História, memória e esquecimento: Implicações políticas

Abstract

Researchers have questioned the retrieval of traumatic situations such as the ones that occurred in the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam war, or the fratricidal massacres in Yugoslavia. Although some classic studies have identified important aspects relating to history and memory, there are several ways of dealing with the past, and all of them involve interests, power and exclusions. The politics of memory relating to past crimes – at the center of an ongoing debate in several academic fields as well as in society in general – depends on processes of selection and on elements that are beyond human understanding. We need to find a balance between an obsession for the past and attempts to impose forgetting. Therefore, our goal is to expand the knowledge of history, memory and forgetting, emphasizing limits as well as moral and ethical implications.

Keywords

• trauma
• memory
• history
• politics of memory
• forgetting