Remembering Hope

In Remembering Hope, Ann Rigney examines the role of storytelling in transferring hope in social transformation from one generation of activists to another. She uses the tools of cultural memory studies to explain how shared narratives about protest are produced using words, images, video, and performance. Rigney's long-term approach shows that cultural memory and activism are deeply entwined across generations and reveals how cultural memory work has been used as a form of resistance to historical outcomes and as a tool for kick-starting older campaigns in new contexts. Above all, the book challenges the assumption that grievance rather than active citizenship has always been at the heart of collective memory.

Ann Rigney is emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and founder of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies. She has published widely on theories of cultural memory and on memory cultures from the nineteenth century to the present, including The Afterlives of Walter Scott (Oxford, 2012) and The Visual Memory of Protest (co-edited with T. Smits; 2023). In the period 2019-2024, she was recipient of a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project Remembering Activism (ReAct).