| Abstract | Memory studies represent one of the latest 'turns' in the social sciences since the 1980s, following the linguistic, narrative and cultural turns. Memory of catastrophe has become not merely a currency of our liquid modernity's 'confessional culture', it is also becoming an increasingly valid social sciences theme, no longer the exclusive realm of historians and psychologists. The insight that traumatic memories take up to one generation to surface -- due to survivors (and perpetrators) being silenced and silencing themselves, and due to histories mostly being written by the victors -- is not only psychoanalytic but is also taken on board by a new generation of social scientists. In the aftermath of the World Wars, the Holocaust and also the Palestinian Nakba, they have increasingly been studying the complex implications of the construction of memory as a collective political artefact. This review article surveys two new collections which make memory their focus -- one, by Ahmad Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod, focusing on the memory of the Palestinian Nakba, and the other, by Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf, focusing on the sociological aspects and legacy of the memory of the Holocaust.
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