Memorial Arcades and Disaster Memory-making

Memory Arcades and Disaster Memory-making highlights the power of stories related to disaster memory arcades in Nigeria and how they continue to impact our communities. The author ably shows the reader that we need to think past the West when it comes to memory arcades and monuments, and instead understand that every culture remembers their memories in different, yet meaningful ways. This eye-opening book makes the reader think about memorials around their own corners of the world and the conditions they are in. * Jeff Hirschy, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science, The University of Mississippi, USA *
Memorial Arcades and Disaster Memory-making offers new ethnographically rich and intellectually cogent insight into how we might understand the construction of memorial arcades in the postcolonial state. The book reveals how state-led memorialization marginalizes alternative voices and turns sites of grief into instruments of official memory rather than collaborative remembrance. It also presents disaster memorials as a key sphere of state-citizen encounter in which Nigerians confront the state's absence, reinterpret its authority and symbolic presence, and construct and contest narratives of honor and dishonor. Ololajulo offers fresh insight into the politics of commemoration and the everyday meanings of the state in Nigeria and beyond. * Omolade Adunbi, Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, USA *