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- Convenors:
-
Erol Saglam
(IMU)
Eray Cayli (London School of Economics and Political Science)
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- Discussants:
-
Yael Navaro
(University of Cambridge)
Charles Stewart (University College London)
- Stream:
- Borders and Places
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting through both earthly (e.g., farming, ruination, burial) and unearthly (e.g., magic, curse, haunting) engagements with land, focusing on how they acknowledge past political violence that otherwise seems unacknowledged.
Long Abstract:
Postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and feminist theorists have highlighted the divergences between nationalist historiographies and other ways of remembering or forgetting. Challenging universalist and homogenous approaches to time and narrative, these theorists have attended to the localized, incoherent, and fragmented ways in which individual and/or collective memories operate, citing as examples trauma victims or subaltern communities whose relations to the past are severely curtailed through colonial-modernist framings. This postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist attention has been characteristically charged with material and spatial import; place, geography, topography, objects and the body have been explored as the media of the localizations, incoherences and fragmentations in question.
Despite this interest in materiality and space, the conventions of narrative-based remembering or forgetting have yet to be deprived of their hegemonic status, as affective potentialities unassimilable within the contours of memories qua narratives remain underexplored. This panel seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the land in which one dwells affects the remembering or forgetting of the past and the forgings of identity. It explores subterranean modalities of remembering and forgetting as indicated not only by the unearthly practices of magic, curse and haunting, but also daily and mundane—earthly—engagements such as farming and burial. The panel comprises ethnographically grounded accounts that highlight how the practice of unearthing—in both senses of rendering unearthly and digging up from the earth—might offer a way into the analysis of publicly unacknowledged histories of political violence and individual or collective struggles to assimilate them.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Taking the return of two people from a collection of human remains from southern Africa, brought to Vienna in 1909, as example, I wish to discuss some of the diverging, ruptured processes of identification and detachment that people from different positionalities show in relation to the remains.
Paper long abstract:
Much has been said about the affective qualities of human remains and their always present excess of meaning, their specific status of being both person and object. But how do we account for the diverging, multiply ruptured processes of identification and detachment that people from different positionalities show when it comes to remains that were unethically removed from their places of origin and put into scientific collections?
Taking a specific collection of human remains appropriated in southern Africa and brought to Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century as example, I wish to discuss some of these diverse attitudes and try to map them along geographical, political and social faultlines. The materiality of unethically acquired human remains in scientific collections both enables and hinders affective engagements with the past.
In 2012, the remains of two of the individuals of the collection in question were returned to South Africa. I conducted interviews with different stakeholders who participated in the negotiation and realisation of the return. These offer insights into the various effects this process had on different people, if and how the engagement changed their understanding of the violent histories these remains represent. They also show how continued structural and epistemic violence complicates processes of relating to each other and the remains. My paper, staying close to this case study, will discuss some of the potentials and pitfalls of the return of human remains from scientific collections to their places of origin.
Paper short abstract:
In Colombia, competing representations and discourses on the armed conflict are at stake. Through creative means such as visual and corporal memorialization of the violence, some actors involved in memorial practices are attempting to challenge hegemonic narratives on peace and war.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on case studies in Medellin, the second largest city of the country, this paper suggests that certain "subterranean memorial practices" that have emerged in some of its peripheral neighborhoods, strongly traumatized by guerillas, paramilitarism and gang violence, can be considered as forms of resistance. "Galeria Viva" (Living Gallery) and "Cuerpos Gramaticales" (Grammatical Bodies) are two memorial initiatives through which some actors, conceived here as "memorial entrepreneurs", advocate and offer alternative ways of representing past and present violence. Through an annual commemoration event introduced in 2014, Cuerpos Gramaticales presents artistic and memorial performances in various public spaces in Medellin, staging the partial burial of dozens of individuals in order to denounce the disappearance of their relatives in a nearby mass grave. Launched in 2017, Galeria Viva is a project that focuses on painting murals on the walls of the cemetery "La América", representing, among others, teenagers who were recently assassinated; the paintings are generally co-produced with relatives of the victims. Memorial practices are considered here as resources through which individuals and groups can challenge hegemonic representations of the violence that continues to plague many cities in Colombia, despite the prospect of peace. Memorial entrepreneurs in these urban marginal areas, through creative means such as visual, performative, and corporal remembrance of violence, resist the loss of their territories, counter the descent of victims into collective oblivion and propose alternative visions of violence prevention.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses different modalities of inscribing forgetting in the Maarjamäe memorial complex in Tallinn. It addresses, specifically, the dynamic ways in which national identity and historical representations are constructed by neglecting inherited memorials, as a slow-motion sacrifice
Paper long abstract:
This paper puts the focus on the Maarjamäe memorial complex in Tallinn, which is composed of a Soviet monumental landscape design, a cemetery of German soldiers, a Russian palace currently hosting the Estonian History Museum, and the newly built memorial of Victims of Communism. Through descriptions and visual documentation of the site, literature review and informal conversations with other visitors, it investigates how the negligence of the Soviet land-scape memorial has been producing memory un-work, which takes form of material decay and preserved disrepair.
The ethnography foregrounds how forgetting is inscribed on historical landscapes and engendered through negative material performance. It argues that, in the case of Estonia, institutionalised forgetting led to the active negligence of Soviet legacies, which in turn contributed to rendering problematic the Communist past.
New developments in the site are changing its current situation of neglect, however, since the construction of a novel antagonist memorial element in the area is paradoxically producing a more attentive maintenance of the Soviet monumental design.
This paper explores, thus, the complex relation between the tangibility and intangibility of memorials, highlighting how the ruin and abandonment of monuments is a political and social performance. It does so through a contemporary archaeology of forgetting, using the trope of excavating to dig through layers of discourse and to gather fractured memorial traces.
Paper short abstract:
Based on long-term fieldwork in Tampa, Florida, this paper explores the controversy around a once-forgotten, recently rediscovered African American cemetery in order to theorize the place of race and haunting in postwar urban planning.
Paper long abstract:
In what ways do violent pasts reassert themselves in the present? In 1950s Tampa, Florida, an African American cemetery, somehow "erased" from municipal records, became the site for the construction of a modernist public housing project. For many decades, the cemetery lay forgotten and forsaken. In 2019, however, the existence of the cemetery and the bodies interred therein was brought to light by the efforts of local activist-historian. The revelation of the cemetery was accompanied by a flurry of social activity. Archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to confirm the presence of coffins and bodies. Residents of the public housing project lying atop the cemetery reported a series of ghostly visions and visitations. The city and its residents debated the significance of the cemetery for the past, present, and future of Tampa. Based on long-term fieldwork on the affective politics of race and empire in South Florida, a region marked simultaneously by global forces of "urban renewal" and entrenched structures of class, gender, and racial inequality, this paper will investigate the coming-to-light of the cemetery and its social aftermath to inquire into the logics and limits of postwar urban planning. Built on the assumption of the mutability of the built environment and its emotional ecologies, efforts to transform the city must inevitably wrestle with the stubbornness of the material and affective worlds they seek to remake.
Paper short abstract:
Landscapes have profound implications on the ways socialities and memories are forged. Drawing on an ethnographic research in Turkey, this study explores how memories are engaged through hauntings and treasure hunts.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary discussions on landscapes underline how they might play significant roles in communal identities and how abjected memories are accommodated in public culture (Navaro Yashin 2012; Gordillo 2014) in different modalities. Studies across different contexts demonstrate that places constantly induce affects and are deeply implicated in the ways the past is remembered (Fontein 2011) through ruins, ghosts, material traces, and uncanny (Freud 1919) objects. Materialities and places, hence, are not comprehended solely as passive backgrounds of social interactions but actively shape these relationalities. Conducted in 2012 and 2015, my ethnographic research in northeastern Turkey deals with haunted (Gordon 1997; Frosh 2013) topographies and hunts for "possessed treasures" through the case of rural communities ‘discreetly’ speaking a local variant of Greek with archaic linguistic characteristics. Through my research I note how this cultural heritage is strictly secluded into the private and remains invisible in public. Still using old Greek toponyms to orient themselves across the Valley, locals incessantly circulate narratives around treasures supposedly left behind by Greek and Armenian communities whose very existence has been denied by the official historiography. These treasures, local claim, are protected and possessed by ghosts that protect them locals' intrusions. Through this paper, I explore how locals' relations to the places they dwell in are configured through unaccounted past memories. Local narratives around buried Greek/Armenian treasures and their subsequent haunting of the intimate spaces, hence, can be explored as alternative modalities of remembrance through which locals engage with unaccounted memories of the past.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper the concepts of "noise" and "silence" are analyzed in depth as ethnographic-turning-into-analytical categories that shed light on processes of recovering and generating histories from the topologies of "haunted" places in Santiago, Chile.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper the concepts of "noise" and "silence" are analyzed in depth as ethnographic-turning-into-analytical categories that shed light on processes of recovering and generating histories from the topologies of "haunted" places in Santiago, Chile. I explore the dynamics of sound in paranormal investigation in locations of political ambiguity, tied to the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, and argue that soundscapes (Eisenlohr, 2012) are poised as excavation devices for multiple historical topologies, providing a kind of archaeology across a multitude of historical voices. As locations of suffering, torture and death, the places discussed are obscured from normative historical accounts of the dictatorship; the point of such investigations resides in accruing "bits" of memory from the machines involved and reconstructing story-lines of geographical and biographical memory. These apparatuses generate sound, static, fragments of voices and fast-moving phonemes - the so-called "noise" - seen as a backdrop from which invisible entities are thought to "make" words, or images. These words or images come in fragments, laden by the ambiguities of the corresponding affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009), and are suggestive, but not determinate of, particular hidden realities, reconstituted through "partial connections". I compare this ethnographic instance to the interpretation process on extraterrestrial phenomena in current Chilean ufology, and its will to unearth, via the "noise" left in human bodies, a cosmology of aliens long at war. "Noise", in both cases, as analytic, acts as a pseudo-archaeological device to penetrate layers of historical causalities, where silence is just as ontologically impactful.