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Understanding how individual perspectives on history build collective memory
Oral History and Public Memories
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edited by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes
"A fine, well-conceived book, refreshingly direct and engaged. A collection of sparkling essays that show oral history at work in a diverse array of contexts, levels, and engagements. They demonstrate powerfully its consequentiality for thinking clearly about meaningful intersections in public space, public life, community sensibility, and mobilized memory. This is no small accomplishment."
—Michael Frisch, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Oral History and Public Memories is the first book to explore the relationship between the well-established practice of oral history and the burgeoning field of memory studies. In the past, oral historians have generally privileged the individual narrator, frequently fetishizing the interview process without fully understanding that interviews are only one form of memory-making. Historians engaged in memory studies, on the other hand, have asked broader questions—about the social and cultural processes at work in remembrance, for example. What distinguishes these essays from much work in oral history is their focus not on the experiences of individual narrators, but on the broader cultural meanings of oral history narratives. What distinguishes them from other work in memory studies is their grounding in real events. Taken together, these contributions explain the processes by which oral histories move beyond interviews with individual people to become articulated memories shared by others.
Excerpt
Reviews
"The welcome purpose of this collection is to…seek some form of rapprochement between oral history and memory studies.... Each chapter takes us somewhere quite different, geographically as well as culturally, but each author considers in some way the relation between their own ethnographic practice and the link-ups between individual life stories and social memory. Through this focus on the broader cultural meanings and significance of oral history narratives, the book operates as a creative exchange between the adjacent but hitherto largely separated fields of memory studies and oral history.... The real promise of the book lies in the marriage of an empirical concern with memory in public with the critical question of the publicness of memory."
—The Journal of Folklore Research
"This book is the result of a fruitful collaboration between two highly regarded oral historians...In the introduction, the authors regret the lack of published work on 'how oral history... both reflects and shapes collective or public memory.' This anthology is an important contribution towards rectifying that lacuna."
—Oral History
"[Chapters] illustrate how oral history can be used as an important tool for enabling personal narratives, transforming public memories and making social change... Several of the chapters...make excellent use of a range of theoretical approaches to memory work.... [T]aken as a whole, this book is one important step towards a rapprochement between oral history and memory scholarship."
—History Australia
"Oral history interviews often turn up surprises, and this book is full of surprises.... No "Cliff Notes" like this review can do justice to this book because the rich details, subtle nuances, and brilliant research strategies are not explored, but the breadth and depth of the collection can be glimpsed. Oral History and Public Memories will speed the development of oral history in the direction of international sharing of information and will make a significant contribution to refinement of oral history research methods."
—Oral History Review
Contents
Introduction: Building Partnerships between Oral History and Memory Studies
Part I
Introduction: Creating Heritage
1. Parks Canada, the Commemoration of Canada, and Northern Aboriginal Oral History
2. History from Above: The Use of Oral History in Shaping Collective Memory in Singapore
3. Mapping Memories: Oral History for Aboriginal Cultural Heritige in New South Wales, Australia
4. Moving beyond the Walls: The Oral History of the Ottoman Fortress Villages of Seddulbahir and Kumkale
5. Private Memory in a Public Space: Oral History and Museums
Part II
Introduction: Recreating Identity and Community
6. Imagining Communities: Memory, Loss, and Resilience in Post-Apertheid Cape Town
7. Contested Places in Public Memory: Reflections on Personal Testimony and Oral History in Japanese American Heritage
8. "Scars in the Ground": Kauri Gum Stories
9. Memory and Mourning: Living Oral History with Queer Latinos and Latinas in San Francisco
10. Interfaced Memory: Black World War II Ex-Gis' and Veterans' Reunions of the Late Twentieth Century
Part III
Introduction: Making Changes
11. Public Memory as Arena of Contested Meanings: A Student Project on Migration
12. Countering Corporate Narratives from the Streets: The Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project
13. Public Memory, Gender, and National Identity in Postwar Kosovo
14. Seeing the Past, Visions of the Future: Memory Workshops with Internally Displaced Persons in Coloumbia
Contributors
Index
About the Author(s)
Paula Hamilton is Associate Professor in History at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She is co-director of the Australian Centre for Public History, and co-editor of Public History Review.
Linda Shopes is a freelance editor and consultant; and formerly a historian at the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission. She is Past President of the U.S. Oral History Association, and co-editor of the series Studies in Oral History.
Subject Categories
In the series
Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig.
Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, is concerned with the traditional and nontraditional ways in which historical ideas are formed. In its attentiveness to issues of race, class, and gender and to the role of human agency in shaping events, the series is as critical of traditional historical method as content. Emphasizing that history is itself an interpretation of material events, the series demonstrates that the historian's choices of subject, narrative technique, and documentation are politically as well as intellectually constructed.