The Memory of Catastrophe

by Edited by Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver

• ISBN13: 9780719063442
• ISBN10: 0719063442
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2004-09-04
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

Memories of catastrophes--both those which occur naturally and those which are consequences of human actions--loom large in the modern consciousness. The volume opens with an investigation of the concepts of catastrophe and collective memory, and the relationships between them. Arguing that a pervasive catastrophic memory may be as disabling as it is instructive, Gray and Oliver stress the necessity of rendering the phenomenon subject to secular critical inquiry. The value of such an approach is then demonstrated in a series of case studies.

Author Biography

Peter Gray is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton.

Kendrick Oliver is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Southampton.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	ix
Acknowledgements	xii
Introduction	1	(18)
Peter Gray
Kendrick Oliver
Remembering the English Civil Wars	19	(12)
Mark Stoyle
`Diabolical design': the Charleston elite, the 1822 slave insurrection, and the discourse of the supernatural	31	(15)
P.A. Cramer
Memory and the commemoration of the Great Irish Famine	46	(19)
Peter Gray
`The greatest and the worst': dominant and subaltern memories of the Dos Bocas well fire of 1908	65	(14)
Glen D. Kuecker
The Titanic and the commodification of catastrophe	79	(12)
James Guimond
Doctors and trauma in the First World War: the response of British military psychiatrists	91	(15)
Edgar Jones
Commemorations of the siege of Leningrad: a catastrophe in memory and myth	106	(12)
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
The missing camps of Aktion Reinhard: the judicial displacement of a mass murder	118	(14)
Donald Bloxham
Memory and authenticity: the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski	132	(15)
Andrea Reiter
Partition memory and multiple identities in the Champaran district of Bihar, India	147	(11)
Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff
Bodies do count: American nurses mourn the catastrophe of Vietnam	158	(13)
Carol Acton
`Not much of a place anymore': the reception and memory of the massacre at My Lai	171	(19)
Kendrick Oliver
Remembering Vukovar, forgetting Vukovar: constructing national identity through the memory of catastrophe in Croatia	190	(15)
Rose Lindsey
Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Sawoniuk? British memory of the Holocaust and Kosovo, spring 1999	205	(17)
Tony Kushner
Index	222