------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: Anne Fuchs <[log in to unmask]>
CALL FOR PAPERS
Memory Contests: Cultural Memory, Hybridity and Identity in German
Discourses since 1990
Date: 23-25 June 2004
Venue: University College Dublin
The conference intends to engage with a fundamental paradigm shift on
interconnected levels of cultural identity. While the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries can be described as the age of failed
assimilation, post-war and post-colonial societies are characterised by
multi-ethnicity and new forms of cultural hybridity. Since the 1960s,
German debates about cultural identity have been characterized by the
engagement with the Holocaust as a total rupture that makes
identification with historical models of a German identity problematic.
However, the Historians' Debate of the 80s begins to mark a move
towards the gradual historicisation of the Holocaust. What we are
beginning to witness is a shift of paradigm from communicative memory
to, what Marianne Hirsch has aptly called, "postmemory". With the death
of the generation that shares first-hand experience of the Nazi-period
and the Holocaust, memory relies increasingly on repositories of the
past, such as archives, museums, memorials, literature, and works of
art. As a result of this, memory becomes more mediated, self-conscious,
and at times, even ironic.
In Germany's case, this shift coincides with the process of political
unification and a reevaluation of the legacy of the GDR on the one hand
and the 'Bonner Republik' on the other. The 1990s are characterised by
frenzied memory work and public memory contests, recent examples of
which are the debates about the Stasi past, the Goldhagen- and
Wehrmacht debates, the Walser-Bubis debate, the Leitkultur debate, and
the debate about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. While the
philosophical discourse from Adorno, Lyotard to Derrida has focused on
the Holocaust as a non-representable caesura, wider public debates have
been spurred by recent imaginings, both popular and academic, of this
event. In this context, cultural memory may be seen as a contested
performance which, perhaps paradoxically, has become intensified with
increasing historical distance.
It is against this background of a fundamental shift of paradigm that
the conference organisers invite investigations of how identity and
memory are being negotiated in post-unified Germany. Drawing on recent
postcolonial debates as well as current theories of cultural memory,
identity, and gender, the participants are invited to analyse a variety
of materials from divergent points of view. The focus of the conference
will be on post-1989 memory contests.
We would welcome papers on the following themes:
(A) Theoretical perspectives on memory, trauma, identity, gender, and
narrative;
(B) Multi-ethnicity and cultural identity;
(C) Post/memory of the Shoah in contemporary German and German-Jewish
narratives, drama, and film;
(D) Revisions of the past (for example, the experience of both World
Wars, the Holocaust, the role of the 1968 generation, RAF generation,
Stasi past etc.) in post-unified Germany;
(E) Mediated expressions and materiality of memory and identity (for
example, architecture, photographs, memorials).
The conference language will be English. Please send a one-page
abstract to [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask],
[log in to unmask]
by 1 April 2003.
Dept. of German & Humanities Institute Ireland
Drs. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, Georg Grote
University College Dublin
Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
Tel.: + 353 1 716 8309
Fax: + 353 1 716 1175
|