Disturbing Pasts: Memories, Controversies and Creativity

Throughout the world, legacies of war, colonialism, genocide and oppression return again and again to dominate contemporary culture. This volume assembles artists, curators and academics to explore how such legacies can inspire creative approaches to remembering and challenging the past.Contributors begin with the idea that any meaningful encounter with the past has to be felt at a personal level, no matter how difficult an event may be to recall and represent. Recollecting stories of this kind is complex and sensitive, and the book demonstrates how the process can benefit from the joint efforts of people from different fields, including professional art practices, art history and visual culture studies, social anthropology, literary studies, history, museology and cultural policy studies. The result is a detailed global picture that presents a variety of new approaches to confronting dominant historical narratives and shaping alternative interpretations.Based on a major project of international collaboration supported by the European Science Foundation, Disturbing pasts gathers voices, histories and images from diverse contexts, including South Africa, Germany, Namibia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Australia.