ABSTRACT
1995 was a banner year for commemoration. A half century earlier, according to dominant Western narratives, justice had vanquished two tyrannies, bringing forth a new paradigm of world history. But it was not just the “roundness” of the number fifty that gave cause for commemoration. The flurry of fifty-year markings of World War Two events was only an instance of our epoch’s wider preoccupation with memory. Everywhere we turn, it seems, memory is at the center of local and national agendas. As the previous chapters have shown, the mass media and entertainment industries find nostalgia an endless attraction to consumers; governments commemorate failures as well as triumphs; and social movements and other identity groups turn to “repressed” histories as sources of their cohesion and as justification for their programs. Whether through the marketing of idealized pasts, a general politics of regret, or historical identitarianism, ours is an era in which the presence of the past — real or imagined — is potent and problematic. Indeed, many commentators have seen this pervasive historical consciousness as emblematic of our contemporary condition. Across many disciplines, and in the wider public too, collective memory we have seen has become a favorite term.
