Remembering Identity

* Most of the work on this volume was accomplished during my stay as Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. I express my deep appreciation of the vibrant intellectual atmosphere at the Center and acknowledge the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities which funded my fellowship. I also acknowledge the copyeditor Bela Malik whose intelligence and meticulousness made it a pleasure to work on the book's publication. 1 Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, American Historical Review, 102, December 1997, 1387. 2 The literature published to date on problems of memory and identity, often overlapping, is enormous. For an important survey of the field with a very extensive bibliography until 1998 see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1998, 105–40. The interplay of the two central notions of memory and identity is discussed by John Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, Richard Handler, ‘Is “Identity” a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept?’ and David Lowenthal, ‘Identity, Heritage, and History’, all in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton University Press, 1994, 3–57. See also Debbora Battaglia, ed., Rhetorics of Self-Making, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995; Kathryn Woodward, ed., Identity and Difference, London: Sage, 1997. For a more focused survey of the historical literature see the American Historical Review Forum on ‘History and Memory’ with Susan A. Crane, Alon Confino and Daniel James, American Historical Review, 102, December 1997, 1371–412; the special issue ‘Memory and the Nation’, Social Science History, 22, 4, winter 1998 (contributions by Jeffrey Olick, Frederick Corney, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Lyn Spillman, Francesca Poletta and Uri Ram); Anne Ollila, ed., Historical Perspectives on Memory, Helsinki: SHS, 1999; Patrick Hutton, ‘Historiography: Recent Scholarship on Memory and History’, The History Teacher, 33, 4, 2000, 533–48; Saul Friedländer, ‘History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, New German Critique, 80, 2000, 3–16; the special issue ‘Grounds for Remembering’, Representations, 69, winter 2000 (contributions by Thomas Laqueur, Stuart Semmel, Ulrich Baer, Barbara Mann, Idith Zertal, and especially Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory