Paper details

Paper authors	Pierre Fuller
In panel on	Key Humanitarian Concepts in Historical Perspective
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

In our roundtable discussion of conceptual problems in humanitarian history, I aim to address the particular ways in which humanitarian crises (or more specifically, responses to these crises) are remembered. My work uses the examples of drought famine, earthquake and other types of disaster in 20th century China to consider the formation of cultural memory and how particular humanitarian actors are privileged in the historical record over others who are effaced. My work shows this collective memory formation in China to be a function of revolutionary politics. The selective nature of collective memory of disaster, however, and its implications for our understanding of societies more broadly, has of course much broader applications beyond China and the 20th century.

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