Remembering Contentious Lives

This collection addresses two interrelated questions: How are the lived experiences of contention remembered in the form of auto/biography? How is life writing, as an act of cultural remembrance, used in activism? Building on cutting-edge scholarship on the socio-political potential of narrating lived experience, this volume takes life-writing as a new point of observation on the entanglement between memory and activism.

This is an open access book.

Ann Rigney is professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and PI of the ERC-funded Advanced Grant Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct 2019-2024); www.rememberingactivism.eu.

She has published widely in the field of memory studies, including three monographs, five edited collections, and many articles in high-profile international journals. Her publications include The Rhetoric of Historical Representation (Cambridge UP, 1990), The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford UP, 2012), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (de Gruyter, 2009; edited with A. Erll), Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (de Gruyter, 2014; edited with C. de Cesari); and The Visual Memory of Protest (Amsterdam UP, forthcoming; edited with Th.Smits). Her work focusses on the cultural mediation of memory and, in recent years, has pioneered the application of the tools of cultural analysis to understanding the memory-activism nexus.

Co-editors Duygu Erbil and Clara Vlessing are both members of the ReAct team. Vlessing has recently submitted her thesis on the afterlives of revolutionary women from the earlier twentieth century, and will graduate in June 2023.

Erbil expects to complete her thesis later in 2023, on the cultural afterlives of Turkish student leader Deniz Gezmis.