On Commemoration

Catherine Gilbert, currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Ghent University, Belgium, will take up a NUAcT Fellowship at Newcastle University from September 2020. She is the author of From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (2018), which received the SAGE Memory Studies Journal and Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award in 2019.Kate McLoughlin is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She is the author, most recently, of Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare (2018). In 2019, she was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to write a literary history of silence.Niall Munro is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University, where he is also Director of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and the Centre’s pamphlet press, ignitionpress. He is author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic (2015).

• CONTENTS: Catherine Gilbert/Kate McLoughlin/Niall Munro: Introduction: The Call to Remembrance – Part I: Textual Commemoration – Catherine Gilbert: Introduction: Words Fail Us – Jenny Lewis: Now as Then –Aminatta Forna with Elleke Boehmer: Memoir and Memory – Philippe Sands: The Act of Looking Back – Rachel Seiffert: Daring to Remember – Shea Esterling, Michael John-Hopkins and Christopher Harding: Reflections on International Justice as a Commemorative Process – Daniel O’Gorman: Bearing Witness, Becoming Human: Cultural Memory, «Post-Truth» and the Digital – Jane Potter with Kate McLoughlin: Encountering Commemoration – Robert Eaglestone: My History, Our History – Lyndsey Stonebridge: Sacred Memory/Prosaic History: Rivesaltes Memorial Camp – Harvey Whitehouse: Commemoration, Collective Loss and Social Cohesion – Cherilyn Elston: Open Wounds: Commemorating the Colombian Conflict – Frank Ledwidge: What Is It All About? – Alex Donnelly: Lacrimae Rerum: Building a Bridge between Literary and Monumental Commemoration – Adnan al-Sayegh: Uruk’s Anthem (Extracts) – Part II: Monumental Commemoration – Niall Munro: Introduction: More than Stone – Finding Ourselves in Our Monuments – Daniel Libeskind: Articulating History: Architecture and Memory – The Very Reverend John Witcombe: From Brokenness to Reconciliation – Cornelia Kulawik with Kate McLoughlin: Reconciliation and a Responsibility to the Past – Gabriel Moshenska: Memorials that Lurk and Pounce – Sue Zatland: Three Poems – Mark Johnston with Alex Donnelly: Community through Creativity: Empowering Veteran Artists – Emma Login: The Paradoxes of Commemoration – Silke Arnold-de Simine with Catherine Gilbert: Commemoration and the Limits of Empathy – Mariah Whelan: Four Poems – Jeremy Treglown: The Knowledge – Charles Gurrey with Niall Munro: A Concretisation of Meaning: Making Memorials – Marita Sturken with Niall Munro: When Is the Focus on Memory Just Too Much? The Challenges of Commemoration and Cultural Memory – Susie Campbell: Memoration – Justine Shaw: The Scent of Commemoration – Johana Wyss: Stones Do Not Forget: Forgetting and Being Forgotten in Czech Silesia – Tony Horwitz: Lose the Dudes, Keep the Horses: On Civil War Monuments in the United States – Part III: Aural Commemoration – Kate McLoughlin: Introduction: Music, Voices, Absence, Silence – Juliana M. Pistorius: Mourning and Music – Jonathan Dove with Kate Kennedy: Music and Memory – Peter Grant: Classical to Dub-Reggae: The First World War and Musical Memory – Dunya Mikhail: Bag of Bones – Rita Phillips: Interviewing as a Commemorative Practice – Annabel Williams: Hearing the Dead – Paul Whitty: Listening to the Past, Sound – Susie Campbell: Hush – John Dunston: Returning from Europe, Reflections on Post-War Commemoration – Patrick Toland: From «Daniel» – Lydia Wilson: Remembering the Lebanese Civil War – Noreen Masud: Monumental Silences – Férdia J. Stone-Davis: Re-valuing Silence – Maggie Ross: The Costliness of Commemoration – Susie Campbell: Traces.

«This timely book is an intelligent, thought-provoking and sensitive journey intoremembrance. It enables us to understand why commemoration is part of our presentas much as our past.» (Shaista Aziz, journalist, writer, activist)