Memory and Postcolonial Studies: Synergies and New Directions

Venue: Centre for Advanced Studies, Highfield House, University campus, University of Nottingham
Period: 10 June 2016

9:30–10:00    Registration and coffee/tea (cloisters area of Highfield House)

10:00–11:15  Welcome and keynote paper (Highfield House A01/02) (chair: Dirk Göttsche):
Stef Craps (Ghent): “Memory Frictions and Cross-Traumatic Affiliation in Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror”

11:15-11:30   coffee break

11:30-13:00   Breakout sessions:
Questioning Trauma Theory (Highfield House A01) (chair: Nigel Hunt)
- Nicki Hitchcott / Laura Blackie (Nottingham): “Analysing memories of trauma in post-genocide Rwanda: theoretical and ethical considerations”
- Abigail Ward (Nottingham): “Long-memoried women: slavery and memory in contemporary Black women’s poetry”
- Yannis Papadopoulos (University of the Peloponnes): “Collective trauma, transgenerational identity, selective memory: dealing with the Ottoman   past in Greece”

Memory and National Identity (Highfield House A02) (chair: Jean-Xavier Ridon)
- Rosemary Chapman (Nottingham): “Literary history and memory in Québec”
- Bram Mertens (Nottingham): “‘The earth has more than enough room...’: concealment and revelation in Erwin Mortier’s Marcel”
- Anneliese Hatton (Nottingham): “Post-national Portuguese literature: reconfiguring the imperial master narrative”

Memory and Life-Writing across Cultures (Trent B65) (chair: Franziska Meyer)
- Heike Bartel (Nottingham): “Food-memories: food and cooking in contemporary migration literature in German”
- Sarah Fang Tang (Nottingham): “Reconstruction of history and cultural memory in contemporary Chinese diasporic women’s writing – a comparative study of two memoirs”
- Christopher Davis (Warwick): “Languages of memory: writing the dying body”

13:00-14:00   Buffet lunch in Cloisters area of Highfield House

14:00-15:30   Breakout sessions:
Comparative Postcolonial Studies across Europe (Highfield House A01) (chair: Jonathan Kwan)
- Monika Albrecht (Vechta): “Comparative Postcolonial Studies: East-Central and Southeastern Europe as a postcolonial space”
- Benedikts Kalnačs (Riga): “The working memory in contemporary Latvian culture and society: between postcolonialism and postcommunism”
- Vladimir Zorić (Nottingham): “‘Ich mein, er müsse kommen von Osten’: the Danube as a memory site in the late Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav period”

Postcolonial and Postimperial Memory: Lusophone Perspectives (Trent B65) (chair: Stephen Roberts)
- Paulo de Medeiros (Warwick): “Violence, memory and politics in a Lusophone postimperial context”
- Emanuelle Santos (Warwick): “Matters of postcolonial memory: implications of contemporary representation of a postcolonial, post-conflict and  post-socialist Angola in the fiction of José Eduardo Agualusa”
- Rui Gonçalves Miranda (Nottingham): “Indian Ocean indices: Borges Coelho and the tracing of the to-come”

Memory and the Black Atlantic (Highfield House A02) (chair: Abigail Ward)
- Hannah-Rose Murray (Nottingham): “‘The real Uncle Tom’: slavery, abolition and the British nostalgic narrative from 1870 to 2016”
- Zoe Trodd (Nottingham): “Am I still not a man and a brother? Protest memory and the contemporary movement against global slavery”
- Stephanie Lewthwaite (Nottingham): “Traumatic memory in the art of Freddy Rodríguez”

15:30-16:00   coffee break

16:00-17:20   Breakout sessions:
Place, Memory and Performance (Highfield House A01) (chair: Joe Jackson)
- Victoria Carpenter (York St John’s University): “‘2 October is not forgotten’:Tlatelolco 1968 massacre and social memory frameworks”
- Christopher Collins (Nottingham): “Performing rural spaces in urban places: memory and affective nostalgia”
- Spencer Jordan (Nottingham): “Form space to place: creative writing and performative memory in the smart city”

The Politics of Memory across Europe (Highfield House A02) (chair: Monika Albrecht)
- Sara Jones (Birmingham): “Towards a collaborative memory: remembering dictatorship through transnational co-operation”
- Anna Soulsby (Nottingham): “Narratives and the continuing influence of history on the Czech-German relationship”
- Alun Thomas (Nottingham Trent University): “Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s memoir The Silent Steppe and the (post-)colonial status of Stalinist Kazakhstan”

Multidirectional Diasporic Memory (Trent B65) (chair: Jenni Ramone)
- Alex Hastie (Sheffield): “Intersecting memories of Algeria, the Holocaust, resistance, and decolonisation: multidirectional memory in Maghrebi-French cinema”
- Beatrice Ivey (Leeds): “Malika Mokeddem’s N’Zid (2001) and La désirante (2011): gendering multidirectional memory in the postcolonial sea”
- Rebekah Vince (Warwick): “Pulled in all directions: the Holocaust, colonialism and exile in Valérie Zenatti’s Jacob, Jacob (2014)”
- Antonia Wimbush (Birmingham): “‘Effacer mes mauvaises pensées’: memory, writing and trauma in Nina Baouraoui’s autofiction”

Memory and History: Africa and the West (Trent LG13) (chair: Nicki Hitchcott)
- Berny Sèbe (Birmingham): “Cross-cultural post-colonial memories: European imperial heroes in post-independence Africa”
- Catherine Gilbert (University of London): “Mediating memory: Rwandan women’s testimonies in the West”
- Dirk Göttsche (Nottingham): “History or memory? Recent English and German novels about European imperialism in Africa”

17:30-18:15   Regional research groups and centres: presentations and networking (Highfield House A01/02) (chair: Dirk Göttsche)

18:15-19:00   Sandwich tea and refreshments

19:00-20:30   Keynote paper / ISOS (Institute for the Study of Slavery) annual lecture (Highfield House A01/02) (chair: Stephen Hodkinson):
Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire): “The Politics of Cultural Memory: Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland (1845-2016)”

Attendance is free but subject to registration. Please register HERE .

Inquiries: NicolaPearson, email: afxnp@nottingham.ac.uk
Professor DirkGöttsche, email: dirk.goettsche@nottingham.ac.uk