Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the
intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the
recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for
progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in
relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging
collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be
mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public
forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past
violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future
generations?
Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist
collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars,
artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The
essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that
activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from
seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The
memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand
justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of
alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents.
Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories
that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing
Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative
practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to
a continuing hope for an alternative future.
