The traumas and catastrophes of modernity uprooted and obliterated lands, cultures, and people; and in the wake of these disasters, mnemonic practices and mnemonic communities were disrupted, dismembered, and sometimes destroyed. In response to the assaults on memory, those in the social sciences and the humanities have tried to make sense of the effects of dramatic change and mass trauma on mnemonic communities. Much of the recent scholarship on social memory centers on the globalization of memory-the tendency of some memories to gain widespread purchase transnationally and transculturally-especially those of traumatic events, such as colonial pasts, genocides, state violence, and the Holocaust. An effect of the globalization of memory is the primacy of certain memories over others; popular theoretical paradigms have emerged in recent years to broaden our understanding of the social memory of these events, such as the "politics of regret" by Jeffrey Olick (2007), "mimetic memories" by Kathleen Stewart (1996), "regimes of memory" by Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (2003), and "multi-directional memory" by Michael Rothberg (2008) among others. We engage with these concepts and theories, but do so in order to reinvigorate an older concept of memory theory, articulated first by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century: screen memory. Here, we argue for the concept of screen memory as a way to both conceptualize and trouble contemporary notions of social memory. In the past, screen memory has been viewed and employed rather one-dimensionally as a memory that obscures other memories by blocking or replacing them (Freud 1901). Freud argued that memories from childhood may be incorrectly recalled or recalled in a way that magnifies or