Mourning, melancholia and violence

Larry Ray

pp. 135-154

in: Duncan Bell (ed), Memory, trauma and world politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

Today the past has achieved a kind of iconic, even sacred status. Remembering the past is now widely understood as a valuable activity in and of itself; … We have become a society of ‘memory groups’ where one’s claim to group membership typically goes unchallenged because a common past … constitutes an area of discourse that cannot be contested.1