Sponsored by many entities, including the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Illinois, and serving as the second meeting of the Network in Transnational Memory Studies (NITMES), this international conference brought established researchers together in fruitful collaboration with emerging scholars and graduate students. Conference organizer Michael Rothberg and conference assistant Jessica Young, both of Illinois, invited participants to interrogate and develop the notion of “diasporic memory,” that is, the persistence and transformation of cultural memory outside of national borders, and to investigate the multiple ways that memory travels and is dispersed across place and time by forces like colonialism, immigration and state-sponsored violence. The conference’s participants deployed a variety of disciplinary methods, from anthropology and museum studies, to epidemiology and literary studies, and presented research on remarkably diverse histories, cultures and literatures that, in many cases, traverse continents and centuries.
The conference began on the morning of the first day with participants discussing pre-circulated works-in-progress by two Illinois graduate students. In “Computer Viruses and Infectious Agents: Transnational Memory in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and Amitav Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome,” Jessica Young from English showed how viruses and other contagions can be deployed as literary metaphors of diasporic memory, and as literal vectors of diaspora since patterns of colonialism and imperialism have been determined, in part, by disease. Hapsatou Wane from Comparative and World Literature presented “Wandering in the Womb of Memory: The Detour of the Surrogate Daughter in As Mulheres de Tijucopapo and Hérémakhonon, en attendant le bonheur.” Responding to both students via Skype, Astrid Erll (Frankfurt) remarked that Wane’s paper showed how all cultural memory returns to points of entanglement rather than to unproblematic points of origin; and that Young’s work is innovative in its linkage of contagion with diasporic memory. The two papers demonstrate, Erll noted, that literature very effectively charts “the geographies of memory.” However, she affirmed the importance of encountering memory in various cultural materials and through diverse methods and disciplines, such as digital humanities and anthropology.
In the afternoon, Michael Rothberg introduced two keynote speakers to a large public audience after explaining the impetus for the conference—to put in conversation multiple methodologies for studying diaspora and transnational memory, and to interrogate and compare categories such as settler colonialism, diasporic communities and indigenous peoples. For the first keynote lecture, Aleida Assmann (Konstanz) presented “Transnational Memory and the Construction of History through Mass Media.” Assmann observed that family serves as a vessel for memory but is also an impediment to the creation of national and transnational memory narratives that advance cross-cultural understanding, justice and peace. Assmann illustrated this point effectively in her account of how the TV show Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter revealed some untold family secrets about WW II but did not succeed in helping the millions of Germans who watched the program imagine how other nationalities remember differently this shared past. What the program lacked, Assmann seemed to be saying, is the kind of critical edge deployed by the students of the 1968 movement who challenged their parents’ version of what happened during the war and in the years immediately after.
For the second keynote lecture, Ann Rigney (Utrecht) presented “Diaspora Poetics and the Articulations of Memory,” in which she elaborated an essential poetics for representing diaspora. Rigney argued that to speak from diaspora is to affirm a hyphenated identity; that memories of one’s dispersed family and community are filtered through the present time and place; and that identities and cultures are constantly remade by brutal forces like conquest, settlement, and assimilation. All of these inform diaspora poetics. Whether immigrants assimilate, or not, they change the places they come to, and they are changed by those new places. Immigrants enter into new forms of entanglement, into new shared narratives that are not founded on kinship. Rigney used these ideas to produce an innovative reading of Scott’s Ivanhoe and give an account of the novel’s reception in North America. Ivanhoe is one model of how memory is made, how nations of diverse peoples must be imagined if they are to realize themselves historically, and how hybrid identities are forged.
The keynote lectures were followed by a lively roundtable discussion by four Illinois scholars in diverse disciplines. Jodi A. Byrd stated that from the perspective of American Indian Studies, diaspora, as a description of a resettling, might not be a useful concept, especially because American Indians and other indigenous communities suffer from on-going colonial victimization. Ronald Bailey suggested that African American Studies offers essential models for theorizing diaspora, especially with respect to the persistence of diasporic memory over longer time frames, even centuries. Historian Peter Fritzsche stressed that the national context still shapes the materials analyzed by both keynote speakers, suggesting that a transnational focus on cultural memory might mistake core issues. In response to Fritzsche, Assmann agreed about the continuing centrality of the national but also argued that national and transnational memories co-evolve and cannot be studied in isolation. Brett Ashley Kaplan, in Comparative Literature, described her in-progress comparative study of the works of W.G. Sebald and Gerhard Richter to illustrate how artists represent Nazi perpetrator memory as it travels across generations.
The second day of the conference began with remarks by two respondents, Matthew Nelson (Illinois) and me, Jonathan Druker (Illinois State), on some of the most salient ideas generated on the first day, and was followed by open discussion among all participants. Nelson mused on forms of transnational memory, beyond prescriptive and descriptive versions of it, that take shape in the realm of the imaginative, which performs an important labor by giving affect and psychological depth to traces of history that cannot otherwise be made to speak. In my remarks, I reflected on diasporic subjectivity, a condition in which one is multiply entangled in at least two spaces and two timeframes.
The conference continued with participants discussing three more pre-circulated works-in-progress. Tina M. Campt (Barnard) situated her paper, “Quiet Circuits of Memory: Passports, Photos and Diasporic Vernaculars,” in the context of an ongoing book project that asks “what kind of diasporic work … photographs do.” Campt distinguished migration from diaspora, which she defined as a dwelling, a foundational moment when communities settle. Rosanne Kennedy (Australian National) offered an overview of her paper, “In the Wake of Moby Dick: Whaling, Colonialism and (Trans)national Remembrance in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance,” which considers how a text like Moby Dick helped enable novelist Kim Scott to tell a story about traditional shore-based whaling among the Aboriginal people of Western Australia, and, at the same time, to link this local history to transnational memories of colonization. Rebecca Saunders (Illinois State) offered “Mobilizing Memory: The Transnational Politics of Dememorialization in Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile and the Films of Patricio Guzmán,” an account of how works of art nurtured beyond the borders of an oppressive regime can return home to dislodge spurious official histories. Two Illinois colleagues, Yasemin Yildiz and Ellen Moodie, offered responses to the papers.
In the afternoon, Erica Lehrer (Concordia-Montreal) presented, “Curating Diasporic Memories,” which described an exhibit in Krakow she curated in the summer of 2013 that displayed, carved wooden figurines representing stereotypical Jews of pre-Holocaust Poland. Through an innovative and dialogic design, Lehrer’s exhibit “Souvenir, Talisman, Toy” elicited complex responses from museum visitors, some of whom found the figurines to be antisemitic while others saw them as honoring the memory of Polish Jews or viewed them as merely nostalgic and kitschy. These diverse responses suggest the persistence of contested and multi-layered memories of Jewish life and the Holocaust in Poland and beyond. Respondent Jenelle Davis (Art History, Illinois) spoke about the challenges museums face when dealing with contested histories.
Two pre-circulated works-in-progress were discussed in the last panel. Sonali Thakkar (Chicago), in “Diaspora without Genealogy? Adoption, Zionism, and Queer Kinship,” addressed questions of identity, self-fashioning and post-memory that are raised by adoption. Her work added thought-provoking complications to our assumptions about how familial bonds, which also act as constraints, shape memory. Harriet Murav (Illinois), in “Memories of the Future: Freud, Bergson, and Bergelson,” brought together three authors that look for ways to think beyond the pathology of traumatic repetition, and to find, through memory, paths toward the future that are not completely determined by the past. Respondent Pieter Vermeulen (Stockholm) said that both papers staged productive encounters between literature and theory to negotiate a return to the past that might, by unsettling received memory, open the way to more productive futures.
A concluding discussion was led by Ann Rigney, Aleida Assmann, and Michael Rothberg. For Rigney, the conference affirmed a number of ideas, including the centrality of imagination in the creation and transformation of memory but also, pointing a way toward future research, in figuring futurity and hope. Among many observations, Assmann commented on the productive tension that was uncovered between the mobility of memory and the idea that diasporic memory seems to issue from a settling or a new rooting. Rothberg, touching on many aspects of the conference, suggested that the work presented affirmed the importance of the transnational as an analytical category that need not discount the national.
