Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles ― Powerful Times

Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggle: Powerful Times marks a new trajectory in Memory Studies by examining cultural memories of nonviolent struggles. The book highlights the cultural forgetting and memory of Gandhi's Salt March, the suffragette struggle in Britain, the Russell Tribunal, 'House Museums' in Europe, the anti-nuclear campaign at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, Poland's Solidarity movement, cultural repatriation and indigenous Australians, the Anti-War museum in Berlin, a South Asian community archive, peaceful alternatives in video games and Palestinian activism against The Wall. The essays explore how memories of nonviolent struggles are mobilized through digital archiving, documentary film-making, video-gaming, and on-the-ground practices such as music, memorial museums, and the building of monuments. By foregrounding an alternative line of memory work whose goal is to commemorate nonviolent struggles in contemporary local, national and global memory cultures, the book opens up new pathways of human hope and agency to the study of cultural memory.

Anna Reading is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, University of London. Aged ten she led a school strike; at fifteen she formed part of a human chain; at twenty she co-founded Rape Crisis in York. Her books, plays and teaching tell the stories of human struggles against atrocity, genocide and war.

Tamar Katriel is Professor of Communication and Education, University of Haifa, Israel. She is the author of Talking Straight (1986); Communal Webs (1991); Performing the Past (1997); Dialogic Moments (2004), a Hebrew book collection Keywords (1999) as well as a range of articles in journals and book collections.