Geographers – and others – have been long aware that landscapes are neither natural or neutral. This is particularly true of landscapes of memory. Powerful groups inscribe such landscapes with both a preferred vision of the past and with sets of idealized societal values, and morays. Yet, and despite the authoritative weight such landscapes carry, they can be challenged. Even before the monument topplings of 2020, groups across the globe were challenging official memory discourses. This volume offers case studies of what might be considered global iconoclasm. Drawing upon original international case studies, this monograph critically engages with and reveals the dynamics of landscape contestation. From the Tsunami Museum of Banda Aceh to the echoes of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy by way of the decolonization of sites in Australia, New Zealand, Colombia and Africa the processes of landscape contestation are innovatively teased out by established and newly emerging scholars. This book should be of interest to any scholar interested in the politics of mnemonic landscapes.

Explores Byzantine perceptions of creation and different types of natural environments, and the principles underpinning such perceptions.

West vs East, antifascism vs fascism, capitalism vs communism: these are the symbolic boundaries that have divided Europe. Focusing on the Adriatic and central European regions, this collection of essays explores ruptures and continuities in memory cultures, commemorative practices and the varying politics of the past in European borderlands.

Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside acci

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of Media Memory and brings Media and Mediation to the forefront of Collective Memory research. The essays explore a diversity of media technologies (television, radio, film and new media), genres (news, fiction, documentaries) and contexts (US, UK, Spain, Nigeria, Germany and the Middle East).

Forges innovative connections between monastic archaeology and heritage studies, revealing new perspectives on sacred heritage, identity, medieval healing, magic and memory. This title is available as Open Access.

A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art's complex relationship to power. Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics. Art, argues the distinguished theoretician Boris Groys, is hardly a powerless commodity subject to the art market's fiats of inclusion and exclusion. In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function. Art, Groys writes, is produced and brought before the public in two ways—as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda. In the contemporary art scene, very little attention is paid to the latter function. Arguing for the inclusion of politically motivated art in contemporary art discourse, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism, and post-Communism. He also considers today's mainstream Western art—which he finds behaving more and more according the norms of ideological propaganda: produced and exhibited for the masses at international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Contemporary art, Groys argues, demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself—by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image. In Art Power, Groys examines this fundamental appropriation that produces the paradoxical object of the modern artwork.

This volume, with essays by leading archaeologists and prehistorians, considers how prehistoric humans attempted to recognise, understand and conceptualise death.