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James V. Wertsch studies language, thought, and culture, with a special focus on national memory and narratives. His publications include the authored volumes Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1985), Voices of the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1991), Mind as Action (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge University Press, 2002), as well as edited volumes with Cambridge University Press on Vygotsky and memory studies. After finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Wertsch was a postdoctoral fellow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where he studied with the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria. Wertsch has held faculty positions at Northwestern University, the University of California, San Diego, Clark University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he has also been Vice Chancellor for International Affairs. He is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Russian Academy of Education, and he holds honorary degrees from Linköping University and the University of Oslo. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and has served as a guest professor at the University of Oslo in Norway, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and at Fudan University in Shanghai.Informed by insights from linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and social psychology, this volume explores narrative templates that condition the articulation of national memory.
A. Vari, CHOICE
In this elegantly written book, James Wertsch makes a compelling case for national memory as a force to be reckoned with. Rich with examples from Russia, China, the U.S., and Europe, How Nations Remember brings home a tremendously important point: No matter how well-informed and cosmopolitan-minded you may be, national memory will inform your worldview, and its tenacious narrative templates will deeply shape the way you remember the historical past.
Astrid Erll, Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Goethe-University Frankfurt
James Wertsch's brilliant compendium How Nations Remember includes 'memories' that have been factitious but powerful for propaganda. For example, Vladimir Putin has pounded into the Russian paranoid psyche the myth for decades that the U.S. and NATO deliberately undermined the USSR. The fact was that Western governments tried to help Gorbachev in the Kremlin and keep the Soviet Union intact. Another example that Wertsch uses: during the Kosovo War, NATO bombers mistakenly attacked a building in Belgrade where Chinese intelligence officers were stationed. The State Department immediately sent a high-level diplomat from Washington to Beijing to apologize. He was rebuffed, and the Chinese stayed with the sinister plot to this day.
Strobe Talbott, Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Former President, Brookings Institution
A masterly study of the 'narrative templates' that underlie the stories nations tell themselves with a tenacity that triumphs over historical time and truth. Combining analytic acuity with striking examples from Russia, China, and the United States, the book provides an eloquent and persuasive account of national memory, both fascinating and significant.
Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University
Jim Wertsch has written a tour de force theory of human collective memory organized at the level of nation states. It is as current as the evening news, as historically grounded, true to life. It is as if the text was coming alive on our screens. A great contribution to sociocultural studies and beyond. This book could not be timelier if it had arrived via Twitter. I read the manuscript just as the two major U.S political parties were holding their conventions. As the pundits told us repeatedly, we would witness the struggle to control 'the narrative' of this moment in history. What ensued on the world's billions of screens was a textbook illustration of the very principles that Wertsch described in this book. A major accomplishment.
Michael Cole, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Communication, University of California, San Diego
With citizens taking to the streets to insist that their countries confront their troubling pasts, this book could not be timelier. With his characteristic incisiveness and from a cross-disciplinary vantage point, Wertsch examines the ways different nations construct renderings of their past that often differ radically from each other and why these distinct renderings are often taken as 'truthful' and maintained with such tenacity. His adoption of a narrative approach to these issues provides insight into the underlying psychological dynamics and offers measures to mitigate the conflicts that disparate renderings of a nation's past often engender. The book is required reading for anyone interested in how memory animates and shapes national identity and actions.
William Hirst, Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research