From the Editor

With contributions on the United States, India, and central, eastern and southern Europe, this issue of History & Memory raises a series of fascinating questions regarding the many ways that memory intersects with and sheds light upon central aspects of modern society, including colonialism and racism, communism and democracy, capitalism and culture, and tourism and cities.

The first article by Robert J. Cook focuses on the efforts to forge and maintain a coherent, unifying memory of the American Civil War. Cook shows how race and the cause of racial equality were progressively eliminated from the memory of the war among Federal veterans (and their descendants) who preferred, over time, to emphasize narratives of solidarity and reconciliation with their former adversaries of the Confederacy. As Cook notes, the "embrace of North-South reconciliation contributed to the eclipse of the Unionist narrative," including the "memory of the Civil War as a wicked proslavery rebellion" (5–6).

Helle Jørgensen also considers the intersection between war, memory and society by exploring the web of meaning woven around a French imperial war memorial in the Indian city of Puducherry. Addressing important methodological and theoretical questions relating to the connection between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, Jørgensen argues that the "French war memorial plays a particular role in the construction of post/colonial memory" (40), one that highlights the multidirectional process of negotiating and reconfiguring postcolonial relations.

Sabine Stach similarly explores the intersection between empire, memory and tourism, but in the radically different context of guided tours to postcommunist sites of memory in three distinct urban environments, Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava. Stach maintains that by serving as "time capsules that allow immersion in the past," these tours "can both strengthen and unsettle historical images" and thereby evoke a mixture of seemingly contradictory responses, ranging from nostalgia for bygone days to a complete rejection of the communist era (76, 102).

Like Stach, Manuel Ghilarducci analyzes the pivotal role that memory plays in postcommunist cities across eastern Europe, in this case the capital of Belarus, Minsk. Based on the work of the Belarussian artist and writer Artur Klinau, Ghilarducci illustrates "the paradoxes that lie at the core of the political antagonisms and the struggles over collective memory and questions of identity" in Belarus (111). Focusing on questions related to the transition between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, on the one hand, and the very nature of Belarusian national identity, on the other, he argues that Klinau's work "seeks an escape from binarism but succeeds only partially…" and that "the erased elements return and create the idea of a postcolonial city which should come to terms with its hybridity" (115).

David Rodríguez-Solás continues many of the themes raised by Cook, Stach and Ghilarducci regarding the role that memory plays in societies that have undergone dramatic periods of "transition." Through his analysis of independent theater in Spain of the 1970s, he questions the prevailing hegemonic narrative of the Spanish transition to democracy as "a negotiated, normalized and nonconfrontational process" (145). Throughout, he emphasizes the role that cultural productions play "as a countermemory of the process of democratization" and the manner in which independent theater served both as "the testing ground for a profound reshaping of theater practice and a space for socialization and political action" (144).

Although separated by geography, political setting and time, the five contributions to this issue address a number of common points regarding memory and its changing role as a broken lens onto a crooked past. Despite the illusion of clarity, memory, as a means of revisiting or constructing individual or collective interpretations of times past and lives present, repeatedly fails to resolve many of the political, intellectual and existential divides in contemporary societies. These shortcomings, however, ultimately allow the authors to provide a deeper understanding of how different aspects of our world intersect with, influence and shape one another over time and space. Far from being monolithic or schematic, the image of memory that emerges is one that is simultaneously divided and coherent, changing and permanent, elusive and pervasive, past and present.