Plastic Pasts: Sited Memory in Paris, Algiers and Marseille

Leffler, Christopher

This book uses plasticity as a metaphor for understanding how the past endures and evolves within the landscape, and the ways in which remembering shapes the sites we occupy and use. The plastic site is characterised both by its resilience, its form never entirely altered from an earlier mould, and by its malleability, which ensures that whatever persists is inevitably transformed. Embodied in its present configuration are the many moments that have produced it over time, and these are continually supplemented and modified.

Surveying examples from Paris, Algiers and Marseille, and media as diverse as literature, film, photography, blogs and video games, Plastic Pasts interrogates how different communities and cultural producers have grappled with the present past in space as an enduring and dynamic memory. It argues that understanding sited memory as plastic entails recognising a multiplicity of immutable pasts that exist in a permanent state of ongoing evolution.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2023-11-21

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9789819956159

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-99-5616-6

Dimensions: 210.0cm x148.0cm

Pages: 297.0