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Since the end of the Second World War, the political rationale to remember the past has shifted from previous focus on states' victories, as these began commemorating their own historical crimes. This Element follows the rise of 'auto-critical memory', or the politics of remembrance of a country's own dark past. The Element explores the idea's gestation in West Germany after the Second World War, its globalisation through initiatives of 'transitional justice' in the 1990s, and present-day debates about how to remember the colonial past. It follows different case studies that span the European continent – including Germany, France, Britain, Poland and Serbia – and places these in a global context that traces the circulation of ideas of auto-critical memory. Ultimately, as it follows the emergence of demands for social and racial justice, the Element questions the usefulness of memory to achieve the goals many political actors ascribe to it.

Itay Lotem is a cultural historian of memory, race and social movements in Britain, France and Europe at the University of Westminster. His first monograph was published with Palgrave Macmillan under the title 'The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence' (2021) and was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association's First Book Award. 

Mirjam S. Brusius is a cultural historian based at the GHIL, and works on the movement of visual and material culture between Europe, Asia, and Africa: from ancient artefacts entering Western museums, to photography moving into the Islamicate world. She is the initiator of the award-winning project 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object, and her book on the photography pioneer W. H. F. Talbot  and Empire is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

Sarah Arens is a Lecturer in French at the University of Liverpool and her research focuses on the histories, texts, and visual cultures produced during and in the aftermath of Belgian and French colonialism, and her interests range from environmental history and Environmental Humanities more broadly (especially Critical Animal Studies), via the histories of transnational far-right politics to ideas of Francophone African writing as 'world literature'. She has published a range of articles and chapters on these questions.


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