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Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. By Andreas Huyssen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xi + 177 pages.
Focused on the complexities of cultural memory practices, Andreas Huyssen's work examines the linkages between memory and history with attention to the fields of power in which the struggle for domination over remembrance and tradition, the manipulation of retrievable historical consciousness and collective forgetting, takes place. A central theme that runs through this collection of insightful essays is how historical trauma has emerged as a prominent site of commemoration by architects, writers, and artists, as much as it is destabilized by the work of memory to vanish in the abyss of amnesia and willful forgetting. The current ubiquity of memory discourses is, according to Huyssen, not merely symptomatic of an ongoing need for historicity in the everyday lived world, but the formation of the latetwentieth-century obsession with memory, an apparent "hypertrophy of memory," is also implicated in the projective future-oriented imaginings for an increasingly consumptiondriven global world. Under global capitalism, the work of memory can obliterate temporal boundaries and destabilize the precarious relation between remembering and forgetting. As Huyssen succinctly points out, "The paradox is that memory discourses themselves partake in the detemporalizing process that characterize a culture of consumption and obsolescence. Memory as re-presentation, as making present, is always in danger of collapsing the constitutive tension between past and present, especially when the imagined past is sucked into the timeless present of the all-pervasive virtual space of consumer culture" (10).
Huyssen grapples with this paradox of the synchronous fluidity and fixity of memorialization by structuring his argument around the trope of the palimpsest. "One of the most interesting cultural phenomena of our day is the way in which memory and temporality have invaded spaces and media that seemed among the most stable and fixed: cities, monuments, architecture, and sculpture. After the waning of modernist fantasies . . . and of the desire for the purity of new beginnings, we have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests of space, monuments as transformable and transitory, and sculptures as subject to the vicissitudes of time" (6-7). With this emphasis on the dynamic tensions of public memory discourses, in which remembered history "is always more...