In an age of information and new media the relationships between
remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the
tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten
pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the
essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover
subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in
WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial
videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the
contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord's notion of the
spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the
contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of
spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the
present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps
now "spectacle" can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed
solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer
Walter Benjamin's plea to "explode the continuum of history" and bring
our attention to now-time.