Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture

Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality, this book applies recent theories of new materialism to explore the material dimension of memory in art and popular culture. The book’s underlying premise is twofold: on the one hand, memory is performed, mediated and stored through the material world that surrounds us; on the other hand, inanimate objects and things also have agency on their own, which affects practices of memory, as well as forgetting. By accounting for the material world as a medium through which acts of remembering and forgetting take place, the chapters of this book offer new insights on such topics as the study of ruins, the exchange and circulation of souvenirs, digitization and the Internet of Things, fashion and technology, as well as the material dimensions of corporeality and traumatic re-enactment.

Laszlo Muntean is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His publications have focused on cultural memory in literature and the visual arts, heritage studies, and photography. His leader of the research group "Memory, Materiality, and Meaning in the Age of Transnationalism".

Anneke Smelik is Katrien van Munster Professor of Visual Culture at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She has published widely in the field of fashion, cinema, popular culture and cultural memory. Her latest books are Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion and Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists.

Liedeke Plate is Associate Professor Gender Studies and Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on literature, gender and cultural memory. She is the author of Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (2011), and co-editor of, among other, Technologies of Memory in the Arts (2009), Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2013).