Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Huyssen, Andreas

ISBN 10: 0804745617 / ISBN 13: 9780804745611

Published by Stanford University Press, 2003

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 0804745617-4-37175976

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804745617
• ISBN 13: 9780804745611
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Fair
• Weight: 10 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.

About the Author

Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia.