The Politics of Memory

This book’s sustained focus on tensions between governance/management structures and community rights/participation in the definition and use of urban space and heritage in Ouro Preto speaks to current concerns in heritage studies and urban development. The close-grained ethnographic and historically grounded studies are immensely useful in adding real-world critiques to the burgeoning heritage and urban development policy context of not only national, but also international agents, such as UNESCO. -- Dr Helle Jørgensen, Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies, Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham
By placing questions of national identity, power, and politics at the center of an investigation into urban memory, cultural heritage, and legacies of social injustice in Brazil, this book provides an important contribution to contemporary social science debates. It is innovative in its methodological approach (owing to the author’s ethnographic study of historical memory), as well as how it highlights connections between postcolonial development, the role of the state, and discourses of public participation. -- Jeff Garmany, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne