The Memory of Catastrophe

by Gray, Peter; Oliver, Kendrick

• ISBN13: 9780719063459
• ISBN10: 0719063450
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-05-13
• Publisher: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

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