Abstracts Archive

In this paper, I will explore "the subtle entanglement of joy, hope and trauma" in the memories of the St. Louis survivors (Anderson and Ortner, 2018, p. 7). The ocean liner M.S. St. Louis left Nazi Germany in 1939 carrying over 900 Jewish refugees toward Cuba, only to be refused entry upon arrival....

This paper examines a unique period in the early twenty-first century when Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian community members in Australia cooperated to attain genocide recognition. Unlike the Armenian genocide, the lesser-known Greek and Assyrian experiences of violence in the late Ottoman Empire (191...

This paper results from research the memory landscape of Buru, a small island in the Moluccas used as a prison for 10.000 political prisoners following the mass killings of an estimated 500.000 to one million a million real or suspected Communists in the mid-1960s in Indonesia. Since then, the state...

This paper discusses mediatized memories of the refugee presence in Portugal between 1933 and 1945 in conjunction with theoretical concerns regarding transcultural memory and memory transfer in the context of migratory phenomena. Due to its geographical location and its official politics of neutrali...

In „The Memory Police" (2019) Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa urges us to remember what has officially been forgotten and, once we have lost the ability to remember, to protect the ones that carry their memory. „It's a shame that the people who live here haven't been able to hold such marvelous thing...

Relying on 6 months of ethnographic research, in this paper I analyze the mobilization process started by a group of women that led to a symbolic act of intervention of the memorial monolith at the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation (CMPR) in Bogotá, Colombia, between September 21- 23, dur...

Regina Jose Galindo (Guatemala, 1974) since her initial performances – To see [Hasta ver] and Who can erase the trace? [¿Quién puede borrar las huellas?], in 2002 and 2003, respectively– has dedicated her performance to make visible the crimes perpetrated during internal war in her country and...

Appropriate for consideration by the Museums and Memory Working Group."We are all born into stories that began long before we arrived,and we become self within their borders." Marie TondreauI grew up in the shadow of a story recounted often and to anyone by my mother. She told of her arranged marria...

 For some decades, the Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France (CRAN), Representative Council of France's Black Associations, has championed the memory of, and acted the collective organic intellectual, for a movement of French people of African heritage to return to ...

If, as Rosi Braidotti suggests in Posthuman Knowledge (2019), transhumanist posthumanism privileges the ontological status of embodied (or disembodied) forms of the human-after-the-human, then critical posthumanism foregrounds epistemological questions stemming from such a critique, and the sentient...

The aim of my paper is to examine the practices of remembering and of forgetting about socialist realism after 1954, the date which marked the end of this style's domination in Poland. I will explore the ways in which those practices were shaped by the changing ideological regimes (socialism thr...

In the foreword to the 2004 Vintage Books edition of her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison notes that the history of black motherhood in the United States is one in which "birthing children was required, but "having" them, being responsible for them – being, in other words, their par...

Once a primarily Jewish trauma, the Holocaust is now a universal symbol that plays a significant role in contemporary politics and to questions concerning justice and human rights. However, each European country has its own relation to this genocide and in the post-war era Sweden has primarily ident...

Shame is a ubiquitous part of the discourse around sexual violence; one of the most pervasive images of sexual violence within patriarchal cultures is that women are ashamed of having been raped. This paradigm has also dominated research approaches to sexual violence and the Holocaust. Scholars have...

In her project 'Under-Writing - Beirut', the Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige approaches Lebanon's capital city as a palimpsest. The media she employs include video, text, still images, and digital technology. The National Museum of Beirut is one of the sites she has chosen and entitled as ...

Palestine/Israel is a textbook example of a conflict over historical narratives. Binary readings of the past pit Philistines and Israelites, Muslims and Jews, survivors of the Holocaust and the Nakba against one another. Many acknowledge the degree to which the past is securitized and weaponized in ...

"It is important to tell the little-known history of the town now, because soon there will be nothing left of it (…) We are fighting here for the last scrap of memory", the former mayor of Sosúa stated referring to the town's Jewish exile history. Today, Sosúa is a popular holiday destination in...

Memorialization has been a growing trend over the past few decades. To date, limited research exists on how memorials affect modern relationships between groups as well as individual attitudes and behaviors. This project focuses on understanding how the first large-scale memorial to victims of lynch...

Reflecting on the ways that absence is evoked in the place through the act of remembrance, this paper outlines the convergence between memory regimes and embodied memory practices in the context of state sanctioned violence. Focusing on hidden and deserted graveyards for the missing, political dissi...

This study analyzes how collective memories of the War of Resistance against Japan are shaped in contemporary China by complex interactions between political power and economic actors. The mnemonic practices we focus on is War of Resistance television dramas produced since 2005. Based on a broad ran...