Finding Mabel: documentary on Argentina's disappeared

Awhile ago, I received an email from Eileen Reardon, the director of Finding Mabel, a feature-length documentary film centered on Argentina's so-called "Dirty War." The film's synopsis follows:

Finding Mabel is a gripping documentary that follows a young woman's journey to Argentina, to piece together the enigmatic disappearance of the woman she was named after, one of the 30,000 people who disappeared during Argentina's last military dictatorship. Part scavenger hunt, part self-discovery, Finding Mabel intelligently weaves Argentina's recent dark past with today's polarizing struggle for justice.

For more, please see these links:

Fundraising campaign
Official website
Interview with the director here

NBC Olympic Editing Generates Controversy

The other day, someone asked me, "did you even know that the Olympics were starting?" And frankly, no, I did not. While I certainly see the value of exercise and understand and believe in the positive effects of sport on the mind and body, I do not practice a sport regularly and I certainly have no interest in watching or following the Olympics (as an aside, I am a huge baseball fan, which is another story, and I listen to my team's games every day -- and have, since I was about 8).

When the Olympics were going on when I was a teenager, my friends and I would gather to watch figure skating in winter and gymnastics in summer. Mostly, as with anything during adolescence, it held a romantic attraction for us. In skating, we liked to see the sequins and the skirts and the death-defying spins of couples impossibly paired and destined for heartbreak. In gymnastics, we pined after the guys on the pommel horse and their resin-covered hands and longed to be petite little girls whose developing bodies were forever locked in amber. We spent quite a long time imitating these heroines -- in fact, I broke my wrist for the first time ice-skating, while pretending to be Peggy Fleming in front of a friend.

Somewhere between junior high and college, the Olympics lost their allure for me and became something only athletes watched. And it took some time, but I also began to experience that sense of what the Spanish call "vergüenza ajena" -- a kind of embarrassment one encounters on behalf of someone else. The chants of "USA, USA" make me cringe. So do the wearing of flags, whether they be American or those of another nation. And all the opening ceremonies showcasing the supposed harmony of the world, complete with native dances and costumes -- like a UNICEF Christmas card -- belie what the Olympics is really about: a kind of athletic nation-building extravaganza. Certainly, a great deal of the Olympics is still about superior athletic achievement and what the human body is capable of. But inevitably, no matter where the Olympics are held, we must encounter an "Olympic controversy."

This year, in London, the U.S. newschannel NBC has already gotten into the fray by editing out a ceremony commemorating the 7/7 terrorist bombings and instead, pasting in an interview between Ryan Seacrest and swimmer Michael Phelps (see British coverage of the story here and American here). As The Guardian reports, "NBC. . . chose to broadcast the entire ceremony on a time-delay to maximise primetime advertising revenue..." While revenue may be part of the story, the larger issue is memory and victimhood. 

Basically, NBC decided that American viewers would not be interested in watching a memorial tribute to the 52 victims of the London bombings, and would prefer to see their own heroes -- in this case, the former "boy next door"gold medal winner Michael Phelps, making his triumphant return. NBC's excuse was that the program was tailored for U.S. audiences.

Maybe, part of the problem is precisely that! What the U.S. needs less of is programs tailored to its own viewing preferences and more opportunities for engaging with the rest of the world. If a British TV channel had edited out a tribute to victims of 9-11, we most certainly would have voiced our outrage. The bottom line is that politics matters when it's our politics. Victims matter when they're our victims. 9-11 is the terrorist attack, and all others fall beneath it. Editing out something even as apparently minor as this 6-minute tribute does nothing to help the image of the U.S. abroad. And then we complain about "anti-Americanism!" The tribute to the London victims could have been an opportunity for Americans to contemplate 9-11 alongside 7/7. As Joanne Garde-Hansen writes in Media and Memory, "National broadcast media, in particular, across the world tend to tell self-aggrandising stories about a nation to a nation" (109). The Olympics is the perfect stage for tales of rebirth from the ashes -- as long as the ashes are those of our own.

See the BBC video here.

CFP: Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining - NY, March 2013

This sounds like an exciting conference, with Marianne Hirsch as keynote speaker. I am currently reading Hirsch's The Generation of Postmemory.

CFP: Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining: The Practices of Memory
1-2 March, 2013
Keynote speaker: Professor Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
“Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.”
–Pierre Nora

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the crucial role of memory in formulating our individual and communal identities, and to examine the scholarly discipline of memory itself. We hope to initiate conversations about memory as an active and ongoing cognitive process rather than simply a reaction to past experiences or a set of “facts” frozen in time. While memory purports to preserve the past in the present, it is inherently protean and unstable, and prone to fictionalizing. Indeed, memory and imagination are tightly intertwined; memory and ideology are closely bound; and our memory of what has come before constantly shapes our understanding of and expectations about what is still to come.
This interdisciplinary conference, then, will explore not only this desire to make memory sacred but also our ability to forget, to forget that we've forgotten, and to imagine the past in a way that fits neatly into our worldviews. These questions are particularly relevant in the wake of recent revolutions and social movements in the Arab World, Europe, and even the United States; learning to reinvent the past in a certain way helps us to reimagine the future, and thus inaugurate change. Consequently, we invite proposals that explore the various and variegated practices of memory as figured through literature, culture, politics, and scholarship generally.
We welcome individual abstracts of 250 words or panel proposals of 750 words, for three participants, to practicesofmemory@gmail.com by November 15, 2012. In addition to traditional academic papers, the committee encourages creative literary work, performance art, and multi-media presentations that in some way address the topic.

Presenters might consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• How is memory practiced through literature, art, film, or culture?
• Who remembers? What is remembered? What is forgotten? Whose voices are heard? Whose voices are suppressed?
• What is the role of “postmemory,” with its focus on the trauma of the past?
• How is memory understood in early eras, such as medieval or early modern?
• How do texts treat or reflect the past?
• How does the past help us prepare for the future?
• What is the role of imagination in memory or nostalgia?
• How is memory mediated by “memory makers” and memorials?
• In what ways has postmodernism influenced the study of memory?
• What is the role of psychoanalysis in memory studies?
• In what ways does the state repress and/or produce memory?
• How do neoconservatist or neoliberalist movements treat the past?
• How do memorializing objects—texts, photographs, monuments—produce and /or subvert an official state narrative?
• What is the role of affect in producing collective memory?

Coming Back to the Blog After a Long Absence

In the course of becoming a faithful blog reader, we all encounter those blogs that simply vanish, or those bloggers that seem to press "pause" with a final post, never even notifying readers of their departure. I never thought I would be one of those bloggers I always hated, but it happened. Memory, Amnesia and Politics went off the air (and was even noted on Bat, Bean, Beam in an excellent post on blog vanishings which I can't seem to locate at the moment -- ha ha) without a blip on the radar screen (I sure am mixing my media in this paragraph!). I kept thinking, I'll get back to it, I should post on this, but other more important events began to occupy my time and I turned my attention there. Since my last post here, I have been busy with two amazing trips to Europe -- one for research and one for pleasure -- having a baby and raising him (he is now 6 months old!) and moving into a new home. It is only now that a year has passed that I feel ready to attempt to pick up where I left off. I have several posts pending -- unwritten, as of yet -- on the following:

• my visit to Spain in May 2011: "Memorials and Landscapes of 20th and 21st Century Spain" 
• review of Paul Connerton's How Modernity Forgets
• belated assessment of the Baltasar Garzón case
• overview of a course I taught during Fall 2011, "Narratives of Violence and Reconciliation in Contemporary Spain"
• review of Marianne Hirsch's new book The Generation of Postmemory (this will not be for some time, as I just got my copy in the mail)
• review of Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust (in installments, as the book may take me several years to read and process -- I am only partly joking)
• review of Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light, which I saw in the days before giving birth
• an overview, with personal photos, of the Kent State memorial in Ohio

I would like to avoid, if possible, the "copy and paste" format blog which this blog, as well as (Re) generando memorias, often slid into (usually a product of desperately wanting to share the story and realizing its value, but not being able to respond to it in a timely fashion). I have certainly enjoyed writing lengthy, detailed posts, but I must recognize I cannot do so with the same regularity as in the past. Therefore, I am setting a lower bar for myself -- just two posts a month for now. If I go over that, wonderful. I am viewing this blog as a continually evolving experiment. In the meantime, if you have comments or suggestions, please let me know by contacting me here.