Mobile Histories, Activated Memories

This book proposes two conceptual prisms to challenge predominating regimes of temporality: mobile histories and activated memories. Mobile histories evokes a sense of how history is forged, how history is narrated, dynamically reshaped through overlapping temporal layers and translocal intersections. By contrast, activated memories focuses on how people across the Global South proactively engage their present circumstances and delineate the horizon of imaginable futures. For its part, mnemonic infrastructures points to the ways in which people and material artefacts come to inhabit shared worlds through memory and affect.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research alike, the contributions explore how material artefacts such as photographs, monuments, ruins, oral and written histories, enfold genealogical layers of temporality, representation, commemoration, and contestation. At the same time, they reveal how these artefacts are firmly embedded in concentrations and circulations of power, authority, and formations of subjectivity. Bringing together case studies from Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Palestine, the volume shows how historical narratives and memory practices continue to shape social and political life across the Global South.

Combining rich empirical research with innovative theoretical insights, the contributors demonstrate how the past functions both as a political resource and a cultural archive. The book will be of great interest to scholars, archivists, and researchers of history, cultural studies, memory studies and trauma studies.