CONTENTS

Buettner, Elizabeth. Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India

Abstract:
This article examines how, and why, decaying colonial-era European graveyards in India became targeted for conservation starting in the 1970s by the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA). Cemeteries serve as a barometer signaling how both ex-colonizers and the ex-colonized have assessed colonial spaces, artifacts, and empire more generally after decolonization. Alongside working to preserve graveyards and record tombstone inscriptions in the Indian subcontinent, BACSA members—many of whom count as "old India hands"—also helped make Raj nostalgia a recurring feature of British public culture in the late twentieth century.

Dean, Carolyn J. (Carolyn Janice), 1960- Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and "Exorbitant" Jewish Memory

Abstract:
This article analyzes how the perceived problem of a "surfeit" of Jewish memory of the Holocaust in France has emerged in the context of a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism among French historians, journalists and intellectuals in the 1990s. It explores the way in which many French scholars across a wide range of ideological positions agree that Jewish memory of genocide has obscured the recognition of other crimes against humanity, and in particular the recognition of Stalin's crimes. The article asks how and why the memory of crimes against Jews and Stalin's victims has been constructed rhetorically as a zero-sum game in which Jews have unjustifiably claimed to have suffered the most of all.

Ventresca, Robert. Mussolini's Ghost: Italy's Duce in History and Memory

Abstract:
This article explores the intense debate sparked in Italy by the public broadcast in 1994 of a documentary called Combat Film, featuring footage taken by American soldiers in the closing stages of World War II, including at Milan's Piazzale Loreto the day after Mussolini's execution. The footage of Mussolini's bloodied and disfigured corpse lying alongside that of his mistress served as a jarring history lesson for a new generation of Italians. The controversy and public soul-searching sparked by the documentary—presented as it was, when it was—reflect the dynamics of remembering the legacy of fascism and antifascism at the end of the Cold War.

Sentilles, Renée M. Identity, Speculation and History: Adah Isaacs Menken as a Case Study

Abstract:
This article explores the posthumous writings on Civil War period actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken in order to examine the intersection of identity politics and the use of historical hearsay in scholarship. It investigates why and how particular stories persist and even expand in the absence of "hard" evidence. While Menken was known under many guises during the height of her national and international stardom, 1861–68, she is now arguably most famous as a Jewish or African-American poet, and is becoming an increasingly popular figure in transgender and lesbian studies. Although little primary evidence exists to corroborate these identities, this article suggests that the intersection of identity politics and historical accuracy is complicated enough to make such studies compelling and worthwhile investigations into cultural history—even if results can never be accepted as more than speculative.

Memory and Commemoration: The Case of Jebwabne

Wolentarska-Ochman, Ewa. Collective Remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled Memory of World War II in Postcommunist Poland

Abstract:
This article focuses on problems of remembering a painful and still contentious historical past and examines the interaction between remembrance and reconciliation initiatives undertaken by local communities, on the one hand, and state-sanctioned national commemorations on the other. Using the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre of Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne in northeast Poland during World War II as a case study, the article argues that interference from the"outside"—in this case by groups holding political power, the media and intellectual elites— is detrimental to local remembering.

Kapralski, Sławomir. The Jedwabne Village Green?: The Memory and Counter-Memory of the Crime

Abstract:
This article is a critical response to the views presented in Ewa Wolentarska-Ochman's article, "Collective Remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled Memory of World War II in Postcommunist Poland." In particular, it argues that mythological narratives are very far from being a genuine remembrance of what happened in Jedwabne and that it is an oversimplification to oppose the allegedly genuine remembrance of the "insiders" to the manipulation of memory by the "external world." Instead, the article outlines a model of memory inspired by Richard Sennet, in which a genuine memory of a traumatic event is possible only in a de-centered memory space, in which no standpoints are privileged a priori and remembrance becomes possible through the interaction of various perspectives.

Wolentarska-Ochman, Ewa. Response to Sławomir Kapralski

Contributors