CFP Deadline: Abstracts and bios due 29 May 2013
Conference location and date:
The Place of Memory: Anglophone Diasporas in the 21st Century
3-4 October 2013, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie
Conference description:
Diasporic studies have often made diaspora rhyme with nostalgia, focusing on the ways in which the loss of the homeland coincides with a dynamics of reminiscence inevitably triggered by that moment of loss. In this perspective, the diasporic subject is, to paraphrase Emmanuel Nelson, a “fossilized fragment that seeks refossilization.”
A large number of literary works but also of visual artistic creations and films undeniably deal with the difficulties inherent in adjusting to a new land, a fact which often makes it tempting for diasporians to seek to revive the homeland and keep it alive through an active process of re-membering. But there is a lot more to the dynamics of diasporization and remembrance than this rather obvious starting point. In recent years diasporic studies have opened up new areas of investigation which have either confirmed or put into question this link between nostalgia and diaspora. Trauma studies have evidenced the haunting presence of past events and their lingering presence in the lives of diasporians through trauma, and the nature of memory — its making, remaking and sometimes its packaging and “marketing” (Huggan) — has also constituted an area of investigation. Indeed, in the wake of geographer David Harvey’s concept of heritage culture, many critics have interrogated the validation and instrumentalisation of the margins, sometimes through a re-/creation of collective memories.
The conference seeks to position itself in this framework of emerging problematics and reassessment of the role, status and place of memory. Contributions are invited on a variety of topics relating to literature but also to different forms of cultural productions (eg the visual arts from films to installations) in the anglophone world.
Keynote speakers: Professor Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Professor Robert Young.
Abstracts (200/ 300 words) should be sent to fmkral@gmail.com with a brief biodata before May 29 2013.
Contributions are invited on the following topics:
– Diasporas and nostalgia or memory as a form of collective hypermnesia which seeks to make up for the forced amnesia of colonialism
– Recreated memories and authenticity
– Memory through time and the re-/creation of collective memories through official history and the emergence of subaltern histories.
– The lingering absence of the homeland, and the transgenerational haunting of the homeland, in the light of trauma studies.
-Memory and transnationalism; the way transnational communities relate to memory ; recreating homelands, the impossible return, homecoming narratives.
– Ethics and oblivion; memory as an active process, a duty to remember the homeland?
– Amnesia, the pragmatics of amnesia, instances of these phenomena and what they are symptomatic of.
– Créolité, créolisation, the creole paradigm and memory.
Conference organizers
Françoise Kral, Professor of English and postcolonial studies, Université de Caen Basse Normandie.
Corinne Bigot, Assistant Professor, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre
Sam Coombes, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh
