Abstracts Archive

Do refugees reshape long-term political behavior in receiving areas? To investigate this question, I examine the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into West Germany at the end of WWII. Expellees were strangers to the cultural practices in their new surroundings. Tensions with natives f...

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...

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...

In the framework of the research project RePAST. Revisiting the Past, Anticipating the Future (H2020 grant no 769252), I am analyzing the role of contemporary artistic and cultural objects, events and practices working with the questions of memory, trauma, violence and troubling episodes from colle...

This paper explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shaped revolutionary memories in the People's Republic of China (PRC) through the use of a dynamic unity of multimedia commemoration techniques including both the built environment as well as education and mass media. As early as 1951, ri...

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I am interested in interrogating memories of marginality as represented in selected poems inspired by the River Niger and River Benue, which are two of the most important bodies of water in Africa and Nigeria and whose history intersects with coloniality and the evolving postc...

Romanian aristocrats, descendants of boyars from Moldavia and Wallachia, faced the loss of family memory during the repressive communist regime. One of the main characteristics of any aristocracy is the call to memory, the identification by reference to the ancestors' great deeds, to the antiquity o...

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...

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...

The Magdalene Laundries are a prominent part of Irish social history, which operated as philanthropic, lay institutions in the 1700s. The Religious Orders took ownership of the institutions in the mid-1800s until the last laundry closed in 1996. The running of the institutions became increasingly pu...

This talk will examine nostalgia's relation to the spatial imagination through a revealing case study – nostalgia for the British Mandate (1917-1948) in 21st century Israeli culture. Through an exploration of contemporary Israeli works of literature, theater and art that convey nostalgia f...

The present paper discusses the memory of fascism in post-Communist Romania. Through the lens of the movement for canonization as saints of the former members of the Romanian fascist movement known as the Legion of Archangel Michael deceased during their imprisonment during the Communist years, a qu...

This paper aims to examine photography in post-war, post-colonial Japan and South Korea, focusing on the ways in which artists challenge official memories and create counter-hegemonic memories. After the end of the Pacific War, both countries witnessed the growing presence of the U.S. and its milit...

The memory of the Second World War has remained a heavily disputed subject in the Baltic States, where the narratives of the Soviet and Nazi occupations continue to remain competitive. In my presentation I will focus on women's memory of the Second World War in the Baltic States involving both major...

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...

Questions of national identity have historically been tied to collective memory and the popular and political interpretations of history. This paper aims to explore the political-discursive convergences involved in the politics of memory and the construction of national identity in the contemporary ...

Russian state, media, and diplomatic actors are exporting a militaristic conception of memory to bolster Russian influence abroad-and undermine that of its rivals. Through media and diplomatic institutions, the Russian government is using its levers of influence and public diplomacy to create memory...

In this paper we seek to analyse and compare the discursive construction of German and Polish memory in everyday and media discourse, focusing on the communist past of both countries, i.e. the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and reunification on the one hand and the People's Republic of Poland and ...

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the representation of perpetrator perspectives in artistic and literary responses to the Holocaust (Shoah). Many of these works seek to explore shameful memories of complicity and guilt, which have often remained concealed within the confines of ...

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...

In refugee discourses, though much has been discussed at the levels of humanitarianism, law, geopolitics and sociology, refugee voices and scholarship on them are largely missing. While historian Dan Stone calls for a more active presence of refugees in these studies, instead of taking refugee as 'a...

Turkish migration to Germany that started in the early 1960s was essentially a response to a call concerning demand for labour on a temporary basis. However, when the gastarbeiter scheme translated into a permanent citizenship, return to homeland became a myth which was environed not only by rememb...

In 1912 the 'Reapers of Poland' a provocative theatre play set during the peasant rebellion in 1794 was performed for the first time for the audiences in Barcelona. A few year later, the street of Poland was inaugurated in the same city.These two examples of early twentieth century memory culture ar...

Contemporary Ukrainian history offers fascinating cases of re-/de-bordering processes that provide evidence for how decision-makers and everyday citizens can change the historical course of the state. Border issues are particularly relevant to Ukraine, a country which has always been a borderland zo...

My presentation uses visual-material rhetorical analysis (Propen 2012) to search the Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, SC, in an attempt to find where and how the "legacies of slavery" are – or aren't – visually presented. I wish I could include the picture I took during my research visit to Ma...

How do the stories we tell ourselves about the past inform what we think about the present? What role do performances of history play in shaping those narratives? How might these performances become more "real" than the history itself? My paper is part of a larger project about the fluid p...

In a new political climate that expects expressions of remorse for past atrocities, public memorialization provides one means to this end. This paper takes a close look at two such spaces: Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe commemorating Jewish victims of the Holocaust (2005), and Mont...

Besides the narrator's evolving memory and re-evaluation of the past events that permanently challenges the self-narrative, the life writing is subject to both external censorship and self-censorship. The self-narratives related to trauma are to various degrees the results of the author's self-censo...

This presentation will focust on recent Spanish films that have explored repression during Franco's dictatorship, through the image of spaces where it took place. Starting out from films Aquí y N'Otro Tempu (Ramón Lluis Bande, 2014) and Elefantes (Carlos Balbuena, 2017) we will analyze how land...

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...