Friday, February 11
121 Pyle Center
9am-4pm

PLACES OF MEMORY:
A Visual Culture Faculty Colloquium

A working schedule, subject to change, as follows:

9:00
Rob Nixon (English)
"What is a War Casualty?"

I'll be looking at war and amnesia, focusing on war-inflicted casualties whose deaths are forgotten because they are insufficiently dramatic, insufficiently visible, and conveniently deferred. I'll consider several situations where war's environmental toxins have created large numbers of deferred deaths. (e.g. from Agent Orange, depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs). One of my concerns is the relationship between memory, place, and time and to draw attention to the slow, delayed war fatalities that are inflicted after war's end.

9:30
Steve J. Stern (History)
"Places and Cover-Ups: Two Models of the Dialectics of Memory and Oblivion"

Based on the history of memory struggles about the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile, this presentation explores argues that the dialectics of memory and oblivion do not reduce to the standard dichotomy of memory versus forgetting. On the one hand, the work of activist memory related to human rights involved exposing places that are "covered-up" in the simple sense of being secret, hidden, or taboo for the public culture. On the other hand, sometimes the method of visual "cover-up" is to cover one slice of historical memory with another, in a place that would otherwise evoke awareness and mobilization of memory related to human rights. "In the end, precisely because memory struggles involve a quest for meaning in the present that pits one kind of selective memory against another, the dialectics of cover-up versus expose' -- and the related geography of visual culture -- do not reduce to a simple dichotomy of memory versus oblivion.

Coffee Break

10:30
Jacques Lezra (English)
"Tracking Memory"

The camp--_Lager_, concentration or extermination camp--, Giorgio Agamben tells us, reveals the bareness of life: 'today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.' The violent politics of the camp's inclusions and exclusions, of its sortings and processings, have turned, for two generations now, on the visualization of its physical borders: what lies inside, the unimaginable, incalculable, sublime; what lies outside, banal, threadbare, mundane. Between inside and out, a line, a border, a set of technologies, institutions, laws: the barbed wire of the compound. What sort of space does this border occupy, devise? How, in the cinematographic representation of the camp, does the camp's border _work_? What is the relation between this border and "life" as Agamben has come to define it? (Do the camp's borders define what "bare life" contains, includes, excludes?) This brief talk approaches these questions by means of a discussion of two sets of cinematographic shots, one drawn from Alain Resnais' determining _Night and Fog_, the other from a notorious tracking shot in Gillo Pontecorvo's controversial, much less well known film _Kapo_.

11:00
Vinay Dharwadker (Languages and Cultures of Asia)
"Figured Spaces of Time: Poets, Painters, and Painter-Poets in Contemporary India "

Several major contemporary Indian painters, such as Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Gieve Patel, and Ram Kumar, are also important poets, playwrights, and/or fiction writers in languages such as Gujarati, Hindi, and English. Together with other major Indian painters who are trained in literature, such as Arpana Caur, they have systematically explored both the figures and the landscapes of memory and history. These "literary painters," along with visionary figurative and landscape artists such as Sudhir Patwardhan, have reconfigured time in ways that are unique in late twentieth-century painting. Their work memorializes figures, places, and events in both the past and the present, transforming our understanding of our social, political, religious, and historical identities to an unprecedented degree.

lunch break

1:00
John Hitchcock (Art)
"Renewal/Strength: Reclaiming Frozen Ground "

John Hitchcock will address stories heard and issues regarding living on indigenous lands in Oklahoma . He will speak about a series of site-specific installations that relate to honoring elders, loss, transition, and the fragmentation of land.

1:30
Laurie Beth Clark (Art)
"Trauma Memorials "

I began thinking about trauma memorials in the days immediately following September 11, 2001, when impromptu memorials appeared not only throughout New York City but also at symbolically significant sites associated with New York all over the world. In hopes of understanding the relationship between these grassroots responses and the kinds of memorial structures that are being proposed by architects and urban planners, I began an international comparative study of trauma memorials. In the last few years, I have spent time at slave forts in Ghana, atomic bomb memorials in Japan, concentration camp sites in Germany, and most recently, war memorials in Vietnam. In this project, I take a comparative look at the ways institutional frameworks for trauma memory are constructed and resisted. Some of the key elements in my study are the use of architecture and guide services to create and reinforce identification (as well as dis-identification), the parallel between the tropes and devices of pilgrimage in use at "on-site" and "off-site" memorials, the role that preparation plays in the probability of a transformative outcome, the dilemma of intrusive quotidian experiences, the use of "educational alibis" to counteract the suspect nature of "trauma tourism," the kinds of rituals enacted and other staged forms of interactivity, the place of nationalist pride at the site of grieving, and the ambivalence regarding suitable souvenirs.

Coffee Break

2:30
Preeti Chopra (Languages and Cultures of Asia)
"Locking up the Gods, Bringing out the Heroes: History, Preservation, and Memory in Colonial Bombay "

In contrast to the Portuguese, the former owners of Bombay, who destroyed temples and attempted to forcibly convert the local citizenry to Christianity, Gerald Aungier, Bombay’s first British governor gave assurance of religious freedom to Bombay’s citizens. However, in certain cases the British did attempt to control religious buildings, usually for preservation. In each instance use of the building was altered from religious to secular. Unlike former conquerors who imposed their own religious symbols on the sacred space of conquered populations, British conquest resulted in the triumph of “history” over “memory,” in the sense that these terms are used by Pierre Nora. This paper suggests that both the colonial regime and the local citizenry influence the associations of a monument by looking at both the secularization of religious structures by the British, and the insertion of the sacred by the local population into the secular public landscape. Colonial Bombay contained spaces, and buildings dedicated to contain or remember heroes, and British royalty. These became the new sacred landscape for a publicly secular regime, where mortal heroes and royalty replaced gods. Some of the local citizenry treated early British statues as gods. British and local practices intersected in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Victoria Gardens. Here not only were British royalty commemorated, but the secular British regime was faced with the problem of accommodating a popular historical Muslim shrine. The gardens were used once a year to celebrate a Muslim festival that commemorated the Prophet’s visit to the outskirts of Mecca as he convalesced after a serious illness, thereby transforming a secular public space into a sacred one.

3:00
Thongchai Winichakul (History)
"Rivalry at the Thai Champs Elysees"

Inspired by what he experienced in Paris, a Thai absolute monarch , Chulalongkorn, built a grand avenue in the middle of Bangkok in 1898, expecting it to be a center of commerce and public activities like the Avenue de Champs Elysees . At one end of the street is the Grand Palace , a majestic structure built since 1782. At the other end is a project for an Italian style marble castle that was done after the kind had passed away. It was a main road to modernity. The absolute monarch was overthrown in 1932, when Chulalongkorn’s son was the king, by an oligarchy in the name of “democracy”. In 1938, then, the oligarchy built a huge Monument of Democracy right in the middle of the thoroughfare. The significance of fascist-style monument was soon faded away since the regime ended with its Japanese ally at the end of World War II. The subsequent military rules never celebrated the monument or its historic significance again. The significance of the monument was revived as it was a major gathering place during the student uprising in 1973 that ended the long military rules. The Thai Champs Elysees became a major political street that saw peasants, workers and other demonstrations, including another bloodshed in the middle of the street in 1992. The street’s new association with democracy has not lost to the royalists of the present time. The history of the street and the original project in 1898 was reinterpreted, together with the new history of democracy in Thailand . According to this royalist history, the absolute monarchs were preparing and paving the ways for democracy before the 1932 revolution. The street itself was designed to be a huge gathering place of people. The last absolute monarch who was overthrown in the name of democracy is currently known as the Father of Thai Democracy. A museum for the Father of Thai Democracy was built recently on this street. About the same time, a memorial for the student uprising in 1973 was finally built as well on this street. Commerce and business are striving. But political rivalry remains heated on this important street of memory.