The project attaches great importance to the role infrastructures of memory play in building national identity, keeping the collective memory alive, making knowledge of a certain identitarian past globally available, and helping to consolidate societies. The consequences of independencies for them are of primary importance. The consequences of independencies for them are of primary importance.

The first question to be raised is on permanence and stability of narratives of memory in times of dramatic transformations, and to the purpose we will focus on three definite periods. In the project we will analyse how countries adjusted to the new situation and how they created or reformed administrative structures in the humanities. We want to study if the “old” infrastructures were kept and used, or if they were simply destroyed. If they were kept, how they were transformed to create the new ones. Important are also Infraestructures of Memory created by organizations of the civic society or by national or regional minorities during the period of the empire but which are, after an independence, part of the new construction of national memories.

We particularly focus on how these countries organized the preservation of the denominated “signatures” of collective memory. The way and forms of preservation should shed light on the political program of the creator of the new states.

Archives, libraries, museums and institutions for the preservation of collective memory, concerning the contemporary period in the participant countries will be object of study as well as institutions of preservation of collective memory such as societies of exiles and emigrants, civic society collections for preservation of particular collective memories. Important for the project are institutions official or unofficial in charge of the memory of repressions, such as, for example, archives of political polices or institutions for transitional justice, etc… 

On a first level, creation, development and organization of infrastructures of memory will be studied. On a second one, particular narratives and representations of identities will be researched as the context of such infrastructures.