The Centre for the Movement of People, Aberystwyth University 20-22nd June 2022
It seems strange, now, to think that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is less than 30 years old. Memory Studies and Trauma Studies have become large academic fields in their own right, spanning the arts, humanities and sciences, but few single concepts have dominated the field in the way that postmemory does.
Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory (2012) acknowledged the way postmemory studies had found productive ways of extending the concept beyond its original parameters. This, then, is an appropriate time to bring together researchers who are using and developing the concept of postmemory to explore how and why this concept speaks to us so strongly now. Why does it speak to so many people, in such widely varying places and situations? And how it has proliferated, how it is developing? What do we mean when we say postmemory?
The conference offers five themed panels with plenary speakers. We invite proposals for papers for each panel:
Panel A : Postmemory: Diagnosis or Manifestation of Dis-ease?
This panel will ask whether the crossover appeal of postmemory could be considered symptomatic as much as diagnostic: as a response to, or manifestation of, a more generalised twentieth- and twenty-first-century memory dis-ease. Contributions to this panel are invited to explore postmemory in its relation to other theories of the modern or postmodern founded on a sense of living in an age of aftermath or belatedness, and the impossibility of moving forward beyond a horizon of equally catastrophic looming inevitabilities.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Kirstin Gwyer (Jesus College, Oxford): tbc
Panel B: Postmemory and the Anthropocene
This panel will explore how postmemory functions in literary and other artistic engagements with the Anthropocene. Panellists may want to consider how memories of traumatic pasts haunt the imagination of planetary environmental degradation, how the climate generation reactivates memories of earlier waves of activism, how our implication in environmental destruction complicates the inheritance of memorial legacies of innocent victimhood or heroic resistance, or how the non-human turn necessitated by the vast scales of the Anthropocene challenges the traditionally anthropocentric notion of postmemory. Note that this list is by no means exhaustive: other angles are explicitly welcomed.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Stef Craps (Ghent University)
Panel C: Memory Activism and Creative Practice in the Diaspora
This panel will examine the main differences between first and second-generation (or even third-generation) exiles in terms of memory activism and creative practice and examine whether there are particular characteristics of second-generation memory work that is created in exile/diaspora (in terms of form, content, etc). The panel will further investigate how memory activism/postmemory in exile shape collective memory work in the countries of origin and how the affiliative (transgenerational) and familial (intergenerational) dimensions of postmemory play out in a diasporic setting.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Cara Levey (University College Cork)
Panel D: Postmemory and Futurity in Contemporary European Literatures
This panel will explore the question of what futures we can develop in response to violent pasts. As such, the panel seeks to problematise the traumatic determinism underpinning much postmemory scholarship, which explicitly and implicitly frames the transfer of memories across generations as a form of traumatic repetition. The devastation, pain and suffering caused by the Holocaust are undeniable and, through their after-effects, they still shape present-day individual and collective realities. This panel wants to trace these after-effects into the future, by asking what different, potentially less violent, futures we can envisage and build in response to the events. It invites contributions that reflect on literary strategies for promoting ‘futurity’ in the face of traumatic pasts. The panel has a specific interest in how references to Holocaust memories have accompanied, sparked and furthered struggles for civil rights, social justice and political change around the globe.
Keynote Speaker Dr Maria Roca Lizarazu (Galway)
Panel E: Postmemory and the Movement of People
This panel will investigate the interrelationship between postmemory and the movement of people, be it travel, mobility, migration or flight. How do postmemory narratives reflect physical and geographical change and destabilisation? Papers are invited on the reflections of singular and repeated movements, voluntary and forced, and the complexity of movement and migration in between. How does postmemory interrelate with transnational and comparative approaches?
The conference will also include a contribution by Dr Petra Rau (UEA) on postmemory and creative practice.
Organisers: Dr Tasha Alden, Aberystwyth University, Dr Andrea Hammel, Aberystwyth University, Dr Aine McMurtry, Kings College London
Please send a 250-word abstract indicating which panel you would like to be considered for to postmemorynow@gmail.com by May 1st 2022. Abstracts should include a short biographical note.
We are pleased to be able to offer a number of bursaries; please indicate if you would like to apply for one. Our preference is for in-person presentations but we will consider presentations delivered online.
Email: postmemorynow@gmail.com Twitter handle: @postmemorynow