“Exquisitely detailed, ethically engaged, theoretically consequential, this book will delight readers across a wide spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. Annie E. Coombes captures the complexities of contemporary South Africa via an intriguing analysis of the country’s public culture. The South African case studies become portable and are intelligently linked to global debates in this highly readable study.”—Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg “With verve, imagination, and engagement, Annie E. Coombes gives us an incisive account of memorial culture in South Africa since apartheid. She foregrounds the political tensions and ambiguities of rehabilitating traditional monuments, making Robben Island into an icon of resistance and liberation, creating museums of urban and township living that hover between reflective nostalgia and traumatized remembrance. Revisionism is a political necessity, but how is one to remember a brutal and painful history without rekindling the divisive passions of the past? A must read for anyone interested in memory culture on a global scale.”—Andreas Huyssen, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory