Urban Terrorism in Contemporary Europe Remembering, Imagining and Anticipating Violence

This open access book sheds light on collective practices of remembering, imagining and anticipating in relation to recent acts of urban terrorism in Europe. Analysing a range of personal and collective responses to urban terrorism in contemporary Europe, this book shows that current debates on this issue are shaped by multiple co-existing and intersecting memories of political violence in the past. Moreover, despite public declarations of unity and solidarity, collective memories of urban terror in contemporary Europe are far from consensual - memory can be both a catalyst for and an impediment to social and political change. Drawing on case studies from a range of European countries and creative responses by survivors, artists, and poets, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to key methods (e.g. discourse analysis and (auto-)ethnography) and concepts (e.g. Lieux de Mémoire and ‘grassroots memorials’) for the study of the memoralization of terror attacks.

 

 

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Time.- Chapter 2: European Cities Facing Terrorism: from Social Responses to Memory, and vice versa – Gérôme Truc.- Chapter 3: 20 Years On: a walk through the memorialisation of the 11M attacks.- Chapter 4: Memory as ‘temporal loop’ in the War on Terror: Using the Past to Secure the Future (and failing).- Chapter 5: Barriers and Prevent Cakes.- Part II: Silences.- Chapter 6: The green tent forever.- Chapter 7: Contested memories and the (re)construction of violent pasts in the Basque Country: A critical examination of the Memorial Centre for the Victims of Terrorism in Vitoria.- Chapter 8: Hanau/Main – Topography of Immigration, Taboo, and Terror, and Lieu de Mémoire.- Part III: Presence and Absenc3.- Chapter 9: Remembering and forgetting terror in Berlin.- Chapter 10: Making, Sharing and Extending Presence in Spontaneous Memorials. The Case of the 2017 Manchester Attack.- Chapter 11: Resilience or re-construction? A psychoanalytical approach to urbanspace after the attack on the Promenade des Anglais (Nice, 14.07.2016).- Chapter 12: Vertigo.- Part: IV. Victimhood and Trauma.- Chapter 13: Hands.- Chapter 14: Temporal conflicts and the victimhood communities (un)bound by memory.- Chapter 15: ‘He must continue living through us’: The Role of Living Memorials in Continuing Bonds with the Deceased in the Aftermath of Terrorist Violence in France (2015-2016).- Chapter 16: Transition of an ex-hostage: Trial of the 13th November 2015 attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis.- Part V: Literature and creative imagination.- Chapter 17: Inside the car.- Chapter 18: The Realm of Change.- Chapter 19: Terrorist trials under literary scrutiny: literature as counterterrorist response.- Chapter 20: Out in the Open.

Katharina Karcher is Associate Professor in German at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on protest movements and political violence in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is particularly interested in questions of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and political ideology.

Yordanka Dimcheva is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on the experiences of terrorist violence in France since 2015 and the complex way trauma, grief, and affect shape how the attacks are remembered.

Mireya Toribio Medina is a lawyer specialising in criminal law and a doctoral researcher at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research project analyses the construction of the narratives surrounding terrorist violence in Spain’s contemporary legal system.

Mia Parkes is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focusses on women’s political imprisonment in the 20th and 21st centuries, including immigration detention, and is centred largely upon testimony, memory, and the prison texts of incarcerated women.