From traumatic memory to utopian imagination

Abstract

Over the last century, the problems concerning the manifold relations between memory and imagination have become a major set of studies wherein a wide range of current approaches on social and cultural change are developing. This is the core idea of this section in the twentieth issue of Digithum. The confluence between both socio and temporal notions denotes a fertile realm of contemporary studies within humanities and social sciences. The articles below, each of them in their own way, present the idea that, in order to comprehend the past, its link with the future must be taken into account; otherwise, the two-dimensional character of the socio historical time, as well as the temporal connotation of all that is human, is being neglected. The articles that make up this section probe some of the essential characteristics of the process in which especially traumatic memory as well as utopian imagination, the former’s counterpart, have grown into a research interest within the so-called realm of memory studies. Needless to say that they focus on the 20th century, or as it has been called by those who study it, -and are only able of providing an account of subsequent humanitarian debacles which are still to be decried