Sites of Memory: Graveyards, Monuments, Ruins
Annual ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) Conference
Date: Utrecht, Netherlands, July 6-9, 2017
Call for contributions to the seminar:
Sites of Memory: Graveyards, Monuments, Ruins
What is the relationship between memory and place? In this seminar, we invite participants to think about the ways in which places establish forms of recollection, archives, and records that we turn to politically and affectively in order to inhabit the world. The notion of a “topological memory” is a way of naming the intimate relationship that certain places ignite, and how they allow for acts of remembrance. Therefore, we ask, how do places become memorials? If memory is frail and moribund, so too are the places that give, allow, offer, and defend memories. What, then, happens with memory in the event of displacement, forced exile, and trauma? What happens when, due to war, invasions, and acts of massive terror, those places of memory are destroyed, pulverized, or deathly wounded? Is memory obliterated, does it remain in the ruins, or do the ruins themselves become sites of memory (lieux de mémoire)? Places bestow memory; even in conditions of radical, neoliberal globalization, they yield extraordinary critical energy. In turn, their deterioration produces reactive memories and nostalgia.
Proposals (250-300 word abstract and short bio) should be submitted through ACLA's online portal between Sept. 1-23:
http://acla.org/node/add/paper
http://acla.org/sites-memory-graveyards-monuments-ruins
For further information, contact the organizer at: jonathan.pimentel.chacon@una.cr
