Call for 9-11 Book Reviews

9-11 Book Reviews

Randy Robertson / Modern Language Studies
contact email:
robertson@susqu.edu

Modern Language Studies, the journal of the Northeast Modern Language Association, is seeking reviews of works related to 9-11. The reviews will appear in a special issue commemorating the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. Relevant works include those on terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign policy in the wake of 9-11, etc. The reviewed work can be fiction or nonfiction.

Please submit your review electronically (as a Word attachment) to Randy Robertson, Reviews Editor of MLS, at robertson@susqu.edu.

New book on Trauma - Haunting Legacies

From: Columbia University Press

About the book:

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships.

Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Marguerite Duras's La Douleur; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's W, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Philippe Grimbert's Secret; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Sabine Reichel's What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and Ursula Duba's Tales from a Child of the Enemy. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Writing Against Memory and Forgetting

3. Haunting Legacies: Trauma in Children of Perpetrators

4. Identity Trouble: Guilt, Shame, and Idealization

5. Replacement Children: The Transgenerational Transmission of Traumatic Loss

6. Deadly Intimacy: The Politics and Psychic Life of Torture

Bibliography

About the author: Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her books in English include Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis; Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood; and The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language.

Upcoming publications on the 10-year anniversary of 9-11

From UPenn CFP:

"9/11/2011" Abstract deadline: November 30, 2010 Paper Submission deadline: May 2011

Other Modernities, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
contact email:
amonline@unimi.it

9/11/2011
Guest Editors Emanuele Monegato and Cinzia Scarpino

If the risk of turning the forthcoming ten-year 9/11 anniversary into a commemorative rhetorical triumph is very high, for us, Altre Modernità (http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/index), a journal of Literary and Cultural studies, that date may otherwise invite reflections that encompass the one event – or, better, “the mother of all events” – which has marked a watershed in late-modern history. Hence the idea of a special issue, “9/11/2011”, which welcomes proposals for papers that explore how the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers have re-drawn both the political boundaries and the world’s imagination of our time on the basis of the “war on terror” ideology endorsed by George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Beside considering the effects posited by such rhetorical strategy – what U.S. scholar Donald Pease has called “the New American Exceptionalism” – another issue we are interested in investigating is the “collateral language” which has been imposed upon American and world citizens as a weapon of “mass distraction”, a doublespeak aimed at containing political dissent and cement national as well as international consent. Fuelled by a renewed East/West clash of civilizations, Washington “war on terror” ideological tenets have been responsible for restrictive immigration policies not only against Arabs but also against other peoples, for example Mexicans.

We also welcome theoretical-philosophical analyses of the epistemological changes associated with a post-9/11 paradigm as well as aesthetics insights into the literary and artistic output which has been shaped after the very “futurable” event long anticipated by mass culture (cinema, TV, comics, etc.).

A further area of consideration will include, accordingly, a study of 9/11 as a turning point in the writing of American and world literature and literary criticism.

Possible topics of relevance include:

• 9/11/2001 – 9/11/2011
• 9/11 East-West
• 9/11 and the contemporary philosophical paradigm
• Aesthetics of 9/11
• “Language is power”: collateral language
• “War on terror” rhetoric
• New 9/11 in contemporary arts
• Theories and acts of violence in post-9/11 cultural representations
• 9/11 and (new) mass culture(s): cinema, documentaries, TV series, comics, music

Proposal Submission deadline: November 30, 2010 at amonline@unimi.it
Paper Submission deadline: May 2011 at amonline@unimi.it
All essays will undergo a double-blind peer review.
Online: September 11, 2011
Languages of contributions: Italian, English, Spanish, French.

We also welcome book reviews (fiction, criticism, poetry, etc.) and reviews for art events (exhibitions, installations, etc.) addressing the above-mentioned themes. Please write to amonline@unimi.it

2. “Field Notes on the 9/11 Moment: Transformations in Community and Country”

Leslie Shortlidge/Kirwan institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
contact email:
shortlidge.2@osu.edu

Call for papers
Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts
Volume 4 Number 3
Spring 2011 (June 2011)
Submission Deadline: October 15, 2010

“Field Notes on the 9/11 Moment: Transformations in Community and Country”
The ten-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on American soil encourages us to consider how the events of that day have framed how we address race, religion and national origin in the policy and public realms. The 9/11 moment has shaped American domestic and foreign policy, and has transformed individuals and communities both in the United States and abroad. Here in the United States, Arab Americans, South Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs have endured backlash, targeted law enforcement, and various forms of racial, religious and national origin profiling at the hands of the general public, the media, and the U.S. government in the name of national security. Nor were the repercussions of 9-11 felt only within the United States; Muslim communities around the world have experienced unprecedented backlash since 9/11.

Guest Editor Deepa Iyer, Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), and the editorial staff of Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts invite submissions for the third issue of its fourth volume, entitled “Field Notes on the 9/11 Moment: Transformations in Community and Country .”
We especially welcome analysis, critiques, reflections, and documentation by activists, community-based organizations, and others who responded to the crisis that enveloped the South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, and Arab American communities in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Topics of inquiry can include but are not limited to:
• How has 9/11 changed the way that we think about race, religion, national origin, and immigration status in the United States and abroad?
• What tools and strategies have been used by community activists to sustain and build community during and after the 9/11 moment?
• What impacts does being targeted as “suspect” by the United States government have on an individual? A family? A community?
• What are some of the success stories around coalition-building and race relations that have occurred since 9/11?
• What lasting impacts, if any, have the events of 9-11 and their aftermath had on relationships between racial and ethnic minority communities in the United States or abroad?
• What lasting impacts, if any, have 9-11 and the subsequent decade-long, global War on Terror had on the political consciousness of Arab American, South Asian, Muslim and/or Sikh communities inside or outside the United States?
See our suggested Style Guidelines (www.raceethnicity.org/styleguide.html) and please feel free to contact our managing editor, Leslie Shortlidge (shortlidge.2@osu.edu), with any questions or concerns about submitting your work.

Submission of artwork for the cover that relates to the theme of the issue is welcome. See website at http://www.raceethnicity.org/coverart.html for submission guidelines.

New Publication: "Memorial Mania"

Erika Doss
Memorial Mania. Public Feeling in America
488 pages © 2010

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express—and claim—those issues in visibly public contexts.

Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

Seen on: University of Chicago Press

Call for Papers: Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature

From UPenn CFP

Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature and Others
full name / name of organization:
452ºF Journal of Comparative Literature
contact email:
redaccion@452f.com

On July 31st 2010, we start the CFP for the fourth issue of 452ºF Journal
of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature.This CFP is open and
addressed to anyone that wishes to and that holds at least a BA degree.

The bidding terms, which are exposed below and that regulate the reception
and publication of the different articles are subject to the content of
the Peer review System, the Style-sheet and the Legal Notice. These can be
consulted in the Procedures area of the web page.

- The deadline is on September 30th 2010, all articles received after this
date will be rejected.
- The number of articles corresponding to this fourth issue will be
between 12 and 16. 40% of these will be reserved to researchers without
PhDs, and the Editorial board can only represent 20% of the total.
- The articles will be placed, according to their field of interest, in
the corresponding section of the journal (monographic or miscellaneous).

- The monographic part will be restricted to 6 to 8 articles and, in this
fourth issue, will approach the relations between Memory and Collective
Identity in Comparative Literature, with the following possible research
approaches:

a. –Relations between cultural production, memory discourses and the
construction of collective identities.
b. –Studies on testimonial literature. Relations between individual and
collective memory.
c. –The fluctuant nature of identity: transformation of the perspective of
memory according to the social-historical context.
d. –Relations between narrative strategies and the ideological load of
memory.
e. –Analysis of the politic capitalization of cultural productions around
memory.

The journal commits itself to organize a thematic bibliography of the
available studies on the topic, following the perspective proposed in the
Monographic section of the web page.

- All other articles will constitute the miscellaneous section and, placed
within the margins of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, the
choice of the theme and approach is free.
- The articles must be sent to redaccion@452f.com . The “subject” of the
email should state what section the article belongs to (“monographic” or
“miscellaneous”), the name of the author and the title of the article.

Memory and Collective Identity in Comparative Literature

Memory has lately become a central concern in contemporary culture and
politics of all societies in a global scale. This “memory boom”,
originated in socio-historical, political, cultural, technological and
market-oriented reasons, is articulated around a certain “memory
industry”, which in turn generates identity discourses. Cultural products
play a fundamental role in the formation and consolidation of these
discourses.

On the one hand, the rehabilitation of the memory of wars, dictatorships,
killings and genocides tries to rescue from oblivion a traumatic past.
There is also a willingness of discursive democratization (represented by
the promotion of testimonial literature), looking to break through that
version of history written by the winning side. Also, the need to look
towards the past as a means of understanding the present is often
emphasized, to increase the new generations’ awareness of the need to
avoid the repetition of the same atrocities. Therefore, new
historiographic methodologies have vindicated the incorporation of new and
different perspectives that had traditionally been excluded from the
construction of discourses.

Nevertheless, the notion of discursive elaboration of memories, together
with the fact that discourses about the past are always filtered by the
interests and beliefs of the present, make it necessary for this new
historiography to be constantly under scrutiny by a critical analysis.
This would reveal possible “abuses of memory” (term coined by Todorov in
the text with the same title) denounced by many authors, politicians,
journalists and human rights activists. It is particularly interesting as
well as complex to work on the relationship that can be established
between the constant re-writing of the past and the construction of
collective identities. As Halbwachs explains, collective memory puts
together the past and the present, as well as the individual and the
social group. It is in this sense that we are also interested in the
different discursive strategies that several authors have developed to
reconstruct their memories from a subjective vision of the present. This
also allows us to establish a link between certain forms of narration and
the different underlying ideological intentions. One of the
characteristics that make memory studies difficult is the specificity of
each political vindication, and also their fluctuating character in
relation to present-day socio-political factors. However, at the same
time, in a global world of linked identities and politics, “different
discourses on historical memory are intertwined and overlap each other all
throughout the world, trespassing frontiers and bouncing against each
other, sometimes hiding and forgetting their own historical memory,
sometimes reinforcing it", as claimed by Huyssen in an interview for
Metropolis magazine.

Taking as starting point, then, the fact that the restoration of the past
is subject to the ideologies of the present; and also that memory studies
are not only a tool for analysis, but also for the transformation of
contemporary contexts, we want to vindicate a critical role that can
distinguish between the "obligation of memory” (which introduces an
ethical evaluation of its own look towards the past, as pointed out by
Lozano Aguilar inDecir, contar, pensar la guerra), and the possible
political abuses that derivate from these vindications. We also believe
that a fundamental role of criticism is to suggest, as long as it is
possible, new strategies to go beyond militaristic discourses. We propose
therefore the following lines of research for this monographic issue:

a. –Relations between cultural production, memory discourses and the
construction of collective identities.
b. –Studies on testimonial literature. Relations between individual and
collective memory.
c. –The fluctuant nature of identity: transformation of the perspective of
memory according to the social-historical context.
d. –Relations between narrative strategies and the ideology of memories.
e. –Analysis of the political capitalization of cultural productions on
memory.
f. –Strategies to overcome memory discourses.
g. –Memory discourses as trans-border political discourses. Analysis,
through cultural products, of the influence of different discourses on
different geographical areas.

Call for Papers: Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

From UPenn CFP:

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization (abstract deadline 9/1/2010)

Rick Crownshaw (Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London)
contact email:
r.crownshaw@gold.ac.uk

The Memory and Narrative series, currently published by Transaction (based at Rutgers University), emerged from the highly acclaimed International Yearbook for Oral History and Life Stories. To date, the series comprises 14 volumes, constituting an interdisciplinary forum that stimulates debate on a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues relating to memory and narrative. 


The series editors invite proposals for a forthcoming volume entitled Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

Representing the Holocaust in an Age of Globalization

In academic study the Holocaust has been wrested from arguments as to its incomparability. For example, recent groundbreaking work in historiography has sought to remove the ‘conceptual blockages’ (Moses, Stone) in comparing modern atrocities, moving beyond conceptualizations of the Holocaust’s uniqueness that might inscribe a hierarchy of suffering across modernity. Such a comparative approach elicits the structural continuities and discontinuities between atrocious events – between, for example, genocide and colonial atrocity. In memory studies, related, current work has focused on the ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of Holocaust memory, arguing the ways that national, collective memory registers the transnational flux of remembrance, and how the global shapes the local and vice versa (Levy and Sznaider). However, in such models does the nation, no matter how ‘glocalised’, remain too coherent a structure for modeling the centrifugal dynamics of memory? Is the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Holocaust memory still too centripetal a dynamic? And in such models, does the Holocaust eclipse other events with which it is compared or contiguous? So, a spatial approach to modernity’s extremes and the correspondent ideas of race, nation and empire that allowed them to happen, together with the increasing difficulty of discretely locating history and memory, suggests a necessary reorientation of Holocaust Studies. More recently, Holocaust memory has been theorised as ‘multidirectional’ and its proximity with the memories of other traumas, no matter how competitive and screening, rethought as the means by which Holocaust memory, protean by nature, can, in an age of decolonization, be adapted, appropriated and entered into dialogue with memories of modernity’s other atrocities (Rothberg). This proposed volume asks, among other things, how might we extend the archive of ‘multidirectional’ memory that Rothberg has so fruitfully begun to explore. What are the implications of ‘multidirectionality’ for the writing of Holocaust history as well as for the study of Holocaust memory? How might memory practitioners and activists use the ‘multidirectional’ archive, and the concept itself, in politically and juridically transformative ways to effect transnational justice? Put another way, how can we move from an ethics of history and memory to material, political and juridical effects? And what of the very definition of memory itself in an age of globalization? As media technologies facilitate the ways that Holocaust memories become unmoored from groups and individuals that lay claim to them, to be shared and inflected by others on a global stage, do definitions of memory (secondary, shared, post, prosthetic) become even more attenuated? Do the itineraries of representations of the Holocaust call for a rethinking of the relationship between history and memory, their definitions and disciplinary boundaries?

The editors invite submissions from across the disciplines, at both a meta-level, exploring the state of Holocaust Studies, and as well as at the level of individual case studies of the transculturation, transnationalisation and globalization of Holocaust memory.

Submissions might address but are not limited to the following themes:

• The changing nature of the archive in a digital age as resource for Holocaust history and memory;
• Global memory and history as a basis for transnational justice and reparations claims, and what serves as legitimate and authoritative evidence, what satisfies claims for recognition and restitution;
• The limits of concepts of transcultural, transnational and global memory and history;
• Globalization and methodological change in historiography, oral historiography, and literary and testimony studies; new comparative methodologies;
• Global inflections in Holocaust museum, memorial and monument practice; commemorative forms used to remember the Holocaust and how they might shape memories of other atrocities around the world;
• Postmodern philosophies of Holocaust representation;
• Theories of ‘secondary witnessing’ (Apel), ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch), ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg), and ‘fantasies’ of witnessing (Weissman) in an age of global memory;
• Citizenship, migration and the uses of Holocaust history and memory.
• ‘Screen’ and political memory;
• Comparative approaches to the Holocaust, slavery and colonialism

Please send a 500-word abstract, along with a short C.V., to the editors of this proposed volume, Rick Crownshaw (r.crownshaw@gold.ac.uk) and Albert Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at), by September 1, 2010. Contributors chosen on the basis of their abstracts will be asked to submit essays (approximately 6,000 words), for further consideration, by March 1, 2010.

Memory and Narrative Series Editors:
Prof. S. Leydesdorff (S.Leijdesdorff@uva.nl)
Prof. A. Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at)
Dr. R. Crownshaw (R.Crownshaw@gold.ac.uk)
Dr. N. Adler (N.Adler@Niod.knaw.nl)
Dr. Adam Brown (adb2004@med.cornell.edu)
Yifat Gutman (gutmy472@newschool.edu)

Memory and the Future

Forthcoming in October 2010

Memory and the Future. Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society. Eds. Yifat Gutamn, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro.

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

• ISBN-10: 0230247407
• ISBN-13: 978-0230247406

Description:  For those who study memory there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, that memory itself and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized can potentially hinder efforts to move forward. However, there are many memory scholars and practitioners who firmly believe that the study of memory is ultimately about and for the present and future. This view of memory as looking to the past as a way to shape the present and future is the basis for the increasingly relevant and pressing concerns about the relationship of memory to conflict and democratic politics: human rights and transitional justice, post-colonial memory, revenge and violence, testimony, imposture and forgery, social movements and utopian ideas, and the role of historical knowledge and testimony. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to examine the relationship between past and present, and especially past and future.

Next on My Reading List: new book on Digital Media and Forgetting

The memory seminar I was teaching ended last week. First, to be clear, I am a Spanish professor, and I love teaching Spanish language, literature and culture. And, I love doing so in the language! But when the opportunity to teach the honors seminar in English presented itself, I took it on as a challenge. At first, teaching in English was a bit like returning home after a long time abroad. I found it kind of surreal to use my English voice, especially with students I had last semester in Spanish class. I think some of it had to do with the fact that teaching in English (or in one's native language, and to speakers of that language) removes some of the communication "scaffolding" that is always present in introductory and intermediate language courses. That is, because you spend less time working on conveying the message (Am I conjugating my verbs right? How's my pronunciation? Is someone going to make fun of me? Will my interlocutor understand what I'm trying to say?), you spend more time zeroing in on the message itself. In both cases, professor and student brains are just as lit up and engaged, but the focus can be different. In any case, teaching the memory seminar was an invigorating experience, and I learned a lot from my students. I will comment in greater depth on the course at some other time, but for today, I'd like to address forgetting, a topic I feel has really been....well, forgotten, by memory scholars.

Yesterday, while on a vacation-time excursion to my local research library and independent bookstore, I happened upon a book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton UP, 2009). The title struck me immediately, for a variety of reasons. First, because the memory seminar ended with several readings that addressed forgetting; second, because I am working on a conference paper dealing with amnesia; and last, because as a blogger who posts primarily on historical and political matters, I cannot help but be hyper aware of the need to catalog everything.

Blogging is about stopping time and recording everything, or establishing a record. It is a bit like trying to press pause on the flood of continual information coming at us from all sides. But blogging also seems fearful of the past, because what counts is what is going on now, which will be old as soon as I get to the end of this sentence. What happens to the information being "logged"? As Andrew Sullivan writes in The Atlantic, blogging "is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in." And, I would add, the consequences for our memory as well.
In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines a fresh idea -- the need to forget in a time in which the abundance of information threatens to drown us. I think of one of my students, who remarked on the challenges of sifting through data for class research projects; or myself, as I drafted my dissertation -- was more information always better, when more information was "never enough"?

I am thinking more and more about where forgetting comes into all the discourse on memory. I would like to believe we are beyond the stale dichotomy of "memory, good, forgetting, bad," but that seems doubtful. How do we talk about forgetting in the context of historical trauma? How does forgetting enable new memories to develop and transform existing narratives? And, where does new media come into the discussion? I read Marc Augé's Oblivion in January, and recently re-read Paul Connerton's "Seven Types of Forgetting" (along with several of the articles written in response to the latter in Memory Studies, such as "Should We Forget Forgetting?"). I did not buy Delete, but I hope to check it out very soon and report back here after I've had a chance to evaluate it properly. For now, I leave you with this informative lecture by Mayer-Schönberger, and a few other helpful related links on his book:



Interview with the author on NPR

Princeton University Press Technology & Media blog (with links to additional interviews with the author)

Review of the book by Peter Cliff, Software Engineer at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Documenting Ruin

I saw this in a University of Chicago Press email and thought it related well to this blog. We spend so much time thinking about memorials, but it's true that ruins tend to get overlooked. I can't help but think of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations when pondering the title of Yablon's book. The pertinent info. follows:



Untimely Ruins
An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919
400 pages, © 2009
Cloth $70.00
ISBN: 9780226946634 Published February 2010
Paper $25.00
ISBN: 9780226946641 Published February 2010

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in postapocalyptic movies. In this highly original book, Nick Yablon argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation’s history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—Untimely Ruins challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America.

The first book to document an American cult of the ruin, Untimely Ruins traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America’s ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time-capsules, Untimely Ruins exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.

Book on Art and Memory

Contemporary Art and Memory
Images of Recollection and Remembrance
Joan Gibbons

I.B. Tauris, January 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84511-619-4, ISBN10: 1-84511-619-4,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 344 pages, 30 b/w illus.,

Description: Contemporary Art and Memory is the first accessible survey book to explore the subject of memory as it appears in its many guises in contemporary art. Looking at both personal and public memory, Gibbons explores art as autobiography, the memory as trace, the role of the archive, revisionist memory and postmemory, as well as the absence of memory in oblivion.

Grounding her discussion in historical precedents, Gibbons explores the work of a wide range of international artists including Yinka Shonibare MBE, Doris Salcedo, Keith Piper, Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and new media artist George Legrady. Contemporary Art and Memory will be indispensable to all those concerned with the ways in which artists represent and remember the past.

Joan Gibbons is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central England in Birmingham and Course Director, MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice. She is the author of Art and Advertising (I.B.Tauris).

New Book on Film and Memory

Cinema, Memory, Modernity
The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema

By Russell J.A. Kilbourn

Price: $95.00

* ISBN: 978-0-415-80118-8
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 27th May 2010 (Available for Pre-order)
* Pages: 313

About the Book

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Return of Memory as Film 1: No Escape from Time: Memory and Redemption in the International Postwar Art Film 2: The ‘Crisis’ of Memory: ‘Traumatic Identity’ in the Contemporary Memory Film 3: ‘Global Memory’: Cinema as Lingua Franca and the Commodification of the Image 4: The Eye of History: Memory, Surveillance and Ethicality in the Contemporary Art Film 5: ‘Prosthetic Memory’ and Transnational Cinema: Globalized Identity and Narrative Recursivity in City of God Conclusion: Remembering to Forget: The Catachreses of Modernity Notes Bibliography Index
About the Author(s)

Russell J.A. Kilbourn is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

New Book - Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

I always get particularly excited when a publication comes out with "postmemory" in the title. I wrote my dissertation on postmemory in contemporary Spanish literature and film; however, I drew largely from the field of Holocaust Studies in my discussion of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

"Postmemory" is a term popularized by -- and most associated with - Marianne Hirsch, although it was also deployed by Andrea Liss in Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust. I am not positive, but I do think Liss used the term first -- albeit in a slightly different manner -- which Hirsch acknowledges. Hirsch defines postmemory as "the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events taht they can neither understand nor re-create" ("Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy," 8). In addition to Hirsch's formulation, Holocaust Studies scholars have created a large, rich body of work on "second generation" cultural production, with "second generation" referring broadly to the descendants of Holocaust survivors (and yes, at times, also to the descendants of perpetrators).

At some point, I will dedicate another post (or several) to the concept of "postmemory" itself, which has recently come under fire in Beatriz Sarlo's Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión (to read an excellent review in English of Sarlo's work, see here). For now, I will limit this post to the mention of the following new book from Routledge:

Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory

By Brett Kaplan

Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

List Price: $95.00
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* ISBN: 978-0-415-87476-2
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 31/08/2010
* Pages: 192

About the Book

How do the spaces of the past stay with us through representations—whether literary or photographic? How has the Holocaust registered in our increasingly globally connected consciousness? What does it mean that this European event is often used as an interpretive or representational touchstone for genocides and traumas globally? In this interdisciplinary study, Kaplan asks and attempts to answer these questions by looking at historically and geographically diverse spaces, photographs, and texts concerned with the physical and/or mental landscape of the Holocaust and its transformations from the postwar period to the early twenty-first century. Examining the intersections of landscape, postmemory, and trauma, Kaplan's text offers a significant contribution to our understanding of the spatial, visual, and literary reach of the Holocaust.

Gendering Historiography

I am so excited to take a look at this book (left)! I just read a very interesting article in the latest issue of the PMLA (special topic: war), which got me thinking again about the often-overlooked connections between memory and gender and all that is still left to explore.

Info:

Gendering Historiography
Beyond National Canons
244 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 3/8
Paper $40.00
ISBN: 9783593389608 Published November 2009

Comparing various European and American historiographies from the past two hundred years, Gendering Historiography provides insights into the establishment and cultivation of gendered power relations in different societies and outlines the devastating effects that exclusionary practices can have on each national canon. This detailed and revealing book will change the face of history writing, bringing overlooked and previously excluded histories back into modern historiography.