In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.
Daniel Arroyo-Rodriguez (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
This panel explores the ways in which marginalized communities in Europe have constructed, preserved, and transmitted collective memories throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, often in opposition to dominant historical narratives. Across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, communities excluded from official histories, including ethnic, racial, linguistic, gendered, sexual, and political minorities, have turned to memory as a means of reclaiming agency and challenging structures of power.
The panel examines how literature, cultural production, oral testimony, visual culture, and other forms of remembrance become sites of resistance where silenced voices recover experiences erased or distorted by institutional discourses. By foregrounding memories that exist at the margins of the archive, these communities create alternative narratives that question official histories and reveal the contested nature of the past.
This panel focuses on memory as an arena in which struggles over representation and historical meaning are negotiated. At a time when public debates over the past continue to shape political and cultural life, examining the memories of marginalized communities offers critical insight into the mechanisms through which official narratives are challenged. By highlighting voices historically excluded from dominant accounts, the panel contributes to broader conversations about historical justice and the democratization of memory.
We invite interdisciplinary approaches from literary studies, history, cultural studies, memory studies, and related fields. Possible topics include, but are not limited to memory and political violence; post-dictatorial and postcolonial memory; migration and diaspora; gendered and queer memories; community archives; oral histories; literature and memory; memorialization practices; digital memory cultures; and the transmission of memory across generations. By bringing together diverse perspectives, this panel seeks to illuminate how memory communities not only preserve the past but also reshape public understandings of history.
This panel explores how marginalized groups in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have used literature, and cultural production to reclaim silenced histories and reshape public understandings of history through memory. The panel examines how these communities challenge official narratives and reshape public understandings of the past through alternative forms of remembrance and representation.