Introduction

This special volume on Historical Memory and Social Justice brings together a series of papers that explore how different societies and groups seek to account for the legacies of violent, shameful or criminal pasts. Our aim is to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas between vastly different historical and cultural contexts as a way of enriching, deepening or altogether transforming our understanding of specific memorial cultures and of social memory more broadly. Jo McCormack and Judith Keene examine why decades needed to pass for the Algerian War in France and the Korean War in the United States respectively to be remembered in the public domain. Linde Apel's paper shows how memories of the air-bombing of German cities during WWII have been used by the survivors to cover up their memories of the Holocaust. Rachel Buchanan and Maria Tumarkin's papers explore the complex co-existence of remembering and forgetting in Aotearoa, New Zealand (Buchanan) and post-Soviet Russia (Tumarkin). Anna Haebich draws on Gitta Sereny's notion of "a twilight between knowing and not knowing" to examine how the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families has repeatedly resurfaced in Australia's public imagination. Emilio Enzel's exploration of Argentina's "Never Again" Report problematizes the alliance between history, memory and transitional justice, while Amanda Nettlebeck's contribution directs our attention to the growing de-centralization of memory-work.