Transcultural amnesia: mapping displaced memories

Abstract

These are contributions to the global mapping of the places of memory marked out by human beings who crossed frontiers, whether coerced or not, in different historic periods, political, social and economic contexts. Their experiences were/are rarely remembered and much less commemorated by local cultures. The involuntary or premeditated areas of forgetting, the strategies and mechanisms of camouflage or obliteration of marks and memories related to transcultural mobility, the places left behind and the memories constructed of these places/cultures by the people that have experienced them or their descendants, were particular topics addressed by the several papers gathered in this volume. The reader will find here a selection of papers covering various aspects of the complex relations between (un)forced mobility and (hi)stories of memory and forgetfulness.