ICFFS-Cultural Memory Program

As you know I have been working for some time on aspects of comparative commemorative practice and regional, national and transnational identity. My book on the Moselle (1999) is the obvious concrete example but I have also worked on the Breton departments and on colonial memorial iconography, and I am now working on a group of comparative studies in other ‘debatable’ lands, notably Catalonia, the Basque country and the Sud-Tyrol/Alto Adige. My paper would use the theoretical and conceptual issues raised by the Mosellan experience to explore analogous issues in the Pyrenées orientales, looking inter alia at successive trans-frontier migrations and communities of memory from the Retirada of February 1939, via the wartime internment of minority or marginalised French and European ethnic or political communities, to the more recent (post 1962) ex-Algerian pied noirs and more recently still, members of France’s harki population. This privileges the area as a complex site of memories which are partly successive and partly contemporaneous, and which have cultural and commemorative dimensions. I think it would fit well with a number of convergent conference themes, including regional case studies, recent commemorative practice (Algeria) and the increasing interest in the ‘identifying’ use of public space.




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