Watch recording here:

https://youtu.be/NnGToYGWSzo

Speakers:

Elizabeth Jelin (Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (IDES) Senior Researcher at CONICET)

Silvana Mandolessi (KU Leuven)

Fazil Moradi (Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS))

Chair: Verónica Abrego (Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

 

Description:

Among the many recurrent issues on the agendas of the Global South, the memory of a violent political past often occupies a key position. Remembering a silenced and/or forgotten violent past is often conflictive but crucial work, as making sense of the past means negotiating and constructing the present with a future perspective.

The extermination unleashed by German Nazism in Europe and, since then, the decades plagued by social violence in other sites of the world have established an international judicial canon and an ethical attitude shared by most peoples: the aspiration to see human rights protected and those who violate them punished. Thus, the universality of human rights and the principle of global law provide a glimpse of the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness. The Global South is united not only for having experiences of social violence after 1945, but also by common memories of colonialism and by a reality in which millions of people are still at the end of a value chain, the beneficiaries of which are mostly in the North. At the same time, voluntary and forced migrations to the North create transnational and transcultural ties and solidarities, while international judicial standards encourage policies of recognition, no doubt with variable results, numerous ambivalences and contradictions.

In terms of the shared memories that transcend geographical boundaries and political borders, cultural studies speak of memory work as cultural translation (José Brunner 2014) or characterise it as multidirectional (Michael Rothberg 2009), as a process that, since the Shoah, has multiplied the listening of neglected social memories. This panel proposes to consider the implications of memory work in the transnational space, in order to reconstruct resonances, to explore the limits of what we share and to find answers to the question of to what extent we may consider ourselves citizens of a global community.

About:

Elizabeth Jelin - Argentinian sociologist engaged in research in the areas of human and citizenship rights, social inequalities, gender and the family, social movements, and memories of political repression. Senior Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and at IDES (Institute of Economic and Social Development) in Buenos Aires. Was and is a member of academic boards of numerous scientific international institutions. Author of books and articles. Among the most recent ones, Pan y afectos: La transformación de las familias, Los trabajos de la memoria (English edition: State Repression and the Labors of Memory), La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social (English edition: The Struggle for the Past. How We Construct Social Memories) and Cómo será el pasado. Una conversación sobre el giro memorial. Recipient of Bernardo Houssay National Prize for Research Trajectory in the Social Sciences granted by the Argentine government. Doctorate Honoris Causa at Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre – La Defense.

Fazil Moradi is a Research Fellow at Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and an Associate Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Dr Moradi has been a researcher at the International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment, and taught at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Halle in Germany. As a socioanthropologist of modernity, he is a fellow at Law, Organization, Science and Technology Research Network, Sci-Tech Asia Research Network, and Refugee Outreach & Research Network. In the recent years, he has started to work with medical science scholars on the long-term impacts of chemical warfare agents at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His book Being Human: Genocide and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq is forthcoming. He is editor of Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (with Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Ralph Buchenhorst; 2017) and Tele-evidence —on the Translatability of Modernity’s Violence (with Richard Rottenburg; 2019). Moradi’s current research interests include, the British colonial destruction of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897; restitution of the Benin art; decolonial polity; the specter of the enlightenment philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo; race and gender; and algorithmic modernity.

Silvana Mandolessi’s research interests lie in memory and trauma studies, twentieth century and contemporary Latin American literature and culture, affect theory and the digital turn. She is assistant professor of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “Digital Memories”. She’s been visiting professor at the University of California, UCLA, Los Angeles, and visiting researcher at UNAM (Mexico) and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina). She is the author of Una literatura abyecta: Gombrowicz en la tradición argentina (Brill, 2012), co-author of Digital Reason: A Guide to Meaning, Medium and Community in a Modern World (Leuven UP, 2020), and co-editor of Disappearances in Mexico: From the ‘Dirty War’ to the ‘War on Drugs’. (Routledge forthcoming), Afectos y violencia en la cultural latinoamericana (Iberoamericana/Verveurt, forthcoming), El pasado inasequible. Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio (Eudeba, 2019) and Estudios de memoria (Eduvim 2015). She also co-edited special issues of European Review and Nuevo Texto Crítico on the transnational dimension of identity, memory and culture in the Hispanic world.

Verónica Abrego’s work focuses on social memory, migration and living together, and intersectionality in literature and culture of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, especially Argentina and Brazil. She received her doctorate with a text on the scientific, literary and social discourses on women persecuted during the repression of the 1970s/80s in Argentina (German original: Erinnerung und Intersektionalität, 2016) and has since published a series of articles (s. ORCID). She co-edited Nación y Migración: España y Portugal frente a las migraciones contemporáneas (2015) and is co-preparing two forthcoming publications on transatlantic networks of Latin American intellectuals, artists and musicians in Cold War Europe and on Intersectionality and Narrated Worlds in literature and media.