Böcker av Cristina DeMaria

What can space tell us about our past? Which stories do memory sites narrate? Which memories do they transmit? And, more importantly, how can we read their meanings? Semiotics can provide us with a homogeneous, shareable and theoretically sound methodology to analyse space within a comparable and common frame of reference for scholars of memory studies and traumatic heritage, as well as for historians, architects and museum curators. The book describes in clear and understandable language the main semiotic concepts that can be used to analyse space, illustrating them with carefully chosen case studies of memory spaces - monuments, museums, post-war urban restoration, filmed and virtual space - in order to show the applicability and efficacy of a semiotic methodology.

Within the human sciences, as in the ever-growing field of memory and trauma studies, works on memories and post-memories of conflicts have been numerous. They have explored the ways in which the representation of individual and collective memories are closely linked to the building and rebuilding of national and transnational, local and diasporic cultures. Yet, even within such studies, rarely has the category of post-conflict been associated directly with that of culture, that is to an interpretation of conflicts, collective violence and wars, centred on the disruption of symbolic systems of cultural reproduction. This cultural dimension is what the Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures series has dedicated itself to investigating. This landmark anthology offers a generous selection from its ten volumes so far published.