The "9/11" Decade: Rethinking Reality: first call for papers, deadline 15 December 2010
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), University of Brighton
contact email: nc95@brighton.ac.uk
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE)
University of Brighton, UK
6th Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference
The “9/11” Decade: Rethinking Reality
Wednesday 31 August – Friday 2 September 2011
Joint conference organisers:
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics, University of Brighton;
Centre for Ethics and Value Inquiry, University of Ghent;
Centre for Research Ethics & Ethical Deliberation, Edge Hill University;
Centre for Research in Ethics and Globalisation, University of Groningen
Invited keynote speaker: Geoffrey Robertson QC
Call for Papers
It is no exaggeration to claim that the politics of the last decade have their origin in one event: the hijacking and flying of passenger aircraft into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Since then wars, putatively justified as responses to this attack, have raged in Iraq and in Afghanistan. These wars have resulted in the growth of violent opposition to a perceived US imperial polity; have been used to justify the rewriting of long established legal frameworks protecting the people’s rights have led to neurosis about the protection of borders which the age of global capital was supposed to bring to an end; and have seen the crippling of active leftist opposition to the opportunistic furtherance of the neo-liberal revolution.
This interdisciplinary conference seeks critically to rethink this last decade and to put into question the nostrums it would have us take for granted. We call for papers that:
• challenge dominant paradigms for understanding terror, war, rights, citizenship, legitimacy, politics and the person;
• address the shifts in our cultural landscapes that the securitisation of everyday life has created;
• rethink the architecture of Empire, the literature of “9/11” and the geography of the unending “war on terror.”
Proposals are invited on any relevant topic and should be addressed to an interdisciplinary audience. Likely themes may include be the following, although the conference is by no means limited to these:
The architecture of terror: cities “at war”; designing the security society
“Just” war and asymmetrical warfare: aerial bombing; “suicide” bombing; drones
The politics of 2001-2011: the “war on terror”; rethinking empire, globalisation and sovereignty after “9/11”; the re-articulation of Capital; the “shock doctrine”
Rethinking ourselves: torture; identity; Islamophobia; immigration, asylum and refugees
Culture after “9/11”: art, literature, film and popular culture.
The politics of death after “9/11”: “remembrance” and memorialisation; counting the dead
Philosophy and its limits: the language of terror and the terror of language; sincerity and conviction
Theorising resistance: rethinking the law; rethinking the political
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be emailed to Nicola Clewer by 15 December 2010: nc95@brighton.ac.uk
Decisions will be communicated no later than 15 January 2011.
For further information please visit website here
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Argentina: "Nieto Recuperado" - Democracy Now Features Interview with "Recovered Grandchild"
We speak with Manuel Gonçalves, a "nieto recuperado," or a "recovered grandchild," in Argentina. He is one of the thousands of children born to parents who were disappeared during the dictatorship. These children were born in captivity, then kidnapped by the military and given away to government supporters or military families. Some of them have found their way back to their families. Manuel Gonçalves, son of Gaston Gonçalves, who was killed during the dictatorship. He was kidnapped as a newborn baby. His father’s alleged killer is now on trial.(From November 12, 2010)
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Conference: "The Role of Memory in the American Construct"
IAAS Postgraduate Symposium - “Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct
Irish Association for American Studies
contact email: iaas.symposium@gmail.com
IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
Saturday 29th January 2011
Location: Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD, Dublin, Ireland.
Call for Papers
“Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct
Memory, (both collective and individual), and memolialisation have an international legacy of shaping identity constructs, impacting upon reactionary politics and re-conceptualising history in accordance with changing social mores. In the United States, choosing what to preserve in collective and individual memory (and perhaps more significantly, what not to preserve and/or commemorate), map a national history of conflict and heroism, despair and hope, decline and renaissance. America’s cultural memory has also been partly shaped by the idea of community. This is reflected in its diverse topography; the collective memory of the small town communities and subjective memory of the frantic, multicultural cities have each, in different ways, impacted on how America has come to define and understand itself. Remembering and choosing not to remember in the United States have, then, been instrumental in surviving trauma and in celebrating achievement, though the suggestion that the past can “infect” the present fosters a tendency to bury the darker aspects of America’s remembrances.
Postgraduate students of all disciplines within the field of American Studies (including literature, film, history, geography, philosophy, visual arts, performance arts, new media, politics, sociology, cultural studies, ecology, law, economics, and international relations) are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers in the area of American studies, with possible topics including but not restricted to:
- (Re)-Constructing National Identity
- Conflict resolution
- Problems within (and without) of Cultural Diversity
- Representations of Gender
- Representations of Race
- Historical interpretation and Periodisation
- (Re)-Configuring America’s Collective (Re)Memory
- American Exceptionalism
- The Hyphenated Identity
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be emailed to the IAAS Postgraduate Caucus Co-Chairs:
Louise Walsh (Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD) and Kate Kirwan (University College Cork) at iaas.symposium@gmail.com
Please note that you must be a member of the IAAS to participate; see membership form attached.
DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: FRIDAY 31st DECEMBER 2010
Irish Association for American Studies
contact email: iaas.symposium@gmail.com
IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
Saturday 29th January 2011
Location: Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD, Dublin, Ireland.
Call for Papers
“Re-memory” and “Disremembering”: The Role of Memory in the American Construct
Memory, (both collective and individual), and memolialisation have an international legacy of shaping identity constructs, impacting upon reactionary politics and re-conceptualising history in accordance with changing social mores. In the United States, choosing what to preserve in collective and individual memory (and perhaps more significantly, what not to preserve and/or commemorate), map a national history of conflict and heroism, despair and hope, decline and renaissance. America’s cultural memory has also been partly shaped by the idea of community. This is reflected in its diverse topography; the collective memory of the small town communities and subjective memory of the frantic, multicultural cities have each, in different ways, impacted on how America has come to define and understand itself. Remembering and choosing not to remember in the United States have, then, been instrumental in surviving trauma and in celebrating achievement, though the suggestion that the past can “infect” the present fosters a tendency to bury the darker aspects of America’s remembrances.
Postgraduate students of all disciplines within the field of American Studies (including literature, film, history, geography, philosophy, visual arts, performance arts, new media, politics, sociology, cultural studies, ecology, law, economics, and international relations) are invited to submit proposals for 20-minute papers in the area of American studies, with possible topics including but not restricted to:
- (Re)-Constructing National Identity
- Conflict resolution
- Problems within (and without) of Cultural Diversity
- Representations of Gender
- Representations of Race
- Historical interpretation and Periodisation
- (Re)-Configuring America’s Collective (Re)Memory
- American Exceptionalism
- The Hyphenated Identity
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be emailed to the IAAS Postgraduate Caucus Co-Chairs:
Louise Walsh (Clinton Institute for American Studies, UCD) and Kate Kirwan (University College Cork) at iaas.symposium@gmail.com
Please note that you must be a member of the IAAS to participate; see membership form attached.
DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: FRIDAY 31st DECEMBER 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Marianne Hirsch to speak at Washington University in St. Louis
The renowned memory scholar Marianne Hirsch will be speaking at Washington University in St. Louis on November 8 at 4 pm. The talk is free and open to the public. Marianne Hirsch's name is most often linked to her formulation of "postmemory" in the book Family Frames and in subsequent articles written individually and with her partner Leo Spitzer.
I read the news of Hirsch's visit to St. Louis with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, because just 3 years ago, I was a student at Wash U and the focus of my dissertation was postmemory in contemporary Spain. While I will be attending a conference in St. Louis next week, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this talk. During my 6 years at Washington University, I was able to hear many exciting, renowned speakers from a variety of disciplines. Anyone in the St. Louis area that researches memory should make time to attend this important lecture!!
Examining the role of memory in reconstructing family history
Marianne Hirsch to deliver Holocaust Memorial Lecture for Assembly Series Nov. 8
October 21, 2010
By Barbara Rea
For many children of Holocaust survivors — collectively known as the “second generation” — there is a longing to understand pre-war life, culture and community experienced by their parents before the trauma of expulsion, incarceration and brutalization.
Marianne Hirsch, PhD, a member of this generation and a distinguished scholar on memory and cultural history, argues that post-Holocaust generations, with their profound need to vicariously participate in this bygone world, experience “postmemory” — a term Hirsch has coined to convey the ways generations born after the Holocaust access the experiences of the witnesses through mediation and imaginative reconstruction.
Hirsch will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis to explore these themes for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, an Assembly Series program at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “Rites of Return: The Afterlife of the Holocaust in Jewish Memory,” is free and open to the public.
“Postmemory refers to the ways in which generations born after a traumatic event access the experiences of the witnesses,” says Erin McGlothlin, PhD, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Holocaust Lecture Committee, “not through actual remembrance and recall, but through imaginative projection and re-creation.”
Images play an especially important role in this re-creation, she says.
McGlothlin also notes that, although postmemory as a concept was created to understand the Holocaust, it can be used to mine cultural memory for any traumatic event.
“In recent years, scholars have extended the concept of postmemory far beyond the particular context of the Holocaust to refer to the generational memory of disparate historical and cultural events,” McGlothlin says.
Thanks to the Internet and to several trips back to Czernowitz, Hirsch has reconstructed the once thriving center of Jewish life in Ukraine, where her parents lived.
With her husband, Leo Spitzer, she has produced a book called Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz, which explores the city that before the war was an important center of Central European Jewish intellectual life. Reviewer Monica Szurmuk, of theworld.org, writes that “Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book Ghosts of Home is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search.”
Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also teaches at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and co-directs its Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.
In addition to the Czernowitz publication, Hirsch has written many books, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Familial Gaze; and Time and the Literary. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including the indispensable MLA guide, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.
She is the recipient of a host of fellowships and has served as editor of the journal PMLA. She is on the advisory boards of two journals, Memory Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.
Hirsch earned bachelors, master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University.
For more information on this and upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.
I read the news of Hirsch's visit to St. Louis with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, because just 3 years ago, I was a student at Wash U and the focus of my dissertation was postmemory in contemporary Spain. While I will be attending a conference in St. Louis next week, I will unfortunately not be able to attend this talk. During my 6 years at Washington University, I was able to hear many exciting, renowned speakers from a variety of disciplines. Anyone in the St. Louis area that researches memory should make time to attend this important lecture!!
Examining the role of memory in reconstructing family history
Marianne Hirsch to deliver Holocaust Memorial Lecture for Assembly Series Nov. 8
October 21, 2010
By Barbara Rea
For many children of Holocaust survivors — collectively known as the “second generation” — there is a longing to understand pre-war life, culture and community experienced by their parents before the trauma of expulsion, incarceration and brutalization.
Marianne Hirsch, PhD, a member of this generation and a distinguished scholar on memory and cultural history, argues that post-Holocaust generations, with their profound need to vicariously participate in this bygone world, experience “postmemory” — a term Hirsch has coined to convey the ways generations born after the Holocaust access the experiences of the witnesses through mediation and imaginative reconstruction.
Hirsch will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis to explore these themes for the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, an Assembly Series program at 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Graham Chapel. The lecture, titled “Rites of Return: The Afterlife of the Holocaust in Jewish Memory,” is free and open to the public.
“Postmemory refers to the ways in which generations born after a traumatic event access the experiences of the witnesses,” says Erin McGlothlin, PhD, associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Holocaust Lecture Committee, “not through actual remembrance and recall, but through imaginative projection and re-creation.”
Images play an especially important role in this re-creation, she says.
McGlothlin also notes that, although postmemory as a concept was created to understand the Holocaust, it can be used to mine cultural memory for any traumatic event.
“In recent years, scholars have extended the concept of postmemory far beyond the particular context of the Holocaust to refer to the generational memory of disparate historical and cultural events,” McGlothlin says.
Thanks to the Internet and to several trips back to Czernowitz, Hirsch has reconstructed the once thriving center of Jewish life in Ukraine, where her parents lived.
With her husband, Leo Spitzer, she has produced a book called Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz, which explores the city that before the war was an important center of Central European Jewish intellectual life. Reviewer Monica Szurmuk, of theworld.org, writes that “Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book Ghosts of Home is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search.”
Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also teaches at Columbia’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender and co-directs its Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.
In addition to the Czernowitz publication, Hirsch has written many books, including Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; The Familial Gaze; and Time and the Literary. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including the indispensable MLA guide, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust.
She is the recipient of a host of fellowships and has served as editor of the journal PMLA. She is on the advisory boards of two journals, Memory Studies and Contemporary Women’s Writing.
Hirsch earned bachelors, master’s and doctoral degrees from Brown University.
For more information on this and upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
On Chile
 |
| the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda |
Before I went to Chile, I had only visited Mexico and Spain. Being in Chile was a little like going to California when you have only been to the east coast (or vice-versa). Stepping off the plane, there is a distinct sense that you are. . . elsewhere. Part of it has to do with the change in seasons, but it's also just the "vibe" of the country. I only saw a fraction of the country, but it made a big impression on me to go from Santiago to Viña del Mar to Valparaíso to Isla Negra to Punta Arenas. The difference in temperatures, pace, amount of people and general landscape was pretty significant.
My visit was incredible. I left the end of winter and entered the end of summer. People swarmed the beach at Viña del Mar. My friend and I started in Valparaíso, with its inclines and sea-worn buildings. Now that I've been in San Francisco, I can say Valparaíso reminds me a bit of being there. Or the other way around. I love being near "the sea" and having that smell in the air. I would love to wake with a view of water -- who wouldn't? In Neruda's house, one of his rooms -- I can't recall which at the moment -- looked right out onto the water. No one was allowed to photograph anything inside the house, but one could be photographed with the view of the sea in the background. I tried to imagine Neruda writing with that backdrop, drinking wine with friends, reading. I tried to imagine the house totally ransacked, his rows of books in ruins on the floor, after the '73 coup, just days before his death.
Recently, like many other people, I've had Chile on my mind for reasons other than Neruda. The earthquake, the bicentennial, the ongoing news about the miners, and the fact that I haven't stopped listening to this CD for the last month, have all put Chile (phonetically, she lay, as my friend would say) back in my everyday thoughts.
Driving home from work last week, I was listening to a report on the rescue of the miners. Isabel Allende was talking. Shortly after Chile's independence day (September 18), she had visited the mine site and now she was reflecting on this emotional moment for the country as a whole. She never mentioned a word about Chile's military dictatorship, never said a thing about the disappeared, but in my own mind, I could not help associating these "disappeared" miners, now being "appeared" and released from the earth, with those who were disappeared and never returned. Strangely, the rescue gave Chile back its own sons in a way that has never been possible for those who vanished under Pinochet. The fact that Isabel Allende - whose father was Socialist Salvador Allende's first cousin -- was standing beside President Sebastián Piñera, a right-wing millionaire, was also quite a symbolic moment, I thought. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything, but the image of the two together seemed to bring the past to a scene that had been concentrating very much on the present, on the extremely delicate, day-to-day, minute-by-minute operations of bringing the miners to the earth's surface.
 |
| Isabel Allende beside President Sebastián Piñera (photo from here) |
The mine rescue, and the connection of the site with a previous traumatic history, illustrate the fact that sites of memory do not just remain stable representatives of the same story, but evolve over time, depending on historical and political circumstances. Although it is quite different, I am reminded of the Valle de los Caídos site in Spain, currently back in the news again as the Spanish government debates whether or not to make it into a "center for memory."
The most striking symbol of Valle de los Caídos is the gigantic cross that marks its location. The site is visited largely by tourists, but also used to be where the ultra right gathered every November 20 (the anniversary of Franco's death), until the 2007 Law of Historical Memory made that illegal. Many people don't realize that Valle was built by slave labor under Franco in the 50s. Many also don't know that, buried on the altar (!) of the church inside are Franco himself and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish fascist party, Falange. In addition to Franco, many of the Civil War dead are also buried in the walls of what some have called Spain's largest "mass grave." What to do with this enormous structure, which still houses a Benedictine monastery, remains unclear. However, one thing is certain -- the site's identity has undergone a series of revisions over the past several years. In my view, these revisions are necessary, and transforming the site into a Center for Memory would give Spain what is still lacks almost 35 years since Franco's death.
"Revising" a site of memory like the area of the mine rescue or the Valle de los Caídos site should not mean eclipsing its past history. Ideally -- and it sounds cliché -- we could use the past struggles there to inform the present use of the site. In 1973, miners were murdered where in 2010, they were rescued. What does this mean? Is it just a coincidence? Or can the rescue ultimately allow healing of other kinds?
I'll be writing a bit more about Chile here soon. I have a post planned about the rapper Ana Tijoux. For now, I'll just say that if you haven't been to this magnificent country, I highly recommend it. One day, I hope to return for a longer visit. In some ways, I know only an "imagined Chile" informed by Neruda and the folksinger Víctor Jara. What is the everyday Chile? It still seems a bit mysterious to me. So much is informed by what lies below ground -- fault lines, the disappeared, miners descending to the earth's pit. What is it to live with the knowledge of unstable tierra, the possibility of tremors and aftershocks? Surely, this awareness comes with its own kind of memory.
Friday, October 15, 2010
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
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
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