Seminar: Cosmpolitan Memory and Trauma

CFP: Cosmopolitan Memory and Travelling Trauma (ACLA March 31-April 3, 2011)

Terri Tomsky, University of Alberta; Jennifer Bowering Delisle, McMaster University
contact email:
tomsky@ualberta.ca

When a collective memory of trauma transcends its directly affected community to be taken up by others, it can be said to be “cosmopolitan” (Levy and Sznaider) or “multidirectional” (Rothberg). The concept of a travelling or a genuinely “cosmopolitan” memory is compelling. Indeed, how a memory of trauma travels across cultures, and develops in time as a shared or borrowed memory is a topic that necessitates further discussion. Like Edward Said’s notion of “travelling theory,” the transition of a memory from a specific context into a new setting or across a transnational space has significant theoretical and pragmatic consequences. Questions must be asked about how traumatic experiences, especially of political violence, are mediated across space and time; how might a transported memory of trauma sharpen consciousness and shape cross-cultural communities? Equally, how might it enable selective commemoration, and risk reification or domestication?

This seminar invites scholars across the fields of trauma, postcolonial, and memory studies to critically examine the movement of traumatic memories across cultures. We are interested in proposals that address the productive transcultural circulation of trauma – what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory” – as a politically significant source for oppressed communities. Additionally, we seek proposals that engage the travel of traumatic memory in relation to audience, affect, capital, and cultural and economic imperialisms.

The deadline for 250 word paper proposals is NOVEMBER 1, 2010. Proposals should be submitted through the ACLA website: http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php?override=xyzzy

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.

Conference on Fiction and Trauma

From: UPenn CFP

Collection CFP: Attached to Fiction: Trauma, Loss, Pleasure (4 October, 2010)

full name / name of organization:
Dr Hila Shachar and Dr Sophie Sunderland/English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

contact email:
attachedtofiction@gmail.com

Collection Call for Papers:

Attached to Fiction: Trauma, Loss, Pleasure

Editors: Dr Hila Shachar and Dr Sophie Sunderland, English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia

Contact email: attachedtofiction@gmail.com

"Mr Sakamoto said that reading had saved his life. Not mathematics. Not money. Not travel. Reading. At a time, he said, when he felt blasted by images, words had anchored him, secured him, stopped his free-falling plunge into nowhere."

-Gail Jones, Dreams of Speaking (London: Harvill Secker, 2006), p. 132.

A survivor of the atomic bomb, Gail Jones’s Mr Sakamoto expresses the inherent relationship between literature, loss and trauma. Words that fail to mediate or reconcile loss can also form fictional worlds that offer a particular kind of fidelity to the troubling, incomprehensible event of loss. Attachments to fiction can therefore be intensely felt and strongly defended as part of traumatic experience. We are seeking 300-500 word abstracts for a book collection of essays and short stories on how fictional narratives intersect with personal narratives of loss and trauma. This collection also aims to explore the complex forms of pleasure brought about by the attachment to, or creation of, fiction during traumatic events, loss, or grief. Essays and fiction with an Australian focus are particularly welcome. Specific examples of topics might include, but are not limited to:

Family histories of loss and trauma told in fictional form

Identification with a specific novel or character at a particularly traumatic stage in life

The use of reading and writing as a therapeutic and cathartic experience

The “pleasure” of fiction during periods of loss and trauma

Writing through grief

Reflections upon why certain novels or narratives are particularly important during certain traumatic events

Fictional short stories that engage with the themes of literary production, trauma and loss

Personal narratives of coping with trauma and loss through the process of reading and writing

Theoretical perspectives on literary representations of trauma and loss

Attachment as a psychological and psychoanalytic model with which to consider personal relationships to fictional characters and narratives

Untold and forgotten stories of local Australian and Western Australian traumatic histories

Parallels between literary fiction and life experiences

The traumatic experience of writing itself

In the spirit of the collection, we welcome both fictional and non-fictional short stories and personal essays that engage with the primary themes of the collection. Essays and short stories can be approached from any tone, from the humorous and irreverent, to the serious and contemplative. While scholarly approaches are also welcome, these essays and short stories should be in the style of creative fiction and non-fiction.

Currently, Australian author Gail Jones (University of Western Sydney) is attached to this project as a possible contributor. We welcome abstracts from scholars, creative writers, emerging and established authors, and others. Please send abstracts and a short bio by 4th of October, 2010, to Hila Shachar and Sophie Sunderland at attachedtofiction@gmail.com. Complete essays and short stories of approximately 3000-5000 words will be due on 31st of January, 2011. Inquiries are welcome.

* By web submission at 06/03/2010 - 10:03

Conference Call for Papers - Trauma and Testimony

From: cfp.english.upenn.edu

UPDATE] NEXUS 2010--Trauma and Testimony
full name / name of organization:
NEXUS
contact email:
dmcgloth@utk.edu

NEXUS—An Interdisciplinary Conference
Trauma and Testimony
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Thursday, March 18-Saturday, March 20, 2010
Web Address: http://web.utk.edu/~nexus

Plenary Speakers: Cathy Caruth (Emory Univeristy) and Julia Levine

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between trauma and testimony, and in particular the therapeutic possibilities and potential problems that testimony entails. Testimony is the term used in trauma studies to talk about the process of articulating or expressing one’s trauma for an “Other” as a crucial step in recovering from the trauma. Dori Laub argues that trauma destroys the possibility of both the internal and the external “Other” and so the traumatized individuals exist in a space of both knowing and not knowing their trauma.

As an interdisciplinary conference, we welcome submissions from relevant fields and disciplines. Abstracts (250-300 words) are invited on a broad range of topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Representations of shared traumatic events (the Holocaust, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc.)
•Ethical issues of truth versus “creative license” in representation
•The role of both the speaker and the listener
•The limits of representation
•Whose history is it, anyway? First-person testimony vs. bearing witness from the “outside”
•Testimony and Therapy—the therapeutic value of telling one’s story
•Testimony and Justice—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission experiment
•Bearing witness using contemporary media (the Shoah Foundation, blogs, etc.)
•Testimony and Action—Telling as a Catalyst for Change
•Collective Suffering and Collective Guilt—the historical and ethical limits of trauma and testimony
•Interdisciplinary Studies—Trauma as experienced through the prisms of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of identification
•Trauma and the Law—Issues of victims’ rights
•Papers written on literary and/or artistic representations of trauma
•Creative submissions
•The future of trauma studies

Individual papers or panel proposals will be considered.

As this is an interdisciplinary conference, please feel free to submit proposals which speak to your academic interests, even if they do not fit neatly into the categories listed above.

Please submit abstracts to Dennis McGlothin (dmcgloth@utk.edu) or Teresa Lopez (tlopez@utk.edu) by January 15, 2009.