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UCSB Memory Studies Group
Past Events
2018-2020
Transnational Memory & Memory as Traveling Concept: Around Imbi Paju's 2005 Documentary Memories Denied
October 30th, 2018
4:00-5:30 PM
Phelps 6206C, GCLR Seminar Room
Join us for a discussion of Imbi Paju's Memories Denied, a 2005 documentary treating Soviet deportations of people in Estonia, confronting the nexus of trauma, memory, travel, and forgetting as a survival strategy.
Please view the documentary before the session.
Additional Readings:
- Astrid Erll"Traveling Memory"
- Excerpts from Theories of Memory, ed. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead
Contact ucsb.memory.studies@gmail.com to join our mailing list
Collective Memory & History
Revisiting Nora’s “Sites of Memory” & Current Debates on Memory & Media
Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2018 5:30-7:00 pm
GCLR Seminar Room, Phelps 6206C
Join us to discuss collective memory & media with Claudio Fogu (Professor of History and Italian Studies, UCSB)
Readings:
Huyssen, Andreas. Selections from Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. (Stanford UP, 2003).
Klein, Kerwin. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127-150.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Selection from On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (1871).
Collective Memory & Holocaust Studies
Revisiting Halbwachs’ “Collective Memory”
Current debates on Holocaust Memory & Digital Culture
Monday, February 11, 2019 5:30 -7:00PM
GCLR SEMINAR ROOM, PHELPS 6206C
Join us to discuss collective memory & Holocaust studies with Harold Marcuse (Professor of History, UCSB)
Readings:
Selections from The Collective Memory Reader (including Maurice Halbwachs, Eric Hobsbawm, Aleida Assmann, Marianne Hirsch, Reinhard Koselleck).
Rothberg, Michael. Introduction. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
Kansteiner, Wulf. “Transnational Holocaust Memory, Digital Culture and the End of Reception Studies.” The Twentieth Century in European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception. Ed. Plewa B. Törnquist and Andersen T. Sindbæk. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017.
---. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41.2 (May, 2002): 179-197.
Harun Farocki's
Images of the World and the Inscription of War(1988)
Monday, March 4, 2019
7:00-8:30 pm, HSSB 1173
Dr. Ute Holl, Kade Visiting Professor (Germanic and Slavic Studies, Comparative Literature), will moderate our post-screening discussions.
"After becoming every student film-club's favorite meditation on the media and modem warfare in the age of smart bombs and Operation Desert Storm, Images of the World quickly advanced to something of a classic: the reference film, the anchoring point for seminars on Paul Virilio, on the essay-film as a hybrid documentary but politically subversive film genre, on the 'limits of representation' after Auschwitz and Schindler's List, as well as-this needs to be rediscovered after September 11th-the definitive film about terrorism."
- Thomas Elsaesser, Senses of Cinema (2002).
Readings:
Elsaesser, Thomas. "Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist." Harun Farocki. Working on the Sight-Lines. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam UP, 2004.
11-40.
Alter, Nora. "The Political 1m/perceptible: Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War." Elsaesser 211-34.
Ernst, Wolfgang & Harun Farocki, "Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts." Elsaesser 261-86.
The Making of A Communal Military Memory in Japan
Hirsch's Post Memory & Transmission
Second-Generation Perpetrators
Monday, April 15, 2019 5:30-7:00 pm
GCLR Seminar Room, Phelps 6206C
Join us to discuss memory, iconicity, and postmemory of the Asia-Pacific War with Professor Sabine Frühstück (East Asian Studies, UCSB)
Readings for Session 5 (#2 is optional)
1. Frühstück, Sabine. “Embattled Memories, Ersatz Histories.” Chapter 5 in Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: UC Press, 2007. 149-178.
2. Harootunian, Harry D. “Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History.” Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Eds. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 98-121.
3. Koga, Yukiko. “Memory, Postmemory, Inheritance: Postimperial Topography of Guilt in Changchun.” Chapter 3 in Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. 67-121.
Keynote Speaker
Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), which is being published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. Previous books include Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and, co-edited with Neil Levi, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003). With Yasemin Yildiz, he is currently completing Inheritance Trouble: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance for Fordham University Press.
The keynote address will be on "The Implicated Subject: Art, Activism, and Historical Responsibility." Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of historical responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. Drawing on his forthcoming book The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford UP, 2019), Rothberg will discuss examples of implication taken from different national contexts, including South Africa and the United States, and from different social realms, including art and activism. The lecture will illustrate how the position of the implicated subject can offer a lens for addressing different scales and temporalities of injustice, but can also provide a lever for rethinking resistance and solidarity across social location.
Schedule of Events
9:30-10:00: Coffee & Breakfast
10:00-10:15: Opening Remarks
John Majewski, Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts
10:15-11:15: Questioning Memory: Science, Technology, and Narratives in Motion
Chair: Trinankur Banerjee (UCSB, Film & Media Studies)
Elena Festa (UCSB, Comparative Literature)
“Digital Cultural Remembering”
Elizabeth Chen (Chapman University, English and Creative Writing)
“Making the Asian American Identity Belong Through Digital Discourse”
Aili Pettersson Peeker (UCSB, English)
“Moving Past the Narrative Self: Metaphors of Memory in Beckett and Neuroscience”
11:30-12:30: Performing Memory: Recollection and Recognition through Literature and Art
Chair: Dustin Lovett (UCSB, Comparative Literature)
Margarita Delcheva (UCSB, Comparative Literature)
“Aesthetic Memory: Poetry, Witness, and the Early Childhood Self”
Kio Griffith (UCSB, Art)
“‘Coral Sea’: The Unheroic Battle and the Surrender of Abandoned Youth”
Patrícia de Nobrega Gomes (UC Berkeley, Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies)
“Movements and Stillness: Rosana Paulino’s ‘Tecelãs’ and Experimentations of the Flesh”
12:30-1:30: Lunch
1:30-2:45: Keynote Address by Michael Rothberg, 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA
“The Implicated Subject: Art, Activism, and Historical Responsibility”
3:00-4:15: Memories of Destruction: Disaster, Resistance, Healing
Chair: Olga Blomgren (UCSB, Black Studies Dissertation Scholar)
Meaghan Baril (UCSD, Literature)
“Nostalgia and Apocalypse: The Eschatological Import of Race in Parable of the Sower and A Canticle for Leibowitz”
Sebaah Hamad (UCSB, Comparative Literature)
“Continuous Mourning, Trauma, and Normalized Chaos in The Fifth Season”
Linshan Jiang (UCSB, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies)
“Transcending Trauma: Women’s War Memories in Literature among Mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan”
Coralie de Mazancourt (UCLA, French & Francophone Studies)
“Healing the Memory of the Dictatorship in Evelyne Trouillot’s La mémoire aux abois”
4:30-5:30: Sites of Memory: Rethinking History through Space
Chair: Wendy Sun (UCSB, Comparative Literature)
Alexandra Noi (UCSB, History)
“Sites of Conscience in a Landscape of Cosmopolitan Memory: Case of Perm-36”
Angelica N. Garcia (UC Merced, Interdisciplinary Humanities)
“California and Colorado in the Twentieth Century: History, Memory, and Labor Activism in the Agricultural, Canning, and Coal Mining Industries”
Penny Yeung (Rutgers University, Comparative Literature)
“Writing Maps and Cities: Theorizing Histor(icit)y in Dung Kai-Cheung’s Atlas and Visible Cities”
5:30-6:00: Reception
Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus University)
“The Cosmopolitan Dilemma: Migration and the Politics of Forgetting in Contemporary Europe”
Wednesday, May 29, 2019 6:00-7:30 pm
HSSB 4020
Co-sponsored by Comp. Lit., Germanic & Slavic Studies, Global Studies, and UCSB's Graduate Center for Literary Research
Cosmopolitan memory seems in decline all across Europe. The transition of WWII memory from communicative to cultural memory has reduced attachment to the Holocaust narrative. In addition, the dynamics of digital media tend to fragment public discourse, allegedly creating self-serving echo chambers of political confirmation bias, on the one hand, and highly emotionalized arenas of political confrontation, on the other, thus destabilizing the previous cosmopolitan consensus. This lecture will put these hypotheses to the test by analyzing the political discourse and memory regimes about migration that were distributed by Germany’s political parties via the web and their social media platforms in the spring of 2019. The analysis suggests that balkanization and historization of memory cultures might contribute to the malaise but that cosmopolitan memory has first and foremost fallen victim to its own contradiction and lack of democratic and emotional legitimacy. Moreover, the images and narratives of cosmopolitan memory have been coopted for the purpose of providing memory plausibility to the nationalistic project of ending immigration to Europe.
Wulf Kansteiner is Professor of Memory Studies and Historical Theory at Aarhus University. Trained in Germany and the US, he has published widely in the fields of Holocaust studies, media history, historical theory, and memory studies. Co-editor and co-founder of Memory Studies (published since 2008), he also has extensive experience in building and directing international and interdisciplinary research teams in memory studies. He is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (2006); co-editor with Claudio Fogu (UCSB) of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2006); Historical Representation and Historical Truth (2009); Den Holocaust erzählen: Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität (2012), and with Claudio Fogu and Todd Pressner, Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (2016).
Warped Mourning
Thursday, October 24, 2019 6:00-7:30 pm
PHELPS 6206C
Join us to discuss the issues of memory and mourning in Russian and Eastern European context with Sven Spieker, professor of art and culture in the Comparative Literature Program at UCSB.
While the publication of the Gulag Archipelago and the memoirs of former prisoners, and the opening of previously classified archives revealed the scope of the tragedy and initiated public discussions, present-day Russia has not yet come to terms with its past. The uniqueness of the Stalinist terror, in which the clear boundary between the victims and perpetrators cannot be drawn, as well as political environment impede the process of working through historical trauma. In the book Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013), Alexander Etkind argues that late Soviet and post-Soviet postcatastrophiс culture is a memoryscape still haunted by the unburied ghosts of the victims and that it produced a unique set of memorial practices – a warped mourning, a perverted recognition, and melancholia.
Reading for the session is available through the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eKjD7Hg750zDwA9O8ctagPhSJ_dZNVsC/view
Nostalgia & Melancholia
Inflections of Left Melancholy
Thursday, Dec. 5, 2019 6:00-7:30 pm
GCLR Seminar Room, Phelps 6206C
Join us to discuss the "Future of Nostalgia" with Prof. Sven Spieker (Germanic & Slavic Studies, UCSB).
Readings:
Feature film: Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). To be
screened on Dec. 3. BRDA 1640 (Broida Hall, The Department of Physics), 6:30pm.
Boym, Svetlana. “I. Hypochondria of the Heart.
Nostalgia, History, and Memory.” The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001, pp. 25-112.
Nostalgia & Melancholia
Inflections of Left Melancholy
Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2020 6:30-8:00 pm
GCLR Seminar Room, Phelps 6206C
Join us to discuss the "Left Melancholia" with Prof. Catherine Nesci (French & Italian Studies, Comparative Literature, UCSB).
Readings:
Benjamin, Walter. "Left-Wing Melancholia (on ErickKästner's New Books of Poems)." (1930)
Brown, Wendy. "Resisting Left Melancholy." Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3, 1999, pp. 19-27.
Traverso, Enzo. Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History, and Memory. Columbia UP, 2016, pp.1-84.
Transgenerational Remembrance
Professor Nakamura (Theater & Dance, UCSB) will discuss her latest book on performance & haunting of the Asia-Pacific War since 1989.
Nakamura’s book focuses on artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. Working from theoretical frameworks of haunting and ethics, Transgenerational Remembrance develops an analytical lens based on the Noh theater ghost. Noh emphasizes the agency of the ghost and the dialogue between the dead and the living. Integrating her Noh-inflected analysis into ethical and transnational feminist queries, Nakamura shows that performances move remembrance beyond current evidentiary and historiographical debates.
(https://nupress.northwestern.edu/content/transgenerational-remembrance)