This book arrives on foot of a decade of commemorations. Contemporary Ireland was founded during the fractious years of 1912-1923. This volume features essays by leading historians, journalists, civic activists and folklorists. The outstanding body of scholarship offers a complexity of new views in the debate how to commemorate a divided past.

Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical event gets told is always a complicated question, and music adds further layers to this complexity, particularly music without words. The three sections of this collection look at different facets of musical commemorations and reenactments, focusing on how music can mediate, but also intensify responses to social injustice; how reenactments and their use of music are shifting (and not always toward greater social effectiveness); and how claims for musical authenticity are politicized in various ways. By engaging with critical theory around memory studies and performance studies, the contributors to this volume explore social justice, in, and through music.

This book proposes a new Ethics of Political Commemoration adapted from the Just War tradition, reflecting that remembrance is often conducted with political – and even coercive – intent. With its Ius ad Memoriam (what to commemorate) and Ius in Memoria (how to commemorate) criteria, the framework looks to guide debates that are currently inchoate so that remembrance of the past can transform relationships in the present and build a shared future. Offering a moral argument with memorable illustrations, Gutbrod and Wood draw on experiences from Armenia, Georgia, Ireland, Lebanon, and Libya, while connecting to mainstream debates in Western Europe and the United States. Bringing together an ethical tradition with the practice of conflict transformation, the framework fuses two perspectives that enrich each other. The book, in providing a first systematic presentation of the ethics, seeks to engage citizens and scholars, and help those who work to transform conflicts.

The Art of Commemoration focuses on a particular historical event that illustrates how nations define their own identities and establish mutual relations in their discourse: the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 and its Commemoration in 1994. This Commemoration was an innovative and unique form of transnational communication because it brought together representative speakers from all parties involved. They considered the commemorated event from different perspectives: the victim (Poland), the former enemy (Germany) and the former allies (England, USA, France and other countries, as well as Russia which liberated Poland but had not supported the Uprising). A letter from the Pope added a Catholic perspective. The 'art of commemoration' consists in invoking the past events from one's own perspective while simultaneously considering the other perspectives, as well as in making sense of the past and present at the same time. This volume analyses the artful way in which the speakers coped with these complexities in a full discourse analytic reconstruction of each address.

An innovative study using the commemoration of 1857 as a prism through which to explore 150 years of Indian history.

How does the act of performance speak to the concept of commemoration? How and why does commemorative theatre operate as a conceptual, historical and political site from which to interrogate ideas of nationalism and nationhood? This volume explores how theatre and performance create a stage for acts of commemoration, considering crises of hate, nationalism and migration, as well as political, racial and religious bigotry. It features case studies drawn from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The book's four parts each explore commemoration through a different theoretical lens and present a new set of dramaturgies for research and study. While Section 1 offers a critical survey of 20th- and 21st-century discourses, Section 2 uncovers the commemorative practices underpinning contemporary dramaturgy and applies these practices to plays and performance pieces. These include works by Martin Lynch, Frank McGuinness, Sanja Mitrovic, Theater RAST, Les SlovaKs Dance Collective, Estela Golovchenko, Wajdi Mouawad, Áine Stapleton, CoisCéim, ANU Productions, Aubrey Sekhabi, and Indian and African dance practices. The final sections investigate how individual and collective memory and performances of commemoration can become tools for propaganda and political agendas.

This book analyses contemporary war commemoration in Britain and Russia. Focusing on the political aspects of remembrance, it explores the instrumentalisation of memory for managing civil-military relations and garnering public support for conflicts. It explains the nexus between remembrance, militarisation and nationalism in modern societies.

In a period characterised by an unprecedented cultural engagement with the past, individuals, groups and nations are debating and experimenting with commemoration in order to find culturally relevant ways of remembering warfare, genocide and terrorism. This book examines such remembrances and the political consequences of these rites. In particular, the volume focuses on the ways in which recent social and technological forces, including digital archiving, transnational flows of historical knowledge, shifts in academic practice, changes in commemorative forms and consumerist engagements with history affect the shaping of new collective memories and our understanding of the social world. Presenting studies of commemorative practices from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East, War Memory and Commemoration illustrates the power of new commemorative forms to shape the world, and highlights the ways in which social actors use them in promoting a range of understandings of the past. The volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, cultural studies and journalism with an interest in commemoration, heritage and/or collective memory.

War memory and commemoration have had increasingly high profiles in public and academic debates in recent years. This volume examines some of the social changes which have led to this development, among them the passing of the two World Wars from survivor into cultural memory. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, the book illuminates the struggle to install particular memories at the centre of a cultural world, and offers an extensive argument about how the politics of commemoration practices should be understood.