Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the modern museum, objects, collections and processes of museaIization have been radically re-signified and re-posited in the cultural arena. The new museums emerging from this shift have redefined their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves now not as disciplinary spaces of academic history but as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make them empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their own contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities in distant places. This dossier seeks to probe these new museographic and curatorial discourses, focusing in particular on the memory museum as an emergent global form of (counter)monumentality. Drawing on different geographical and historical contexts, it argues that the new museums’ apparently global aesthetics implies a danger of surrendering the very specificity of historical experiences the memorial ‘site’ offers its visitors.

Cultural memory studies finds itself at an impasse: whereas 'cultural memory' is conceptualised as mediated, dynamic, imaginative and shaped by the present, the dominant paradigm of 'trauma' illuminates the hold the past has on us, casting the shadow of a melancholic subjectivity that threatens to obscure our agency as (political) subjects. This article asks what lies in store for memory studies beyond the focus on (classic) trauma (theory). Using the movie Blade Runner 2049 (US 2017; dir: Denis Villeneuve) as an illustrative example, it explores how creative and joyful forms of meaning-making through play and acts of memory inform each other in what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott described as 'cultural experience'.

In his book In Ruins Christopher Woodward asks the provocative question ifHitler's admiration for ruins and the infamous notion of 'ruin value', favoured by Nazi architect Albert Speer, should somehow make readers suspicious of ruins' appeal and alert them to their potentially morally compromised aesthetic. But he reassures his readers:To Hitler the Colosseum was not a ruin but a monument, a bottle that was half-full rather than half-empty .… He was attracted to the endurance of the masonry and the physical survival of an emperor's ambitions; to the lover of the ruinous, by contrast, the attraction is in the sight of transience and vulnerability. Poets and painters like ruins, and dictators like monuments. (Woodward 2002: 30).In this juxtaposition between monument and memorial, Woodward seems to suggest that being compelled by something that signifies transience and vulnerability, rather than grandeur and the sublime, is somehow benign and therefore ethically superior. Is he saying that if the ruin gives rise to melancholy or even mourning, if it engages the imagination rather than the temptation to bask in the faded glory of ancient sites of power, it can be a force for good?The ruin as a memorial, as a way to lament rather than celebrate the past, has a long tradition, although we ought to be careful to distinguish the different kinds of losses that are mourned in the meditation of ruins. In classical funerary iconography the broken column signifies life being cut short by death. During the baroque, the ruin stands as a memento mori, a reminder of the vanity of all earthly things. Writing during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), the German poet Andreas Gryphius painted the following scenario in his poem 'All is transient' (Es ist alles eitel) (1643):Wherever you look, you see nothing but transience on earth.

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