Description:
1. This book explores memory, politics, and memory culture in contemporary Ukraine. Ukraine provides an important study into the battle between Westernized Europe and the political pull of Russia. With Russia annexing Crimea, government control of media in the country, and the fall of President Viktor Yaunkovych in 2014, Ukraine continues to be a site of contestation and a key indicator of the degree of Russia's increasing aggressions.
2. Wylegala is a young academic who has firmly established herself as an advocate for the preservation and support of oral history, particularly focused on Poland and the Holocaust. She has published a monograph on resettlement and memory in Polish which earned a grant for translation into English. Glowacka-Grajper is a mid-career academic who has edited several collections and has written four monographs in Polish on cultural survival and ethnic identity.
3. This book will find an audience with scholars in the fields of memory studies and Ukraine studies, Central-European history, Holocaust and genocide studies.
Review Quotes:
"The Burden of the Past is a milestone of the scholarship about Eastern European politics of memory and a compelling plea for the need to further de-Westernize the field of memory studies."--Wulf Kansteiner
"This book is an important stepstone in both memory and Ukrainian studies. By posting new questions and introducing new categories of analysis, it makes us to rethink us what is Ukraine and how its troublesome past can be overcome for a better future."--Yaroslav Hrytsak, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv
"This book is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarly literature on Ukrainian identity and memory politics. . . . The two editors can be commended for having produced an excellent book, an important addition to ongoing discussions of Ukrainian memory politics in Ukraine."--Taras Kuzio, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Ukraine, Europe - Asia Studies
"This volume, edited by Anna Wylegala and Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper, presents a remarkably consistent scholarly concept and a clear civic, or even political, agenda. . . . Both scholars of Ukraine and memory studies specialists will enjoy this solid and thought-provoking volume, which it is to be hoped will succeed in influencing ongoing conversations in Ukraine on such important topics for the future of the country."--Alessandro Achilli, Monash University, Modern Language Review
"Using an interdisciplinary approach, Anna Wylegala and Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper have succeeded in assembling a well-selected array of fieldwork and comparative research that explores hidden and forbidden memory of Ukraine's recent past. They have also effectively questioned how political as well as sociocultural and religious markers of today's identities polarize Ukrainian society given the lack of a common frame of reference and unhealed wounds. . . . It is a milestone collection of memories and testimonies of those who still remember and those who have forgotten; of those who continue to look critically at the present without forgetting their past."--Francesco Trupia, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, Harvard Ukranian Studies