Call for Dossiers "Difficult Heritage" (v.21, n.1/2025)
In recent decades, the sites associated with the remembrance of events of pain and traumatic events have multiplied. This is a process of memorialising spaces that goes back to the interpretation of the trenches and cemeteries of the First World War in Europe or even earlier, reaching the most recent conflicts expressed in genocides (the Shoah, Cambodia, Rwanda). Progressively, these places have been punctuated by monuments, remembrances, museums, memorials, museum-memorials and, more recently, sites of conscience. Not only the sites themselves, but the entire network of remembrance - including images, related literature and testimonies - has come to constitute a living, current and painful heritage.
The reality of conflict, which brings human, physical and economic losses, directly affects the material and immaterial heritage of human groups, inviting reflection on cultural disconnection, accessories and the return of goods seized in processes of colonisation, neocolonisation and recolonisation. UNESCO has worked with concepts such as conflict memory, limit events and conflict heritage.
On the American continent, there is a large presence of sites of conscience that refer to the experience of the enslaved, the genocides of native populations and dictatorial regimes marked by state violence against citizens. In addition, recent Latin American history has left its mark in cities and countryside, in institutionalised places of segregation such as leprosariums, asylums, prisons, hospitals, slave labour sites or the separation of migrating populations.
The dossier aims, firstly, to bring together studies that deal with difficult heritages, that is, the recognition of material remains of ‘a past that is recognized as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity.’ (Sharon Macdonald, 2009). We welcome studies that make it possible to: recognise structures, objects or territories relating to controversial situations; reflect on the symbolism of these monuments or memorials; explain memory policies that recognise them and legal demands for those involved to be held accountable; understand the stances that deny them or movements that remember traumatic collective events; and the dissemination of sites that were the scene of regimes of exception or traumatic events. Secondly, this dossier also aims to bring together articles that stimulate, substantiate and/or consolidate proposals for recognition actions with preservation bodies and organisations related to difficult heritage.
Organisers: Cristina Meneguello (Unicamp); Eduardo Romero (Unesp)
Deadline: 30 June 2025
