Jessica Gorter. “I’m interested in how memory is inherently subjective, shaped by time, emotion, and experience”
Filming from under a history in erasure: Jessica Gorter’s documentary films about Russia’s memory and counter-memory.
Download back issue of Baltic Worlds
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
memory politics
19 articles tagged with memory politics were found.
The concerns of historians
Network of Concerned Historians Annual Report 2025, contains news about the domain where history and human rights intersect, in particular about the censorship of history and the persecution of historians.
THE SILENCE OF THE PINK CUBES
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, has always astonished foreigners with its peculiar eerie atmosphere. Broad, empty, impeccably clean avenues adorned with WW2 obelisks and pompous statues of Soviet heroes attracted untrained gazes reminding the guests of the city of the utopian settings by Orwell and Huxley. But to me, a born Minsker, they reminded more of a hospital — with the ghosts of the collective memory sanitizers leaders safeguarding imaginary peace and order
MEMORY FOR SALE: ETHICAL DILEMMAS AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE HOLOCAUST
The thematic bookstalls, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the Italian city of Turin, January 2025, show a range of covers, some only rather vaguely connected with the traumatic past in the context that they are displayed in. The Storyteller of Auschwitz is just one of many in the same vein, blending real events with fictionalized narratives. The Italian version sold at Milan airport as an on-the-plane read has a title that literally translates as “a girl who wrote love stories in Auschwitz”, and the cover shows the image of a malnourished child in bedraggled clothes with the eerie Birkenau gate contour as background. This leads to reflections on the many layers of Holocaust portrayal, 80 years after the end of WWII, and its implications.
THE DEADLOCKS OF MEMORY AND THE (NO LONGER) POST-SOVIET COLONIALITY, or CAN MEMORY BE DECOLONIZED?
The article reflects if it is possible to decolonize memory in the former Soviet republics that have been gradually moving centrifugally towards different political allegiances. It is needed to go beyond the postcolonial/post-Soviet national optic and consider inter-imperial (Doyle) and non-nation-state post-imperial (Burbank and Cooper) models and other unrealized alternatives. The article focuses on coloniality of memory critically engaging with various concepts including “dismembering” (Thiong’o), “mankurtism” (Aitmatov), “Myalism” (Brodber), “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg), “double critique” (Khatibi), “species memory” (Kaiser and Thiele), and the “third way” (Wynter). It sets the goal of tracing possible paths for rethinking of what it means to remember in a human way and what it takes to engender a global mnemonic transversal network of solidarity for refuturing.
Post-communist memory in the negative
This essay takes the novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić as a starting point for a discussion of why the notion of a post-Yugoslav or post-communist cultural memory seems to be a contradiction in terms. The manifest impossibility of forming a collective post-Yugoslav memory provokes a reflection on how cultural and collective memory has been used in post-communist Eastern Europe to historify the communist past, which further has served the revival of a nationalist agenda. Ugrešić offers a counter memory, if we understand the term from Foucault as something that escapes the forming of identities. Finally, I suggest the notion of negative memory, as introduced by Reinhardt Koselleck, as a more apposite term for approaching memory in the post-communist sphere and in the unfolding catastrophes of the modern world.
Introduction. The politics of aesthetic historicizations and memory culture in former Yugoslavia Theme: Monuments, new arts, and new narratives
This special section in Baltic Worlds is the result of a workshop engaging with the politics of aesthetic historicizations, through the grid of the monument.
The dilemma of memory laws To restore the dignity of victims without feeding into ultra-nationalism
In most post-communist countries after the breakdown of the USSR, memory legislation often aimed at constructing an identity of suffering under Nazism and the totalitarian Soviet regime, which relativized itself according to a cosmopolitan understanding of victimhood centered on the Holocaust memory. Regulations of memory, in this sense, were considered an indicator of democratic transition and an entry ticket to the European Union.
Defining the future for the people. Defining the future for the people. Examining a proposed link between cultural heritage and the future
Cultural Heritage and the Future, Cornelius Holtorf & Anders Högberg, eds., (London & New York: Routledge, 2021), 256 pages.
A multifaceted picture of the memory processes in Eastern Europe. In search of reconciliation
CBEES Annual Report 2020: Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past. A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region, Eds. Ninna Mörner et al., (Södertörn University: Stockholm, 2021). 186 pages
- Cover of BW 2026:2
Issue 2026, 2: Download. -
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.
Articles listed by country you find here.>>