From the Editor

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From the Editor José Brunner All contributions to this issue discuss the role of private individuals and civil society memory activists in the construction of collective memories and historical consciousness. The first three articles deal with various ways in which memory politics serve minority communities to bolster their identity. Huw Halstead explores transcultural cross-references in the discourse of Greek expatriates from Turkey and in YouTube videos dealing with Greek-Turkish relationships, which establish analogies between the oppression of the Greeks by the Turks, on the one hand, and the Armenian genocide, the persecution of the Kurds and Nazi atrocities against the Jews, on the other. He concludes that such "knotting" between different histories casts them neither in a cosmopolitan nor in a postnational mold, nor does it construct hierarchies of suffering. He suggests that while historical equivalences may foster solidarity among different nationalities, they can also be used to strengthen national histories and identities. Valentina Rozas-Krause examines four decades of memory politics surrounding the site of the former Tanforan Assembly Center in California, a temporary detention camp where Japanese and Japanese American citizens were imprisoned during World War II. She discusses the different forms of commemoration at the site, from the successive dedication of three memorial plaques, each with a different wording, erected by Japanese American groups of activists between 1980 and 2007, to a photographic exhibition held at a nearby train station and finally the current plan for a future Tanforan memorial that is to include a bronze sculpture and a memorial plaza. She suggests that the continuing commemorative interventions at Tanforan reflect not only the changes in the Japanese American community and the surrounding urban landscape but also that community's sense that its demands for apology have remained unfulfilled. Torgrim Sneve Guttormsen's article centers on the bronze sculpture of the Viking seafarer Leif Erikson that was erected in late nineteenth-century Boston in order to make a Scandinavian foundation myth of the United States present in public space. Since many more monuments to Leif Erikson, [End Page 1] reputed to be the first European to have discovered America, were subsequently erected in the United States and Europe, Guttormsen considers the Boston monument part of a broader memory culture. He shows how Leif Erikson continues to serve the American Scandinavian community as a focal figure in its struggles for political recognition by personifying Protestant values of commerce, hard work, progress and enlightenment. Rather than relegating the monument to a heritage culture whose heyday has passed, Guttormsen suggests that it could be used to mediate reflection on immigration politics, humanistic ethics and questions of injustice. The last two essays deal with the role of books in fostering historical memory. Samuel O'Donoghue describes how the Spanish publisher Carlos Barral was the first to effectively challenge the Franco regime's silence on the Holocaust, which stemmed from the Spanish radical right's anti-Semitism and its flirtation with Nazism. Barral's determination to disseminate Holocaust awareness in Spain led him to initiate and promote Spanish translations of some of the first important historical and fictional works on the Holocaust. O'Donoghue shows that the regime's censors were willing to permit the publication of books dealing with the Holocaust as long as these did not express a more general antifascist sentiment that implicated Spain or portray Republicans and communists as heroes. According to O'Donoghue, it was thanks to Barral that Spanish readers had, at least from the beginning of the 1960s, access to knowledge about the Holocaust. Astrid Rasch examines four memoirs by Alexandra Fuller and Peter Godwin, two expatriate Zimbabweans writing about Africa for the West. Rasch uses the term "postcolonial nostalgia" for a perspective that conjoins a critique of colonial rule, condemnation of Rhodesian crimes and acknowledgment of personal participation and racism with subtle nostalgic tendencies. She shows how Fuller and Godwin are able to simultaneously condemn and romanticize the settler colonial past of Zimbabwe by presenting their families as caught up in illusions and unaware of the consequences of their racism. Conjuring up depoliticized images of childhood naiveté, wholesome domesticity as well as intimacy with black servants, their memoirs contrast a happier and...