Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction: Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age—Memorialization Unmoored

   • David J. Simon, Eve Monique Zucker

   Pages 1-18

3. Memorialization in Rwanda: The Legal, Social, and Digital Constructions of the Memorial Narrative

   • Stephanie Wolfe

   Pages 19-44

4. Breaking the Silence: Memorialization and Cultural Repair in the Aftermath of the Armenian Genocide

   • Armen T. Marsoobian

   Pages 45-70

5. Let Them Speak: An Effort to Reconnect Communities of Survivors in a Digital Archive

   • Stephen Naron, Gabor Mihaly Toth

   Pages 71-94

6. (Re)Producing the Past Online: Oral History and Social Media–Based Discourse on Cambodian Performing Arts in the Aftermath of Genocide

   • Stephanie Khoury

   Pages 95-122

7. From the Material to the Digital: Reflections on Collecting and Exhibiting Grief at the 9/11 Memorial Museum

   • Alexandra Drakakis

   Pages 123-140

8. Teaching and Learning in Virtual Places of Exception: Gone GITMO and the Guantánamo Bay Museum of Art and History

   • Cathlin Goulding

   Pages 141-173

9. The Slow Rise of Social Movement Organizations for Memorialization in Haiti: Lutte Contre Impunite, Devoire de Memoire-Haiti and Digitizing the Record on Atrocities

   • Henry F. (Chip) Carey

   Pages 175-196

10. “Rebuilding the Jigsaw of Memory”: The Discourse of Portuguese Colonial War Veterans’ Blogs

    • Verónica Ferreira

    Pages 197-223

11. Conclusion

    • David J. Simon, Eve Monique Zucker

    Pages 225-236

12. Back Matter

    Pages 237-246

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This volume explores the shifting tides of how political violence is memorialized in today's decentralized, digital era. The book enhances our understanding of how the digital turn is changing the ways that we remember, interpret, and memorialize the past. It also raises practical and ethical questions of how we should utilize these tools and study their impacts. Cases covered include memorialization efforts related to the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Europe (the Holocaust), and Armenia; to non-genocidal violence in Haiti, and the Portuguese Colonial War on the African Continent; and of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

• Memorialization
• Collective memory
• Social memory
• Genocide
• Mass violence
• Digital turn
• Digital revolution

“This book shows the way in which small groups of people doing the work of remembrance within civil society resist and transcend the appropriation of the past by state actors.  Using physical and digital sites of memory, these memory activists have preserved and disseminated the history and experience of suffering ignored, hijacked or distorted by those in power.  Risks remain, but remembrance unmoored is remembrance affirmed and protected from atrophy and erasure.” (Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University, USA)

“A tremendously important contribution to the growing attention to the ways past atrocities are memorialized through various media. The focus on non-state actors and the productive resistance to state-controlled memory helps readers understand how memorialization truly works, rather than rehearing or rationalizing state agendas regarding how memorialization should work. The balance between novel insights into various human rights violations, including a number of genocides, and the rich theoretical aspects of the case analyses taken as a whole is as rare in the literature as it is valuable even for the most knowledgeable scholar. The studies of the ways in which new technologies are impacting atrocity memory pushes readers far beyond the comfortable and reductive ideas about social media that not only pervade the media but also strongly impact academic thinking on the topic.” (Henry C. Theriault, President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and Co-Editor of Genocide Studies International)

• Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, USA

  Eve Monique Zucker

• Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, USA

  David J. Simon

Eve Monique Zucker is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, USA, and a research affiliate at Yale University, USA. She is the author of Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia (2013).

David J. Simon is Director of the Genocide Studies Program and Senior Lecturer of Political Science at Yale University, USA.

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