Mass demonstrations regularly make the headlines. This project studies how they are also remembered when they are no longer news. Focusing on developments in Europe since 1871 it examines how stories about protest are produced and shared in different media and how that culturally produced memory informs later generations of activists. Where previous research has focussed on particular movements and the actors involved in them, ReAct examines the cultural work that happens in the intervals between protest cycles. We investigate how stories of civil resistance are produced, shared, and transmitted across generations and national borders in the form of documentaries, memoirs, commemorations, and archiving projects as well as in the visual arts and literature. ReAct shows how and why cultural memory is important to new protest movements.
Relevance for society:
ReAct posits that the cultural memory of earlier protests informs civil resistance by shaping expectations and offering models for action. Scenarios for the future are informed by narratives about the past. More insight into the way stories about protest are culturally constructed, disseminated, and adapted to new circumstances will help us understand better the nature of protest in today’s world. ReAct provides new critical literacies about how the meaning of protest is produced across different media and cultural forms. By offering a historical perspective reaching back to the late nineteenth century, it also gives new insight into long-term trends and provides valuable context for analysing contemporary developments. More generally, it helps us understand how collective identities are produced outside traditional ethno-national frameworks and in the context of collective action. Our focus is on protest movements in Europe, but given the transnational entanglements our project has brought to light, our findings also have relevance for the understanding of movements elsewhere.
Overall objectives:
The overall objective is to provide new insight, on the one hand, into the ways in which narratives about protest are produced and transmitted across generations and national borders and, on the other hand, into how that cultural memory informs new social movements. In terms of its empirical focus, ReAct provides the first in-depth account of the remembering and forgetting of civil resistance in Europe since 1871. In terms of its disciplinary positioning, it effects a necessary reorientation within the field of cultural memory studies, hitherto dominated by trauma and victimhood, towards the cultural memory of civic life and of hope in social transformation.
