Mobile Histories, Activated Memories

This book proposes two conceptual prisms to make sense of how pasts and presents are interlaced: mobile histories and activated memories. The term mobile histories evokes a sense of how history is forged, how history is narrated, how it involves temporal layerings and translocal intersections by which it is worked on and fashioned; activated memories refers more to the way in which subjects are informed by and employ the past in their efforts to proactively engage their present circumstances and delineate the horizon of imaginable futures. The volume foregrounds the mediation of past experiences, shedding light on how material artefacts—a photograph, a monument, a ruin, or indeed a written history—enfold genealogical layers of temporality, of representation, commemoration, and contestation, all the while anchored in concentrations and circulations of power, authority, and accompanying formations of subjectivity. The volume demonstrates the mobilizing power of historical narratives and activation of memory cultures in the Global South, and brings together studies from Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, India, and Nepal. With empirically robust and conceptually challenging case studies, the volume enriches the understanding of the past as a socio-political resource and socio-cultural repository. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, cultural studies, memory studies and trauma studies.