Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture; Special issue Editors: Andrea Petö and Ann Phoenix (Web)

Proposals due: 19 August 2018

Memory has become a buzzword in the study of the past and memory analysis is increasingly common. Yet, new forms of political radicalization foreground memory politics in ways that are producing multi-faceted exclusions, intolerance and erasure as well as the exclusion of challenging memories from minoritised ethnic groups. At the same time, memory politics also produce new solidarities.

Some anniversaries that commemorate historical events force issues previously submerged into public view. For example, the 2017 Danish commemoration of the centenary of their sale of the Danish West Indies to the US (now the US Virgin Isles) raises questions about the meanings of loss of, or emancipation from, empire for colonisers and those colonised. The notion that repression of such memories have long-lasting and damaging cultural consequences is increasingly the subject of academic theorising. This is exemplified by Paul Gilroy’s (2005) notion that failure to engage with the lessons of the colonial period produces ‘postcolonial melancholia’(c.f. Goswami, 2013), which, as Jane Flax (2010) suggests results because burying the past does not obliterate the dead, who retur n to haunt us. Read more … (Web).