Radio program on "False Memories"

When I used to live in St. Louis, one of my favorite listening experiences was The Diane Rehm Show. I no longer get to listen nearly enough to the program, especially since it comes on in Iowa at 9 pm, rather than 9 am. Diane Rehm is an amazing interviewer, and I have to put in my plug for her show before getting on to the following.

Tomorrow, the program is featuring a dialogue about repressed, recovered or "false memories." When I was growing up in the 80s, "false memories" were all the rage. It seemed as though people were being accused every other day of things -- always, extremely abusive things -- they had done 20 years ago. This is an extremely complex matter, and one I am unqualified to address.

My Lie is a book by journalist Meredith Maran, who falsely accused her father of molesting her. How do "false memories" develop? What does the so-called "recovered memories" movement say about particular periods of our history? And, what interests me in particular, how and why does this movement impact women? Perhaps, a slightly off-topic matter for this blog, but one that merits our attention nonetheless.

Argentina will investigate the crimes of Francoism

I was a bit startled to see this title in the Spanish press this morning, but I am happy to see that the matter Spain has tried to keep internal for so long now has international players involved.This is a big deal!!

From: BBC News

4 September 2010 Last updated at 15:06 ET


Argentine court reopens Franco probe

An Argentine court has reopened an investigation into crimes against humanity in Spain during the rule of Gen. Francisco Franco.

The appeals court overturned a previous ruling that blocked a suit brought by Argentine relatives of two Spaniards killed under Franco.

It said they had a right to know if the case was being investigated.

Crimes committed under Franco and during the 1936-39 civil war are covered by an amnesty law in Spain.

The Argentine appeals court said a diplomatic request should be sent to Spain to ask what action it was taking to investigate crimes against humanity between 1936 and 1977.

'Systematic terror'

It said Spain should be asked if it was investigating the existence of "a systematic and deliberate plan to terrorise Spaniards who supported representative government by their physical elimination."

Human rights groups have welcomed the decision.

The lawsuit was opened in Argentina in April after the high-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was forced to drop an investigation into killings during the civil war and under Franco's rule.

Judge Garzon was suspended after Spain's supreme court found that he had exceeded his authority by ignoring the 1977 amnesty law.

The Argentine lawsuit is based on the principal of universal justice.

Judge Garzon has previously invoked the same principle to investigate crimes against humanity committed during 1976-83 military rule in Argentina, as well as to seek the extradition of the late Chilean military ruler, Augusto Pinochet.

Spain's 1977 amnesty law, which pardoned political crimes by both sides in the civil war, was seen as vital to ensure a successful transition to democracy after Franco died in 1975.

Tens of thousands of people were killed and buried in unmarked graves during the Spanish civil war and under Gen Franco's subsequent rule, but no-one has ever been prosecuted for the killings.

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.

An August 28 of 47 Years Ago

All day I have been contemplating a post on this despicable appropriation of what might be called a U.S. Civil Rights "site of memory." However, I think that posting on it, especially now, will only end up attracting unwelcome visitors and their comments. Also, posting on "it," even in this minuscule, unknown corner of internet space, is offering a gift to those people whose "ideas" I wish to deflect. Instead, for now, I will post this reminder of August 28, 1963. We need to contemplate why persons such as those mentioned in the NYT article have decided to descend on the Lincoln Memorial on precisely this day. Post-racial society? I think not.



Read full text of speech here

"Destroy this Memory" - Hurricane Katrina and Grafitti

"Destroy this Memory," photo by Richard Misrach

Someone sent me a link to this story on NPR. I was captivated by the photo on the left, which also is the title of a book of photographs (see below) on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There are so many layers to this one image -- the loss of memories inside this intimate space (what was lived there, the house intact); the manner in which the memory of Hurricane Katrina has in itself been covered over; and of course, the fact that the picture resists the grafitti's command.

Richard Misrach's Destroy This Memory is an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina. Rather than simply surveying the damage, Misrach—who has photographed the region regularly since the 1970s, most notably for his ongoing Cancer Alley project—found himself drawn to the hurricane-inspired graffiti: messages scrawled in spray paint, crayons, chalk, or whatever materials happened to be on hand. At turns threatening, desperate, clinical, and even darkly humorous, the phrases he captured—the only text that appears in the book—offer unique and revealing human perspectives on the devastation and shock left in the wake of this disaster.

Destroy This Memory presents previously unpublished and starkly compelling material, all of which Misrach shot with his 4 MP pocket camera. Created between October and December 2005, this haunting series of images serves as a potent, unalloyed document of the raw experiences of those left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of Katrina.

Artist's royalties for this project are being donated to the Make It Right Foundation, which is currently rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) is credited with helping pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation in the 1970s. He has exhibited extensively, and his work is held in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship. Misrach is represented by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace-MacGill Gallery, New York; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Click here to see more photos from the book

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.