Mobile Histories, Activated Memories

Mnemonic Infrastructures & Contested Souths
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-43152-7
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 214 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Transdisciplinary Souths

This book proposes two conceptual prisms to challenge predominating regimes of temporality: mobile histories and activated memories. Mobile histories evoke a sense of how history is forged, how history is narrated, and dynamically reshaped through overlapping temporal layers and translocal intersections. By contrast, activated memories focus on how people across the Global South proactively engage their present circumstances and delineate the horizon of imaginable futures. For its part, mnemonic infrastructures point to the ways in which people and material artefacts come to inhabit shared worlds through memory and affect.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research alike, the contributions explore how material artefacts such as photographs, monuments, ruins, oral and written histories, enfold genealogical layers of temporality, representation, commemoration, and contestation. At the same time, they reveal how these artefacts are firmly embedded in concentrations and circulations of power, authority, and formations of subjectivity. Bringing together case studies from Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Palestine, the volume shows how historical narratives and memory practices continue to shape social and political life across the Global South.

Combining rich empirical research with innovative theoretical insights, the contributors demonstrate how the past functions both as a political resource and as a cultural archive.

The book will be of great interest to scholars, archivists, and researchers of history, cultural studies, memory studies and trauma studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nikro, Norman Saadi

Leupold, David

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtspolitik, Erinnerungskultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
Part I: Mobile Histories
1 The Social Life of Ta’atuf (Empathy): Storytelling and the Production of Mnemonic
Infrastructures in Lebanon
2 Mobile histories: Chempakaraman Pillai and the construction of a collective role model in
post-colonial India
3 An ‘immobile history’? Narrating the cultural memory of Bishkek’s hip-hop community
4 Charan Narzary’s Dream for Udayachal: Contested Memorialization and the Political
Memoir as an Artefact in the Bodoland Territorial Region in India

Part II: Activated Memories
5 Laughing Away the War? Dolma Diaries (2022) and the Multivocalization of Armenian-
Azerbaijani Cultural Memory
6 Entangled Palestinian Memories Activated through Music: Sabreen and 47Soul
7 Photographs as travelling radio- and memory-objects from Cold War India
8 The Memomusor Art Project and the ‘trashification’ of historical memory in Kyrgyzstan
9 Genealogies of Intergenerational Memory in Lebanon: Ghassan Halwani’s
Erased,____Ascent of the Invisible

Über Autor(innen)

Norman Saadi Nikro is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin.
David Leupold is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin, and principal investigator of the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft-funded project Relicts of (Another) Future? Life and Afterlife of the Socialist City in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus.