Author(s): Rowan Light

Aotearoa New Zealand Non-Fiction | Politics | History

Why Memory Matters

'Behind the foreground narratives of justification, real or symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of cultural memory.'

From curriculum to commemoration to constitutional reform, our society is in the grip of memory, a politics and culture marked by waves of loss, grief, absence and victimhood. Why are certain aspects of the past remembered over others, and why does this matter? In response to this fraught question, historian Rowan Light offers a series of case studies about local debates about history in New Zealand. These provisional judgements of the past illuminate aspects of what it means to remember - and why it matters.

Dr Rowan Light is an historian and curator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, History, at the University of Auckland. He specialises in the public use of history, memory, and commemoration, specifically as it relates to war and violence.