Photo credit: still from Pınar Öğrenci’s film Aşît
Mnemonics Summer School 2024
Violence and Repair
July 9-11, 2024
Tuesday, July 9, 2024 (All panels in Royce 314)
8:30- 9:00: Breakfast and Coffee
9:00- 9:15: Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:15-10:30: Keynote
Susanne Knittel (Utrecht), “Conceptualizing Ecologies of Violence: The Genocide-Ecocide-Nexus in the Cultural Imagination”
10:30-11:00: Coffee Break
11:00-12:30: Panel 1—The Long Shadow of Colonial Violence
Chair: Yair Agmon (UCLA)
Pranav Menon, Columbia University, “The Tidalectic Claim: Unincorporated Territories, Colonial Ruins, and Ecopoetic Ownership in the Pacific”
Berklee Baum, University of Oxford, “Dedicatory Distraction: Canada’s use of Memorialisation to Cover a Continuing Genocide”
Noreen Kane, University College Cork, “The Representation of Intergenerational Trauma in Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy”
Respondent: Stef Craps (Ghent)
12:30-1:30: Lunch
1:30-3:00: Panel 2—Memories of State Violence
Chair: Rebecca Chhay (UCLA)
Chih-hen Chang, UCLA, “Licking Clean Filthy Wounds”: Moral Injury and its Repair in Shih Ming-cheng’s Testimonial Literature of the White Terror”
Pablo Pamplona, University of São Paulo, “45 Layers of Paint not to Forget: Metamorphoses in a Martyr’s Intergenerational Memory”
Ragini Chakraborty, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Body and the Nation, Body of the Nation: 1947 Partition and Memories of Violence”
Respondent: Guido Bartolini (Ghent)
3:00-3:30: Coffee Break
3:30-5:00: Panel 3—On Repair and Reparations
Chair: Jennifer Noji (UCLA)
Linda Mannheim, University of Westminster, ‘Compensation for Damages 5,000 Marks’: German Reparations Applications and the Limits of Repair”
Justyna Szklarczyk, University of Warsaw, “Redressing Class Injustice and Violence. History of State Farms in Socialist Poland”
Katja Ekman, Lund University, “Divine Dynamite – The Dangerous Memory of Hope”
Respondent: Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus)
Wednesday, July 10, 2024 (Morning panels in Royce 314)
8:30- 9:00: Breakfast and Coffee
9:00-10:30: Panel 4—Multidirectional Memory and Comparison
Chair: Michael Rothberg (UCLA)
Rita Elizabeth Maricocchi, University of Münster, “‘What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?’: Reading Violent Histories and Reparative Futures in Musa Okwonga’s In the End, It Was All About Love (2021)”
Ward Awad, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Darwish Rewrites Celan: Holocaust Reception and the Shaping of the Nakba in Poetry”
Hannah Jakobsen, UCLA, “From Memory to Urgency? The Affective Dynamics of Historical Comparison in Activism”
Respondent: Sonali Thakkar (NYU)
10:30-11:00: Coffee Break
11:00-12:30: Panel 5—Memories of Femicide
Chair: Rebecca Chhay (UCLA)
Eva Van Hoey, Ghent University, “Creating a Feminist Counter-Archive: The Memory of Feminicide in Selva Almada’s Dead Girls (2014) and Lydiette Carrión’s The Water Pit (2018)”
Vivian Arimany, Columbia University, “The Vengeful Body: Ethics of Representing Femicide in Cultural Production”
Sofía Forchieri, Radboud University Nijmegen, “Impure Testimonies: Witnessing Feminicide through Complicity and Perpetration”
Respondent: Hanna Teichler (Frankfurt)
12:30-1:30: Lunch (Royce 306)
1:30-3:00: Keynote Roundtable on Movements for Reparations (James Bridges Theater)
Chair: Jennifer Noji (UCLA)
Kristin Nimmers (Policy & Campaign Manager at California Black Power Network; Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth)
Miya Iwataki (Nikkei Progressives; Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress; and National Nikkei Reparations Coalition)
3:00-4:00: Reception James Bridges Theater)
4:00-6:00: Keynote Film Screening and Discussion (James Bridges Theater)
Chair: Michael Rothberg (UCLA)
Pınar Öğrenci (Berlin), Aşît [The Avalanche]
Thursday, July 11, 2024 (All panels in Royce 314)
8:30- 9:00: Breakfast and Coffee
9:00-10:30: Panel 6—Spatial Memory and Commemoration
Chair: Claudio Fogu (UC Santa Barbara)
Sunjay Mathuria, Concordia University, “Tracing the Wounds: Spatial Storytelling and Walking as Modes of Repair in Lahore and Belfast”
Elisabetta Visaggio, King’s College London, “Using the Seascape as an Investigative Tool to Apprehend Seaborne Memories of Migration and Migratory Violence in the Mediterranean”
Sylva Sukop, Washington University in St. Louis, “Slavery Commemoration in St. Louis: A Tale of Two Sites”
Respondent: Mara Josi (Ghent)
10:30-11:00: Coffee Break
11:00-12:15: Keynote
Sonali Thakkar (NYU), “Regimes of Repair”
12:30-1:30: Lunch
1:30-3:00: Panel 7—Visual and Prosthetic Memory
Chair: Naomi Taub (UCLA)
Samantha Bell, SOAS University London, “Landscape Abstractions: Violence and Aftermath in Jo Ractliffe’s South African Photography”
Danielle Andréa Krikorian, University of Birmingham, “Mnemonic Images: Memory and Silenced Violence from the South of Lebanon”
Sofiia Kosourova, Oxford University, “Donbas War and Prosthetic Memory: Ukrainian War Film in 2014-2022”
Respondent: Silvana Mandolessi (Leuven)
3:00-3:30: Coffee break
4:00-5:30: Panel 8—Contesting States/Memory
Chair: Pınar Öğrenci (Berlin)
Konstantina Tsoleridou, Goethe University Frankfurt , “Beyond Mnemonic Standoffs: Reimagining the Descendant of Perpetrators in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2008) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2016)”
Rebecca Gross, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Diasporic Disruptions of the Nation-State: The Judeo-Futurist Performances of David Bernstein and Julie Weitz”
Hannah Katalin Grimmer, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna & Goethe University Frankfurt, “Contested Pasts or to do ‘Justice within the Realm of Possibilities’: Artistic Resistances, Social Activism, and Memories in Chile”
Respondent: Susanne Knittel (Utrecht)
Organizing Team: Yair Agmon, Rebecca Chhay, Jennifer Noji, Michael Rothberg, and Sharon Zelnick
Contact: mnemonics2024 [at] gmail.com
