Showing papers by "John L. Monteith published in 2016"

I. theory and practice

Abstract: In recent decades there has been considerable i nternational research into the meanings, uses, and consumption of the past among various peoples around the world. These memory studies have been fuelled not only by the nationally oriented work of Pierre Nora and David Lowenthal, among others, but also by the exploration of commemoration, trauma, and genocide as sites of history. Holocaust, and then postcolonial, studies precipitated an expansive research interest that was less nationally bound and more defi ned by ethnicity and experience. Both of these closely related fi elds have seen a wealth of theoretical speculation, semiotic analysis, and investigation of representations of the past and of those who produce them. With that burgeoning fi eld of research also began the important interpretive work of interrogating and making meaning from history sites, such as monuments, textbooks, remembrances, and exhibitions. The result of such scholarly attention meant these markers in eff ect became “works” of history, as laden with meaning as any text, and demanded critique accordingly: memorial architecture was analyzed and interrogated, syllabuses and textbooks were rigorously combed, commemorations and museum exhibits were re-read from critical perspectives, family histories were interpreted with a scholarly lens. Building on the scholarship into these public historical iterations, feminist and postcolonial scholars also revealed the embodied power of the past, as memories of slavery, colonization, Indigenous histories, the Holocaust, and motherhood registered corporeally. Archaeologists and