Mass Dictatorship and Memory As Ever Present Past

This volume explores the politics of memory involved in 'coming to terms with the past' of mass dictatorship on a global scale. Considering how a growing sense of global connectivity and global human rights politics changed the memory landscape, the essays explore entangled pasts of dictatorships, tensions between de-territorializing and re-territorializing memories, competitive ways of constructing the memories of the intersubjective past in a global perspective. The collection goes beyond a mere compilation of separate national memories; essays combine to present an overview of the landscape of the global public sphere of memory in which the loci of various national memories are confirmed. The first part of the book deals with the entanglement of memories beyond various borders such as nation-state, social classes, gender, disciplines and generations. The second part addresses issues of production, circulation and consumption of historical images of the past in the mass dictatorship and of the mass dictatorship. The third part is dedicated to the investigation of contested memories that various political actors and social agents deploy in their attempts to influence or control the discourse of memory. Written from different historical perspectives, cultural positions and disciplinary backgrounds, the collection searches for historical accountability among the postwar generations.

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History at Hanyang University, Republic of Korea, and Director of the Research Institute of Comparative History. He is the editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series 'Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century'.

Barbara Walker teaches in the History Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA, and is the author of Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (2004).

Peter Lambert is Lecturer in Modern European History at Aberystwyth University, UK.