The Other Side of Memory:
Forgetting, Denial, Repression
Mnemonics Summer School 2016
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
All lectures and panels take place at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the Levis Faculty Center, 4th Floor, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana, IL
Thursday, June 2
11:30 am-12:45 pm: Welcome lunch for participants
12:45-1:00 pm: Opening Remarks—Brett Kaplan and Michael Rothberg
1:00-2:15 pm: Keynote 1: Françoise Vergès (Collège d’études mondiales): “Politics of Memories in Postcolonial France: Space, Time, Rights”
Introduction: Michael Rothberg (UIUC)
2:15-2:30 pm: Break
2:30-4:00 pm: Panel 1: The Art of Forgetting and the Material Remnants of Memory
Respondent: Brett Kaplan (UIUC) – Chair: Priscilla Charrat (UIUC)
- Amy Freier (Western University): “Lost Art, Stolen Memories: Excavating Fascination with Repressed Arts”
- Sara Callahan (Stockholm University): “Examining Archival Exclusion in Three Recent Artworks: Colonial Hubris, Archival Redemption, and Subjective Association”
- Sanna Stegmaier (King’s College): “Doron Rabinovici’s Die letzten Zeugen (2013) – Performing the interspace between Memory and Forgetting”
4:00-4:15 pm: Break
4:15-5:45 pm: Panel 2: Landscapes of Forgetting
Respondent: Jessica Rapson (Kings College) – Chair: Jessica Young (UIUC)
- Noah Hansen (University of Chicago): “Traumatic Infrastructure in the Occupied West Bank”
- Ifor Duncan (Goldsmiths): “Droughts in the Rivers of Forgetting”
- Catherine Nguyen (UCLA): “Working through Forgetting: Towards the Memory of French Indochinese Immigration/CAFIs”
Friday, June 3
9:30-10:00 am: Coffee & pastries
10:00-11:15 am: Keynote 2: Jodi A. Byrd (UIUC): “‘Eyes that can never close’: Colonial Agnosia and the Mnemonics of Refusal”
Introduction: Brett Kaplan (UIUC)
11:15 am-12:45 pm: Panel 3: Memory and Forgetting in Diaspora I
Respondent: Françoise Vergès (Collège d’études mondiales) – Chair: Alexandra van Doren (UIUC)
- Jarula Wegner (Frankfurt): “Carnival Memories: Challenging Forgetting, Denial and Repression”
- Matthew Houdek (University of Iowa): “‘Until the Story of the Hunt is told by the Lion’: Articulating the Maafa and the Struggle for Re-membrance”
- Campbell Johnston Birch (Columbia): “Remembering to Forget: Archive Danger in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother”
12:45-2:00 pm: Lunch
2:00-3:30 pm: Panel 4: Memory and Forgetting in Diaspora II
Respondent: Michael Rothberg (UIUC) – Chair: Lauren Hansen (UIUC)
- Helen Makhdoumian (UIUC): “Forging Transnational Armenian Peoplehood amid Forgetting, Denial, and Erasure”
- Duygu Gül Kaya (York University): “Remembering the Genocide in Diaspora: Armenian Youth’s Postmemory Work in Canada”
- Erin Högerle (Frankfurt): “Film Festivals: Performed Remembering, Selective Forgetting”
3:30-3:45 pm: Break
3:45-5:15 pm: Panel 5: Transitions: History, Nation, Justice
Respondent: Berber Beverage (Ghent University)– Chair: Estibalitz Ezkerra (UIUC)
- Ricardo Velasco (University of Texas at Austin): “Audiovisual testimony against structural amnesia in Colombia’s remote North Pacific Coast Region”
- Naomi Taub (UIUC): “‘So that we might together forget’: Anachronism and Anxiety in Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases”
- Masiha Vaala (University of Leiden): “The Silence and the Screams: Iranian Youth and The Nation’s Traumatic Past”
Saturday, June 4
9:30-10:00 am: Coffee & Pastries
10:00-11:15 am: Keynote 3: Berber Bevernage (Ghent University): “Truth Telling, Skepticism and Denial in the Age of Positivism and Colonialism”
Introduction: Jessica Young (UIUC)
11:15 am-12:45 pm: Panel 6: Disappeared Bodies, State Erasure
Respondent: Dara Goldman (UIUC) – Chair: Ethan Madarieta (UIUC)
- Eva Willems (Ghent University): “Secrets and silences: mechanisms of forgetting in dealing with a violent past”
- Kritish Rajbhandari (Northwestern): “Poetics of Distance: Reconstructing Narratives of Race and Desire in Abulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion”
- Daniella Wust (Columbia): “Feeling Memory: Tensions and Contradictions in the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM) in Lima, Perú”
12:45-2:00 pm: Lunch
2:00-3:30 pm: Panel 7: Archival Silences
Respondent: Lucy Bond (University of Westminster) – Chair: Sophia Levine (UIUC)
- Tom Chadwick (KU Leuven): “Nothing Now But My Books: Reader’s Block and the Fate of David Markson’s Library”
- Katya Linden (Stockholm University): “The Nord-Ost Theatre Siege: Forgetting the National Trauma—Personalizing the Loss Online”
- Dora Komnenović (Justus Liebig University): “Discarding a Common Past: The Cleansing of Croatian and Slovenian Libraries in the 1990s and Beyond”
3:30-3:45 pm: Break
3:45-5:15 pm: Panel 8: Embodiments of Memory and Forgetting
Respondent: Jodi Byrd (UIUC) – Chair: Jenn Baldwin (UIUC)
- Holly Brown (Ghent University): “Spectres of AIDS in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life”
- Eman Ghanayem (UIUC): “Confinable Body-minds: From the ‘Muselmann’ to the ‘Mad Muslim Terrorist’”
- Haritha Popuri (York University): “Deconstructing the Seen, Scene, and Unseemly in Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B”
5:15-5:30 pm: Closing Remarks—Brett Kaplan and Michael Rothberg
Co-Organizers: Michael Rothberg (Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies/English) & Brett Kaplan (Jewish Culture and Society/Comparative and World Literature).
Graduate Student Organizing Committee: Jennifer Baldwin (Anthropology/MD/PhD), Priscilla Charrat (French), Estibalitz Ezkerra (Comparative Literature), Lauren Hansen (German), Sophia Levine (Dance), and Jessica Young (English)
Co-Sponsors: The Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies; Illinois International Programs; School for Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics; Center for Advanced Study; College of LAS; Graduate College; Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center and US Department of Education Title VI Grant; Comparative and World Literature; Religion; Center for Global Studies; English; Program in Jewish Culture and Society; Anthropology; College of Fine and Applied Arts; French and Italian; European Union Center and US Department of Education Title VI Grant; Slavic; Germanic; Art History; Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
