Monuments and ‘nonuments’: A typology of the forgotten memoryscape

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Abstract

We live surrounded by sites of memory, and are broadly aware of their existence, sometimes their significance. But what often goes unremarked in the memoryscape – the spaces and places of memory that make up a geographic or abstract area – are the monuments, memorials, and museums that are partial, missing, or never existed. This article proposes a new type of monument – the ‘nonument’ - as a site of both remembering and forgetting that is yet a key contributor to latent narratives of cultural, individual, and collective memory. The article proposes five categories of nonument – the Rejected; the Removed; the Ruined; the Rebuilt; the Repurposed – and demonstrates these categories primarily through the development of the urban memoryscape of Paris since the French Revolution (1789), founding event of the French nation, and key contributor to ideas of a French collective and cultural memory.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)(In-Press)
Number of pages15
JournalMemory Studies
Volume(In-Press)
Early online date1 Jun 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 1 Jun 2024

Bibliographical note

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

  • forgetting
  • France
  • memory
  • monuments
  • museums
  • nonuments

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Cultural Studies
  • Social Psychology

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