“History under surveillance”: studies of memory and pedagogy of teaching of collective traumas

Abstract

The main objective of the text is to analyze the studies of memory as a historical source and of its urgency in the present time. To this end, we constructed a division of memory studies into three central axes: the first, from the 1980s, with the republication of the work Collective Memory of Maurice Halbwachs and the first publication of The Places of Memory by Pierre Norra; the second and third axes, inscribed in the same context, refer to the studies of Shoah’s memory policies and globalization of memory, widely disseminated by Andreas Huyssen, and the problematization around the concept of post-memory, coined by Marianne Hirsch. We discussed the pedagogy of two museums concerned with the History of the Shoah: Yad Vashem of Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is possible to notice that in the 1990s the culture of memory gains a political dimension of celebrations, which leads us to intense discussions about the role of this event in the regime of contemporary historicity and, therefore, in the present time.