Erik Sjoberg, "The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe" (Berghahn Books, 2018)
Most of the time, memory studies focuses on well-known case studies.\xa0 The result Is that we know lots about commemoration and memory regarding the Holocaust, about slavery, about apartheid, and other cases, but much less about how memory works in smaller states and less well-known tragedies.\nErik Sj\xf6berg's\xa0 new book The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (Berghahn Books, 2018) is an exception to this rule.\xa0 Sj\xf6berg is interested in the violence and expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Anatolia before, during and especially after World War One.\xa0 But the focus of his work is on how this violence has been remembered and contested in the last 30 years.\xa0 He argues that efforts to remember the violence and deploy it politically emerged in the 1980s.\xa0 It then became a prominent feature in the complicated politics of national identity within and outside of Greece.\nSj\xf6berg book is deeply researched, methodologically sophisticated and precise in argument and tone.\xa0 He deploys concepts from sociology to help understand the way memory has functioned.\xa0 In doing so, he helps us consider both the particular details of his case study and the broader lessons that writing about a less-well known case can teach us about memory and the past.\nKelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He\u2019s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.\n\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies