The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics

The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics
Author: Philip J. Brendese
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580464238

Offers an examination of ancient, modern, and contemporary political theories and practices in order to develop a more expansive way of conceptualizing memory, how political power influences the presence of the past, and memory'songoing impact on democratic horizons.

The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics

The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics
Author: Philip J. Brendese
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2014-08-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781580468039

George Orwell famously argued that those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past. In this study of the relationship between democracy and memory, P.J. Brendese examines Orwell's insight, revealing how political power affects what is available to be remembered, who is allowed to recall the past, and when and where past events can be commemorated. Engaging a diverse panoply of thinkers that includes Sophocles, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Brendese considers the role of disavowed memory and the politics of collective memory in democratic processes throughout history. Among the cases treated are democracy in ancient Athens, South Africa's effort to transition from apartheid via its landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mexico's struggle to fortify democratic accountability after the "dirty war," and the unresolved legacy of slavery in US race relations. The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics draws on these national histories to develop a theory of memory that accounts for the ways the past lives on in unconscious, habituated practices, shaping the possibilities of freedom, action, and political imagination. P. J. Brendese is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.

Segregated Time

Segregated Time
Author: P. J. Brendese
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2023-06-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197535747

When Martin Luther King Jr. argued on behalf of civil rights he was told that he was "too soon." Today, those demanding reparations for slavery are told they are "too late." What time is it? Or perhaps the appropriate question is: whose time is it? These questions point to a phenomenon of segregated time: how a range of political subjects are viewed as occupants of different time zones, how experiences of time diverge across peoples, and how these divergent temporal spheres are mutually entwined in ways that serve the interests of white supremacy. In Segregated Time, P.J. Brendese takes a time-sensitive approach to race as it pertains to the acceleration of human disposability, dynamic identity formation, and the production and allocation of social and economic goods. Although typically conceived in terms of space, Brendese argues that racial segregation and inequality are also sustained through impositions on human time. Drawing on a range of Africana, Latinx, and Indigenous political thought, Brendese demonstrates the way in which time is weaponized against people of color and advances a theory of "white time" as a possessive, acquisitive, colonizing force. The chapters explore how migration politics involves temporal borders, how the extended lifetimes of some are built on the foreshortened lives of others, how racial stigma conveys debt and "subprime time," and how whiteness functions as a store of credit through time. In this innovative inquiry into contemporary orders of time and race, Segregated Time examines who is regarded as behind the times, who is cast out of time through racial violence, who "does time" in the prison system, and the racial divides of lives on borrowed time in an epoch of climate catastrophe.

Never Forget National Humiliation

Never Forget National Humiliation
Author: Zheng Wang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231148909

Wang follows the Chinese Communist Party's ideological re-education of the public through the exploitation of China's humiliating modern history, tracking the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, re-establish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era.

Memory Laws, Memory Wars

Memory Laws, Memory Wars
Author: Nikolay Koposov
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108419720

A major contribution to our understanding of present-day historical consciousness through a study of memory laws across Europe.

The Promise of Democracy

The Promise of Democracy
Author: Fred Dallmayr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010-01-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 143843040X

Presentation of a new, ethical vision of democracy built around self-rule, civic education, and ethical cultivation.

Prosthetic Memory

Prosthetic Memory
Author: Alison Landsberg
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231129268

Prosthetic Memory argues that mass cultural forms such as cinema and television in fact contain the still-unrealized potential for a progressive politics based on empathy for the historical experiences of others. The technologies of mass culture make it possible for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, to share collective memories--to assimilate as deeply felt personal experiences historical events through which they themselves did not live.

Conservatism and Memory Politics in Russia and Eastern Europe

Conservatism and Memory Politics in Russia and Eastern Europe
Author: Katalin Miklóssy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000516768

This book discusses the diverse practices and discourses of memory politics in Russia and Eastern Europe. It argues that currently prevailing conservativism has a long tradition, which continued even in Communist times, and is different to conservatism in the West, which can accommodate other viewpoints within liberal democratic systems. It considers how important history is for conservatism, and how history is reconstituted according to changing circumstances. It goes on to examine in detail values which are key to conservatism, such as patriotism, Christianity and religious life, and the traditional model of the family, the importance of the sovereign national state within globalization, and the emphasis on a strong paternal state, featuring hierarchy, authority and political continuity. The book concludes by analysing how far states in the region are experiencing a common trend and whether different countries’ conservative narratives are reinforcing each other or are colliding.

Disremembering the Dictatorship

Disremembering the Dictatorship
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004483225

Most accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy have been celebratory exercises at the service of a stabilizing rather than a critical project of far-reaching reform. As one of the essays in this volume puts it, the “pact of oblivion,” which characterized the Spanish transition to democracy, curtailed any serious attempt to address the legacies of authoritarianism that the new democracy inherited from the Franco era. As a result, those legacies pervaded public discourse even in newly created organs of opinion. As another contributor argues, the Transition was based on the erasure of memory and the invention of a new political tradition. On the other hand, memory and its etiolation have been an object of reflection for a number of film directors and fiction writers, who have probed the return of the repressed under spectral conditions. Above all, this book strives to present memory as a performative exercise of democratic agents and an open field for encounters with different, possibly divergent, and necessarily fragmented recollections. The pact of the Transition could not entirely disguise the naturalization of a society made of winners and losers, nor could it ensure the consolidation of amnesia by political agents and by the tools that create hegemony by shaping opinion. Spanish society is haunted by the specters of a past it has tried to surmount by denying it. It seems unlikely that it can rid itself of its ghosts without in the process undermining the democracy it sought to legitimate through the erasure of memories and the drowning of witnesses' voices in the cacaphony of triumphant modernization.