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In the age of empire, colonial promoters sought to mark the very landscape of France with reminders of France’s empire: statues, war memorials, museum collections and buildings. With decolonization, and a period of ‘colonial amnesia’ that followed it, the fate of these memorial sites was brought into question, many left neglected or viewed with discomfort. In recent years, France has rediscovered its colonial past (and its legacy in contemporary issues) and ‘repurposed’ some of the old monuments, though the treatment of extant memorials and the erection of new sites suggests the ambivalence still felt about the colonial past. This essay discusses lieux de mémoire in Paris and the provinces, placing the material heritage of colonialism in the context of the colonial and post-colonial periods and France’s confrontation with the imperial record.

In Britain the First World War has been commemorated more than any other conflict. The small street shrines erected during the war years were soon replaced by memorials in stone and bronze in every one of Britain's villages, towns and cities. Death and mourning have always been closely associated with the conflict. The commemorative rituals which developed organically in the immediate aftermath of the war were designed to be self-generating, to reassure a grieving nation that it would never forget those who had died in foreign fields. In the wake of the Second World War – perceived by comparison as a ‘good’ war which was worth fighting – the legacy of 1914-18 in popular memory began to change. The accepted idea of the conflict as senseless slaughter was buttressed by the writings of a handful of soldier-poets, some of whom were largely unknown until the 1960s. As History programmes became increasingly popular on British television from the 1950s, the medium developed the modern grand narrative documentary style in time for the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of 1914-18. Successive television documentaries became central sites of national memory and mourning which utilised the modes of remembrance established in the interwar years.

Despite the rightward political turn across the nation, gay communities mobilized for legal protection and increasingly, for AIDS research and treatment. Black gay activists formed new groups to combat racism, while others joined forces to prevent further HIV infections, but the losses continued to impact.

This chapter looks at the work the ABMC has been doing since World War II ended. The chairmanships of Generals Jacob Devers and Mark Clark are explored in some detail. Maintenance of the memorials is a mission of remembrance that the ABMC is strongly upholding. Some additional sites have been created since 1960, and “interpretive centers” continue to be added to the World War I and II memorials. Presidential visits to some of the cemeteries since the Carter years have expanded public awareness of these places of memory. The commission directed the construction of the WWII Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., that was dedicated in 2004. This chapter concludes with an assessment of the enduring importance of the work of the ABMC. The WWI veterans have all passed away, and WWII veterans are becoming fewer. The ABMC’s efforts to maintain the beautiful memorials, monuments, and cemeteries keep the many stories, examples learned, and sacrifices continually fresh in the public mind.

In Chapter 1 the author creates a history out of the shamanic narratives that reaches beyond the official. She argues that shamanism as a form of mobile history and memory and should be understood against the Buryats’ experiences of colonialism, displacement, and socialism in Russia and Mongolia. Shamanism is a type of symbolic protection against being turned into “bare life”—biopolitical subjects stripped of their identities and places of belonging. The origin spirits constitute verbal memorials; a shaman adorned in full paraphernalia is a compendium of narrative memories; and a Celestial Court—the ruling hierarchy of spirits—governs an imagined nation-state. The Buryats’ origin-spirit narratives have an unusual anti-colonial thrust, as they contain a partial betrayal—a politically opposing side of the story. This helps integrate diverse Buryat groups, including those that might shift identities between the oppressed and the dominators. Yet the Buryats’ mimicry of oppressors is highly targeted and different from what Taussig and others discuss. Even as the Buryats attribute acts of power by the oppressors to their shamanic deities and thus make their deities more powerful, they maintain their own, culturally distinct representation of their deities through language and embodied performance.

Although in ill health, Hopkins is convinced to attend a film retrospective of Paramount’s sixtieth anniversary at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a showing of The Story of Temple Drake. Also that month, she gives her last interview to historian and writer John Kobal. A few weeks later, she collapses in her hotel suite and is admitted to the Harkness Medical Center. Later, she returns to the Alrae Hotel, spending time with her sister, Ruby, and friend Becky Morehouse. She dies alone at the hotel, shortly before her seventieth birthday. The reactions from her friends and family are documented, recounting her funeral in New York and memorials in Bainbridge and Hollywood.

This section features selections from Edward Dowden's Poems (based on the 1914 Dent edition), including The Wanderer, The Fountain (An Introduction to the Sonnets), In the Galleries, On the Heights, “La Rélévation par le Désert,” and The Morning Star. Other poems found in this volume are A Child's Noonday Sleep, In the Garden, The Heroines, By the Sea, Among the Rocks, To a Year, A Song of the New Day, Swallows, Memorials of Travel, An Autumn Song, Burdens, Song, By the Window, Sunsets, Oasis, Foreign Speech, In the Twilight, The Inner Life, In the Cathedral Close, First Love, Beau Rivage Hotel, In a June Night, From April to October, Sea Voices, Aboard the “Sea-Swallow,” Sea-sighing, In the Mountains, “The Top of a Hill Called Clear,” The Initiation, Renunciants, Speakers to God, Poesia, Musicians, and Miscellaneous Sonnets.

In the twentieth century the antisemitism either directed at Jews in Poland or which was more broadly at work within ideological systems was largely disavowed, deployed for political point-scoring or simply prohibited from critique in public discourse. In chapter 5, the focus on Polish-Jewish relations gives particular attention to the public debate provoked by the publication of the historian Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001), which attributes guilt for the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom to ethnic Poles rather than the German fascists. The publication of Gross’s monograph caused mass outrage, provoking Joanna Michlic to identify the debate around the pogrom as the most important and long-standing in postcommunist Poland. A large number of productions by artists such as Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jan Klata, Tadeusz Słobodzianek, Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, Artur Pałyga and Marcin Liber appeared within an environment of public outrage and recriminations over culpability for antisemitic violence in Poland over the course of the last century that gave voice to alternative and often repressed histories, Jewish lives and experiences, and which mark a haunting and acutely felt absence of Jewish populations after the Holocaust and the purges of 1968.

This essay complicates the dominant literary-historical narrative by comparing Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1927) with Christopher Isherwood’s The Memorial (1932) in the context of the Great War and the national memorialization in its wake. Woolf’s “The Leaning Tower” (1940) helps tie the threads together. This essay advocates for a discourse of affiliation rather than opposition, highlighting the shared literary sympathies of modernist and Younger Generation writers in a world saturated by memorials both military and masculine.

Apart from offering general explanations of the Bolshevik predominance during the “Russian” Civil Wars, the Conclusion to this book casts some doubt over the solidity and meaningfulness of the “Red Victories”, noting that not only did the Soviet government fail to conquer all the territories of the former tsarist Empire (having to accept the loss of Finland, the Baltic States, Poland and Bessarabia) and regions occupied by Russia during the First World War (in Western Ukraine and Eastern Anatolia, for example), but it also failed to achieve the principal aim of Bolshevik revolution: to inspire proletarian revolutions in Europe and Asia through the thereafter blunted instrument of the Komintern. It is also argued that the character of the Bolshevik party was indelibly and fatefully marked by the brutal experience of the civil wars, paving the way for the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and the attendant Soviet war against the peasantry of that decade. Attention is paid also to the contested role of propaganda in the Red victory, whilst contested memorialization of the civil-wars era as well as films and memorials to the civil wars are adumbrated.