Remembering Contentious Lives

This collection is the first to integrate insights from life writing studies into the field of memory studies and opens a new chapter in the study of the memory-activism nexus. It addresses two interrelated questions: How are the lived experiences of contention remembered in the form of auto/biography? How is life writing, as an act of cultural remembrance, used in (contemporary) activism? Building on cutting-edge scholarship on the socio-political potential of narrating lived experience, this volume focuses on life-writing as a new point of observation on the entanglement between memory and activism. This is an open access book. Ann Rigney is professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and PI of the Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct). She has published widely in the field of cultural memory studies, including most recently The Visual Memory of Protest (edited with Th. Smits, Amsterdam UP, 2023) and Remembering Hope (forthcoming). Duygu Erbil is affiliate researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Utrecht University. She completed her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in 2024. Her PhD project analysed the cultural afterlife of Deniz Gezmis and was part of the project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct). Clara Vlessing is a lecturer at Utrecht University and a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She completed her doctoral degree at Utrecht University in 2023. Her PhD analysed the cultural afterlives of three women revolutionaries and was part of the project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct).