This chapter argues that Soviet crimes at times of war were both widespread and complex in their origin, goals, logic, and trajectory. It distinguishes and explains several forms of Soviet criminality during its defensive war against Germany in 1941–1945: crimes against humanity and war crimes, both perpetrated by agents of the state and often in accordance with explicitly formulated state policy; troop crimes, not guided by state policy but often understood to be in its fulfilment by the perpetrators; and a variety of violent and criminal behaviour emanating from small group bonding, both within the military and outside of it. The chapter explains their origins and charts the reasons why there was so much silence about the criminality of the Soviet war effort after victory.

This chapter situates contemporary Russian war memory in its twentieth-century historical context, exploring how and why the war victory gained such prominence and drawing out certain continuities and discontinuities across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. Given the immense scale of Soviet wartime losses and the unusually heavy-handed instrumentalization of history under Putin, the Second World War was bound to play a prominent role in Russian memory culture. Yet, as the chapter will show, the precise character of Russian war memory and its utility for the Kremlin derive overwhelmingly from decades of Soviet-era commemorative practices. The chapter does not attempt to rectify distortions of historical truth but rather to elucidate the mechanisms by which states repurpose the past in the service of the present. Soviet war memory, as elsewhere, was the product of internal debate and deliberation as the leadership wrestled with what were often pan-European issues of representation. The chapter therefore approaches the myth and memory of the Great Patriotic War as a particular manifestation of a universal impulse to ‘make sense’ of war in the modern world.

Collective memory of a historical event does not depend on its contemporary and historiographical significance alone. Germany’s selective memory of the Eastern Front is a case in point. It has been influenced by four developments. The problem of the prisoners of war that had remained in the Soviet Union, the ‘returnees’, and the veterans underlined the importance of the Eastern Front among the West German public. The Stalingrad myth, in particular, had a decisive influence on an image of war (in the East), according to which the Germans considered themselves first and foremost victims of that war. The critical discussion of the war and its nexus with the Holocaust after 1970 led to a turning point wherein the victims of the Germans became the focus of remembrance in West Germany. In the socialist satellite state of East Germany, the heroization of the Red Army was a characteristic feature of public war memories. Commemorations of the Eastern Front changed again in unified Germany after the Cold War – from the early years of Russia’s rapprochement to the dramatic deterioration of the German-Russian relationship.

The chapter examines how North African fiction in French has engaged with gaps in official history by foregrounding the stories of and about erased or forgotten events and actors, thus seeking to fill the factual and experiential lacunae of archival records. It first provides an overview of different generations of writers from the anti-colonial group who leveraged the symbolic powers of fiction to pave the way for independence to post-independence authors such as those who in the 1980s self-identified as “Beur” (first-generation French citizens born of parents who immigrated from North Africa) and the following generation of “banlieue” writers who emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The chapter then focuses on Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel L’Amour, la fantasia as a work that both exemplifies and exceeds the ethical stance and the aesthetic potential of the archival novel insofar as it mobilizes all the genre’s strategies of research, recovery, and representation while also questioning the very project of restoring the archive and thus revoking its presumed authority. The chapter admits to its own incompleteness, unknowing and linguistic partiality as it does not purport to account for the rich literary production in other languages such as Arabic, Tamazight, and English.

This chapter considers how colonialism (and its legacy in the postcolonial period) has influenced the articulation of the geographical space of Algiers as a lieu de mémoire in works of fiction written by contemporary Algerian authors of French expression. “Under what historical conditions is a city, and a postcolonial city at that, transformed into a ‘site of memory’?” asks scholar Réda Bensmaïa referring to Algiers. Is Pierre Nora’s les lieux de mémoire framework valid for the colonized as well as the colonizer? From 1962 forward, Algerian authors of French expression have sought to identify spaces that they thought necessary for the progress of the postcolonial nation. For authors such as Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra, and Assia Djebar, remembering and memory are essential to building national postcolonial identity. These authors were born post-1962 and reside for the most part in Algeria. The chapter studies Samir Toumi’s Alger, le cri (2013) and Kaouther Adimi’s Nos richesses (2017) for what they say about the legacies of colonialism, the Revolution, and the more recent civil war of the 1990s to early 2000s.

How we transform our memories and experiences into fiction beyond the injunction to ‘write what you know’. The imaginative process includes filling in the gaps of memory, embracing the freedom to invent, selecting a viewpoint and adding energy through dialogue. We need to consider not only which details and descriptions to include but which to omit: the balancing of information affects the meaning and impact of the story.

Memory, shared realities, and political possibility through the remnant traces of an art installation. The unstable documentation of several related 1990s collective arts installations, all intentionally ephemeral within the abandoned spaces of condemned buildings on the eve of their destruction, opens up questions of plural achievement, the singularity of truth, and the possible contradictions among versions of evidence. These interconnecting collective arts projects were all intended to break free of the commodified gallery space, while calling attention to the vulnerability of both culture and city to rampant financial speculation. Despite the author’s and the archive’s confusion, different versions of the Khaneh Kolangi (the “To-Be-Demolished House”) together provided a key intervention in Iranian postrevolutionary arts culture and practice. They also offer a ghostly metaphor for the ongoing potential power of collective action, individual and shared memory, and political inspiration. Luce Irigaray’s conceptualizations of a plural self and its potentials offers insight into posibilities for differently understanding power, politics, and history.

Chapter 5 explores a wide range of passages where the Sectarians identify themselves as the present-time victims or potential victims of violence perpetrated by empowered others: Rome and the local Jewish priestly and political authorities. The imagery of the powerful priests in Jerusalem and their leader the Wicked Priest waging a campaign of violence and intimidation against the Sectarians is part of a broader attempt by the disempowered and disenfranchised Sectarians to craft a narrative of victimhood.

The current understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is unique relative to other psychiatric disorders in that there are very clear links between basic affective neuroscience and the diagnostic criteria and treatment of the disorder. Current theories of the causes of PTSD, and gold-standard cognitive behavioral treatments, are grounded in foundational knowledge of fear learning and extinction, emotion regulation, attention, memory, and executive functioning. This conceptual alignment allows for clear translational links from molecular biology to systems neuroscience to healthy human studies and, finally, to the clinic. This chapter will outline a number of such translational links, giving a general overview of how affective neuroscience has informed the current understanding of PTSD and the emerging benefits of these insights.

Realist narrative genres, such as memoir and autobiography, are the most prevalent women’s prison writing. Contemporary readers rely on these narrative elements in order to believe stories. However, when the writer disassociates during a traumatic event and does not remember details that would ground their telling in recognizable details, their narratives cannot reliably reference them. As incarcerated women authors grapple with what they’ve suffered and what they’ve done, their narratives inevitably intersect with social realities that form the background violence that created the conditions for the discrete, traumatic events of harmdoing. While carceral culture essentializes people into stagnant categories of worth – good/flawed, criminal/victim, innocent/guilty – incarcerated women’s stories show how facile these conceptions are, how much harm they cause, and that incarceration does nothing to address these issues and often actively prohibits healing.

The history of Russia’s peatlands is closely entangled with the environmental issues of our time. Although most peat extraction in central Russia ceased decades ago, the legacy of this history is ongoing. Drainage and industrial exploitation have turned peatlands from carbon sinks into powerful carbon emitters. Recognizing how this issue is rooted in a larger history of economic growth adds depth to our understanding of the current planetary predicament. Even though Russia may not soon become an ally in efforts to cure degraded peatlands, writing their history constitutes an important step in addressing the ecological amnesia surrounding these ecosystems and in developing more caring relationships with them.

I detail the impacts of US imperialism on both the structural and interpersonal levels and how these memories live in the bodies of migrants. I discuss Comandante Susana’s unearthed archive, which was found by a campesino farmer in a corn field in 2015. That archive contained the intimate letters of Domitila, the woman whose story opened the book. I show how history can be a tool to connect with movement ancestors, heal historical trauma, and reawaken a radical imagination to organize powerful social movements. I underscore the necessity of revolutionary feminism in our current historical moment. I conclude with a discussion of the larger political lessons of the Salvadoran revolution and its current-day political relevance. In an era of state violence and despair, we have much to learn from Salvadoran women who waged revolution.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.