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- Convenors:
-
Michiko Aramaki
(Concordia University)
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
- Stream:
- Relational movements: States, Politics and Knowledge/Mouvements relationnels: États, politiques et savoirs
- Location:
- MHN 033
- Start time:
- 5 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
What happens when the procedures of "forced forgetting" are revealed? Our panel will delve into the subject of forced forgetting and its revelation in different socio-cultural settings.
Long Abstract:
Robinson and Bishop (1997) declare that the "aphasia" or code of silence in Thailand ultimately helped preserve its existing hierarchies of race, nationalities, class and gender. Buyanderger's studies (2013) on the ethnography of Mongolia state that forced forgetting ("technologies of forgetting") was utilized by the state to undermine social remembering of past atrocities and violence, in an effort towards nation-building; it's argued that these technologies generated violence through the practice of domination and oppression.
The panel shall explore the significance of historical and present "forgetting", channeled through self-censorship or enforced by the state. In this light, we'll question: what happens when the technologies and procedures of forced forgetting are unveiled? What impact does this revelation have on the formation of shifting socio-cultural memories? What do recovered "memories" do to the society in question, and to the world at large?
We welcome papers and collaborations, multi-disciplinary and other, historical or present; relevance to current state of affairs are encouraged, cultural and creative explorations are also welcome.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my personal life history grounded in the gendered performativity of the patronym, I question a biopolitics of names that would erase Greek diasporic female to male trans temporalities and discuss the implications of such a disappearing archive for documenting transmasculine lives
Paper long abstract:
Remembering my trans-Atlantic voyage to Canada from Athens Greece in the mid-1950s and the concomitant Anglicization of my Greek surname, I encounter the violence of forced forgetting in the Age of Trans.
This paper seeks to expose and contest obstacles to the visibility of trans men and trans masculine embodiments that the Americanization of Greek patronymic names in Canadian naturalization citizenship documents poses for archiving trans lives and their trajectories, in the context of new administrative policies pertaining to name changes for Canadian immigrants today.
Played out against the backdrop of the current celebratory response to recent amendments to the civil code in Québec pertaining to protocols for changing name and gender marker on identity documents without surgery, my paper reflects upon the "impossible identities," contradictions and conflicting truth-obligations encountered by marginalized non-native trans men who are, since 2014, required by law to make retro-active name changes on naturalization certificates as a pre-condition for passport applications under their current legal name status, masculine embodiment, and identity as reflected on official identity documents issued by provincial agencies.
Drawing on my personal life history grounded in the gendered performativity of the patronym, I question a biopolitics of names that would erase Greek diasporic female to male trans temporalities and discuss the implications of such a disappearing archive for documenting transmasculine lives
Paper short abstract:
This study analyzes the social impact of the revelation of erased traditional philosophies, religion and ideas in Japan. Because the past was purposefully erased by the foreign power, and submission to the US Authority introduced, that the complex process of forgetting and remembering began.
Paper long abstract:
For many Japanese, the end of the World War II marked the beginning of the separation of its historical perspective of Japan before and after WWII. It was recently revealed that during a period following the end of the War the U.S. authority systematically and clandestinely destroyed books in Japan while secretly shipping copies thereof to the US Library of the Congress (Nishio 2008; Tsuchiya 2009). This revelation caused some polarized reaction — some were shocked but others were indifferent. Yet, this very polarized reaction signifies the presence of the complex processing of the meaning of its own past.
In this context, this study will analyze the social impact of the revelation of erased traditional philosophies, religion and ideas in Japan. I will look at literary canons that existed before and after the war and examine the ideas expressed in the books that the US authority had banned. I will examine symbolism used in some books that survived the American censorship during the post-war years and finally, I will focus on anxieties expressed in the most recent literature regarding forgotten Japanese heroism erased from Japan's national identity. By tracing the complex plays of symbolism of the forgotten and the remembered, this paper reveals the sense of the ever-lasting "postwar" period in Japanese imagery. I will argue that because the past was purposefully erased by the foreign power, and submission to the US Authority introduced, that the complex process of forgetting and remembering began.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will be a hybrid text of poetry and prose contemplating the socio-political and biophysical dynamics I experience, being human.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will be a hybrid text of poetry and prose contemplating the socio-political and biophysical dynamics I experience, being human. Below are a few sections from this discourse.
We pour into cities and out the grand battement stretch
bold quelled the untouched night
with unfinished business
Recite it, narrate it, lament it. Is this a revelation? Maybe. Biological complex systems turn robust when perturbation occurs. Genetic variation follows. Wake up wizard, the beat has joined the apocryphal. Remember, rules are not objectives but means. Un-sayable measures drive them.
Extract nothing from history but all the whats and hows, pink silly agglutinations decidedly colliding. A tear at the core lending edge, varieties of symmetry as the symmetry within variety - color charge, electrical charge, magnetic form factor against momentum we continually absorb and emit, despite our dysfunctional arrogance.
Lindenmayer grammar, Feigenbaum grammar, Fibonacci grammar, in and out the same, differently. Do not worry about form, said Rumi.
oak tree in the garden simulations tanda
outside of justice backed technologies
verdant and fungible the beat
empathy/capital
Hear, hear. Under complex non-linear systems, particles have materiality and force. They are also the product of forces. The relationship between language and culture is similar.
even les evenements are not our own
is this revelation or manipulation?
coming into undifferentiated origins
the will to desire to relate to that
the undoing of that
the denial of that
empathy like language evolving
gardant le regard.
Paper short abstract:
This application of an Olsonian "Projective Verse" poetics--with further reference to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Daphne Marlatt, and certain postmoderns--to Arpine Konyalian Grenier's poem "Waterwheel at the Electric Institute" relates to the theme of "forced forgetting" in Grenier's poetry.
Paper long abstract:
I am proposing the application of a modified Olsonian "Projective Verse" poetics (with further reference to Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Daphne Marlatt, and certain postmoderns) to Arpine Konyalian Grenier's poem "Waterwheel at the Electric Institute" as part of a session on "forced forgetting" in Grenier's poetry. This poem constitutes a notable force field, and with Grenier's academic training in science (quantum physics), my approach would afford rich interpretative play in investigating the theme of "forced forgetting" in her writing.
In a review of Grenier's collection The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins, published in Jacket2 (see http://jacket2.org/reviews/registers-breath-origins-and-concession), I situated Grenier in a trajectory extending from Cid Corman, through William Bronk and Clayton Eshleman (with whom Grenier studied at California Institute of Technology in Pasedena). While Origin was not a Beat "little mag," it might be argued—especially in light of her prose poem "Ever Feral and Chrial, the Howl" delivered at the European Beat Studies Conference Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2015—that Grenier is a post-Beat—or so those who have Donald Allen's penchant to categorize might have it. What she shares with the Beats—in particular Allen Ginsberg—is her raising of social consciousness though her own experience of deracination and a forced forgetting (genocide) that formed not only her personal past but also informed the world with which she remains steadily at odds, forever on the margins, yet always compassionate and engaged.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing upon fieldwork findings, this paper investigates how Acadians in the present experience, enact their identities in their day-to-day lives and to what degree they experience nationalism and forgetting as Acadian people in the community of Pomquet, Nova Scotia.
Paper long abstract:
Acadians are often associated with their deportation in 1755, the Grand Dérangement; however, it is unclear if this historic event is still important for Acadian public memory with the various sociopolitical and nationalistic reconstructions of Acadian identities that have occurred between the 1880s and today. Drawing upon preliminary fieldwork findings, this paper investigates how Acadians in the present experience, use/enact their identities in their day-to-day lives and to what degree they experience nationalism and forgetting as Acadian people in the community of Pomquet, Nova Scotia. Differing from their Acadian counterparts in New Brunswick, Acadians in Pomquet were not exposed to the narrative of the deportation and nationalism until the 1960s. Although the community has a focus on local history, there was less attention paid to the national movement in the 1880s which contained elements of forced forgetting. It was not until Nova Scotia Acadians began to mobilize with the La Fédération acadienne de la Nouvelle-Écosse in 1968 with a branch in Pomquet that the community became fully aware of the Acadian Renaissance and the narratives that emerged from it. This paper will examine how contemporary Acadians experience Acadian popular memory and identity, the ways in which national myth has impacted the community since the 1960s, and how Acadian identities have adapted to the shifting political and social landscape in their community and Nova Scotia.