[Commlist] Symposium CFP Cultural Memory of Past Dictatorships: Narratives of Implication in a Global Perspective

Cultural Memory of Past Dictatorships:
Narratives of Implication in a Global Perspective


Symposium Date: 20 May 2022
Mode of Delivery: Online
Host Institution:  University College Cork, Ireland
Deadline for Submitting abstracts: 17 December 2021


Keynote Speakers will include:

Professor Jie-Hyun Lim (Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang 
University)
Professor Juliane Prade-Weiss (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Professor Michael Lazzara (University of California, Davis)


Democratic societies around the world are haunted by the memory of their 
dictatorial past. While the legacy of past dictatorships has long been a 
point of concern of academic disciplines such History, Sociology, and 
Heritage Studies, in the last decades, it has become a key issue for 
scholars of literature, cinema, and visual arts, too. This is a much 
welcome trend of the scholarship of Memory Studies, not only because 
writers, film-makers, and visual artists can heavily affect how the 
democratic present imagines and understands the dictatorial past, but 
also because they allow us to think about it in particularly complex and 
productive ways.

Recent development of memory theory confirms the importance of cultural 
production. Going beyond a schematic victim-perpetrator dichotomy that 
tended to characterise national and public discourses across the world, 
today’s scholarship of Memory Studies points towards the importance of 
mapping the grey zone that exists between victims and perpetrators, 
recognising the varied ways in which ordinary people can be entangled 
with past, present, and structural injustices and how they can be 
implicated in their perpetuation. Cultural products seem particularly 
apt to think about the past along these lines since novels, films, 
graphic-novels, tv-series, and works of art enable us to see the diverse 
subject-positions that individuals can have vis-à-vis past injustices, 
including those that fall beyond the purview of the law. By doing so, 
cultural products can offer extremely powerful platforms to reflect on 
the dictatorial past in all its complexities.

This Symposium brings together scholars working on the representation of 
past dictatorships through the study of cultural products. Adopting 
Michael Rothberg’s concept of implication as a common thread, the 
Symposium aims to investigate the ways in which cultural products engage 
with the ethical dilemmas of complicity, guilt, and responsibility that 
dictatorships create. In representing past dictatorships, how do 
cultural products construct and problematise the notions of victim, 
perpetrator, beneficiary, bystander, collaborator, and implicated 
subject? How can cultural products help us think about the ways ordinary 
citizens are involved in dictatorial regimes? What are the benefits and 
limitations of using aesthetically refined works to pose ethical 
questions about the past? By approaching these issues in a global, 
comparative, and transnational perspective, the Symposium also aims to 
explore the tensions between local and global circulation of narratives 
of implication assessing which visual and narrative tropes and templates 
are used to appeal to both global and local audiences.

We welcome papers that touch upon the legacy of any past dictatorships 
in Africa, Americas, Asia, and Europe (widely conceived, including both 
Eastern and Western countries as well as the Balkans) through the study 
of any forms of cultural products. If interested, please send a 300-word 
abstract and short bio blurb to both organisers by 17 December 2021:

Organisers:  Dr Guido Bartolini  ((gbartolini /at/ ucc.ie))
Dr Diana Popa  ((popa /at/ tlu.ee))

The Symposium seeks to explore the following, non-exhaustive, list of 
topics:

— The involvement of ordinary people in the crimes of dictatorships.
— Position-taking through cultural depictions (e.g. victims, 
perpetrators, beneficiaries, bystanders, collaborators, and implicated 
subjects).
— Narratives of guilt and responsibility for past dictatorships.
— Failures to construct a sense of implication through redemptive 
narratives and self-absolving tropes.
— Diachronic implication in and trans-generational responsibility for 
the dictatorial past.
— The relationship between the Ethics and the Aesthetics in the 
representation of past dictatorships.
— The limits and dangers of narratives of implication.
— Tensions between the local and global in narratives of implication 
(either at production and reception level of the artwork or at the 
textual level)
— The relationship between transnational memory practices and national, 
local or regional debates provoked by narratives of implication.


You will be notified whether your proposal has been accepted in February 
2022.


This Symposium is generously supported by the Irish Research Council and 
the ERC project ‘Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the 
Global Arena’ funded by the European Research Council under the European 
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

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