Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

Andreas Huyssen

ISBN 10: 0804745617 / ISBN 13: 9780804745611

Published by Stanford University Press, 2003

About this Item

2003. 1st Edition. Paperback. Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This title analyses the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires and New York - three late-20th century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Series: Cultural Memory in the Present Series. Num Pages: 192 pages, references, index. BIC Classification: 1DFG; 1KBBEY; 1KLSA; AB; HPS; JFC. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 228 x 154 x 12. Weight in Grams: 266. . . . . . Seller Inventory # V9780804745611

Bibliographic Details

Title: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the ...

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: New

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York―three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.

From the Back Cover:

“Fascinating reading, this is a profound, original, and timely book about the world’s current obsession with the past, as well as the form which this obsession has taken: memory. Huyssen considers what our obsession with memory means, and examines a number of material forms that it has taken, as well as the social, cultural, and aesthetic functions they have served.” —Kaja Silverman, University of California, Berkeley