The rise of a cosmopolitan urban memory
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
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| Description | In the last decades one can observe an emergence of transnational solidarities which are interlinked with cosmopolitan forms of urban memory. Natan Sznaider and Daniel Levy traced the emergence of cosmopolitan memory cultures through an analysis of how the Holocaust has been remembered. They demonstrated that cosmopolitan memory cultures gain a transnational character by means of producing decontextualized symbols, representing the abstract nature of good and evil. By turning to the concept of urban memory I will look for those form of cosmopolitanism which have their ground in contemporary lived practices and experiences of diverse urban dwellers. Urban memory indicates in this sense both the city as it embodies the past through traces of its rebuilding as well as the city as an assemblage of objects and practices that enable remembrance of the past. Memorials and museums illustrate how cosmopolitan urban memory is brought into being by aesthetic mode of interpretation which displaces their original nationalist meanings frames. |
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