Research & Studies

The Challenges of Transcultural Memories and Memory Studies in the Global Age

This brand new article was written by Tímea Jablonczay, iASK researcher, and was released in Helikon in 2022.

Abstract

In the decade following the turn of the millennium, transcultural memory has emerged as an established research perspective, as a paradigm, and as a third phase within memory studies, interested in travelling, translation and intersections of memory in practices of cultural representations and mediations, examining cross-cultural and transcultural mnemonical processes. In this introductory paper, I attempt to explore the antecedents of the new perspective, providing a summary on the conceptual framework of the transcultural memory studies to measure the novelty of the transcultural turn in this field. Furthermore, I try to illustrate how this research perspective has provided a new departure from previous ones, both in theoretical and empirical research, and I also try to interpret its implications for transnational holocaust memory as cosmopolitan one. In this paper, I discuss the concepts of memory developed by leading theorists, including travelling (Astrid Erll), multidirectional (Michael Rothberg), palimpsest (Max Silverman), post- and connective (Marianne Hirsch), born translated (Eneken Laanes), and, most recently, planetary memory (Bond, Rapson, Crownshaw), and their range of meanings.

Keywords: transcultural memory, travelling memory, multidirectional memory, postmemory, planetary memory.

The article is available HERE, with full text in Hungarian.