Politics of Remembering: Postmemory, Decoloniality, and Community Empowerment
N/A
Organization: NeMLA
"One of my life’s ambition[s] has been to remember what others have forgotten or chosen to forget—to give our people a voice and a modicum of humanity, to give them a place at the table of history...history doesn’t only belong to the victors but to the vanquished as well." - Brij V Lal
Marianne Hirsch defines "postmemory" as the relationship that the ‘generation after’ has with inherited personal, collective or cultural trauma. Post colonial contemporaries and descendants of those who suffered catastrophic histories use what Saidiya Hartman calls “Critical Fabulation”. Beyond uncovering details through recall, affect, oral records, and material memory such as objects and photographs, this process seeks at large to resist the impassivity of the official records and silencing of traumatic experiences, through narrative filling of historical gaps and imaginative reimagining.
Aligned with the 2027 conference theme “Empowering Communities”, the panel seeks to explore how postmemory and vicarious victimhood of the descendants act as a generative strategy, empowering communities through creation of histories based on experiential truths and ever-present hauntological relationships to the past.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Indenture, partition, displacement and forced migration as sites of postmemory
- Afterlives of colonialism, slavery, genocide, war and other catastrophic histories
- Past, spectrality and hauntological readings of literary texts
- Gendered, maternal and intersectional dimensions of inherited trauma
- Memory and ethics of remembering
- Photographs, images and material memory
- Decoloniality and resistance to official narratives
- Digital shift of archives and its impact on intergenerational memories
We particularly welcome works on South Asian literature and Indenture writing.
Description: The panel seeks to explore how postmemory of the descendants of catastrophic events act as a generative strategy, empowering communities through creation of histories based on experiential truths and ever-present hauntological relationships to the past.
Modality of the session: Virtual Only
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22658
Shivani Gnanasekaran