Sarah Farmer

Bio: Sarah Farmer is an academic researcher from University of California, Irvine. The author has contributed to research in topics: The Holocaust & Economic Justice. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 8 publications receiving 73 citations.

Rural Inventions: The French Countryside after 1945

Abstract: In post–World War II France, commitment to cutting-edge technological modernization and explosive economic growth uprooted rural populations and eroded the village traditions of a largely peasant nation. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. The attachment of the French to rural ways and the agricultural past became a widely shared preoccupation in the 1970s; this, in turn, became an engine of change in its own right. Though the French countryside is often imagined as stable and enduring, this book presents it as a site not just of decline and loss, but also of change and adaptation. Rural Inventions explores the rise of restored peasant houses as second residences; utopian experiments in rural communes and in going back to the land; environmentalism; the literary success of peasant autobiographies; photography; and other representations through which the French revalorized rural life and landscapes. The peasantry as a social class may have died out, but the countryside persisted, valued as a site not only for agriculture but increasingly for sport and leisure, tourism, and social and political engagement; a place to dwell part-time as well as full-time; and a natural environment worth protecting. The postwar French state and the nation’s rural and urban inhabitants remade the French countryside in relation to the city and to the world at large, invoking not only traditional France but also creating a vibrant and evolving part of the France yet to come.

The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited

Abstract: The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

Plenitude, scarcity and the circulation of cultural memory

Abstract: An argument is made for the need to conceptualize cultural memory, not as merely derivative of individual psychology, but in terms of a ‘working memory’ (Assmann) that is constructed and reconstructed in public acts of remembrance and evolves according to distinctly cultural mechanisms. Foucault’s ‘scarcity principle’ is used to show the role of media in generating shared memories through processes of selection, convergence, recursivity and transfer. This media-based approach, emphasizing the way memories are communicated, circulated and exchanged, allows us to see how collective identities may be (re)defined through memorial practices, and not merely reflected in them.

Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History

Abstract: This essay reviews critical developments in the history of oral history and outlines four paradigm transformations in theory and practice: the postwar renaissance of memory as a source for 'people's history'; the development, from the late 1970s, of 'post-positivist' approaches to memory and subjectivity; a transformation in perceptions about the role of the oral historian as interviewer and analyst from the late 1980s; and the digital revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Threaded through discussion of these paradigm shifts are reflections upon four factors that have impacted upon oral history and, in turn, been significantly influenced by oral historians: the growing significance of political and legal practices in which personal testimony is a central resource; the increasing interdisciplinarity of approaches to interviewing and the interpretation of memory; the proliferation from the 1980s of studies concerned with the relationship between history and memory; and the evolving internationalism of oral history.

Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine : The Politics of National Commemoration

Abstract: Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.

Authenticity and historic preservation: towards an authentic history:

Abstract: Authenticity was neither an exclusive criterion nor even a keyword in the rise of the historic preservation movement before the heated controversies over `Heritage' beginning in the late 1960s. Bot...