Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity
Nanci Adler · Selma Leydesdorff · Mary Chamberlain · Leyla Neyzi
Dec 2011 · Transaction Publishers
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249
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About this ebook
Memories of Mass Repression presents the results of researchers working with the voices of witnesses. Its stories include the witnesses, victims, and survivors; it also reflects the subjective experience of the study of such narratives. The work contributes to the development of the field of oral history, where the creation of the narrative is considered an interaction between the text of the narrator and the listener. The contributors are particularly interested in ways in which memory is created and molded. The interactions of different, even conflicting, memories of other individuals, and society as a whole are considered. In writing the history of genocide, "emotional" memory and "objective" research are interwoven and inseparable. It is as much the historian's task to decipher witness account, as it is to interpret traditional written sources. These sometimes antagonistic narratives of memory fashioned and mobilized within public and private arenas, together with the ensuing conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions that they unleash, are all part of efforts to come to terms with what happened. Mining memory is the only way in which we can hope to arrive at a truer, and less biased historical account of events. Memory is at some level selective. Most believers in political movements turned out to be the opposite of what they promised. When given a proper forum, stories that are in opposition to dominant memories, or in conflict with our own memories, can effectively battle collective forgetting. This volume offers the reader a vision of the subjective side of history without falsifying the objective reality of human survival.
About the author
Nanci Adler is senior researcher at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an organization of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of "Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement" and numerous scholarly journal articles on the consequences of Stalinism.
Mary Chamberlain is emeritus professor of Caribbean history at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. In addition, she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the advisory group of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and a member of the United Kingdom government’s Caribbean Advisory Group (1998-2002). She is former editor of the Transaction Memory and Narrative series, which now has over fifteen volumes in print.
Leyla Neyzi, an anthropologist and oral historian, is associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, Istanbul.
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