Photos by Brett Kaplan Every time I flaneuse around a German city I stumble, as I am supposed to, over the Stolpersteine. These stones are not new: in 1996 Gunter Demnig began a project to memorialize some of the victims of the Nazi genocide through a seemingly simple but intensely engaging and important method. Each small, squarish metal plaque is embedded into the sidewalk and inscribed with straightforward information about the person or people who lived there. There are now some 60,000 of them in many European cities. “Hier Wohnte Leo Böttigheimer Jg. 1886 Flucht Holland Ermordet 1943 Aushwitz,” and right below this stone: “Hier Wohnte Else Böttigheimer Geb. Levy Jg. 1901 Flucht Holland Ermordet 1943 in Auschwitz.” The family names that group the stones remind us of the loves and kinships of these people who died or were forced to flee. While in Frankfurt for the 2017 Mnemonics conference in September, I was photographing a shockingly large group of Stolpersteine (they are often in groups of just two or three, or sometimes just a lone stone) whilst the residents walked around me—I seemed to be almost invisible to them at first, a tourist with her camera, probably a Jewish tourist, I imagined them thinking—they were carrying something rather large (a boxed bookshelf from Ikea?) and they pretended I was not in their way. I was about to ask them how they felt about the stones and the tourists who visit them when one of them looked at me with such a sense of pity that I felt ashamed and shuffled away. When I found this large group of memorial stones I was only about a block away from my hotel on Hebelstrasse, and the proximity felt uncanny and a little scary. Every time I have seen stones—in Frankfurt and, a few years ago, in Cologne, and in Berlin—I stop and take a photo and try to picture what those people might have been like. They may have been lovely, selfish, awful, generous, or, likely, some combination of all. Every time I pause for a photo the locals around me just move aside—sometimes they seem confused given that I am photographing the ground rather than making a selfie or taking a photo up high, above the sight line. I wonder whether the passersby have seen the curious taking photos a zillion times and what it might feel like for them to walk familiar routes past a succession of gawkers from all over the world capturing an image of these unimposing but very powerful memorials. I wonder if those on the stones who may have surviving family have been visited in these not-graves by their families? I wonder how many of the those who live in the houses formerly inhabited by the Jewish residents who are no longer there—either murdered or left for safety—knew, before the Stolpersteine were installed in front of their houses, that Jewish residents used to live there. In Frankfurt, there is a great likelihood that the houses wherein the murdered or fled lived are no longer there—Frankfurt was heavily bombed and many of the “old” sections are actually reproductions of what was there before ’45. Place and the traces of the past are displaced by the vast destruction of the fire- bombing. I live in Illinois and there are no Stolpersteine to the native peoples who may have lived where we live now. There are no monuments in front of our house and we do not who may have been displaced, murdered, long before we arrived. I imagine that the folks who live in the Stopel-houses think to themselves, on occasion, “but I had nothing to do with the Nazis! I wasn’t even born yet.” Or “Why are they dredging up the past and making tourists stop in front of our house with their iPhones?” Both of my parents are either immigrants or descended from immigrants—my mother from England, my father the grand-son of a rabbi from a shtetl outside Minsk. I have no bio connection to the Mayflower murderers who committed genocide so many generations ago. I do not feel absolved, though, and while not feeling guilty I do own my complicity. The “ordinary Germans” who live in the houses marked by those gripping, melancholic stones may feel the same way. Did their parents or grandparents, if they were in Frankfurt during the war, resist? Am I doing enough to resist the current strands of racism and antisemitism that are manifesting now? If the forebears of the folks in the houses had done more to resist would history have looked different, millions never murdered by the state, Frankfurt never been bombed? Chances are good, though, that those forebears did not want or need to resist because they believed in the tantalizing Nazi vision of a pure, better, homogenous world full of Lebesraum and racial purtiy. Along with the Stolpersteine I also saw in Frankfurt a sign that read: “Der Jugend Eine Zukunft HEIMAT Verteidigen! Junge Nationalisten Wahlen: NPD.” Before Trump, I might have taken this shocking sign less seriously. But now, we need to recognize that while they may be a laughably small group in Germany, they have kindred spirits in the U.S. More information about the Stolperstine is here http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/ The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies is delighted to share this article about the Stolpersteine by Anja Reich, translated by Hunter Frederick, orginally published here: http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/panorama/reportage-der-goldene-stein-10695994 The Golden Stone BERLIN – A young road builder gets the first job assignment of his life from a family in Israel. The story behind the setting of a Stolperstein in Berlin. Sixty-nine years and seventy-one days after Jewish resident Else Hecht was taken from her apartment on Motzstrasse, roadwork apprentice Andreas Wünsch is assigned the job of laying a stone in her memory into the city curbstone. Just before the end of his shift at the training site for apprentices in Berlin, where Wünsch has spent the day laying cobblestones – in a row, in a circle, in a mosaic – his training supervisor Herr Saager informs him that the next day he wouldn't be working in the shop. Instead, they'd be driving into the city to lay Stolpersteine, thirteen in all. Dirk Saager shows him a cardboard box containing a dozen small concrete blocks, on top of which metal plates have been fastened. Names, dates, and places are engraved on each of these plates. Andreas Wünsch had never heard of these memorial stones. He only knew about old war memorials from the villages in Brandenburg where he grew up, he says later. He's nineteen years old, a skinny kid with a shaved head, a soft smile, and restless eyes. He's from Wildau, near Berlin. He refers to himself as Andi. His friends call him Neger or Kanake because his father comes from Saudi Arabia and he likes wearing hip-hop pants. He says it doesn't bother him: “I'm an open-minded person, I get along with everyone, including Turks.” The only people he might have any problems with are “those Turk wanna-be sorts or other pseudo-foreigners, otherwise I respect everybody.” Andreas Wünsch says he respects Jews as well: “I don't know any, but if I did, I wouldn't have a problem with them.” A Special Trip from IsraelRuth Rotstein couldn't get much sleep last night. She went to bed late and kept waking up in her hotel room on Kochstrasse. She's waited for this moment for a long time – she made a special trip from Israel for the occasion – but now she has to tell herself over and over again that it's OK, that she's doing the right thing. At the beginning of this year Ruth Rotstein dialed a telephone number in Berlin, and said to the man who answered on the other end that she would like to place two memorial stones (Stolpersteine, she said – she has a good command of German) for her grandparents Else and Karl Hecht. She told the man from the Stolperstein initiative what she knew about her grandparents: Else and Karl Hecht came from Plauen, where they ran two stores. Else had one for ladies' wear, and Karl one for men's. They had two daughters, who managed to get out of Germany just in time: one to England, the other to Palestine. Else and Karl Hecht stayed behind; they probably felt too old to be moving to a foreign country. Or perhaps they didn't fully anticipate what the Nazis were capable of. Ruth Rotstein doesn't know much about her grandparents. She was born in Palestine and never met them. Her older sister Inge can still remember saying goodbye to her grandmother before she escaped from Germany: how she took Inge into her arms and held her tight, how her grandmother's face and clothes felt wet – wet from tears, which Inge came to understand only much later. Deported to RigaDocuments show that Karl Hecht died from a lung infection in January of 1942 in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, and was buried in the (Weißensee) Jewish Cemetery. Two letters survive from Else Hecht to her daughter Eva in London: short, truncated missives without a single negative word. Jews were prohibited from complaining about their situation; their letters were not allowed to exceed thirty words. One of the letters is dated August 9, 1942. “Beloved child,” it begins, “replying to uplifting June letter. From children naught? Am healthy, working, earning. Endless yearning. Stay healthy, strong. Heartfelt kisses – to you, children.” With date and address, it adds up to exactly thirty words. Six days later, on August 15, 1942, Else Hecht was taken from her apartment in 82 Motzstrasse and deported to a concentration camp in Riga. She was murdered there on August 18. Else's other daughter, Tina, the mother of Ruth Rotstein and Inge Goldstein, never spoke about it, not a word. All she ever mentioned were the lovely German forests, where one could forage for berries and mushrooms. Now that both of Else’s daughters are dead, it's too late to ask questions. All that remains is the need to do something, to create a connection to the forgotten grandparents. This little brass stone might be such a connection. Almost the entire family has come to Berlin: Ruth Rotstein's daughter from New Jersey, daughter and son-in-law from Israel, her sister and brother-in-law and niece from New York, and her granddaughter from London. After she gets up this morning, Ruth Rotstein unpacks a couple of old photographs and her grandmother's letters, which she had brought with her from Israel. She lays the items side by side by the window. Outside, it's slowly beginning to grow light. Andreas Wünsch loads the box with the stones into the small blue truck belonging to the builders' cooperative. It's cold, damp, and gray. There had been frost overnight. Frost is bad for road work. Dirk Saager briefly considers calling off the day's work, but then decides to go ahead after making a call and learning that family members have come to Motzstrasse all the way from Israel and the USA. They can't be sent away again. Idea by artist Gunter DemnigThey set off in a group of four. Shop superintendent Ahmed drives the truck. Andreas Wünsch sits in the back with Akin Gündogdu, a second-year apprentice. Dirk Saager follows in his car with the planned route in his pocket: seven locations, thirteen stones. Work gets going on Kreuznacher Strasse at 9:00 a.m. with Sebastian Jezower and his wife Erna, deported on January 13, 1942. If all goes well, by 12:30 p.m. they'll be done at 24 Aschaffenburger Strasse with Margarete Schenk, murdered on December 16, 1942 in Theresienstadt. Stolpersteine are based on an idea by the artist Gunter Demnig. At the beginning of the 1990's he laid the first memorial stone in Kreuzberg – which was illegal at the time – in order to remind people that here, in the middle of the city, lived someone who was taken from their apartment and murdered by the Nazis. Since then, almost 30,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in Germany alone. Most requests for the memorial stones are made by family members or by the building's occupants. Sometimes residents refuse to contribute towards the 120 euro cost of a Stolperstein, other times building owners complain because they worry about loss of property value. And occasionally, relatives make idiosyncratic requests, such as the recent request of one family member that the inscription on the stone for his great uncle mention the fact the Americans had denied him an entry visa. The project initiators found that request inappropriate, but then went ahead and did it anyway with a somewhat toned down inscription. There is no state funding and no political litmus test for Stolpersteine. No mayors or state secretaries come for Stolperstein dedications. Rather, those who take part are family members, local residents, and people who just happen to be walking down the street. Familiar and strange at the same timeRuth Rotstein and her relatives are in Berlin for ten days. They've been to the Barn District, the Turkish Market in Kreuzberg, as well as the C/O Gallery on Oranienburger Street. When the last family member finally arrived on Saturday, they all took the 200 bus to Weißensee to seek out Karl's gravesite in the Jewish Cemetery. The cemetery was closed, as it always is on Shabbat. They stood in front of the big gate, eight family members from three generations, and wondered how this could happen to them. Maybe they were too excited, or tired, or maybe they just couldn't imagine that Jewish precepts pertained even in Berlin. The city is familiar and strange to them at the same time. Ruth Rotstein expresses hope that a circle will be closed with this family gathering in Berlin. But the older sister, Inge Goldstein, born in 1930 in Plauen, will have none of it. For decades she refused to return, but then came back in the 1980's as an American scientist to study the effect of air pollution on the incidence of asthma in East Germany. Sixty-six Stolpersteine in one day The professional distance helped her. But when she visited Berlin with her children five years ago, though she liked the liveliness and openness of the city, at the same time it disturbed her. She knew these were the same reasons her mother loved the city in the 30's, and why she never got over having been forced to leave. For a long time, Inge Goldstein didn't know if she would come to the Stolperstein dedication or not – first she agreed to participate, then she declined. But now she's here, with her husband and daughter. Shorty after 10 a.m., the family sets off for Motzstrasse. Dirk Saager is a little jittery, as he always is when he makes the rounds with his apprentices on this project, which he began doing this past spring. Gunter Demnig used to knock every stone into the pavement himself, but now there are so many Stolperstein requests that he rarely puts in an appearance anymore. One day in November Saager's crew laid sixty-six Stolpersteine on Sybel Street, twenty-one of them in front of a single building. With these kind of numbers, Saager marches in with a whole brigade. “It's good for the apprentices to get out once in a while,” he says, “and once they're out there, they get the big picture pretty quickly.” His apprentices come from Marzahn, Neukölln, Hohenschönhausen, Brandenburg – kids with piercings, tattoos, and shaved heads. These are mostly young men who never went to high school, sent over from the Employment Office [Arbeitsamt]. They don't know very much about the Holocaust; when asked about it, Andreas Wünsch says that his great-grandfather was killed in WWII, and that his great-grandmother was raped by Russian soldiers. He says he's always wondered “why Adolf, who wasn't even German, made such a big deal about race theories.” When asked if he knew how many Jews the Nazis had murdered, he squints into the milky autumn sky and guesses, “Fifty thousand?”
Grandpa is his role modelA silver medallion hangs around his neck. On one side is his name, on the other his father's: Abdul Manhan Fahet. He barely knows his father. His mother met him after the two Germanies unified. Now he supposedly lives somewhere in Thuringia. He had the medallion chain made a month ago. “A dog tag like soldiers have,” says Andreas Wünsch. He finished school on his second try. He tried to join the Army, but they wouldn't take him. “Because I have ADHD,” he says – attention deficit disorder. He began an apprenticeship as an elder-care worker, but then quit. He got jobs on construction sites and waiting tables, but then wanted to “do something proper” again, like his grandfather. “Grandpa had himself a driving school and built two houses”, he says. His grandfather is his role model. In September, Andreas Wünsch began his apprenticeship as a road builder. For hours at a time, he squats on his knees in the sand and learns how to lay stones in a join. He learns what a 45-degree radial pattern is. He learns that Bernburg cobblestones are not as hard as granite. “It's a blast,” he says. Austere post-war buildingsRuth Rotstein and her family members arrive at Motzstrasse far too early. One might mistake them for tourists, standing around in their warm jackets and sensible shoes, cameras at the ready, even though there's no tourist destination anywhere in the area. Motzstrasse is a long street whose character alters at several points. The street begins at Nollendorfplatz, which is lively, colorful, and distinctly gay; then, at about the mid-point around Viktoria-Luise-Platz, it becomes opulent and bourgeois; towards the end, just before Prager Platz, it becomes austere and low-rent. Here, the trees are recently planted, and the buildings consist of post-war apartments with tiny balconies. On one corner is a discount drugstore, on the other a tanning salon called “Sunshine.” 82 Motzstrasse is just about in the middle of the block. It has six stories and a gray facade. The lawn is clipped, and there's a round ornamental shrub. Not a single leaf is to be found on the sidewalks. A bird house hangs from one of the balconies. A sign warns to beware of the dog. It's a tidy German post-war apartment building. There's nothing here that would bring Else Hecht to mind. Dirk Saager and his apprentices are making slow progress. It has nothing to do with the weather: the ground isn't frozen anymore, and the dirt is easy to dig into. The cobblestones are easily removed and replaced with the brass ones. The obstacles are of a rather different sort. At the first stop, on Kreuznacher Strasse, Andreas Wünsch has to be shown the procedure. On Georg-Wilhelm-Strasse, an older Stolperstein had been put in the wrong way, which Saager immediately corrects. To make up for lost time, they work through their morning break, and get back on schedule. But then Akin, the second-year apprentice, remembers that he left his work shoes at a construction site yesterday. They make a detour so Akin can retrieve his shoes. He's quick about it, but then on the way to Motzstrasse, Ahmed makes a wrong turn, which he only realizes after it's too late. Ruth Rotstein looks at her watch. It's already ten minutes before noon, and things were supposed to get started twenty minutes ago – but so far there's no sign of the stone. The air is still frigid, the sky still gray. The gathered relatives rub their hands together, pump their legs, talk about the weather (who'd have thought it'd already be so cold in Berlin?), about the food in the restaurants (they'd expected better) – but at least the hair dressers in Berlin lived up to expectations. Two of the women got their hair cut short in Kreuzberg, and now everyone is admiring their new hairdos. Seemingly trivial conversations, but a current of tension is in the air. This becomes evident in small gestures: a sudden jolt when a bicyclist shouts “Careful!” as he passes, or a nervous glance at a watch. Every so often people walk by: elderly women with walkers, men with shopping bags, mothers with strollers. Just after noon the blue truck pulls into Motzstrasse and double-parks. Time for the seventh stone: Else Hecht, with family members in attendance. Estimated time of work: ten minutes. Meanwhile, the group in front of 82 Motzstrasse has grown even larger. A man in sweatpants and a cut-off vest is standing on the lawn, one of the tenants from 82 Motzstrasse. He's been standing there a while, at something of a distance, as if he was afraid of disturbing anyone. Superintendent Ahmed shuts off the engine, and the apprentices spring out of the truck and unload their tools: bucket, chisels, trowel, pickax, and hammer. Ruth Rotstein and her family, somewhat startled by all the action and the new arrivals, grow quiet. Andreas Wünsch runs back to the truck and returns with the stone. It's lovely, very simple, and glitters like gold. The family members take pictures of it from all angles with their cameras and cell phones. The sidewalk on Motzstrasse and the entrance to 82 are both laid in flagstone, and between the two flagstone segments lies a strip of small rough stones: Bernburg cobblestones. Andreas Wünsch sets down the Stolperstein exactly in the middle of this strip. He looks at his instructor. Dirk Saager nods his head: it's show time. Andreas Wünsch makes a chalk outline around the stone. Akin loosens up the dirt with the pickax, lifts out some stones, and digs a hole. Ruth Rotstein's family stands in a circle looking down toward the two men working. A solemn momentNobody talks. It all goes very quickly: remove dirt, insert stone, pack dirt, put back cobbles, pound in Stolperstein, brush dirt away, wash off stone, brush off hands. Done. Dirk Saager nods at the family members. The apprentices put the tools back into the truck. Before Andreas Wünsch gets into the truck, he turns around and says, “Have a nice day.” The workmen are gone, they did their job — much as if they had just patched a pipe or laid down some telephone cable. And yet it's a special, even solemn moment. Maybe it has something to do with the sun, which at this moment breaks through the clouds for the first time. Or maybe something to do with the building tenant, who has now moved closer to the group and explains in halting German that he's from Sri Lanka, that he's a refugee. A man rushes down the street and yells, “Religious freedom for all!” A young Turkish woman with a stroller comes back from the store with groceries; on her way into the building, she notices the stone and stands still. Ruth Rotstein asks her if she lives here. The Turkish woman nods. Ruth Rotstein tells her that her grandmother used to live here. It's still the same city after all. Ceremony of forgivenessRuth Rotstein stands behind the Stolperstein and pulls a slip of paper out of her pocket. She had prepared a speech at home in Israel. “I would like to thank everyone who took part today in this important ceremony,” she reads from her note. She especially wants to thank her sister Inge. “I know it wasn't an easy decision for her.” Ruth Rotstein talks about her mother, who never once talked about Else, never explained why she and her sister fled the country, nor why Else and Karl didn't. “My mother kept all that inside her heart and it must have caused her great pain.” Ruth Rotstein says that this ceremony is her way of asking for forgiveness for never having asked those questions. She can barely say the words, her voice is breaking. Her sister steps in and talks about the beautiful house in Plauen, and about saying goodbye to her grandmother. Afterward, Ruth Rotstein's granddaughter solemnly sings a song in Hebrew. Without being able to understand the words, it sounds as if it cried out all the lamentations that Else Hecht had been forbidden to write in the letters to her family. It Is heartbreaking. The apprentice Andreas Wünsch is now on Schaperstrasse, the next to last job before he punches out for the day. He lays three stones, one each for Max and Käthe Herrmann, and one for their twelve-year-old daughter Ilse-Ruth. original article by Anja Reich, published Dec. 10, 2011 in the Berliner Zeitung Magazin translation by Hunter Frederick
1 Comment
By: Helen Makhdoumian and Dilara Çalışkan
On April 28th, 2017, The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) and The Future of Trauma and Memory Studies (FTMS) reading group hosted Spaces of Remembering the Armenian Genocide. The atmosphere at the conference was electric, the room was full to bursting, and everyone agreed it was a spectacular event! Conference speakers included Myrna Douzjian (UC Berkeley), Talar Chahinian (California State University, Long Beach), Nancy Kricorian (New York City-based writer and organizer), and Scout Tufankjian (New York City-based photographer). Brett Kaplan also invited us, Helen Makhdoumian and Dilara Çalışkan, to present. The event closed with a screening of Armenoscope: constructing belonging and a conversation with the documentary essay’s director, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian (Berlin-based visual artist and artistic director for Houshamadyan). In this vein, we had both an all-women organizing committee and an all-women lineup of speakers making thought-provoking, critical and artistic contributions to Armenian studies and the larger fields of trauma, memory, and diaspora studies. Faculty and graduate students across campus introduced each speaker. Presentation titles and bios of the speakers and introducers can be found on the this blog. Brett suggested doing an event on the topic of the Armenian Genocide to Helen after learning about a campus conference funding application. Helen proposed inviting inspiring people with diverse academic and creative talents and backgrounds. Because of her exposure to the interdisciplinary and multinational community of promising and more advanced scholars that HGMS has fostered, Helen believes that Armenian literature and art often produce nuanced theories that can be harnessed alongside other methodological frameworks for the study of transnational Armenian experiences. Dilara joined the organizing committee and provided insightful perspectives that continued to shape the committee’s goals for the event. Alongside speakers and attendees, we actualized our vision for the event: to foster conversations on remembrance practices of the Armenian Genocide across time, space, and place, how memories of this genocide travel across media and form (film, literature, art, and photography), and how Armenians’ experiences of victimization and survival are referenced in varied locations and contexts to raise awareness of other histories of traumatic collective violence. The diverse geographies, backgrounds, and disciplines of both panelists and attendees engendered dynamic and transformative discussions throughout the day. By the afternoon, the room filled to full capacity. The exciting conference program drew an audience of students, faculty, and community members from UIUC and even other Illinois institutions. Attendees actively participated in post-panel discussions, which further facilitated an interdisciplinary atmosphere and opened spaces to think more critically about memory work and its itinerary across borders and generations. Ultimately, Spaces of Remembering the Armenian Genocide demonstrated that collective memory remains a vital source of inspiration for ongoing struggles for justice. To continue the conversations that transformed all of us during the event, HGMS has invited Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia University) to give a lecture in January. Furthermore, the comments about the strength of this conference’s structure and the energy for continuing to produce innovative scholarship on the memory and representation of the Armenian Genocide that it generated inspires us to continue to carry HGMS forward as an internationally-recognized venue for research, teaching, and public engagement with diverse histories and memories of collective trauma. To that end, HGMS would like to begin the process of establishing The April 24th Fund, which will enable the Initiative to host more events to commemorate and study the Armenian Genocide. Such opportunities will help us further actualize what HGMS, FTMS, and The Program in Jewish Culture and Society have previously set into motion for us and countless others. That is, an awareness of how a thick understanding of the past can inform how we witness, engage, and respond to contemporaneous acts of mass violence, displacement, and migration and how we address related questions about history-writing processes, remembering, forgetting, and denial, and the securement of social justice for different peoples who resist erasure. Many individuals and organizations made this conference possible and we are so grateful to all for their generous support; we thoroughly enjoyed bringing together the “Dream Team.” Enormous thanks to: Beckman Institute; Center for Advanced Study; Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies; College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Department of English; Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Department of History; European Union Center; Graduate College; National Association for Armenian Studies and Research; Program in Comparative and World Literatures; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center; School of literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics. Article Author Bios: Helen Makhdoumian received a BA in English with an Art minor from Westminster College and an MA in English from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is also pursuing her PhD through English and HGMS. She works comparatively on Armenian American, Arab American, and American Indian literatures and focuses on representations of collective violence and trauma, memory, and migration. Helen co-organizes the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies reading group and has published in Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL). Dilara Çalışkan is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department and HGMS. She is also a graduate student fellow of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University and working on the links between queer kinship and non-normative forms of “intergenerational” transmission of memory. From 2014 to 2016 she worked at Sabancı University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Forum as the coordinator of Curious Steps: Gender and Memory Walks of Istanbul project. In 2014, she graduated from Sabancı University’s Cultural Studies Master Program with a thesis titled “Queer Mothers and Daughters: The Role of Queer Kinship in the Everyday Lives of Trans Sex Worker Women in Istanbul.” Since 2010, she has been involved with Istanbul LGBTI Solidarity Association, which particularly focuses on transgender rights and opposes the criminalization of sex work, and supports its recognition as work
On April 28th, 2017, The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies Reading Group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will host a one day conference titled “Spaces of Remembering the Armenian Genocide,” featuring presentations by Myrna Douzjian, Talar Chahinian, Nancy Kricorian, and Scout Tufankjian. The conference will close with a screening of Armenoscope: constructing belonging, which will be followed by a conversation with the docu-essay’s director, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian. This event aims to foster interdisciplinary and transnational discussions on remembering the Armenian Genocide across time, space, and place. It will address how memories of this genocide travel across media and form (film, literature, art, and photography) and how they are referenced across intersectional lines to also bring to the fore other histories of collective violence. The conference and film screening are free and open to the public. It will take place on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus, with the main conference during the day in the Foreign Languages Building and the film screening in the afternoon in the English Building. Please see schedule below for links to campus maps and more information on speakers. Conference Schedule: 9:00 am to 2:30 pm Conference in Lucy Ellis Lounge, Room 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S Matthews Avenue 9:00-9:30 am Welcome, coffee and pastries provided 9:30-10:15 am Helen Makhdoumian and Dilara Çalışkan (UIUC) "These Lands Bare Witness: Activating Armenian Genocide Memories." Introduction: Tamara Chaplin (UIUC) 10:15-11:00 am Myrna Douzjian (Lecturer, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley) “A Photograph Resists Archivization: Reading Hrayr Anmahouni and Anahid Kassabian's Solemnity” Introduction: David Cooper (UIUC) 11-11:45 am Talar Chahinian (Lecturer, Department of Comparative World Literature, California State University, Long Beach) “In Search of a Lost Archive: The Orphaned Generation's Literary Response to the Genocide” Introduction: Marcus Keller (UIUC) 11:45 am–1:00 pm Vegetarian lunch provided 1:00-1:45 pm Scout Tufankjian (Brooklyn-based photographer) “The Armenian Diaspora Project” Introduction: Brett Kaplan (UIUC) 1:45-2:30 pm Nancy Kricorian (New York City-based Writer and Organizer) “Writing as Restoration Project” Introduction: Helen Makhdoumian (UIUC) 3:00-5:00 pm Film Screening and Discussion, Room 304 English Building, 608 South Wright Street Armenoscope: contructing belonging A docu-essay by Silvina Der-Meguerditchian (Berlin-based Visual and Performance Artist and Artistic Director of the Houshamadyan Project) Introduction: Dilara Çalışkan (UIUC) The event is co-sponsored by: Beckman Institute, Center for Advanced Study, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of English, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Department of History, European Union Center, Graduate College, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, Program in Comparative and World Literatures, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, School of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages To stay updated on the event, please visit the Facebook event and return to this website. https://www.facebook.com/events/1887933791486972/ Questions about the event can be directed to Helen Makhdoumian and Dilara Çalışkan at: [email protected] Speaker Bios: Myrna Douzjian Myrna Douzjian holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work examining the politics of twentieth-century Armenian literary production has been published in a volume on Armenian Philology in the Modern Era. She has also published translations of contemporary Armenian poetry and drama, and several of her translations have been staged in the U.S. Her current research focuses on critical approaches to the study of world literature and post-Soviet literary culture. Dr. Douzjian has taught literature, composition, literary theory, and film at UCLA, Temple University, and California State University, Fresno. She is currently Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on Armenian literature, culture, and film. Talar Chahinian Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Department of Comparative World Literature at California State University, Long Beach. Her research interests include transnational studies, Western Armenian language and literature, francophone literature, politics and aesthetics, and translation. She served as assistant editor of Armenian Review (2012-2016). She contributes regularly to the online journal, Critics’ Forum, and is the co-editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Nancy Kricorian Nancy Kricorian is a New York City-based writer and organizer. She is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and most recently All The Light There Was, which is set in the Armenian community of Paris during World War II. Her poetry and essays have been published in journals such as MINNESOTA REVIEW, PARNASSUS, WITNESS, and WOMEN’S STUDIES QUARTELY, and have appeared online at GUERNICA, ALTERNET, ARMENIAN WEEKLY, MONDOWEISS, PEN World Voices Online Anthology, and other outlets. Scout Tufankjian Although she has spent the bulk of her career working in the Middle East, Scout Tufankjian is best known for her work documenting the Barack Obama campaigns, and her book on the 2007-2008 campaign, Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign was a New York Times and LA Times bestseller. In the summer of 2012, she returned to the campaign trail as a photographer for President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, where she took an image of the President and the First Lady hugging that shattered all social media records at the time. Her new book, There is Only the Earth: Images from the Armenian Diaspora Project, is the culmination of six years documenting Armenian communities in over 20 different countries. She is a two-time TUMO workshop leader and has recently worked in Spain on the set of the film The Promise, and in Nagorno-Karabakh for the HALO Trust. More of her work can be seen at www.scouttufankjian.com. Silvina Der-Meguerditchian The artist is the granddaughter of Armenian immigrants to Argentina; since 1988, she has lived in Berlin. Her artistic work deals with issues related to the burden of national identity, the role of minorities in society and the potential of a space “in between.” Der-Meguerditchian is interested in the impact of migration on the urban texture and its consequences. Reconstruction of the past and the building of archives are a red thread in her artistic research. Her work is multidisciplinary and uses different media. Since 2010, she has served as the artistic director of Houshamadyan (www.houshamadyan.org), a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life. In 2014/15 she was awarded a fellowship through the Kulturakademie Tarabya, a residency program of the German Foreign Ministry and the Goethe Institute in Istanbul. Furthermore, she participated in “Armenity,” the Pavilion awarded the Golden Lion at the 56th Venice Biennale for best national participation. Her work has been shown in many exhibitions around the world, including, among others, Germany, Argentina, USA, and Turkey. Her last initiated and coordinated collective project, “Grandchildren, new geographies of belonging” (DEPO Cultural Center), closed its doors last November 1st in Istanbul. Introducers:
Tamara Chaplin (Associate Professor of History, UIUC) David Cooper (Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of Russian, East European and Eurasian Center, UIUC) Brett Kaplan (Professor of Comparative and World Literatures and Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society and The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, UIUC) Marcus Keller (Associate Professor and Department Head of French and Italian, UIUC) Helen Makhdoumian (Graduate Student in English and Co-Organizer of The Future of Trauma and Memory Studies, UIUC) Dilara Çalışkan (Graduate Student in Anthropology, UIUC) Recently, my husband momentarily misplaced his wedding ring. While this might seem to be a commonplace, yet anxiety-inducing event, it created a unique moment of mnemonic crisis for us: my husband’s wedding band originally belonged to my grandfather, a metallurgist who forged the ring himself and engraved it with my grandmother’s initials and their wedding date in 1936, shortly after they fled Germany. As we searched for the ring we tried to remember what the engraving read; despite studying the words for years, we could not remember the exact arrangement of initials and dates. We wondered how we could replace the ring, its engraving, as well as its scratches and dents, the evidence it bore of the lives of generations of wearers. We found the ring, but the anxiety of loss lingers, urging me to reexamine my own relationship to the indexicality and transmission of generational memory and weigh what those of us in the second and third generation removed from trauma owe to our ancestors and to the past. This personal meditation on generational memory actually began several weeks ago when I visited the exhibit “From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memories and Contemporary Art” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. According to the curators, the title embraces “l’dor vador—the call to pass tradition from one generation to another,”[1] fitting the museum’s focus on representing contemporary Jewish culture. The exhibition employs Marianne Hirsch’s foundational concept of “postmemory” to thematically organize pieces from twenty-three international artists as they depict memories they have not experienced, but inherited. According to Hirsch, “postmemory describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before—to events that they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images and behaviors among which they grew up. But these events were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”[2] The exhibit thus asks us to consider how various familial and cultural pasts are transmitted to these artists and how they choose to represent, as Hirsch describes, these “belated, temporally, and qualitatively removed” memories. Despite this generational focus, only some of the works are primarily concerned with familial memories, those passed down from parents to children through not only overt methods such as storytelling and photographs, but also more subtle silences and affects. One of the pieces that specifically focuses on parental transmission is Anri Sala’s Intervista (Finding the Words) (1998), where the artist attempts to reconstruct the lost vocal track of his mother’s speech to Albania’s Communist Youth Alliance, a recreation that his mother cannot recognize or remember almost thirty years later. Other than these intimate family portraits, most of the exhibit is concerned with larger cultural forces that shape generational memory, even within the family. This is not at odds with postmemory, as Hirsch argues, “Family life, even in its most intimate moments, is imbricated in a collective imaginary shaped by a shared archive of stories and images, by public fantasies and projections,” mediations that become especially important after traumatic events that resist comprehension and need multiple forms of repetition to work through, especially amongst families who do not speak openly about such pasts. Though trauma and transformation are often presented as breaks in the continuum between past and present, the “post” in “postmemory,” Hirsch writes, “reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture,” where the past and present exist in uneasy yet entangled tension. Art is thus a valuable medium for working through difficult and transformative pasts while navigating the familial and the cultural, the personal and the collective, to see how the past resonates today, shaping our hopes for the future. The exhibition is loosely broken up into three parts: personal, collective, and future memories, although these scales are often blurred. In “personal memories,” intimate and often painful moments in the lives of individuals are represented, encouraging us to consider not only the artists’ relationship to their subjects, but ours as well. In Amelia Falling (2014), artist Hank Willis Thomas prints a photograph of Civil Rights activist Amelia Boynton after she was beaten unconscious in the Selma, Alabama march of 1965 by State Troopers on a reflective mirror.[3] Thomas focuses on Boynton in mid-faint as she is supported by two marchers, allowing viewers to see themselves reflected above the distressed trio. Placing the viewer in this event collapses the distinction between the personal and the collective, the past and present, asking us to empathize with Boynton’s personal suffering while connecting this difficult historical moment to current instances of police brutality. In a similar act of intimate mediation of inter-generational transmission, Nao Bustamante’s installation Chac-Mool (2015) transmits the memories of Leandra Becerra Lumbreras, who at a purported 127 years old, was the last surviving soldadera, or female fighter in the Mexican Revolution. Sitting on a stool in front of a makeshift wooden video player, we are invited to peer into a viewfinder and listen on headphones to Lumbreras beat out a revolutionary anthem on her drum. Thus the originary intimate process of intergenerational memory transfer between the artist and her subject is replicated through Chac-Mool, where the personal stories and defiant affect of Lumbreras are passed on to us, the museum visitors. The endurance of Lumbreras’s tune is reiterated in Bustamante’s other piece, Kevlar Fighting Costumes (2015), where the signature dresses of the soldaderas are reproduced in bullet-proof Kevlar. This retroactive effort to protect the female soldaderas is also an attempt to preserve their legacy and empower new generations of feminists and female freedom fighters. This theme of testimony eliciting intergenerational empathetic attachment is reiterated in Chickako Yamashiro’s powerful video, Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009), where a survivor of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 tells his story through the mouth of the young artist. As his voice speaks through her moving lips, the artist begins to cry in an extreme display of empathetic connection to her subject, and later, when the ghostly image of the survivor is projected over the artist’s own face, there is almost a collapse between artist and subject. However, the artist stops short of appropriating the survivor’s testimony, closing her mouth as he recounts the violent death of his family. While this work questions the limits of empathy cultivated through posttraumatic testimony, it also brings up a disturbing dimension of postmemory: “if we adopt the transformative or traumatic experiences of others as ones we might ourselves have lived through… can we do so without imitating or over-identifying with them?” Hirsch asks. Your Voice Came Through My Throat seems to skirt the delicate border between empathy and appropriation, but it remains a powerful moment of intergenerational memory transfer. In line with new directions in memory studies, two works examine the environment as it shapes personal and collective memories of trauma. In one of the exhibition’s most striking works, Vietnamese artist Bihn Danh prints images from the Vietnam War on leaves using a photosynthetic process in a series called "Immortality: The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War" (2005-2009). Danh juxtaposes three leaves bearing images of American soldiers during combat with four leaves depicting the devastation of the war, where wounded children are held by visibly traumatized adults. By bringing together the natural, the leaves and images of familial intimacies, with the unnatural mechanisms and trauma of war, Danh asks us to confront the process of memory as both an organic and mediated process. The diasporic biography of the artist intensifies the wartime trauma depicted on the leaves; Danh and his family left Vietnam as refugees shortly after he was born and he has been unable to imaginatively return to his homeland as it existed for his parents, before the conflict and their resulting exile. His multiple traumatic displacements are reflected in his choice of organic medium: though they are preserved in resin, eventually these delicate leaf prints will fade and completely disintegrate, demonstrating the limited longevity of postmemory. Vandy Rattana also explores the aftermath of the Vietnam War through his photographic series, Bomb Ponds (2009), which document the bomb craters littering the Cambodian countryside left in the aftermath of American bombing raids starting in 1969. The craters remain today, some filled with toxic water, as an enduring and inescapable environmental reminder of the war, asking us to consider how the environment continues to shape the lives and memories of multiple generations by bearing the scars of traumatic pasts. Given the gravity of the exhibition, I originally had difficulty navigating the levity of the “future memory” section, where artists playfully stretch memory to its imaginative limits, at times abandoning the generational theme organizing the rest of the exhibit. Contrasting the traumatic landscapes of Bomb Ponds with Rä di Martino’s photographic series Every World’s a Stage (Beggar in the Ruins of Star Wars) (2012), which features a Tunisian beggar amongst abandoned Star Wars sets, potentially trivializes the earlier photographs. While di Martino’s point is that these artificial environments take on new memories for different populations—that those who use the sets today as dwellings do so without knowledge of the pop-culture phenomenon that is Star Wars—the fictional conflict of the films pales in comparison to the environmental imprint of the war represented in Bomb Ponds. Similarly, Mike Kelley’s installation Kandor 17 (2007), which imagines Superman as a diasporic subject, despite its melancholic undertones, seems almost trivial compared to the actual diasporic experiences of Danh. While many of us know that Superman’s journey to Earth was precipitated by the destruction of his home planet, in a later series Krypton’s capital, Kandor, survives, albeit in shrunken form. Kandor 17 thus laments Superman’s inability to return to his home even as he is tasked with preserving the miniaturized city and its inhabitants under a bell jar displayed in his Fortress of Solitude. On the surface, Kandor 17’s bright color palate and fanciful recreation of a fictional universe seems to undermine the gravity of diasporic memory presented elsewhere in the exhibit, however, when one remembers that Jewish immigrants fueled the early comic book industry, we begin to see the gravity, and yes, solitude, behind the playful exterior of Kelley’s installation.[4] Fitting with the museum’s larger mission to present contemporary Jewish culture and the exhibition’s focus on generational memory, Kandor 17 seemingly asks us to think about how the Jewish diaspora has been mediated and remediated throughout the past century as we interpret and reinterpret cultural touchstones like Superman. “From Generation to Generation” will be at the Contemporary Jewish Museum until April 2, 2017. [1] Star, Lori. “Director’s Foreword.” From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art. Eds. Pierre-François Galpin and Lily Siegel. San Francisco: The Contemporary Jewish Museum, 2016. 1-3.
[2] Hirsch, Marianne. “Connective Arts of Postmemory.” From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art. Eds. Pierre-François Galpin and Lily Siegel. San Francisco: The Contemporary Jewish Museum, 2016. 69-75. All citations from Hirsch in this post are taken from the exhibition catalogue, although she has defined and refined the concept of postmemory in multiple books and articles, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. [3] This event would become known as one of many “Bloody Sundays,” see Ann Rigney’s earlier blog post, “Transnational Bloody Sundays: Multi-Sited Memory.” [4] The history of which was fictionally represented by Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). I woke up this morning to news of the death of a good friend, Okla Elliott. I walked around campus much of the day, stunned. For me, nowhere in this town isn’t touched by his memory. (And no one: I suppose I owe him some gratitude for introducing Priscilla and me. We didn’t talk that night beyond hello, but he remained steadfastly convinced that she and I should not only date, but marry, long before we had spent our first real days together). I met Okla my first semester in grad school in 2010, in a class with Nancy M Blake. I found him loud and brash, but by the time the semester closed I was warming to his outgoing brilliance. We bonded over Bushmills and Bad Religion, started getting dinner after class each week. Pretty soon, hardly a day went by without at least an hour’s chat over coffee. We’d spend hours talking and reading at the coffee shop, only to grab dinner, get some Bushmill’s, and head to his place to argue about Heidegger, read poetry at each other, and discuss each and every stupid thing that came into our over-read heads. So many drunken nights of dancing, stomping, and singing. So many times we infuriated each other. So many times we didn’t. All were minor miracles. Okla was, as so many are remembering, a great friend. He was unfailingly encouraging. And he took real interest in the interests of those around him. Of course, he was also a competitive friend, a frustrating friend, even a spiteful friend. But he was, invariably, a friend. And an incredibly vivacious one at that. How many people must be asking themselves now, with me, how a force of nature like that can simply have stopped. By his own accounting (which he offered daily on Facebook), any given day couldn’t get any better, and every taco he made was the kind of genius that gods bow down before. I am grateful to have spent so much time with someone so in love with the world. Over the last couple of years, various frictions grew a polite diffidence between us. I’m not sad about that. We had our years of brilliant friendship. I *am* sad, though, that the world has been deprived of such a machine of creativity, so serious a teacher, and so intense a friend. I was looking forward to catching up with him one of these days, which is now not to be. But there is one thing I could count on: a long night of conversation with Okla would always end with a hug, a handshake, and his saying, “It was a pleasure and honor, as always.” Well, brother, it really was a pleasure and an honor. And I will always remember it. - Matt Nelson I am heartbroken to learn about my friend Okla Elliott's death. Many have spoken more eloquently than me about his work as a poet, a novelist, a literary critic, and a scholar. I will cherish the memories of grabbing bucket-sized iced lattes before going to talks on the Illinois campus, reading for hours in coffee shops together when everyone else left campus for the summer, collaborating on scholarly projects, hitting the gym only to stuff our faces with Thai food right after, and lengthy conversations about philosophy. Dear "robot monkey man", you are dearly missed. - Priscilla Charrat Nelson Okla Jeff Elliott passed unexpectedly in his sleep on March 19, 2017. He will be remembered as a prolific writer, teacher, mentor, beloved brother and friend. He is survived by his mother, Freida Elliott, sisters, Vickie Elliott Brammer and Flora Elliott D'Souza, and nieces and nephew Hannah Brammer, Sabrina D'Souza, and Michael Brammer. Okla earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Illinois, an MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University, and a certificate in legal studies from Purdue University . Okla published widely in national and international literary magazines, journals, and newspapers. He was the author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including From the Crooked Timber, The Cartographer’s Ink, The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, Blackbirds in September, Bernie Sanders: The Essential Guide, and Pope Francis: The Essential Guide. He was a cofounder and editor of New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine, where he encouraged and cultivated the talent of both new and established writers. He also co-founded a blog for literary and political commentary, As It Ought to Be. Overcoming the obstacles of growing up poor and losing his father at age ten, Okla was an advocate for education as a pathway out of poverty. His too-short life served as a witness to his philosophy. His life and his loss touch his students, colleagues, friends, and family. He will be missed, but he lives on in his words, his genius, and our hearts." - David Bowen I'm so overwhelmed to learn of the death of my friend and former colleague Okla Elliott today. I noticed his photos in my Facebook feed this morning and without even reading the context simply assumed he'd published a new German translation, another poetry anthology or received a glowing interview somewhere about his last novel. It feels disingenuous writing about how intensely news of his death is making me feel right now, crying as I write this, without also explaining that in the early years that I knew him, now more than six years ago, we argued so so often. I don't think there is anyone who has unfriended and refriended me more on Facebook over the years than Okla. Maybe precisely because we shared so many of the same very specific interests (from Sartre to the legacy of Stalin in Marxism) we butted heads on nearly every issue. In an atmosphere of quiet consensus I was drawn to Okla as a strong, confident interlocutor who wouldn't back down from an argument, someone who believed in the inherent value of debate, someone who resisted political chauvinism for the sake of keeping open a space for critical thought. Even after we stopped talking, I thought I'd have the chance someday to catch up over a drink and remark on the irony that so many years after our first and most heated arguments about theology, our positions had seemingly reversed. I came to define and redefine my intellectual positions against him. I really always felt he would be there in the background, his constant overachieving compelling me to work harder. I always imagined telling him someday how much I respect him and what an enormously positive effect on my intellectual development he had. I'm absolutely devastated to learn of his death today. - Brandon Carr Okla was so alive in the world that it does not seem possible he is not here...his formidable energy seemed like it would never end. When he was working on his dissertation Okla would come to my office often; without fail he arrived carrying a huge iced coffee, no matter what the season. But the potential energy in an enormous coffee was nothing compared to Okla’s own vibrant mind. We would talk about all of his many ideas and I always felt that my role was, rather than offering any new ideas, to trim those thoughts lest they stray into too many directions. After Okla defended his dissertation I was so proud that he took up a post as an Assistant Professor at Misericordia. We were in touch often over email and Facebook and I was delighted that he undertook the important project of building a Holocaust pedagogy website. When prospective graduate students visit Illinois I always hold up Okla as a model. His voracious mind could take in Bernie Sanders and Pope Francis all while writing fiction and poetry and teaching. He was (why must I use the past tense?) an energetic person but someone whose traumatic past haunted him. More than once I cried reading his fictionalized autobiographical stories. His prose was often sparse but very powerful and I don’t think he would ever have run out of beautiful words with which to express his many and variegated thoughts. Already on facebook people who knew him in person and also a surprising number who knew him only virtually have been describing Okla as a generous friend and colleague who always supported and encouraged them, who often argued with them, and who was always onto some new thought. He was indeed extremely generous and consistently went out of his way to help publish and broadcast other people’s thoughts and ideas. He was a tireless advocate for small presses and independent publishing. I was very fond of him, and very proud of him, and he should have been able to continue to be the force of nature that he was. - Brett Kaplan Feeling totally shocked this morning, having learned of the sudden death of my former classmate and friend Okla Elliott. A creative writer and scholar of comparative literature, law, and (most recently) religion, Okla always seemed to be guided by a boundless energy and enthusiasm for learning that I found astonishing. He continued taking seminars while dissertating (and teaching) out of love for the experience, and always seemed to be working on multiple involved projects concurrently. In recent years, his prolific social media posts offered windows into his latest labors of love. Really struggling to process this one. - Valerie O’Brien Many people will have seen this by now, but my good friend, longtime roommate, and literary collaborator Okla Elliott passed away in his sleep on March 19th. He was a brilliant mind and someone who was incredibly generous with me and changed my life for the better. I apologize to anyone close to him who is finding this out through Facebook. We wanted to contact you all by phone first, but his personal and professional spheres were large and it just wasn't possible before the news came out in other ways. That is all I want to write for now. David Bowen has posted a nice obituary on Okla's timeline for those wishing to read it. - Raul Clement My Dearest Okla Elliott, Not long were my days in Illinois before I met you, standing there amidst the rest of the comparative literature students and faculty, beaming with happiness and that beard covered smile I came to love so much, and ever since I was always incredibly grateful for the interest you showed in me and my work, your guidance and helping hand, and your willingness to take on a reclusive and introverted Swede. The two years I spent in Illinois, with you in my life, will forever stand out among the greatest in my life. Okla, you took me in, and not only as a roommate, but as an equal, as a fellow student, as a colleague, and as a debater of many things literary, and even though I could never convince you of the brilliance of my genre classification, you still stood there as civil as ever and told me your argument. This is one of the many things I will miss now that you are gone, your undying love to do and fight for what is right, your incredible fortitude to take the good fight, and perhaps most of all, to always be civil when others argued against you. You always took the fights, when I never could. My dearest Okla, I will forever cherish our moments together, and I always wish I were there with you more, in your many and long conversations with Raul and Matt, but we did have many fantastic dinners and lunches together, not the least of which were your absolutely amazing tacos. You were always there for me. I will forever miss you, my dear friend, my roommate, my brother. - Fredrik Wittsten Heartbroken to hear that we have lost Okla Elliott, an amazing writer and person. It was an honor and pleasure to co-edit New Poetry from the Midwest alongside him. He was a seemingly tireless creator and advocate for other writers. I was consistently inspired by his generosity of spirit and energy--he was such a force of empathy and good in the literary community. He made an impact on so many people--I know there are many grieving for him, and to all of you, I send hugs and compassion. - Hannah Stephenson I am absolutely devastated to learn that Okla Elliott has passed away. The co-founder and managing editor of As It Ought To Be, he was my editor for 10 years. I feel like that sentence is too smal to contain all that it means, so I will just say it again: He was my editor for 10 years. He changed my life in so many ways, all of them for the better. I don't envy the person charged with writing Okla's eulogy; every time I start to write about who Okla was and all he accomplished I am humbled by the sheer weight of the task. Never have I known a man more prolific, more passionate, more capable. He was the smartest and most well-read person I knew, period. And he was the very definition of a mensch. I am thinking in this moment of grief of all of the people I know because of Okla, of the many friends we had in common and the many people who are in my life because of this man, people whose lives, like mine, were touched beyond words by this incomparable human: Raul Clement, Yahya T. Ali, John Guzlowski, Chandra EA Dickson, Karen Craigo, Chase Dimock, Matt Gonzalez, Deborah Dubroff, and many others who I am forgetting in this moment in my grief. If you go to Okla's memorial page here on Facebook you'll see post after post extolling his virtues and attempting to remember his innumerable accomplishments. I want to add one thing here that I think important. For most of the 10 years I knew him, Okla was an ardent atheist. This past summer he nearly died twice, but survived, and in his surviving he found god. I am not a traditional believer myself, but I was moved by Okla's newfound relationship with god, and with the countless ways Okla lived a life in the spirit of the core values of his religion: kindness to others, care for the downtrodden, generosity, social welfare, and an abundance of love. Looking back, I can't help but wonder if there were not some divine purpose in sparing his life twice this past year and only taking him from this earth once he had reconnected with his god. At the very least, I know his transformation brought him comfort. But I hope it's more than that. I hope he knew something that many of us don't. I hope he was right, and that he is now in a place worthy of a man who lived his life in righteousness, as Okla did. My heart goes out to everyone who is grieving for this loss. The world will never know another like you. You will be missed more than we can imagine. - Tristan Chaika ENTRANCES AND EXITS by Okla Elliott When I was a younger man, a boy, the intrigue of washing machine doors trunks, windows, manholes--secret passages of all sorts--possessed me. I spent hours passing through and back through a simple hole in the wall of a condemned house careful to step with the other foot or at a new angle each time, conducting experiments that might foretell how the world would receive me and how I would leave. A day later, and I still can't process the fact that Okla Elliott, 39 years old, is gone. That someone so full of life could be taken from life, and so young, is incomprehensible. It makes me feel vulnerable and very, very small. Which I am; which we all are. It just sucks to be reminded of it.
I only knew him on the internet - one of his scores of fans aka "amigos internetos" as he called his online friends - but from what I can tell he is the most influential, impactful non-famous person I've ever known. The outpouring of grief I've seen on his Facebook page is beyond anything I've ever seen for anyone, and that includes famous people. It was thrilling to watch his career - as a poet, novelist, professor, translator, editor, and news commentator - unravel in ever more dazzling twists and turns. He made you believe in his potential, and then showed you time and again that your faith was not misplaced; indeed, that you had somehow managed to both believe in him and underestimate him at the same time. And along the way, he supported so many people in their own journeys. I don't know how he found time for it all, but someone he did it. He had an impressive work ethic. Most of all, I admired his courageous intellectual honesty. By now, I think we were all getting on the same page. Okla was going to be a huge force of good in the world, and we were on the edge of our seats; couldn't wait to see what he was going to do next. Except that his life was cut short before "next" could happen. It's a staggering loss. My condolences go out to his friends, family, colleagues and students. He was so open about his life, and he made us care about you through his stories of you, and we care about you now in your time of grief. - Eliana Mariella The sixth Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies summer school will be hosted by the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform from September 7-9, 2017 at Goethe University Frankfurt. Confirmed keynote speakers are Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz), Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University, New York) and Anna Reading (King’s College, London). This year’s Mnemonics summer school addresses the ‘social life of memory’. Memory studies is based on the premise that memories emerge (as Maurice Halbwachs argued) within ‘social frameworks’. But this is just the first stage of memory’s social dynamics. Those memories which have an impact in culture don’t just stand still, but lead a vibrant ‘social life’: They are mediated and remediated, emphatically welcomed and harshly criticized, handed on across generations, they travel across space, become connected with other memories or turn into a paradigm for further experience. Conversely, books about the past that are not sold and read, oral stories that are not passed on to grandchildren, history films that are not screened and reviewed, monuments that nobody visits, public apologies that do not engender heated debates – all these will fail to have an effect in memory culture. Memory ‘lives’ only insofar as it is continually shared among people, moves from minds and bodies to media and back again, is performed, remediated, translated, received, discussed and negotiated. Once we conceive of objects and media as part of memory culture, we realize that these are not stable entities, containing unalterable meanings, but that they unfold their mnemonic significance only within dynamic and transitory social processes. This insight entails methodological consequences. It creates the need to use more complex theory/methodology-designs in order to do justice to the moving constellations we study. This may also mean connecting humanities- and social sciences-approaches. Reception theories, reader response theories, audience studies, performance studies, sociological and political science-methods, museum visitor studies, social history, social psychology, ethnography, or actor-network theory – these all belong to the long list of approaches that we may want to draw on in order to study what our research group here in Frankfurt calls ‘socio-medial constellations’ of memory. The metaphor of the ‘social life of memory’ is not yet a clear-cut concept. However, it resonates with existing ideas, from Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘social life of discourse’ to Arjun Appadurai’s ‘social life of things’ or Alondra Nelson’s ‘the social life of DNA’. It also brings to mind the ‘afterlife’ of artworks as it was addressed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. More recently, and within the new memory studies, Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka have addressed the life of ‘memory-making films’ by studying their embeddedness in social contexts and in ‘plurimedial constellations’. In her study of Walter Scott, Ann Rigney has theorized the social (after-)lives of texts and authors in cultural memory. The summer school welcomes paper proposals that display a keen interest in the dynamic interplay of medial and social aspects of memory culture and that suggest ways to explore ‘the social life of memory’ – from the perspectives of contemporary memory cultures across the globe as well as from historical viewpoints. Possible topics include, but are emphatically not restricted to, the following:
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Aleida Assmann is Professor emeritus in English Literature at the University of Konstanz. She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton (2001), Yale (2002, 2003 and 2005) as well as other universities and has received numerous prizes. Among her recent publications in the field of memory studies are Formen des Vergessens (Wallstein, 2016), Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (Fordham University Press, 2015) and Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur: Eine Intervention (C. H. Beck, 2013). An important earlier contribution to the field of memory studies, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (C. H. Beck, 1999), has also been translated into English, as Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Before joining Columbia, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1971 until 1986. He served as founding director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). He is one of the founding editors of New German Critique and is on the editorial board of various journals. Among his publications in the field of memory studies are William Kentridge, Nalini Malani: The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory (Charta, 2013), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Routledge, 1995). Anna Reading is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She is also a journalist and playwright. Before joining King’s College, she was a researcher at the University of Westminster (1992-1995) and a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Lodz (1988-1989). She directed the Centre for Media and Culture Research, which she founded, at London South Bank University from 2009 to 2011 and was a member of the Institute of Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney from 2010 to 2012. Among her recent publications in the field of memory studies are Gender and Memory in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2016), her co-edited volume Save as… Digital Memories (Palgrave, 2009) with Joanne Garde-Hansen and Andrew Hoskins, and The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (Palgrave, 2002). Format: The Mnemonics summer school serves as an interactive forum in which junior and senior memory scholars meet in an informal and convivial setting to discuss each other’s work and to reflect on new developments in the field of memory studies. The objective is to help graduate students refine their research questions, strengthen the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of their projects, and gain further insight into current trends in memory scholarship. Each of the three days of the summer school will start with a keynote lecture, followed by sessions consisting of three graduate student papers, responses and extensive Q&A. Participants are expected to be in attendance for the full three days of the summer school. In order to foster incisive and targeted feedback, all accepted papers will be pre-circulated among the participants and each presentation session will be chaired by a senior scholar who will also act as respondent. Practical Information: Local organizers: Mnemonics 2017 will be hosted by the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, which is an initiative of the Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre. Both are located at Goethe University Frankfurt. Organizers are Astrid Erll, professor at the Institute for England and America Studies at Goethe University, Erin Högerle and Jarula M. I. Wegner, PhD candidates on the DFG research project “Migration and Transcultural Memory: Literature, Film the ‘Social Life’ of Memory Media”. Where: Campus Westend of Goethe University Frankfurt, located in Frankfurt Westend and easily accessible by car, train (Frankfurt central station) or airplane (Frankfurt Airport, FRA). When: September 7-9, 2017 Costs: 200€. The fee includes conference registration, a private bedroom at Ibis Hotel Centrum close to Frankfurt central station for three nights (September 6-9) and most meals. Travel to Goethe University is not covered, and prospective attendees are encouraged to check travel costs in advance. Scholarship: Memory studies is an increasingly global field, and we hope to see this reflected in the composition of the participant group. We therefore encourage graduate students based at non-European institutions, particularly in the Global South, to apply for admission to the summer school. In order to facilitate their participation, Frankfurt offers one scholarship for a fully-funded place at the summer school. Awarded on the basis of both merit and need, it covers all travel expenses, hotel costs, a daily allowance, the conference fee and visa assistance. If you want to be considered for this scholarship, please indicate this in your application, include a budget estimate and disclose any other sources of funding. Submission: Submissions are open to all graduate students interested in memory studies. About half of the 24 available places are reserved for students affiliated with Mnemonics partner institutions. Send: A 300-word abstract for a 15-minute paper (including title, presenter’s name and institutional affiliation), a description of your graduate research project (one paragraph) and a short CV (max. one page) as a single Word or PDF document to: [email protected] Deadline: March 31, 2017 Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2017 Deadline for submission of paper drafts: August 15, 2017 Questions? Write to [email protected] Mnemonics homepage: http://www.mnemonics.ugent.be/ Mnemonics on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/mnemonics.network/ Mnemonics on Twitter: @mnemonics_net Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform homepage: http://www.memorystudies-frankfurt.com/ Frankfurt Humanities Research Centre homepage: http://fzhg.org/ References
Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens.” 1923. Reprint. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. 69-82. Erll, Astrid and Stephanie Wodianka, eds. Film und kulturelle Erinnerung. Plurimediale Konstellationen. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2008. Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016. Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scot: Memory on The Move. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999. Disorienting Memory / Reorienting the Present A response to Ethan Madarieta’s SUBmerge Remember12/22/2016 By Comparative and World Literature Graduate Student Meagan Smith The smell of baking bread is an incredible, visceral memory trigger. It always takes me back to a particular time and place in my childhood, and then initiates an involuntary flood of other associations and memories. I’m at my best friend’s house; it must be sometime in the mid-nineties, when I was in middle school. It was around the time that those automatic bread-makers became popular and Patti, my best friend’s mom, had one. She’d make this slightly crusty white-bread and the smell would, of course, fill the kitchen and creep throughout the house. Our parents were close and Patti would have my whole family over for these wonderful dinners. My mom was just a shockingly terrible cook, so dinners at Patti’s house were always a treat for me and my siblings. The smell of baking bread always reminds me of Patti, who died about a year-and-a-half ago, just before her sixtieth birthday. It reminds me of being in middle-school; of the safety and comfort of my best friend’s house as opposed to the chaos and pins-and-needles feeling of my own house. For some reason, it also reminds me of the first time I ate fresh green beans. Maybe Patti served them with the bread at one of those wonderful dinners. The range of these personal details, the intense emotions and the inconsequential memory of the green beans, were all invoked and laid bare for my own private act of contemplation the night of December 9th during Ethan Madarieta’s performance titled, SUBmersion Remember: a performance of memory. Submersion is a fitting description of the experience. Ethan was the sole performer and didn’t speak a word or even make eye contact with the audience, but we were each engrossed in the sensorial textures he managed to create and the stream of individual memories and emotions he managed to raise in a span of roughly forty-five minutes. The lights were off, a mild psychedelic droning music played in the background, a video installation with shots of soft cumulus clouds and footage of sandy high-desert from a variety of angles played on a screen behind an apparatus consisting of a clothesline suspended between two cinderblocks and pine two-by-fours, and, to complete the sensorial submersion, the scent of baking bread filled the room from a convection oven in the corner. Ethan’s role consisted mainly of mixing and kneading the ingredients for a second loaf of bread while intermittently pausing to hang objects covered in batter from the clothesline. This was bookended with several minutes of him sitting on the cinderblocks, bent forward with his elbows on his knees in a sort of self-contained, introspective pose. The performance struck a balance between invoking this intensely personal, self-contained introspection—in which the actions, objects, and spaces presented to the audience remained unexplained—and the ambiguity of impersonal observation. In some sense the precise content and meaning of the more or less familiar images was less important than their common ability to invoke an individual response. This tension between the familiar and the strange, the intensely personal and the common or generalizable, hints at the theoretical apparatus of Ethan’s performance: the Bergsonian notion of “pure memory”. For Bergson, pure memory relies on the defamiliarization of the familiar. It can disrupt the automatic chain of involuntary perception and unconscious reaction. Perception, for Bergson, is as automatic as reflex and is full of memories that speed up the time it takes to involuntarily process external stimulus. The ease with which a stored memory is recalled and mapped onto a current moment overcomes the more complicated process of integrating perception and memory in response to a more or less familiar external object. In this process, the spontaneous potential of the individual body is lost, choice and even consciousness of one’s movement through the world become all but obsolete. To reintegrate the body into the external world of things acting upon it, we must disrupt mindlessness of actions produced by automatic, unconscious perception. The surreal act of hanging batter-soaked objects on a clothesline with no explanation accomplishes this act of disruption. Each of the memory-objects—photographs, leaves, little trinkets—represents some significant moment in Ethan’s life, but that significance is lost to the audience who likely cannot identify the object let alone access the memories associated with it. While each object might be familiar in a general sense, they are emptied of their specific content, they lack the context needed for interpretation, and they become strange and unfamiliar when obscured by the batter and the layers of indecipherable meaning heaped on them through their association with someone else’s inaccessible memories. The technique of making an object or event unfamiliar is intended to disorient rather than orient us to our perceived universe. It gives objects and even memories back their unique properties so that we can perceive them without all the baggage of always already “knowing” what they mean and how to respond to them. For an object or event to break the ceaseless automization of perception and reaction, though, the process of perception must be artificially prolonged. What Bergson calls “pure memory” is the process by which these automatic memory responses are disrupted, broken down, and then strung back together. This requires sustained intellectual engagement and full emersion in the sensorial experience of the disruptive event. What Ethan’s performance enacts is the duration of pure memory; he emphasizes the process, the time and full awareness it demands. He provides the audience with layers of sensory stimuli full of surreal but familiar memory triggers: the stream of personal associations invoked by scent of the bread, the prolonged submersion in the disorienting space of someone else’s memories, the strangeness of the batter-soaked objects hanging from the clothesline, and especially the otherworldliness of the clouds and open desert occupied only by an impersonal naked body leaving impermanent marks in the sand. For me, this last image is associated particularly with the imaginative futures and “elsewhere” of science fiction—a realm of unfamiliarity and untapped potential. It strikes me that the juxtaposition of all the memories and emotions invoked by the multiple layers of Ethan’s performance is full of the same surreal otherworldliness and untapped potential. Placing my childhood memories of my best friend’s house next to the perplexing image of batter dripping from unidentified objects on a clothesline in front of a video montage of a naked man walking in reverse through some alien sandscape is disorienting, to say the least. Throw in the random memory of green beans and we’ve certainly entered the realm of the surreal. That’s the point, though. Pure memory requires full, sometimes uncomfortable submersion, but it provides us with fresh perceptions and enough strange material to build otherwise impossible connections and to imagine brave new futures. Photos from the event taken by Professor Brett Kaplan
By HGMS Graduate Student Priscilla Charrat Nelson On October 19th, 2016, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society and the Department of French and Italian received the visit of Maxime Decout, Maître de conferences at the University of Lille 3 in France, and author of three books on the following topics: Albert Cohen, Writing Judaism in French Literature, and Bad Faith in Literature[1]. His visit focused on French author, and 2014 Nobel Prize recipient, Patrick Modiano. Decout is the editor of the special issue dedicated to Patrick Modiano of the journal Europe and published articles on Modiano, among other numerous publications on Albert Cohen, George Perec, Romain Gary, and Judaism in French literature[2]. A leading figure of contemporary French literature, Patrick Modiano’s reception of the Nobel Prize in 2014 came to the surprise of the American media and readership, despite the author’s literary fame in Europe. The relatively restrained circulation of Modiano’s work in North America before the reception of his Nobel compared to his European success might be due to the topographic nature of his works, which follow the paths of characters through Paris’s sinuous streets, evoking the social background of characters by mentioning the name of neighborhoods in passing, and inviting the reader to tap into his own knowledge of the places evoked. The serpentine nature of the Parisian landscape that echoes the meandering of memory evoked by Modiano’s novels might more intuitively translate culturally to European readers than to Americans more used to the grid system of American city planning. Modiano’s success is due largely to the singularity of his approach. In the midst of instant communication and flash news, Modiano proposes novels which posit the void, and the enigma, as value. Maxime Decout started his visit with a workshop on Modiano’s best known, and most accessible, novel Dora Bruder. The novel follows a narrator, an apparent double of the author himself, a teenage Jewish runaway living in Paris during the Occupation. The novel’s artfulness lies in the way it engages the reader, proposing a narrative permeated with silence, restraint, and interrogation that leads the reader to piece together clues both about Dora herself, and about the lived experience of Jews in occupied France. A specialist of Judaism and Jewish identity in French literature, Decout highlighted the absence of an identifiable Jewish literature category in France. While there are French Jewish authors, and while some of them might write about Jewish identity, Jewish History, or Jewish protagonists, Decout pointed out that unlike in American literature, there is no "French Jewish" canon. Modiano might write about the Jewish runaway Dora, but he can also be described as a writer of the occupation period, a writer of Paris and its suburbs, or a writer of silence. Yet, the Occupation period recurs obsessively in Modiano’s work with many of his novels echoing each other through recurring scenes, anecdotes, or motifs such as phone books listing names and addresses, photographic portraits, and suitcases (tacitly alluding to the Holocaust). Born in 1945 to a Sephardic Jewish father and a gentile Belgian mother, Modiano’s own Jewish identity remains a constant questioning on inheritance best apprehended through his body of works. We thank Dr. Decout for his superb talk and workshop, and pledge to follow Modiano’s footsteps in our continuous engagement with memory and literature. [1] -Albert Cohen : les fictions de la judéité, Paris, Classiques-Garnier, « Etudes de littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles », 2011, 371p.
– Écrire la judéité. Enquête sur un malaise dans la littérature française, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, « Détours », 2015. – En toute mauvaise foi. Sur un paradoxe littéraire, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, « Paradoxe », 2015. [2] The exhaustive list of Dr. Decout’s publications can be found at http://alithila.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/index.php/contacts/decout-maxime/ The fifth Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies summer school will take place from June 2-4, 2016 on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will be hosted by the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS). The theme of the 2016 event will be “The Other Side of Memory: Forgetting, Denial, Repression." Our keynote speakers will be Berber Bevernage (Ghent), Jodi A. Byrd (Illinois), and Françoise Vergès (Paris). Submissions are open to all graduate students interested in memory studies. Mnemonics is an international collaborative effort for graduate education in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Each year a different partner institution hosts a summer school for select students on a particular theme pertinent to the study of cultural memory. Panels of scholarly presentations by graduate students will be supplemented by professionalization workshops, cultural events, and opportunities for informal socializing. Three distinguished keynote lecturers will present new work and will engage with participants. Partners from the different campuses affiliated with Mnemonics will also be on site and will help in responding to and mentoring graduate students. We have chosen the theme of forgetting as a way of highlighting an essential, but often overlooked component of the dynamics of remembrance. As the pioneering memory studies scholar Aleida Assmann has written, “Memory, including cultural memory, is always permeated and shot through with forgetting. In order to remember anything one has to forget; but what is forgotten need not necessarily be lost forever.” Both Assmann and the anthropologist Paul Connerton point out that forgetting is not a “unitary phenomenon”: it comes in multiple forms, including those associated with traumatic events, post-conflict amnesties, and repressive state apparatuses. Furthermore, as Assmann and Connerton emphasize, there is also a positive side to forgetting: discarding the past can make possible new beginnings and assist in the overcoming of violent pasts. The topic, “The Other Side of Memory: Forgetting, Denial, Repression,” will provide space for consideration of this variety of forms in individual and collective contexts as well as in theoretical reflection and concrete case studies. We anticipate papers on such topics as Holocaust and Armenian Genocide denial, migration and forgetting, nation building and selective remembrance, and trauma and repression, among other things. In the months leading up to the conference, HGMS will host a reading group for students and faculty in Illinois on the theme of “forgetting” as a way of preparing the intellectual ground for the event. Information about the reading group will be posted on our Facebook page so that others will have the option of reading along. Possible topics might include, but are not restricted to:
Confirmed Keynote SpeakersBerber Bevernage is Assistant Professor of historical theory at the Department of History at Ghent University (Belgium). His research focuses on the dissemination, attestation and contestation of historical discourse and historical culture in post-conflict situations. He is the author of History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (Routledge, 2011) and has published in journals such as History and Theory, Memory Studies, Social History and History Workshop Journal. Bevernage is (co-)founder of the interdisciplinary research forum 'TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt' which focuses on popular, academic and artistic dealings with the past in a large variety of different cultural and social areas. Together with colleagues he established the International Network for Theory of History, which aims to foster collaboration and the exchange of ideas among theorists of history around the world. Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is also a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She is the author of Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minnesota, 2011) and her articles have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, Cultural Studies Review, Interventions, J19, College Literatures, Settler Colonial Studies, and American Quarterly. Her teaching and research focuses on issues of indigeneity, gender, and sexuality at the intersections of political studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and comparative ethnic studies. Her current manuscript in process, entitled Indigenomicon: American Indians, Videogames, and Structures of Genre, interrogates how the structures of digital code intersect with issues of sovereignty, militarism, and colonialism. Françoise Vergès currently holds the Chair “Global South(s)” at the Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. She also works for the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes. After growing up in Reunion Island, she lived in Algeria, France, Mexico, the United States, and England. In the 1970s-1980s, she was a journalist in a feminist weekly, an editor in a feminist publishing house, and worked in anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements. She moved to the USA in 1983 and got her BA summa cum laude in Women’s Studies and Political Science at UCSD and her Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of California, Berkeley (1995). Vergès has directed the scientific and cultural program for a museum in Reunion Island (2002-2010) and has been the president of the French Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (2009-2012). She has written extensively on colonial slavery and colonialism, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, museums in the South, processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean, new politics of colonization and decolonization. She is the author of Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (Duke UP, 1999) and many books in French. She also works with filmmakers and artists and is the author of documentaries. FormatThe Mnemonics summer school serves as an interactive forum in which junior and senior memory scholars meet in an informal and convivial setting to discuss each other’s work and to reflect on new developments in the field of memory studies. The objective is to help graduate students refine their research questions, strengthen the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of their projects, and gain further insight into current trends in memory scholarship. Each of the three days of the summer school will start with a keynote lecture, followed by sessions consisting of three graduate student papers, responses, and extensive Q&A. Participants are expected to be in attendance for the full three days of the summer school. In order to foster incisive and targeted feedback, all accepted papers will be pre-circulated among the participants and each presentation session will be chaired by a senior scholar who will also act as respondent. Practical InformationLocal Organizers: The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS) is located in the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An interdisciplinary unit dedicated to comparative research on trauma, genocide, and cultural memory, HGMS sponsors conferences and workshops and offers a Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Co-Organizers: Michael Rothberg (Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies/English) & Brett Kaplan (Jewish Culture and Society/Comparative and World Literature). Graduate Student Organizing Committee: Jennifer Baldwin (Anthropology/MD/PhD), Priscilla Charrat (French), Jenelle Davis (Art History), Estibalitz Ezkerra (Comparative Literature), Lauren Hansen (German), Sophia Levine (Dance), and Jessica Young (English). Where: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is located two and a half hours south of Chicago by car. It has its own small airport (CMI) and flights from Chicago on American Airlines take only 30 minutes. Urbana-Champaign is also accessible by bus or train from Chicago. When: June 2-4, 2016 Costs: $200. The fee includes conference registration, a private bedroom and shared suite at the Illini Tower for four nights (June 1-June 4), and most meals. For those who do not require overnight accommodation, the fee is $50. Travel to Champaign-Urbana is not covered; prospective attendees are encouraged to check travel costs in advance. (UIUC students may attend for free.) Submission: Submissions are open to all graduate students interested in memory studies. Send: A 300-word abstract for a 15-minute paper (including title, presenter’s name, and institutional affiliation), a description of your graduate research project (one paragraph), and a short CV (max. one page) as a single Word or PDF document to: [email protected] Deadline: February 1, 2016 Notification of Acceptance: February 22, 2016 Deadline for submission of paper drafts: May 16, 2016 Questions? Write to [email protected] Mnemonics homepage: http://www.mnemonics.ugent.be/
Mnemonics on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/mnemonics.network/ Mnemonics on Twitter: @mnemonics_net The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies homepage: https://jewishculture.illinois.edu/academics/initiative-holocaust-genocide-and-memory-studies The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/507030256062140/ A ForumThis Days and Memory forum brings together four scholars of cultural memory, based on three continents, who have been actively involved in promoting the transnational turn in memory studies: Rosanne Kennedy (Australian National University), Ann Rigney (Utrecht University), Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois), and Debarati Sanyal (University of California, Berkeley). Three of the presenters (Kennedy, Rigney, and Rothberg) are part of an internationally funded research project called the Network in Transnational Memory Studies (NITMES), which was initiated by Ann Rigney with support from the NWO (The Dutch Research Council). Through a series of conferences, faculty exchanges, and publications—including this one—NITMES seeks to provide a platform for new debates in cultural memory studies.
In the past 25 years, memory studies has emerged as a new interdisciplinary field of cultural inquiry. It aims for insight into practices of public remembrance and the sociocultural dynamics through which mediations of the past shape collective identities and inform social action. The development of this field was linked from the outset to investigations of national memory cultures and institutions, with the nation‐state taken as the most self‐evident framework for analysis. Pierre Nora’s pioneering, influential, and contested study Les Lieux de Memoire (1984‐1992) encapsulated the link between “territorialization” (focusing on how memory narratives are fixed, located, contained, “inherited”) and the nation (as the self‐evident frame within which narratives operate and identities are shaped). With the turn towards transnational approaches in the last decade, however, Nora's concept of “sites of memory” has come under pressure as the assumed framework for memory studies. In our increasingly globalized, networked, and mediated world, alternatives to national models of memory as a resource for identity constructions are beginning to emerge without yet being fully understood. This forum explores the consequences of the transnational turn for the study of sites, practices, and noeuds or knots of memory. The short papers collected here—originally presented at the Modern Language Association Convention in Vancouver in January 2015 on a roundtable organized by Rosanne Kennedy and Michael Rothberg—track the intersection of memory and politics across a range of sites: from Ireland to Indonesia, from Germany to Kurdistan, and beyond. At stake in these discussions are such multivalenced categories as complicity, human rights, and internationalism, which play out in relation to what Astrid Erll has called "traveling memories." Paying close attention to a range of media—from photographs and films to literary texts and monuments—contributors interrogate the mobilizing potential of public remembrance, its catalyzing force in activist projects both within and beyond nation-states. You can find the papers here: 1. Debarati Sanyal, “Memory in Complicity” 2. Rosanne Kennedy, “The Act of Killing, the Global Memory Imperative, and Trans/national Accountability” 3. Michael Rothberg, “Remembering Ronahî, Remembering Internationalism” 4. Ann Rigney, “Transnational Bloody Sundays: Multi-Sited Memory” We invite you to join the discussion! |
Illinois Jewish Studieswww.facebook.com/IllinoisJewishStudies/The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studiesis an interdisciplinary program based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Founded in 2009 and located within the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, HGMS provides a platform for cutting-edge, comparative research, teaching, and public engagement related to genocide, trauma, and collective memory.
Archives
November 2022
Categories |