Book Review: Women Mobilizing Memory edited by Ayșe Gül Altınay, María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca and Alisa Solomon

Abstract

Women Mobilizing Memory is the first comprehensive anthology in the emerging field of practice-based feminist memory studies. The book, as outlined in Marianne Hirsch’s insightful introduction, and then exemplified by a wide variety of case studies, performs three important theoretical and methodological interventions in the field of memory studies. First, Women Mobilizing Memory explores what constitutes feminist memory today, primarily by emphasising a feminist ‘ethics of transculturality’ that facilitates transnational conversations while also acknowledging ‘the limits of translatability’ of singular experiences and distinctive sociopolitical contexts (pp. 12–13). Second, it underlines the inherent transculturality of the twenty-first century virtual memory sites and spaces by forging new methodologies in the practices and analyses of online memory practices. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the book illuminates how feminist acts of memory discussed in the volume extend the ritual of commemoration and become powerful acts of resistance.