Memory on My Doorstep - by Sarah Gensburger (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On November 13, 2015, three gunmen opened fire in the Bataclan concert hall at 50 Boulevard Voltaire in Paris and subsequently held the venue under a three-hour siege. This was the largest in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that eventually killed 130 people and injured 500. During the aftermath of these attacks, expressions of mourning and trauma marked and invariably transformed the urban landscape. Sarah Gensburger, a sociologist working on social memory and its localisation, lives with her family on the Boulevard Voltaire and has been studying the city of Paris as her primary field site for several years. This time, memorialisation was taking place on her doorstep. Both a diary and an academic work, this book is a chronicle of this grassroots memorialisation process and an in-depth analysis of the way it has been embedded in the everyday lives of the author, neighbours, other Parisians and tourists.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer Review Content).

Review Quotes

Memory dynamics in times of crisis: An interview with Sarah Gensburger

Working at the intersection of political science, ethnographic sociology, and contemporary historiography, Sarah Gensburger specializes in the social dynamics of memory. In this interview, she talks about her book 'Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris 2015-2016', which traces the evolving memorialization processes following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, their impact on the local landscape, and the social appropriations of the past by visitors at memorials and commemorative sites.

Stef Craps, Catherine Gilbert, Memory Studies 2021, Vol. 14(6) 1388-1400, https: //doi.org/10.1177/17506980211054345

All in all, the eye-witness testimonies and photos in Memory on My Doorstep are useful primary sources documenting the local-grassroots aftermath of the attacks. But the book is probably even more useful for the many questions it poses. Those can be read as suggestive prompts for new studies, adding more chapters to the story. For, as the book's last sentence notes, the memorialization of the 2015 attacks is "still ongoing."
Charles Rearick, H-France Review
Vol. 20 (April 2020), No. 70

Gensburger is a careful observer, as well as a well-read one, and with a relatively light touch she is able to present the memorial efforts, the changes to them, and the tensions and cleavages that the memorialization reveals. [...] This book is unusual-in style, content, and tone. The material is inherently fascinating, and the questions at the heart of the book are crucial. This is a terrific, unique book.Scott Straus, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Gensburger's superb visual ethnography reveals memory as lived and remade in the aftermath of the 2005 Paris terrorist attacks. Her personal and vivid chronicles offer us a radical memory studies that eases by the political limits sometimes imposed by traditional academic culture and form. Gensburger's finely attuned sociological gaze finds the city not in the paralysis of terror's shadow, but rather active in mobilised memorialisation, and deserving of our attention. Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow

La mémoire est en vogue. Et pourtant, rares sont les travaux qui s'attaquent au coeur de ce phénomène: la mémoire vive. L'ouvrage dont il est ici question fait exception. Consacré aux chroniques sociologiques d'un quartier situé entre la place de la République et la salle du Bataclan, de décembre 2015 à septembre 2016, il interroge les pratiques sociales liées à la mémoire des attentats perpétrés à Paris. Sur le plan de la forme, l'ouvrage est un petit bijou. Truffé de photographies, éclairé par plusieurs cartographies, il livre des questionnements qui débordent de loin la gestion mémorielle des attentats perpétrés le 7 janvier 2015 dans les bureaux du journal satirique Charlie Hebdo et le 13 novembre 2015 au Bataclan. Valérie Rosoux, Droit et Société, 06/03/2018

About the Author

Sarah Gensburger is a senior researcher in social sciences at the French National Center for Scientific Research-CNRS and a member of the executive committee of the international Memory Studies Association.