Interpreting Contentious Memory: Countermemories and Social Conflicts over the Past

Memory is at the center of a diverse array of political conflicts, moral disputes, and power dynamics.

This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study and explain profound conflicts rooted in the past. Addressing issues of racism, genocide, trauma, war, nationalism, colonial occupation, and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities.

Featuring an international group of scholars, this book makes important contributions to social memory studies, but also shows how studying memory is vital to our understanding of enduring social problems that span the globe.

Thomas DeGloma is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Janet Jacobs is Professor of Distinction in Women and Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.