been central to the efforts of diaspora Jewish scholars, religious leaders, politicians and others to suture the suffering past to the present. The imperative to not only remember but also commemorate histories of suffering is ubiquitous among conflict-generated diasporas as well. For diaspora Croats, victim-centred themes regularly surface in identity narratives, focusing on memories of trauma and suffering after the establishment of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia in 1945. While the manipulation of victimhood narratives and the rehabilitation of controversial histories by Croatian political elites have been examined extensively, the persistence of memories focused on suffering among diaspora Croats has received less scholarly attention. In this article, I ask why, 30 years after the end of the Homeland War and the establishment of the Croatian state, do victimhood narratives continue to resonate for diaspora Croats particularly from the Herzegovinian region of the former Yugoslavia who arrived in Canada between 1945 and 1990. What role do memory activists in Canada originating mainly from Herzegovina play in lubricating and mobilizing memories that reinforce victimhood? Finally, how does the desire for validation and legitimacy beyond diaspora communities factor into commemorations and initiatives focused on collective suffering? The focus here is on research conducted between 2019 and 2020 in Toronto when diaspora commemorations and the memory narratives that have sustained them came under increased critical scrutiny, challenging the veracity of Croatian victimhood claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politologija is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper attempts to investigate recent urban space-making practices and imaginaries of two different civic actors: Swakopmund City Tour, operated by Namibian Germans depicting the history of Swakopmund linked to German heritage, and a group of Herero activists around Swakopmund Genocide Museum, challenging the monopoly in framing representations of urban heritage and history, and presenting alternative memory narratives. The aim is to explore how the official memory is dealt with in present day-remembrance policies and practices, and how it is challenged by alternative memory driven by Herero activists. Conceptually, the notion of a mnemoscape (Kössler, 2012) is used, including both intangible and tangible aspects of the remembrance of collective experience. Methodologically, the paper is largely based on the outcomes of a short fieldwork in the urban environment of Swakopmund in 2022.

This paper attempts to investigate recent urban space-making practices and imaginaries of two different civic actors: Swakopmund City Tour, operated by Namibian Germans depicting the history of Swakopmund linked to German heritage, and a group of Herero activists around Swakopmund Genocide Museum, challenging the monopoly in framing representations of urban heritage and history, and presenting alternative memory narratives. The aim is to explore how the official memory is dealt with in present day-remembrance policies and practices, and how it is challenged by alternative memory driven by Herero activists. Conceptually, the notion of a mnemoscape (Kössler, 2012) is used, including both intangible and tangible aspects of the remembrance of collective experience. Methodologically, the paper is largely based on the outcomes of a short fieldwork in the urban environment of Swakopmund in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests.

The mythology of the foreign interference into the Russian civil war goes to the heart of the memory politics in Putin’s Russia today, most recently in connection with the invasion in Ukraine. In a bid to unite the country against perceived threats from the NATO alliance, the Russian leadership engages Soviet narratives going back to the Allied intervention into North Russia in 1918–1920, as a deterrent against association with the West. During Soviet times multiple memorials were created in the North to the victims of intervention in support of this narrative. Central to it was the Mudyug ‘concentration camp’ museum, established to demonstrate the atrocities of the intervention forces. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union this museum was branded as propaganda and eventually got decommissioned. Yet after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent war with Ukraine, the old intervention narratives saw a comeback. Backed by the state, the local memory activists in Arkhangelsk in North Russia took to restoring the Mudyug camp museum as a forepost of patriotic tourism in the region.

Copyright of Letonica is the property of University of Latvia, Institute of Literature, Folklore & Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses the Lithuanian feature film Izaokas (Isaac, 2018) as an expression of memory activism. The film actualised heated debates on a national level over the role of ordinary Lithuanians in the Holocaust and collaboration with Nazi Germany, in spite of the fact that the filmmakers did not intend to engage in historical debates. Nonetheless, by generating an immersive experience and engaging viewers at the level of affect, the film effectively engages in polemics with public narratives of the Second World War.

Transitional justice in Spain is still an ongoing process. This article examines the impact of memory laws and the rise of the radical right on transitional justice measures and the historical memory movement in Spain. It contends that the continued application of the 46/1977 Amnesty Law and the campaigning by radical right party Vox to repeal memory laws left a legal vacuum that precipitated interventions by memory activist groups. It is argued that these protest actions are a form of advocacy for participatory transitional justice. The article first focuses on Andalusia's 2017 memory law and the rise of Vox in the region. Subsequently, it examines the effect of the state's Democratic Memory Law (2022) on memory and justice measures and argues that both bottom-up approaches by civil society organizations and top-down measures by state actors are essential to transform Spain into a society anchored in the five pillars of transitional justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art accompanies demonstrations, deriving motifs from them and strengthening the sense of community by developing a collective imaginary. In times of repression, violence and censorship during the Chilean dictatorship, the interdisciplinary artistic collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (1979–83) transformed the streets into their exhibition space. Decades later, the collective Delight Lab paid tribute to CADA. The connection between the two collectives is approached from a mnemonic perspective. The research design focuses on memory activism showing how the recurrence of certain images from the past contributes to empower contemporary movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a study of two recent Latin American cases of counter-monumental interventions initiated by feminist and dissident actors: the intervention Amor y Furia in Santiago de Chile and the creation of La Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan in Mexico City. The analysis of the two cases is empirically based on a combination of social media publications and interviews with central actors conducted during fieldwork in both cities. The analysis demonstrates how the interventions made visible and enriched the conflicts of memory that stem from the traditional monumentalization of national histories, whilst fortifying feminist and dissident movements through an exposure of the continuity of their demands. Based on this combined analysis of the interventions' aesthetic representations of patriarchal violence on a variety of temporal levels and their role in the reappropriation of public space, we argue that both interventions are in their own way expressions of what we have chosen to call ch'ixi memory activism; an affective, cathartic and aesthetically cacophonous practice through which long-lasting injustices are exposed in the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that Hartmut Rosa's theory of resonance provides memory activists (those actors engaged in memory politics) with both a normative justification and qualitative metric by which sites of memory may be compared and evaluated. Resonance is a plausible candidate for an assessing concept on the grounds that there is overlap between Rosa's sociological approach and the implicit appeal to resonance in the memory studies literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with White Armband Day (Dan Bijelih Traka), marked on 31 May in memory of the genocidal campaign against Prijedor's non-Serb population during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–95). What started spontaneously in 2012 as a global social media campaign against genocide denial has become a commemoration day marked in Prijedor, the post-Yugoslav region, across the world and in virtual spaces. Its widespread recognition and impact on alternative memory discourses rendered it one of the most successful civil society initiatives engaging in dealing with the past in the region. Drawing on a transnational mobilisation perspective, the article explores how the initiative emerged and what factors contributed to White Armband Day's establishment as a transnational commemoration day. Findings from multi-sited research indicate that beyond rapid online mobilisation, two prerequisites have been key to its success: displacement-based (trans)local networks of Prijedorčani and its ability to mobilise young people across ethnic divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Bella ciao' is one of the best-known partisan songs of the Italian anti-fascist Resistance (1943–5) and is part of the repertoire of protest of many movements across the globe. In 2018, the song was revived by its use in the popular TV series La casa de papel. This article examines how 'Bella ciao' is adopted by activists worldwide. It does so by analyzing the song through the concept of 'portability': the capacity of a cultural artifact to be a model that can be adapted to different contexts. After an examination of 'Bella ciao''s historical uses, the article focuses on the song's feminist versions for supporting different causes and in particular abortion rights. The reuses of the song speak of memory in terms of not only a product – what we remember – but also a process : the creative use of the cultural legacy of past movements for the shaping of new stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article turns to the queer memorial activism of the Uckermark Initiative in Germany. This network of feminist, lesbian, queer and trans antifascist activists has been organizing for over two decades to memorialize forgotten victims of Nazi terror – girls and young women who were incarcerated for their non-conforming gender, sexual and social behaviour at the Uckermark Youth concentration camp. The Uckermark Initiative's memorial activism instantiates my thinking about the performative affects and effects of such organizing. I conceptualize the durational counter-memorial activism enacted on the former camp site as memory care work, which I argue produces new social formations that I term queer akinship. Queer akinship is a social formation enabled by relations of adjacency, where subjects develop queer kin relations through the durational work of caring for the remembrance of forgotten victims of state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 documentary film They Call Me Babu utilises historical film footage including the home movies of one Dutch family with a voiceover in Bahasa Indonesia to narrate the fictionalised experiences of a former female domestic worker in the colonial Netherlands East Indies in the closing decades of Dutch colonial rule from 1939 to 1949. By centring the experiences of 'babu', women who worked as nannies and nursemaids for families holding European status, the Dutch-Indonesian director Sarah Beerends endeavours to make these women visible and to narrate their viewpoints. In this paper we argue, however, that the director's aspiration to centre the women's stories is haunted by the spectres of the colonial matrix of power. This leads to the unintended replication of nostalgic images of, and tropes about, the colony that has characterised earlier Dutch memory work. The film does not offer a critical engagement with colonial violence and the colonial structures of power are instead positioned as contributing to the nanny's gendered emancipation. Furthermore, we reflect on why, in the context of recent vociferous debates about colonial violence, a film which serves to soften images of Dutch colonialism, was generally well received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This edited transcript of conversations among a group of scholars and practitioners is the culmination of a multi-year, multi-platform dialogue intended to capture the work and motivations of memory activists towards addressing both historical justice and current social and political needs of Asian American communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how memory activism can contribute to the democratizing of history through the example of a specific protest campaign in which activist historians among other groups and civil society actors attacked the dominant narrative of the "clean Wehrmacht" represented by a veteran association of Mountain Troops. It interrogates the Public History approaches of the activists and their impact on the local level of the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, where the protests took place between 2002 and 2009, in order to find out how participatory their construction of an alternative historical narrative actually was. Although memory activism has obvious benefits especially in dealing with painful pasts, the article also reveals its limits, as such benefits are contingent on the extent to which historian activists share their authority and the way they deal with public, as well as their own, emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of traditional, institutionalized archives and memory platforms has been more and more challenged by the emergence of digital networks and "peer-to-peer" memory practices. This article argues that memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not. Therefore, I will analyze tweets, Tumblr posts and a YouTube video in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. Social media platforms can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. While traditional archives focus on the representation of events, memory practices on social media platforms can also stress structural and slow forms of violence and their embeddedness in the everyday, point to historical continuities and make memories travel, thus establishing transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The afterlives of a monstrous colonial monument are being contested in the heart of Belgium. Engaging in a visual analysis of the PeoPL happening, facilitated by artivist Laura Nsengiyumva, I will argue that this visual proposition is witness to a renewed wave of revolt, altering a still very present colonial order, its vibrant properties of space and possibilities of time. By melting down an ice-reproduction of the equestrian statue of Leopold II, Nsengiyumva renders visible the lingering possibility to restructure the shared division of the sensible proper to the colonial present of Belgium and beyond. This wave of revolt opened a discursive space that altered the conditions through which difference was historically thematised. From (failed) multiculturalism, diversity, superdiversity and the present turn in securitisation through the misnomer of radicalisation, processes of inclusion/exclusion are for the first time in history being discussed on the conditions of the primary concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, unveiled in Berlin in 2008 at the edge of the Tiergarten park, forms part of an impressive commemorative landscape. It caused considerable controversy from the outset due to its twofold intention of recognizing past repression and creating a symbol against the exclusion of gays and lesbians. The article departs from these debates and describes the polyphonous field of visitor reactions to the memorial. It is based empirically on expert interviews, covert observation, and almost one hundred "express interviews" with visitors. The findings suggest that the relationships between visitors and the memorial are shaped by a pronounced aesthetic attitude. Identity-related visitor reactions center on the video installation inside the memorial, which depicts an endless male-to-male kiss. The article shows how visitors derive meaning from the memorial regardless of the superficiality of their encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research essay contributes to the special issue "Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces" by examining memory activist art projects focused on three heritage sites in Warsaw from the perspective of the "decolonial option" as conceived by Madina Tlostanova. The essay's theoretical framework draws from memory studies and critical heritage studies by applying the notions of memory activism, heritage repression, reframing and re-emergence, and communities of implication. The empirical cases involve The Józef Rotblat Institute for Disarmament of Culture and Abolition of War (by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jarosław Kozakiewicz, 2016); The Próżna Project (curated by Krystyna Piotrowska, 2005–12); The Footbridge Was There (by Adam X, 2007); (...) Ellipsis (by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant, 2009); A Footbridge of Memory (by Tomasz Lec and Krzysztof Pasternak, 2011); and photographic interventions Palace LX (by Błażej Pindor, 2014) and PKiN (by Jacek Fota, 2015). In all those critical artistic projects the essay identifies a characteristic duality: not only do they address the legacies of foreign dependencies, but in addition, and with an eye on the future, seek to destabilize nation-oriented essentialist interpretations of those dependencies. The essay claims that such a dual decolonial approach constitutes a relevant critical heuristic tool for studying other cases in which the nationalistic framing of heritage and memory is the strongest decolonial response to the fall of empires and to their aftermaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores one of the most dramatic shifts in the mnemonic landscape of contemporary Poland: the invention of the "cursed soldiers" (żołnierze wyklęci). Coined in the early 1990s, this term is nowadays not only a well-established and popularly accepted description of Polish partisans fighting against the Soviet and communist authorities around 1945, and the symbol of various forms of their commemoration. It is also a powerful tool of political mobilization, subject to an intellectual debate about historical facts and moral values, as well as an object of commodification. As shown in this article, the invention of the "cursed soldiers" consisted of three stages: their legacy was claimed by popular opinion from the late 1980s, gradually acknowledged by the state around 2011, and eventually taken over by one political force after 2015. By exploring the agency operating behind the transfer of the "cursed soldiers" from the margins of memory activism to the center of the state-sponsored politics of memory, this article argues for a comprehensive study of the social and political mechanisms of memory-making in modern Poland and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory landscape in Germany has been lauded for its pluralism: for reckoning with the past not only critically but in its many complex facets. Nevertheless, particularly victims of repression in East Germany lament that their plight is not adequately represented and some have recently affiliated themselves with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and other groups on the far-right spectrum. This article seeks to explain the seeming contradiction between existing pluralism in German public memory and dissatisfaction with it by tracing how memory activists have shaped memory policy and institutions. Based on extensive interview and archival research, I argue that the infiltration of civil society into the institutions that govern memory in large part explains the strength of critical memory in unified Germany and the country's ability to accommodate a variety of pasts. However, there is also a distinct lack of pluralism when it comes to the rules of "how memory is done," to the exclusion of more emotional and politicized approaches that are sometimes favored by some victims' groups. Using the case of the recent debate about the Hohenschönhausen Memorial, I contend that this explains some of the attraction felt by these groups towards the right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]