Issues of Social Memory and their Challenges in the Global Age

Abstract

The social experience of time is investigated in connection with the transformation of global power relations expressed symbolically. Collective memory in postmodernity is featured as a temporal distinctiveness of the global age. Consequently, problems of the politics of memory, followed by conflicts of memory come to the fore. Symptomatic for postmodernity in the context of globalization is the phenomenon of reshaping problems of memory into social problems. The global politics of memory and globalizing symbolic conflicts over memory are a new phenomenon. They are exemplified by the problems of memory in post-communist countries, with the focus on the case of Poland.