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.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.
