Review Article: Democratization as Cultural History, or: When is (West) German Democracy Fulfilled?

This review article seeks to advance the notion of democracyas action as a concept for the study of (West) German democracy.It suggests that it would be preferable to define democracyas practical rather than speculative so as to show how democraticculture, far from being merely an object of reverence, emergedin the form of serious disputes and equally serious displacements.Because democracy is the régime within which the strugglefor democracy finds legitimacy, the study of democracy meansexamining how men and women invoked democracy in the strugglefor what they believed were democratic goals and aspirations.Among the books under review, three in particular seem bestto anticipate future research in the area, in that they examinepost-1945 German democratization in an anti-teleological vein,mindful of conflict and the competition for power.     

From three Ottoman gates to three Serbian sites of memory: The performative rewriting of Belgrade from 1878 until today

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses how three entrances to Ottoman-era Belgrade have been reconstructed since 1878. It demonstrates how the rewriting of these places entailed silencing the Ottoman past and constructing sites of Serbian national memory. By examining city space as a palimpsest, it shows how a new national narrative has been written in relation to earlier Ottoman space, thus making the national narrative a mediator of the memory of the seemingly erased Ottoman past.     

Between Apartheid,the Holocaust and the Nakba: Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine (1989) and the Emergence of an Analogical Lexicon

ABSTRACT

On 22 December 1989, the anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu conducted a Christmas pilgrimage to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Tutu used his visit to relay political messages in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle and to criticize Israeli-South African ties, and his statements evoked sever criticism on the part of Zionist Jewish constituencies. Through a tighter focus on Tutu’s various public statements and their reception in the years leading up to the visit, this article traces the history of different sets of interlocking analogies in Tutu’s thought, positioning his 1989 visit to Israel-Palestine—neglected thus far in the critical literature —as a landmark in his thinking. In so doing, it offers a critical analysis of another instance of the Israel-apartheid analogy in the political struggle against the Israeli occupation. At the same time, it points to the genesis of the analogy in Tutu’s ongoing engagements with the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.     

Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

ABSTRACT

In pursuit of a novel perspective on legacies of empire in the present, this introduction addresses prominent debates related to post-imperialism, collective memory, and the construction of historical knowledge, while also reviewing recent trends in post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman studies. First, I examine the insights and limitations of ‘memory studies,’ ultimately proposing a more capacious model of post-imperial ‘ambivalence.’ I then recapitulate Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach to historical knowledge in order to anchor the signal conceptual contribution of the volume, ‘textured historicity.’ This discussion is followed by a meditation on the role of metaphors in conceptualizing post-imperial legacies and a roster of the most common metaphors for post-imperial legacies. Finally, the introduction briefly summarizes the volume’s constituent essays and the rubrics that unite them.     

Shrine diplomacy: Turkey’s quest for a post-Kemalist identity

ABSTRACT

Shrines are many things to different people: war memorials, places of pilgrimage and even venues for shared festivities. The Sultan Murad shrine complex in Kosovo was raised to commemorate the strategic Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Over the past decade, however, it has assumed significance for Turkey as at no other time in the Republic’s history. Not only is it a key part of state visit itineraries, it also hosts dignitaries of various kinds, tourists and even schoolchildren from Turkey. Taking inspiration from historical and anthropological studies on shrines and memory, this paper dissects the significance of the Sultan Murad I shrine complex in Kosovo to contemporary Turkish foreign policy imaginaries. The shrine allows us to explore the wider motifs and symbols used in presenting the state’s attachment to physical spaces outside of its borders.     

Introduction: Marginalised Histories of the Second World War1

This special issue, stemming out of the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War Research Network (2017–2020), is published at an important juncture in cultural memory: as the focus of public commemorative events in Britain and the Commonwealth shifts from the First to the Second World War, including the Holocaust. Not only does it showcase exciting and cutting-edge research, but it also aims to stimulate conversation and ‘forward-thinking’ about commemorative cycles over the next two-and-a-half decades (2025–2045). The three research articles and four provocations focus, in different ways, on the question of ‘hidden histories’ in the expectation of a need to ensure that diversity, multi-perspectivity, complexity, and contention remain at the heart of ‘national’ commemorative processes (whether in Britain or elsewhere).