MIGRATION, MEMORY AND PLACE 5-7 December 2012 NETWORK FOR MIGRATION AND CULTURE and DANISH NETWORK FOR CULTURAL MEMORY STUDIES University of Copenhagen and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj

KEYNOTE, PLENARY AND SESSION ABSTRACTS (04-12-2012, FINAL)

KEYNOTES

ANDREAS HUYSSEN Shadowplays and Memory Politics: A New Aesthetic Medium Chair: Peter Madsen, University of Copenhagen

Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University The talk will analyze the practice of the shadowplay as medium in the work of William Kentridge and Nalini Malani in relation to South African apartheid and the Indian/Pakistani Partition. Part of a transnational and 'multi-directional' memory discourse, Kentridge and Malani raise key issues for 'global art' such as appropriation and translation, aesthetic specificity, the relation to the political, and the centrality of the local beyond indigeneity.

ALISTAIR THOMSON Moving Stories and Missing Pieces: Interpreting Migrant Women's Lives Across Letters, Photos and Memories

Chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, University of Aarhus

Alistair Thomson is Professor of History, Monash University

In the project for my book Moving Stories: an intimate history of four women across two countries (2011), I had an extraordinary opportunity to work with women who migrated from Britain to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. They provided access to letters they had written to their families back in England, family photographs they took of their new lives in Australia, journals and other life writings about their migration, and oral history interviews we conducted over several years. These different sources not only provided rich evidence about women’s migration experience; they also showed how the women articulated that experience in different ways, in different forms, and for different audiences. Oral histories, for example, are sometimes criticised for the unreliability of memories recorded long after the event. Certainly much of the detail of contemporary letters was lost to memory. Yet sometimes the women recalled aspects of their earlier lives which they could not write about in contemporary letters, or they recounted the hidden history behind the glossy surface of a family photograph. My paper explores how migrants articulate and represent their experience, and how, as historians, we can use these ‘moving stories’ to understand the missing pieces of migrant women’s lives and the changing meanings of the migration experience.

EDWARD CASEY A Matter of Edge: Border vs. Boundary at La Frontera Chair: Sten Pultz Moslund, University of Southern Denmark

Edward S. Casey is distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook In this talk I discuss the complex and evolving situation at La Frontera, the U.S.-Mexico border. I do so with special reference to the role of borders and boundaries in this vexed circumstance. I identify certain primary differences between these two kinds of edge in order to illuminate the earlier history of La Frontera as well as what is now happening at certain critical locations. In the course of my remarks, I take up issues of mapping the border, the nature of the “borderline,” and especially the presence of the massive wall that has been constructed along considerable portions of La Frontera.

SIGRID WEIGEL The Mediterranean from the perspective of the Black Sea: Topography and cultural semantics of land and sea in the European thalassic debate Chair: Mads Anders Baggesgaard, University of Aarhus

Sigrid Weigel is Professor of Comparative Literature, Technische Universität, Berlin, and Director of Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin What would follow from shifting the view point of European cultural history from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea? This question will be examined in front of the horizon of the topographical paradigm of ‘land and sea’ and its historical index. Based on an examination of Carl Schmitt’s concepts and its historical background the lecture discusses the role of land and sea in the topographical discourse on Europe and suggests to develop a different perspective. Since the Black sea functions as an appendix or as a sort of borderline case for the ‘European’ continent it provides a proper view point of a topographically reversed image of reflection.

NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS The Scenes of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism Chair: Anne Ring Petersen, University of Copenhagen

Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor of Cultural Studies and Media & Communications, University of Melbourne

This lecture would focus on the relationship between place, mobility and the making of a world images. I will argue that place and mobility are not to be understood opposites, but as mutually constitutive categories. After an initial exploration of the relationship between the location of the Stoic Schools in the central arcades of Athens and their articulation of a cosmopolitan vision, I will then make the more general claim that contemporary artistic experiments in cross-cultural dialogues and aesthetic representations of global connections are also part of a common attempt to give form to a fundamental need to find a place and create a sense of belonging in the world as a whole. In general this lecture will argue that the process of making a world, which is central to the artistic imagination, is expressive of an aesthetic mode of cosmopolitanism, and that it is a mode that radically extends the conventional debates on normative or deliberative cosmopolitanism.

PLENARY ADDRESSES Christopher Whitehead The Representational Politics of Migrant Stories in City Museums Chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University

Christopher Whitehead is Professor of Museology at Newcastle University. His research activities focus on both historical and contemporary museology. In the context of museological study he has strong interests in learning theory, social constructionism, theories of representation, cartography and disciplinarity. He is the author of three books: The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate 2005), Museums and the Constructions of Disciplines (Bloomsbury/Duckworth Academic 2009) and Interpreting Art in Museums and Galleries (Routledge 2012). He is principal investigator of the Newcastle University work package of the EC-funded MeLa project (Museums in and Age of Migrations)

This paper, emerging from the ‘Museums in an Age of Migration’ (MeLa) FP7 project, focuses on representations of migrant experiences in European city museums, considering themes such as homeland, dislocation, struggle, adaptation and cultural tradition. Adapting place identity theories, we consider the complex politics involved in the representation of migrants in ‘receiving states’, involving, on one hand, the impulse to recognise and historicise the presence of migrants and diaspora groups in centres like London, Amsterdam or Berlin and, on the other, the conferral of identity on the ‘host’ country (e.g. as multicultural, liberal, tolerant etc.). This dynamic exists in a social context of heterogeneous attitudes to multiculturalism which find expression in museums, as in the Amsterdam Museum where one display pertains to the murder by an Islamic fundamentalist of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, pointing to the limits of tolerance and the possible fallacy of peaceful multicultural integration. Within this political and politicised sphere of representation we examine displays involving the use of migrants’ possessions to emblematise cultural displacement and survival; such objects are set alongside personal stories about how and why individuals moved from a homeland, towards settlement in an (initially) alien land with which they have to forge relations of belonging. In some displays we find narratives of seamless adaptation and integration, and in others we find unconcluded narratives of struggle and separateness. This analysis underpins consideration of museums’ roles in negotiating and representing a network of interacting place identities: migrants’ ‘homeland’ and post-migration identities and the identity conferred upon the ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ states. At stake in this account of personal stories and networked identity constructions are critical questions about the charged representational politics of folding the guest into the host, the other into the self, refashioning the ‘we’ of whom and to whom the museum speaks. [co-authored with Rhiannon Mason and Susannah Eckersley]

Ilaria Vanni Objects and narratives of migration and place in Belongings, an Australian online material culture collection Chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Ilaria Vanni is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She researches visual and material cultures in relation to diasporas, social change and to political activism.

Domestic objects play an important role in narratives of migration to Australia, as documented in the project Belongings, and online exhibitions of objects and histories told as first person narratives by people who arrived in Australia in the post WWII years. The project is curated by the New South Wales Migration Heritage Centre (MHC) and it was developed in partnership with state-wide community and local history societies (http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/belongings/about-belongings/about-theproject/). This paper focuses on the analysis of Belongings’ first person memories in relation to objects. In doing so, it explores the role of objects in telling histories of migration and considers the reasons why certain objects become repository and triggers of memories. Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino’s work on cultural apocalypses is a good starting point to think

about the relationship between material culture and migration. De Martino defines the ‘crisis of presence’ as the moment when familiar objects become unfamiliar or uncanny by losing their relation with the web of domestic uses, habits, sense of belonging, and cultural memories (as it happens in experiences of migration). In this crisis, objects either lose their meaning becoming mute, or acquire new layers of meaning entangled in the loss and re-creation of entire life-worlds, relational universes, senses of place, ‘homes’. By taking Belongings as its case study, this paper offers a two-fold argument. On one hand it argues that objects in Belongings enable the telling and performance of displacement from one place and regrounding in another one as a continuum of affective, embodied and political experiences that question the separation between being at home and being a migrant. On the other it posits that the choice to present these objects and memoirs as an online exhibition rather than in a physical space creates a shared, multicultural, and relational idea of ‘home’.

Peter Leese Living Spaces: a new aesthetic for migrant recollection Chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Peter Leese is Associate Professor in social and cultural history at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen. His current research project, on the history of migrant recollection and observation, explores the development of migration life-stories, changes in visual representation, and the development of ‘observer’ accounts since the 18th century. His previous publications include Shell Shock: traumatic neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (2002), The British Migrant Experience: an anthology (2002) and Britain since 1945: aspects of identity (2006).

Autobiographies, diaries and criminal records as far back as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative (1772) tussled for ‘ownership’ of the migrant’s experience. Migrant recollection’s history is one of continual struggle: for power, position and ideological control; for knowledge of what it means to be part of a mobilized, global labour force. In the later 19th and early 20th century, for example, the emergent disciplines of anthropology and sociology sought to classify, categorise and objectify migrant’s lives, in the social philanthropy of Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1902-3) or the life-story construction of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20). At the beginning of our ‘memory boom’ (the 1970s onwards), which coincides with the rise of oral history and the gradual recognition of traumatic memory, John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Seventh Man (1975) marks a shift from the study of migrant as object to migrant subjectivity; from history to life-story. This new aesthetic for migrant recollection centres on the everyday: on the spaces of departure, transit and arrival; on a family photograph, a blanket or a supermarket receipt. Here I consider the affinities between A Seventh Man and more recent accounts such as Winterbottom’s In This World (2002), Biemann and Holmes’ The Maghreb Connection (2006) and the Museo delle Migrazioni di Lampedusa. Each analyses the movement and living space of migrant memory, of migrant life-story. Each sets up word-image combinations to convey movement through shack, truck, cargo container, workshop, tent, boat and holding room.

Pieter Vermeulen The Critique of Cosmopolitan Memory in Teju Cole’s Open City Chair: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Pieter Vermeulen is assistant professor in English literature at Stockholm University. He works in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, and memory studies. His writing has appeared or will appear in journals such as Arcadia, Criticism, Critique, Memory Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Postmodern Culture, and Textual Practice. His book Romanticism after the Holocaust was republished in paperback by Continuum in 2012. He is currently at work on a book-length study of the relation between affect and genre in the early-twenty-first-century novel.

This paper reflects on the limitations of the concept of “cosmopolitan memory” through a reading of Teju Cole’s successful 2011 novel Open City. Like related notions such as “multidirectional” (Rothberg), “global” (Assmann and Conrad), or “prosthetic” (Landsberg) memory, Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider’s notion of “cosmopolitan memory” bolsters strong claims for the role that memory can play in promoting transcultural encounters and understanding. Starting from the observation that Levy and Sznaider’s work underplays the historical and conceptual complexities of the notion of cosmopolitanism that they invoke, this paper reads Open City as a more promising investigation of the nexus of metropolitanism, aesthetics, and transcultural encounter that constitutes the legacy of moderm cosmopolitanism. I show how the novel’s exploration of the values of different artistic media and its practice of recovering memories of (often racial) violence is combined with a hardly perceptible awareness that these elements fail to add up to a significant cosmopolitan intervention. I trace the novel’s emphasis on the notion of the “fugue”: on the one hand, this names the contrapuntal principle of composition that the novel adopts to shape its memory work, while on the other, it indicates the psychiatric disorder of “dissociative fugue,” a form of reversible amnesia, from which the narrator seems to suffer. In the end, the novel proposes a more minimal ethics of radical dissociation instead of the more grandiose cosmopolitan dialectic of detachment and re-attachment.

Mary Watkins The Un-Doing of Hard Borders: Art at the U.S. Wall Against Mexico

Chair: Sten Pultz Moslund, University of Southern Denmark

Mary Watkins, Ph.D., a liberation psychologist, is co-chair of the Specialization in Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology and Ecopsychology in the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute (Santa Barbara, California, USA). She is a student of forced migration between Mexico and the U.S., and has worked in her home community to help create an oral history of the experiences of Mexicans who live in Santa Barbara without documents (In the Shadows of Paradise: Testimonies of the Undocumented Immigrant Community in Santa Barbara). She is the author of Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation, and Talking with Young Children about Adoption, and co-editor of Psychology and the Promotion of Peace. She is a Peacebuilding Associate of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, and a member of the national Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR). Her current work concerns the role of restorative shame in bridging communities that have been historically alienated due to histories of injustice.

The conjunction of the pernicious effects of transnational capitalism, environmental degradation, genocides and civil wars have caused millions to flee their homes in search of basic human rights to food, shelter, healthcare, education, and security. While the number of international migrants has doubled since 1994, we have become witnesses to the multiplying of highly militarized walls built between groups, nations, and regions. Their functions are multiple, i.e., to divide peoples, to prevent entrance to victims of forced migration, to preserve unjust income divides, to create cheap labor at and beyond the border, and to inscribe national rights above human rights. Like salve on a wound, art on these walls attempts healing functions. Countering nationalistic, class, and ethnic divides, artistic partnerships are forged. Rejecting false and militarized separations of hybrid or potentially hybrid cultures, art on the wall ignites critical consciousness about the dynamics of such barriers. Most strikingly, some border art fulfills what Freire calls an annunciatory function, awakening our imaginations to peaceful and just possibilities of relationship. While separation walls pose limit situations, border wall art helps us to see them not as “the impassable boundaries where possibilities end,” says Alvaro Pinto, “but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin” (1960, p. 284). The limit situations of hard borders call forth the creation of art as limit acts that cross over the given into rehearsal for and creation of a more just and peaceful world. This presentation will reflect on the functions of border art at and near the U.S. border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. It is drawn from a book-in-progress Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border by Edward Casey and myself.

PARALLEL SESSIONS

(1) Museums I: Representation of Immigrants and Their Stories in Museums

Chair: Alistair Thomson, Monash University

Christina Johansson Swedish Museums and Migration

Christina Johansson is a historian working as Senior Lecturer at the Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, and a key researcher at the Ludwig Botzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres. Besides studies on museums and migration she has published books, articles and reports on the relationship between state, nation, migration policy and representations of migration.

In the past the museums have functioned as important symbols of power for monarchs, empires, and nations and been legitimating the ruling regime. Later on the museum became important building bricks in the colonial project, functioning as symbols of power and displaying and classifying objects from conquered parts of the world. During the latter part of the 20th century societies all over the world became more diversified due to intensified globalisation- and migration processes. Societies are changing and museums have to change with them if they are to appeal to the public and try to meet the demands of a more diverse audience. The aim of this paper is to, from theoretical inspiration from scholars as James Clifford, Nina Glick Schiller, Katherine Goodnow and Stuart Hall, discuss how museums that traditionally have been relating to the local and national have dealt with the challenge of representing migration. By focusing on a specific case study – the project/exhibition “The Dream of a Better Life” produced at the Museum of Work in Norrköping – this paper will address the overall question: How are aspects of belonging, home, roots, divided loyalties, and integration represented and what does this say about the museum’s ability to address issues of migration and transnationalism?

Patricia Deuser Migration museums and (post-) national narratives of remembrance

Patricia Deuser is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Science, University of Leipzig. She is member of the “Laboratory migration”, an interdisciplinary research group affiliated at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin. One of her recent articles “Stairways to immigration”, deals with the entanglement of pedagogy, space and identity constructions at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York.

Migration museums, specifically national migration museums that build the focus of my study, have to deal with an underlying ambivalence: On the one hand they are set up to change cultural representations taking into account the population´s ungoing transformation and plurality in the respective nation state. They represent the ‘Other’ as ‘Same’. On the other hand, the stories they tell are national immigration stories that re-affirm the imagination of national borders and produce new ‘Others’. Taking a closer look at the Cité National de l´Histoire de l´Immigration (CNHI) in Paris, I will show the effects of this ambivalence and how it is dealt with in practice. The building of the museum, the former ‘Palais des Colonies’ with its visible colonial iconography, is itself a symbolic memory place which is used by political activists: by squatting the place, Sans Papiers-activists who mostly come from countries formerly colonized by France call attention to continuities between past and present. In contrast to this, the CNHI uses the building as an aesthetic framework for its exhibition that deals with the immigration to France since 1871. It neglects the specificities of the building as memory place for post-colonial migrants. Based on ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, the paper will scrutinize the possibilities and impossibilities of constructing new post-national narratives of remembrance in the framework of national museums.

Peter Muir Memory, Myth and Idealization in Lubaina Himid’s Tailor, Striker, Singer, Dandy (2011)

Dr. Peter Muir is a Research Associate with MIRIAD (the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design): http://www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk/visualculture/locationmemory/ and an Associate Lecturer with the Open

University. His current work focuses around the visual strategies of the historical avant-garde and their relationship to contemporary art practice.

Lubaina Himid’s Tailor, Striker, Singer, Dandy? was exhibited at Platt Hall Gallery of Costume in 2011. This small gallery holds an important collection of clothing dating from the seventeenth century, but also has a collection of cloth, described as ‘West African textiles.’ This paper argues that these textiles are mnemonic of migratory space, of relationships, of loss, of home, belonging and memory. Relationships that have slipped from our minds, relationships that are no longer able to ‘bear witness’ to their origins. Himid’s painted mediations reveal the visual richness contained in these fabrics, whist also staging those mnemonic relationships. Moreover, her engagement with these textiles (Baxandall) reveals significant aspects of the cotton trade in the North West of England. Himid appropriates the cloth collection to produce five full length ‘portraits’ of men: the four men identified in the title of the work itself, but also a fifth that personifies the African continent itself― a signifier of the diaspora and the processes of globalization. The paintings were exhibited in a small, discrete space, also included were a selection of bolts of cloth from the collection, a video loop of stills showing working drawings for the project, Himid’s explorations of colours as well as patterns deriving from the textiles themselves. In addition modified newspaper pages carrying stories about men of colour appearing in the media. The place and environs of the city of Manchester in colonial and post-colonial history (Orientalism) is crucial to Himid’s visual and textual rhetoric in this artwork― the cultural space of the gallery being the site for the artist’s presentation of cultural identities. This paper explores Himid’s use of the textile collection to create these figures, whose dress contains references to place and site, to migration and integration, to loss and mourning as well as mercantile and aesthetic relationships, both historical and contemporary. See http://www.lubainahimid.info/tailor_striker_singer_dandy

(2) The Dynamics of Migrants’ Memory and Imagination

Chair: Kasper Green Krejberg, University of Aarhus

Hala W. Mahmoud and Brady Wagoner Between Remembering and Forgetting: Challenges of Self-continuity among Refugees Hala W, Mahmoud is the Director of Psychosocial Programming at AMERA (Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance). She has been working as a researcher and practitioner with refugees in Egypt for over eight years. She has completed her PhD in Social-Cultural Psychology at the University of Cambridge, focusing on the culture, identity, and coping of Sudanese refugees in Cairo. Her research interests include: narrative, identity, culture, migration and refugee studies. Brady Wagoner (presenting author) is Associate Professor of Psychology at Aalborg University Denmark. He is on the editorial board of several journals, including Culture & Psychology, and is a co-creator of the F.C. Bartlett Internet Archive. His publications deal with culture, memory, methodology, and the history of psychology, among other topics. He is currently working on a book titled Bartlett in Reconstruction: Where Culture and Mind Meet.

This paper explores the dynamics of memory and self-continuity among refugees. Whereas some refugees deliberately avoid reminders of their homeland because of the emotional burden, others use reminders as a means of coping to sustain a sense of self-continuity. Yet even in the latter case, the results are inconsistent. The act of recreating aspects of home may or may not succeed in contributing to their wellbeing in the new environment. Being connected with the past can support one’s sense of self-worth as defined in one’s homeland, but it might equally serve as a bitter reminder of both the pre-flight suffering and the fact that they might never return. Included in this dynamic of memory and self-continuity is a tension between the need to adapt to new circumstances and the need to maintain a sense of grounding and belonging. This plays out through rituals, social spaces, cultural objects, food, clothing, etc. Thus, memory and identity here are as much about embodied actions as they are about mental cognitions, and creating continuity through time as well as space.

Irina Culic

Place, time, and the reconstitution of the self in international migration: the work of memory and imagination at Romanian immigrants in North America Irina Culic is a 2011-2012 Fulbright fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Babeş-Bolyai University in Romania. She has previously taught at Central European University in Budapest, University College London, and University of Windsor, Canada. She has published on nationalism and inter-ethnic relations in Romania and Hungary, the re-writing of history in post-communist Romania, on immigration, citizenship, and state-building in Central and Eastern Europe. Her present research takes the empirical case of historical immigration of Romanians to Canada and the US to approach issues of state power and embodiments of the state, ontological stratification of ethnicity, modes of subjectivity, and solidarity as generative element of social forms.

If progress in transportation made the experience of Eastern European immigration to North America a dislocation less definitive than it had been at the turn of the twentieth century, and communications now support a form of online, instant, and visual transnationalism, I find the celebration of short-circuiting of distance and time in migration hasted and I call for the re-signification of both distance and time in the case of overseas immigrants. The study takes imagination and memory as relational processes through which immigrants cope with the transformation of distance and time in their experience of migration, which starts well before the actual move takes place and continues for a long time after they have landed in the new country. By signifying and resignifying home and new home immigrants in the experience of migration, immigrants also operate in complex way to refashion their selves. The paper examines these processes for the case of Romanian immigrants to North America. Drawing on memoirs, yearbooks, and opinions published during the last one hundred years and on blogs, forums and material collected during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Romanian immigrants to Canada and the U.S., it indicates the striking similarity of practice and expression in becoming in the new country. It also investigates the variable modes of relating to the homeland and the new country, and reflects on the ontological work they do upon migrants.

Annelis Kuhlmann The Human Specific Space – on inner exile among theatre actors Annelis Kuhlmann is associate professor, PhD in Dramaturgy, at Dep. of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. She has published on a broad scale on dramaturgy in historical classical contexts as well as on more contemporary performance issues. She is president of Centre for Theatre Laboratory Studies (CTLS) – a researching collaboration between Dramaturgy at Dpt. of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University and Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark.

The Russian actor, pedagogue and co-founder of the legendary Moscow Art Theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) wrote four famous semi-fiction novels, which in a few years ago appeared in a new English translation by Jean Benedetti as My Life in Art (2008) and An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary (1-2 -2008) and An Actor’s Work on a Role (2010). Stanislavsky tried to facilitate his experiences about the overall question, how to liberate the actor’s creativity. One of the basic tools he used to achieve this liberation was in the novels expressed through theatricalised ‘master memories’ with founding textual constructions of the actor’s work – better known as the so called Stanislavsky system. Stanislavsky denied a scientific proof of the achieved knowledge that he had managed to communicate to theatre peoples not only in Russia / USSR but in many parts of the world. With a language that spoke to the heart of the young actor he organised a whole set of tacit knowledge, that I would here name a Human Specific Space. This space was in Stanislavsky’s texts characterised by a daily artistic research within a specific well-defined group of young acting students. Like a small community the work transforms the qualities of the artistic laboratory, which later in the post war period in the theatres of the European laboratory tradition turned out to become emphasized as what Eugenio Barba has named an inner exile for the actor; a space where the actor always would feel at home. The paper discusses the ‘master memories’ as theatre cultural ways not only to stick to the ‘ghetto’ of the heritage, but to transgress the local professional community and interweave into new cultural relational contexts achieving interference with other artistic laboratories. It is the argument that the quality of the concept of creativity here has not expanded into a never ending theatre horizon, but more vertically condensed into the specific human site of intercultural theatre. In the sense that creativity has become more mobile in the globalised world, the human specific site thus offers a survival in the inner exile of arts.

(3) Material Migrations and Migrant Memories

Chair: Kirsten Thisted, University of Copenhagen

Lana Sloutsky Byzantine Nostalgia and Women:The Transferal and Translation of Byzantine Visual Culture 1453 to 1510 Lana Sloutsky is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Architecture History at Boston University (Boston, USA). Her research focuses on the relationship between early modern identity and material culture. She is specifically interested in the preservation of Byzantine culture post-1453 in the West. Ms. Sloutsky teaches art history at several Boston area colleges and is an adjunct lecturer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In May 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (1432-1481) conquered Constantinople and effectively ended the millennium-long reign of the Byzantine Empire. The ensuing physical and psychological devastation and conversion of the Byzantine capital to Islamic Istanbul contributed to wide-scale emigration. With Constantinople literally disappearing before their eyes, Byzantines from across the socioeconomic spectrum, but especially those of the upper classes, fled for parts of the former Byzantine Commonwealth and Western Europe. Driven by a newfound sense of nostalgia, this small but relatively educated and wealthy population became prominent for preserving Byzantine cultural identity abroad. My project focuses on several female émigrés who were integral in these efforts. By carefully following the lives and social networks of these women as well as the objects they took with them, my research addresses questions of early modern identity from the art-historical perspective. Upon leaving Constantinople, many émigrés took with them whatever remnants of Byzantium’s rich cultural legacy they could. Icons, manuscripts, relics, liturgical objects, jewelry, and textiles were among the examples of “rescued” material culture. On the one hand these objects became key for preserving Byzantine culture and identity. On the other, their displacement served an important translational role between the visual languages of Byzantium and the West. An examination of their destruction, preservation, transferal, and translation leads to a more cohesive understanding of how material culture affected both the maintenance and formation of early modern identity. Irrevocably displaced and combined with memory, both single objects and collections became microcosms of complex cultural identifiers such as religion. By physically linking the present with the past, they helped create a fictional Byzantium that, removed by temporal and geographical boundaries from the original, became fundamental for the preservation of Byzantine cultural identity. The objects rescued, encountered, and commissioned by Byzantine émigrés can thus be viewed as intermediaries between émigré communities and the outside world and as active vehicles for analyzing the transferal, translation, and preservation of identity.

Jennifer Way Autochthony as Belonging: Representations of Refugee Artisans in South Vietnam, 1956 Jennifer Way, Associate Professor of Art History, teaches and publishes on the history, historiography, methodology and theory of art since 1900 at the University of North Texas. She is currently writing a book about American State Department aid programs for handicraft production and export in Southeast Asia during the 1950s.

This paper examines the political and cultural significance for the American middle classes of photographs of Vietnamese handicraft artisans whom the U.S. State Department’s International Cooperation Administration’s handicraft program targeted as the beneficiaries of its support. The goal was to train them to produce traditional handicrafts to export to the United States for consumption by the middle class. The program sustained the overarching goal of bringing economic stability to Southeast Asia as a means of checking the spread of communism there following the end of the first Indochina War, the French departing Vietnam in 1954 and Vietnam dividing at the 17th Parallel a year later. My research studies the significance of photographs that the program’s director, Russel Wright, published in a design magazine during 1956. They featured the initial handicraft artisans who were refugees that fled from communists in the north and were residing in refugee camps located throughout South Vietnam. I analyze how the photographs visually represent the refugee artisans in comparison to other then contemporary images of Vietnamese refugees, for example, in stamps issued by South Vietnam in celebration of its establishment

(1955) and for the Year of the Refugee (1960), and in photographs published in American print journalism reporting on Operation Passage to Freedom and American’s changing involvement in Vietnam. Consequently, I show that instead of characterizing the refugees as traumatized politically or socially, although the photographs allude to their homelessness, they do so only as part of an overarching agenda of presenting Americans with an image of traditional labor waiting and prepared for work. This contrasts with how the American mass print media had portrayed the exodus of Koreans from northern Korea during late 1950. At issue are the ways the photographs domesticated the refugees, not necessarily by transposing them from uncivilized to civilized, although this theme was certainly present. Rather, the photographs transitioned them from mobility, specifically, journeying in Southeast Asia, which resulted in their subsequent displacement and homelessness, to encampment, producing wares to enrich the homes of the American middle class. They demonstrated then topical American ideas about individual and collective industry that linked the refugees with prevailing American interests in hand made goods, even as these interests maintained and indeed, in numerous ways, demonstrated the refugees’ ethnic differences from American in an Orientalizing fashion. Of particular interest are the ways the photographs stage autochthony - originating where found, or indigenous, in regard to how North American viewers made sense of to what and how the refugees belonged, along with the places so valorized. In this context, the photographs conflate refugees with places and natural materials to signify a non-industrialized people having the potential to form a new nation (Republic of Vietnam) while maintaining their identity as agrarian-based craft workers using centuries old techniques. Ironically, as they accompanied exhibitions of Vietnamese handicrafts touring the U.S., the photographs of anonymous refugee Vietnamese artisans deflected attention from the politics and everyday circumstances of their lives, and towards American concerns about salvaging non-western cultures from destruction by over industrialized western nations. For American viewers, these features transposed the refugees’ situation from one of political urgency and immediate location and hardships of living in makeshift camps, into familiar discourses of ethnic difference. They had a history of belonging in the American home, for example, through associations with craft materials and objects. Moreover, they resonated in a collective national American memory that, at least according to early and mid twentieth century students of memory, such as Maurice Halbwachs, relied upon references to place to connote its stability and endurance.

Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson Travelling Memory: local, national, and global implications of rehoming World Trade Center steel

Lucy Bond teaches and lectures on American literature and culture. In 2012, she completed a thesis on the commemoration of 9/11 in American memorial culture, entitled Retracing Rupture: remembering 9/11 in theory and practice. She is a contributing editor of the forthcoming collection, The Transcultural Turn: interrogating memory between and beyond borders (co-edited with Jessica Rapson). Her work has appeared in special editions of the Journal of American Studies (2011), and Culture Theory and Critique (2012), and she has written and spoken widely on the concept of trauma in American memorial culture.

Jessica Rapson is a postdoctoral tutor and researcher in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Current research interests concern the relationship between memory, nature and disaster, and theoretical confluences across cultural memory, cultural geography and ecocriticism. Recent and forthcoming publications include articles on the curation and experience of Holocaust commemorative landscapes and the mobilization of the Holocaust in cosmopolitan memory networks. She is also contributing co-editor, with Lucy Bond (University of Westminster) of the forthcoming edited collection 'The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders' (de Gruyter, 2013). Part of a project examining the imbrication of diverse commemorative discourses in the United States, this paper examines the trajectories travelled by steel from the former World Trade Center, tracing the changing dynamics between the local, the national, and the global as memories migrate across time and space. We begin by considering the steel’s reterritorialisation beyond US borders, analysing its assimilation into the hull of the USS New York and its erection as a memorial to 9/11 at Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan (a centre for US troops). Whilst these endeavours may appear to suggest a diasporic diffusion of 9/11’s commemorative culture, their militarisation represents a renationalisation of its memory. We then examine the deployment of the steel within the US, considering its incorporation into a Memorial to the Victims of World Terrorism at the Babi Yar Park, Denver. Originally created to remember Ukrainian Holocaust victims, the Park’s relocalisation of the steel manifests an attempt to construct a global nexus of memory. Finally, we analyse the nationalizing dynamics at work at local levels of commemoration,

looking at the curation of the steel in the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Alongside artefacts from Pearl Harbor, the Museum drafts 9/11 into a display that celebrates the heroism of Americans, occluding any reference to the more immediate memories of Hurricane Katrina. We suggest that by focusing upon events already assimilated into national memory, such projects elide recognition of recent histories that may prove more problematic to the national imaginary. However, as Rothberg (2009) has argued, even when certain events may appear to screen others from view, surprising connections may disrupt this occlusion of difficult memories. The USS New York was built in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, connecting this memorial to a foreign attack on the homeland to both the devastating dereliction of the government’s duty to its own populace, and America’s ongoing invasion of other lands. In examining these connections, we suggest that local, national, and global memories may be more closely related that seems evident at first glance.

(4) Memories of Diaspora and Destruction in Caribbean Literature

Chair: Søren Frank, University of Southern Denmark

Anne-Sofie Persson “Our memory is trembling” – Haitian literature after the 2010 earthquake

Ann-Sofie Persson received her Ph.D. in French literature from the Ohio State University in 2001. Her dissertation Tracer l’enfance. Poétiques autobiographiques chez Maria Wine, Patrick Chamoiseau et Nathalie Sarraute focuses on autobiographical poetics in childhood memoirs. Since 2001 she teaches French and Comparative literature at the Department of Culture and Communication at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests include autobiographical writings, francophone/migrant/postcolonial literature, and gender issues. Her publications deal with the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Maryse Condé, Marie Cardinal, Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar.

The notions of place, home and belonging have, in the Haitian context after the 2010 earthquake, been subject to change. The material destruction implies a destabilization both concrete and abstract. In terms of concrete reality, people share the experience of homelessness and the disappearance of places. On an abstract level, the violence of the incident and its ramifications influence the ways to conceive of memory and identity. Haitian writers, both domestic and migrant, must face the rupture in their original landscape and deal with the consequences on their creative activity as writers. The urge to write, to bear witness, along with the fear of exploiting people’s suffering and despair for artistic purposes, make for a very complex creative situation. At the same time as writers collected notes for their writing, their recording of the memory of this event, media across the globe were very quickly writing their history, creating the memory of the catastrophe for them. Yanick Lahens and Dany Laferrière, Haitian natives born in 1953, have both ventured into the writing of the earthquake. While Lahens is now living in Haiti, Laferrière left the island for Québec in 1976. Lanhens’ Failles is a literary experiment intertwining the bearing of witness, a piece of fiction she was writing at the time and reflections on the activity of writing in this particular context. Laferrière’s Tout bouge autour de moi is composed of short texts reporting the events of January 12th from a personal perspective, since the writer was in Haiti for a festival. This communication proposes to investigate the literary representations of the implications of the earthquake on notions of place, home, belonging, identity and memory in the Haitian context through the reading of Failles and Tout bouge autour de moi.

Mads Anders Baggesgaard Memories from Ruins Mads Anders Baggesgaard is a postdoc Fellow at Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark

The devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 leading to the death of more than 300.000 people is of course beyond words. Nevertheless the earthquake has been the topic of works of a number of Haitian writers including Dany Lafferière, Edwidge Danticat and Lyonel Trouillot, all seeing the earthquake as yet another in a series of events leading from the Haitian revolution of 1792 to today. The destruction seen simultaneously as the latest in a series of events contributing to ‘silencing the past’ as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has termed it with, and as a renewed opportunity

to revive the memories of the nations revolutionary past. A crucial point here is the discrepancy between the, today virtually destroyed, place that is Haiti, and the diasporic rewritings of the history of this place, emphasizing the complexity of the processes determining the interchange between history and memory in relation to place and nation.

Maria Strääf A Literary Representation of Rootlessness in two Caribbean Contexts: Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes and Memory and Diana McCaulay’s Dog-Heart

Maria Strääf received her Master’s degree in English (2000), and her Ph.D. in Language and Culture, with a specialization in English Literature, both from the Department of Culture and Communication at Linköping University, Sweden. She began her doctoral studies in 2001 and after finishing her Ph.D. in 2008 she remained at Linköping University, and have since been teaching full time principally at the English department, and at the school of research Language and Culture in Europe. Her doctoral thesis In Between Cultures: Franco-American Encounters In The Work Of Edith Wharton (Linköping, 2008) is a study of how the American author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) in a number of novels and short stories written between 1876 and 1937 depicts cultural encounters between Americans and Europeans, mostly Frenchmen. Most recently she presented a paper at the NeMLA 2012 Conference (North Eastern Modern Language Association) entitled “Inventing a Contemporary meaning of a Lived Life: Edith Wharton, Biography with the Young Reader in Mind” (March 2012).

In the Caribbean Islands people, languages and cultures have been violently brought together by the common experience of colonization, displacement, slavery, indenture, emancipation and nationalism, leaving ensuing questions of displacement, rootlessness, belonging, and identity in its wake. The novel Breath, Eyes and Memory (1994) by Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat discusses among other issues how to re-create a connection to a society which the individual has abandoned in exile following trauma. Violence drives a mother to leave her young daughter in her home village with her grandmother and aunt for America. Years later, when she summons her daughter to join her in New York, the daughter has to relate to what it means to be a Haitian-American in New York. It is not until she is an adult that she understands how Haiti’s violent past has affected and continues to influence her relationships to people close to her. Both women struggle to create a sense of belonging to the American society, as well as to the Haitian society, but also to each other. In the other novel of my choice, Dog-Heart by Jamaican Diana McCaulay (2010), classes within contemporary Jamaican society meet, questioning a sense of rootlessness in a society which organizes people by color and class. In neighborhoods within close proximity to each other, people try to reach out across the social divide, but social structures and expectations, force them back in their place. Both Danticat and McCaulay link the individual to the whole of society. This paper will examine how rootlessness and the struggle to create a sense of belonging is depicted in two novels set in different Caribbean contexts; one in a Haitian village and in the Haitian diaspora of New York, and the other, in Kingston Jamaica.

(5) Museums II: Constructing Modes of Belonging

Chair: Christopher Whitehead, Newscastle University

Hilda Nissimi "Between Here and There": Museums and Immigrant Identity in Israel Hilda Nissimi is Senior lecturer of Modern History at the General History Department in Bar Ilan University, Israel In this paper I will show that rather then protesting against exclusion, communal heritage centres present a different Zionist narrative than Israeli National Museums. Whereas the Israel Museum presents the Zionist narrative which negates the Diaspora as legitimate part of Jewish history, the heritage centres incorporates the Diaspora experience in their Jewish national narrative. I will further try to look into the objectives of the heritage centres by taking a closer look at one community: the Mashhadis – can they help us further understand the phenomenon or are they too special a case? It will raise the possibility that only what is truly threatened is enshrined in Museums. Communal heritage centres indeed seek the enhancement of knowledge and continuation of heritages on the verge of extinction. This might be a

museal expression against the melting pot and a call for diversity. But group identities have found other ways of preservation: synagogues and saints' sanctuaries can fulfill similar objectives. However, they are also articulating an alternative history of the Jewish people with the chapter of their community writ large for a reason. It is their way to claim a right to a place in the present. Telling the story of Jewish communities as the story of their loyalty to the Jewish people and of their efforts for and after immigration to Israel, is not only the reification of the Zionist version of history; it is a memorial to the past and a claim in the future. Thus, these centres create a capsule of another place and another time to be consumed within a new political and cultural context.

Christopher Sommer Here to stay - The representation of place identity, rootedness and belonging in regional and national museums in New Zealand Christopher Sommer completed a Bachelor of Arts in History and German language and literature studies in Mannheim (Germany) followed by a Master programme in Museum Studies in Oldenburg (Germany). In 2010 he was awarded the University of Auckland (NZ) International Doctoral scholarship. His research is associated with the School of European Languages and Literature (SELL). The thesis intends to examine the way immigration is remembered and represented in museums in New Zealand with a special focus on differences and similarities between institutions of national significance and regional museums. New Zealand as a country with an identity based on immigration experiences houses a vast number of small- to medium-sized museums that depict the history of specific immigrant communities or a regional story of immigration. New Zealand’s National Museum Te Papa Tongarewa shows, in contrast, a national story of immigration. Te Papa attempts to reflect the enormous influence migration had on the country’s history in its permanent exhibition “Passports” and in special exhibitions in the “Community Gallery”, which deal with a specific immigration community. The gallery currently features an exhibition focusing on young people with a refugee background settling down in New Zealand. Many of the small- to medium-sized museums underwent extensive refurbishments or were only established in the past decade. The newly established exhibitions focus on a multicultural portrait of New Zealand’s society and intend to show the contributions of past and present immigrants to New Zealand’s social fabric. In each case the same questions can be addressed: How do these museums address concepts like ‘belonging’ or ‘rootedness’, how do they represent and remember a place’s identity, which is undeniably changed through migration and finally when do migrant communities become rooted and are no longer seen as ‘passers-by’? The paper intends to compare past and present immigration exhibitions of Te Papa and regional museums to outline different concepts of place and belonging on a national and regional level. The visitor’s perception of the analysed exhibitions will also be taken into account, providing an insight into how representations and memoralizations of place identity are transformed through the museum visit.

Rob Garbutt and Moya Costello

‘Wood for the trees’: Re-membering migration in the Australian settler colonial aesthetic

Rob Garbutt (presenting author) is Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Written Communication, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Australia. His research focuses on place, identity and belonging. His latest book is The Locals: Identity, Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond.

Moya Costello is a Lecturer in Creative Writing, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Australia. One aspect of her research is art writing. Her book-length publications are two collections of short prose, Kites in Jakarta and Small Ecstasies, and a novella, The Office as a Boat: A Chronicle.

Stories and representations of migration have typically been expunged from Australian settler imaginary. Rather than invoking what Mieke Bal (2007) conceives as a ‘migratory aesthetic’, the settler imaginary invokes a sedentary, nation-building and place-making aesthetic. In this view, national spaces and historical time have their origin upon the settlers’ arrival. It is on this basis that the born-and-bred locals in Australia, those who have been here since ‘the year dot’, the native-born, are not Indigenous Australians as one might expect, but white and of predominantly Anglo-Celtic ethnicity. In the language of settler Australia, transnational mobility holds an exceptional status reserved for

those migrants from continental Europe, Asia and more recently, Africa. Artistic practice has the power to disrupt the easy and unproblematic story of settling, however. This paper considers ways in which a curated group exhibition, Wood for the Trees, held in 2011 in the regional city of Lismore on the far north coast of NSW, brings attention to the practices through which place and nation are constructed by migrants who were also colonisers. By focusing on the complex and changing relationships between people, forests, trees and wood, the artworks in the exhibition necessarily confront the displacement and marginalisation of local Indigenous peoples, as well as exploitative and dependent relationships between European settlers and the new and unfamiliar environment in which they found themselves. Moreover, through postcolonial and migrant references, they restore the migrant heritage that settler Australians have long eschewed in order to maintain relations of power founded upon the claim that ‘we were here first’.

(6) In-Between Spaces, Other Places

Chair: Frauke Wiegand, University of Copenhagen

Christine Ludl Representations of Mobility and the Experience of Place: Senegalese and Malian migrants in Paris and Johannesburg Christine Ludl is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at the University of Bayreuth, Germany and an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. I earned my PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin and Sciences Po Paris and have worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the African Centre of Migration and Society (ACMS) (formerly Forced Migration Studies Center, FMSP) at the University of the Witwatersrand and the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) in Johannesburg in a research project on “Transit Migration in Africa”.

This paper deals with the representations of mobility and success of Senegalese and Malian migrants in two very different locations, in Johannesburg, South Africa and in Paris, France. Senegalese and Malian migrants are considered as one of the prime examples of “transnational migrants” who travel back and forth between their country of origin and one or several destinations across the globe; at the same time, they recreate their social and cultural organizations wherever they go. The paper examines how the migrants consider travelling, different destinations, places they transit through, as well as their home countries as offering (or not) favorable conditions for achieving success – and what this means for them. I am drawing on a theoretical concept of representation(s) at the intersection of of cultural theory, anthropology, (social) psychology and the philosophy of culture, namely Ernst Cassirer, a German philosopher of culture and Octave Mannoni, a French anthropologist and analyst, which places the dynamic construction and expression of representation(s) through social relations, symbols, practices, sense perception and (artistic) creation in its center. I will show how this dynamic concept allows for an understanding of how migrants negotiate the ambivalence – or rather „concomitance“ (Diouf, 2000, 698) – between mobility and a strong reference to home through the „narration of the self“ (Ricoeur, 1985, 435; 1990). This more precise understanding of a concomitance between mobility and reference to home will – in the case of Johannesburg – contribute to critically reflect on descriptions of the city as a „transient“ space, characterized by a highly diverse population, conflicting relationships between groups, urban transformation, and gentrification – and on how this situation differs from France. In this line of argument, I will draw on a dynamic conception of place (amongst others: Lefebvre, Massey, Bondi, Lehnert) to account for the ways how the migrants construct these places through social relations, practices, and representations but also how the built environment and the ways it is experienced through emotions and the senses influences on the migrants’ perceptions and practices. The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork, non-directive collective and individual interviews with Senegalese and Malian migrants in Johannesburg, Paris, Dakar, and Bamako, and the analysis of cultural productions like theatre, music, or film. By examining the question of representations of mobility and success it will show how the migrants relate to different places and to home and, at the same time, how these spaces and places influence on their practices and perceptions.

Charles Lock Doubled Place, Haunted Space: Migration and the Enantiomorphic

Charles Lock, Professor of English Literature, University of Copenhagen. Enantiomorphic pairs, or incongruent counterparts -- such as left- & right-handed gloves -- have intrigued philosophers in modernity, from Kant to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The existence of one glove implies another, and thus sets up a contract within and across space, anticipating what nuclear physicists would later term ‘quantum entanglement’. What these pairs share is the like-unlikeness of each member of the set: the right-left pairing, of gloves or shoes, was first given philosophical definition by Kant as ‘incongruent counterparts’. Casey explains the vast consequences of ‘Kant’s uncovering of the enormous consequences entailed by a tiny and almost literally invisible detail, that of right versus left hands regarded as enantiomorphic.’ To realize the significance of the enantiomorphic is to end the arguments between Newton and Leibniz as to whether space should be conceived as absolute or relative. Enantiomorphically considered, space cannot be conceived without place. Or, more precisely, there is no space except that produced by a minimum of two places, and by the distance -- diastema -- that keeps one place apart from another, that makes distinction possible. The figure of the pair of gloves has given rise to heuristic analogies in the sciences, in crystallography as well as in nuclear physics. The pairing of incongruent counterparts may also be usefully related to the migrant's experience of space as not absolute, nor relative, but composed of discontinuous and incongruent counterparts, each recognized only by its inferred and absent other.

Kathrin Maurer Translating Catastrophes: Yoko Tawada’s Poetic Response to Fukushima Kathrin Maurer is Associate Professor in German Studies at Syddansk Universitet. Her research subjects include German literary and cultural history of the nineteenth- and twentieth century, literary realism, travel literature, optical media, historicism. Recent publications: Visualizing History: The Power of the Visual in Nineteenth-Century German Historicism (forthcoming 2013 Walter de Gruyter, Berlin); "Fra Restauration til Revolution 1815-1850," Tysk Kulturhistorie fra 1740 til i dag. Kopenhagen: Gyldendal, (2011): 83-112, "Der panoramatische Blick auf das Fremde in Ida von Hahn-Hahns Reisebericht Orientalische Briefe (1843)," The German Quarterly 83.2 (2010): 149-167. Imagine the following scenario: It is the year 2023, another big earthquake happened in Japan, more nuclear reactors melted down, more destruction by another tsunami. Young people are dying from the high radioactivity; the old people strangely cannot die at all. The Japanese emperor has been kidnapped by anti-nuclear terrorists. The atomic reactors no longer produce electricity, darkness prevails Japan, and the only source of light is masses of fireflies. All the borders are shut off; there is no airline traffic, no emails. Japan became an island of complete isolation. This scenario could be taken out of a most recent science fiction projecting an image of the future which is all the more terrifying because of its plausibility. But this is neither a sci-fi bestseller nor a recent eco thriller, but the futuristic poetic image in the most recent short-story “The island of Eternal life” by the experimental and avant-garde contemporary Japanese and German author Yoko Tawada. The author writes both in Japanese and in German, and her oeuvre reflects the perception of the cultural “other” from a multi-linguistic perspective. Tawada’s works, however, do not approach the otherness of cultures by familiarization, rather she distorts traditional patterns of cultural perception them by utilizing experimental poetic strategies, ironic-fantastic language games, and surreal interpretations of scenes from everyday life. Tawada’s cultural poetic games create linguistic and cultural “in-between-spaces,” in which the “other” is constantly renegotiated and reconfigured in an ironic and self-reflexive fashion. These “in-between-spaces” function as autopoetic catalysts in Tawada’s writing. Yet this self-reflexivity does not efface itself in postmodern language games, rather it is precisely the playing with and within the languages, which presents a mode of cultural perception, in which identity is constructed on the basis of difference. These “hybrid” moments in Tawada’s texts exhibit a model of “otherness” beyond traditional national paradigms and suggest a transnational perception of culture and its literatures. In my talk I would like to investigate Tawada’s response to Japan’s earthquake in 2011, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Her model of translating culture is contextualized with her most recent writings (“Fremde Wasser: Hamburger Poetikvorlesungen” (2012) and “The Island of Eternal Life” (2012). These works suggest that catastrophes have to be understood as cultural texts that cannot be communicated in a dialogic model. Rather catastrophes demand a cultural form of perception, in which dichotomies of the known and the unknown, the own and the other remain fluid and are constantly transgressed.

(7) Labor / Migration

Chair: Peter Leese, University of Copenhagen

Axel Bangert Crossed Paths and Shared Places: Memories of Migration in the New European Cinema Axel Bangert is a Junior Research Fellow in Transnational Cinemas at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, and a member of the Department of German and Dutch. In 2010, he was awarded a PhD in German film from the University of Cambridge. His thesis, which was funded by a scholarship from the Gates Cambridge Trust, examined the portrayal of the Third Reich in post-reunification German cinema and television. As a post-doctoral researcher, he is undertaking a study of migration and exile in the cinema of post-Wall Europe. In the context of this work, he is currently completing an article on displacement in post-conflict Balkan film and co-organising an international conference on “Filming Transnational Interiors” to be held at Cambridge in September 2012. This paper proposes an original approach to the representation and remembrance of migration in the cinema of post-Wall Europe. Building on the concept of “double occupancies” proposed by Thomas Elsaesser, it sets out to investigate a strand of contemporary films which create a space for encounters between different experiences and memories of displacement. The study of these films is crucial to an understanding of the relation between migration, memory and place in recent European cinema, as they highlight the multiple realities of displacement which have shaped the continent and examine the possibilities of communicating and negotiating these diverging experiences across cultural borders. The aim of my paper is to illustrate these processes by analysing two films dealing with labour migrations in Europe: the Italian feature L’america (1994) by Gianni Amelio, which brings together Albanian immigration to Italy after the fall of Socialism with the history of Italian immigration to the United States, and the Spanish feature Poniente (2002), which portrays the experience of illegal African labourers in Spanish greenhouses through that of Spanish guest workers in 1960s Germany. Blurring the boundaries between migrations past and present, both films illustrate how the cinema has challenged the binary oppositions between the indigenous and the foreign, home and host which, since the seminal study An Accented Cinema (Naficy 2001), have dominated the field of migrant and diasporic film. By contrast, their “take” on migration and its memory complicates facile distinctions between self and other, drawing attention to culturally intermediate and historically layered spaces which undermine traditional demarcations of Europe.

Christoph Schaub Transnational Belonging from Below: Internationalism, Migration, and Urban Imaginaries in Anna Seghers’ The Companions and Kurt Kläber’s Third Class Passengers Christoph Schaub holds a M.A. in comparative literature from Freie Universität Berlin and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Weimar Contact Zones: Modernism, Workers’ Movement Literature, and Urban Imaginaries.” A former fellow of Fulbright and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, he is the author of several articles and book chapters on urban imaginaries, cosmopolitanism, and politics of memory, that deal with diverse cultural practices, such as hip hop, techno music, contemporary U.S.-American literature, and German memorials.

A product of mid-nineteenth Century work migration, political exile, and a Marxist theory of globalization, workers’ movement internationalism was based on imaginaries of transnational class solidarity and world revolution. Inflected by Eurocentrism from its beginnings, internationalism became increasingly dogmatic and centralist after the foundation of the Communist International in 1919. Unorthodox Communists, the German writers Anna Seghers and Kurt Kläber composed alternate imaginaries of internationalism against this background. Reading their novels Third Class Passengers (Passagiere der III. Klasse, 1927) and The Companions (Die Gefährten, 1932) – that deal with work migration and political exile respectively – I will trace how they imagine transnational belonging in regard to tensions between transnationally shared class experiences, on the one hand, and the diverse cultural, ethnic, and national affiliations within an allegedly global workersʼ movement, on the other. My paper will discuss this question firstly in regard to the aesthetic forms these modernist novels use to organize their internationalist imaginaries, namely dialogue and montage. Secondly, I will look at how they stage urban contact zones since cities function as nodal points for the migratory movements of the novels’ characters and as places for collective activism. As both texts represent

memories of failed revolutions and collective social change from below, the paper closes by suggesting that these novels pose the questions of transnational belonging, urban space, and memory from the perspective of subordinated class positions. These novels and the rarely discussed tradition of internationalism, I contend, remind us of the importance of class for literary and cultural studies of transnational memory that until now have mostly focused on issues such as race, ethnicity, or gender.

Martina Fetting and Martin Koplin Re-locating industrial culture – the mediation of European labor migration by artMUSE and the European Corner

Martina Fetting (presenting author) is a Research Assistant at the University of Bremen; Internships (selection): European Commission, Ludlow Museum Resource Centre, Federal Archives of Lower Saxony. She handed in her PhD thesis in 2012 under the title ”Legitimation by representation? Contributions to the self-perspective of the last German monarchs”.

Martin Koplin is a managing director of the M2C Institute for Applied Media Research at the University of Applied Sciences Bremen. His work focuses on the development of new ideas and technologies for communication and participation in topics of social change. He leads the BMBF-funded think tank "Think BETA" for the development of communication tools to the evolution of smart cities. Other of his works are currently in the EU projects MaX Museum at Public Access and Participation to the development of media in attendance and networking of European textile industry museums, the project Betaville for participatory urban development and artMUSE.

artMUSE, a current collaboration with our European partners from the LWL-Textile Museum Bocholt (D), the Museum of Bitola (MK), the Gdansk City Gallery (PL), the Museum for Industrial Archeology and Textiles Gent (NL) and the Nordwolle North-West German Museum for Industry Culture Delmenhorst (D), gives a voice to the memory of labor migration. Our concept is: “The audience is the curator is the audience is…”. One example is the project “125 + X Menschen - Dinge – Wege“, a participative exhibition growing by contributions of the descendants of former Nordwolle workers who came to one of the landmarks of the industrial revolution in Northern Germany since 1884. The danger of the conventional archivist’s work consisting of “putting things in their proper place [and] making place(s) for them” is that we create containerized spaces and categories of the subject which is thereby muted. Regarding the history of labor migration, the „victim’s plot“ is such a place, dominating migration discourse since the 1970ies. However, there is more to the great narrative than that. To present cultural identity formation processes on an individual scale is one characterizing aspect of artMUSE. Part of the project is a multimedia platform, the “European Corner”, which is installed in all participating institutions. Every user, from the ordinary visitor to the museum’s director, can feed and ask this collaborative sculpture with or about information concerning the industrial revolution and its impact for migrating workers and their space of action, understood as a place in relation to other places and times, interfaces and conversions where dynamical social relations meet, overlap and change.

(8) Memorial Sites of Immigration

Chair: Claire Lévy-Vroelant, Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University

Christiane Hintermann The making of a site of remembrance of migration in Vienna: the Marcus Omofuma Stone Christiane Hintermann is geographer and migration researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres in Vienna and lecturer at the Institute for Geography and Regional Research at the University of Vienna. Her research focus over the last years was on the interrelations of migration and memory. Currently she is working on a four-year research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) titled Lieux de mémoire of migration in urban spaces: the example of Vienna. Among other publications Christiane Hintermann is co-editor of the anthology Migration and Memory. Representations of Migrations in Europe since 1960 edited in 2010.

Generally speaking the very rich European migration history has not yet found adequate entrance into historiography and the collective memories of European nation states. Immigrants and their histories live on the fringes of our

historical consciousness and they are also neglected when it comes to the historical cultural organisation of public space. This is especially true in Austria, where migration is still a neglected topic in official remembrance policy and activities and where public space is virtually free of anything that would point to the recognition of national, regional or local migration histories, especially regarding the younger migration history of the country. In the conference contribution I will deal with the following questions, also asked by Christiane Harzig in her introduction to the anthology Migration und Erinnerung (Migration and Remembrance) which she edited in 2006: Where are sites of remembrance for migrants? Where are the places for migrants to remember and where are the places where they are remembered? I will discuss the making of such a site of remembrance in the Austrian context – the so called Marcus Omofuma Stone and the naming or better non-naming of the square where it is located in Human Rights Square. The analysis will especially focus on the actors in the field of remembrance policy regarding migration in Vienna and Austria and conflicts and struggles connected to the erection of the Marcus Omofuma Stone and consequently the appropriation of public space in Vienna.

Eureka Henrich Nations of Immigrants: Memorialising Migration in Australia and the United States Eureka Henrich is a historian interested in museums, memory and identity. Her recently completed PhD thesis tracked the exhibition of migration history in Australian museums, from the first galleries of the Migration and Settlement Museum in Adelaide in 1986 to the opening of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in 2001. Eureka held an Australian Postgraduate Award for the duration of her PhD at the University of New South Wales. In 2008 she won the Frank Crowley Australian History Prize for her honours thesis, which was a social history of Sydney’s Ragged Schools in the mid 19th century. Her work has been published in the International Journal for the Inclusive Museum, and in reCollections: a journal of museums and collections. The act of inscribing individual names on a memorial is one most readily associated with national service in war. However, since the early 1990s, immigration and maritime museums have launched memorials where, for a fee, the names of migrants and their descendants can be displayed, effectively carving them into the nation’s history. Most often in the fashion of Ellis Island’s American Immigrant Wall of Honor, these sites celebrate what Graeme Davison has termed the “myth of the Great Voyage”, which “focuses our ideals on the experience of journeying - of national becoming - rather than upon our origins or destination”. Yet the databases of information that accompany registered names record precious individual stories of triumph and success, sorrow and grief, which transcend national boundaries. The meanings of these sites are complex, diverse, and sometimes contradictory. The huge popularity of Ellis Island’s Wall inspired the Welcome Wall at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and the Tribute Garden at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne in the late 1990s. In 2011 similar projects were completed by the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle and Albany. A proposed national monument to Australia’s migrant past, called “Immigration Place”, is currently garnering support and may form part of Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. Why the continuing demand in Australia for such memorials? What are their functions, and what meanings do they convey? This paper will shed light on these questions though an examination of three key sites. It will then assess how Australia’s collective migrant memory has been shaped by the adoption of an American model, and how memories of loss and trauma are remembered and forgotten through such projects.

Raluca Iacob Physical and Virtual Borders: New Geographies of Space Raluca Iacob is a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Film Studies, University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the thematic directions in recent Romanian cinema and the ways in which they define and construct a national identity in a post-communist society. Her research interests include emotion theories, narratives of migration and Eastern European cinema. Due to the geopolitical changes that occurred with Romania and Bulgaria being included in the broader European sphere in 2007, the representations of migratory patterns concerning this region have been relevantly adjusted. In the film Morgen (Marian Crisan, Romania/France/Hungary, 2010) Romanian space has become a place of transition for people from outside the European community to gain access into Fortress Europe. In a globalized post-Cold War

world, the border has become a ‘space of flows’, as Yosefa Loshitzky notes, through which there is a constant flow of immigrants moving from East to West. In Morgen the main character, Nelu is a middle age man, whose ordinary daily existence is overturned when one of the immigrants comes across his path. Living in the proximity of the Western border, Nelu has been a witness to the continuous flow of migrants passing by in their journeys westward. It isn’t until he meets Behran (a Turkish man who is trying to make his way to Germany where his children have migrated at some previous point) that he takes an active role in the destiny of any of these migrants. Having uprooted his life, the only connection that Behran has is through one of his prized possession—an album of photographs of his family—linking his past and his future in an uncertain present, and allowing him to connect to a temporary family nucleus that he constructs with Nelu. In my paper, by looking at the specific example of Morgen, I wish to discuss how representations of border space and personal memory in transnational films have an effect on the ways in which we perceive the changing dynamics of contemporary geopolitics.

(9) Architectures of Threshold Spaces

Chair: Mirjam Gebauer, Aalborg University

Pei-Sze Chow Cinematic Portrayals of Architecture as Transcultural Nodes in the Øresund Region

After having attained an MA at the National University of Singapore for her work on the aesthetics of films by Lars von Trier, Pei-Sze began her PhD research in 2011 at UCL where her research seeks to articulate the intersections between film aesthetics, architecture, and transnational flows. In addition to the Øresund region, the project will consider architectural-construction films about Berlin, Germany. Broader research themes include visual experimentation in film, cities, and the tensions between identity and place-making through cinema. . This paper discusses the cinematic representations of landmark architecture as an aesthetic mode of depicting lived experience and expressions of identity in transnational spaces. I analyse three film essays by filmmaker Fredrik Gertten that focus on landmark architectural projects in the Øresund region: Gå På Vatten (2000), Bye Bye Malmö (2002), and Sossen Arkitekten och det Skruvade Huset (2005). The films are an investigation into the social and spatial transformation of the Øresund region that comprises the cities of Copenhagen (Denmark) and Malmö (Sweden). The films capture a region that is still in the process of emergence, and where the tensions between identity and contemporary transcultural flows materialise via the construction of two landmark structures and the dismantling of one. These structures, I argue, are nodes or cultural meeting points where peoples, memories, and identities intersect. Narratives of belonging, places, migration, global flows, and post/trans/national identities are then mediated through the camera’s interaction with these architectural projects, in which visual and aural elements both reconstruct and deconstruct the complex social relations emerging from the spatial/geographical dynamism of this Nordic region. In these films, various characters–‘locals’, ‘immigrant-citizens’, ‘foreign talent’, and ‘neighbours’–offer a multiplicity of narrative spaces that are woven into the (de)construction of the structures, producing a critical visual space that interrogates the topophilic relationship between places and identities in an increasingly networked and postnational world. I posit that the visual interface between film and architecture adds a further layer of complexity to our efforts at problematising and articulating these new transnational flows and exchanges, and to help us understand the broader question of the ways in which films visualise social change.

Runa Johannessen The Urbanized Palestinian Camp

Runa Johannessen has an architectural degree from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, and is currently pursuing her PhD studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is doing research on architectural strategies in states of emergency, focusing on the Palestinian refugee camp Shuafat.

Being a migrant in an intended temporary arrangement like a refugee camp has become a permanent situation for the worlds increasing number of refugees. Many camps have become ghettos and a part of the urban fabric. Although

politically still considered temporary, the inhabitants are left as stateless non-citizens in transit for generations. Palestinian refugee camps are among the oldest camps in the world. The prospect of resolving the background conflict is evidently poor. There are numbers of politically charged reasons for not resolving the problem of the camps, as the camps and the claim for a right to return are at the core of the conflict. Consensus of the discourse has been to avoid permanency in the physical surroundings as this has been regarded as equivalent to not renouncing the claim for return. A shift in this discourse is described by sociologist Sari Hanafi and architect Philipp Misselwitz, emphasizing the connection between the built environment and camp governance. Developmental projects with new approaches to planning are now being tested. The West Bank based architecture studio Decolonizing Architecture considers their involvement in refugee camp projects as a possibility to speculate on how new societal forms can emerge from the camps exceptional situation. A backdrop for understanding the Palestinian refugee identity is given by the ethnographer Julie Peteet, examining how life in exile produces new relationships between identity and place. Looking into the case of Palestinian refugee camps, I will describe a connection between consciousness of a fundamental affiliation to a place that is lost and the production of a space that is politically temporary but de facto permanent. Can these places become laboratories for new approaches to how to deal with the political conflict - alongside urbanization of the camps and the increasing number of refugees? Marc Schoonderbeek Border, Map and Frame Marc Schoonderbeek is an architect based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He graduated from Eindhoven University of Technology, department of Architectural Theory and History and practised as an architect in the Netherlands, Germany (Studio Libeskind) and Israel. He is Assistant Professor of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, department of Architectural Design/Public Building, and coordinator of the research group Border Conditions. This paper will discuss the investigation of contemporary border and threshold spaces from the perspective of architecture. In architecture, the notion of ‘place’ emerges once a participatory involvement via spatial practices of inhabitants transforms space into a place of belonging. The issue of the border will be discussed by giving an insight into (1) how power structures are having their physical effect in space, (2) how implemented policies have resulted in specific spatial conditions and (3) how the border, as framing device, allows for an appropriation of place and starts to frame ‘identity’. The border will be discussed as an architectural element that demarcates a territory but also offers a space for encountering the ‘other’. Rather than regarding the border as a spatial element that causes division and segregation, the border is a threshold space where spatial practices both confirm and resist social and political ideologies. In our globalized world, the border is a highly problematic entity, not only because it obstructs global flows of goods, information and people, but also because it seems to be contradictory to our increasingly nomadic and migratory existence. The paper will attempt to connect a philosophical/theoretical understanding of the relationship between politics and place with the techniques of analysis used for the gaining of insight into and the clarification of spatial practices around thresholds. Both topics will be discussed using Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave within the European Union, also known as the former city of Königsberg, as case study. Because of the detached relationship between its genius loci and its locals, as the ‘original’ inhabitants of Kaliningrad initially came from other parts of the Soviet Union, Kaliningrad forms a rather intriguing test-case for discussing issues of migration, identity, place, identity, history and memory.

(10) National Identities and Questions of Belonging

Chair: Ilaria Vanni, Sidney University of Technology

Randi Marselis Memory work in television and on the Web: representations of actions by radicalized Dutch-Moluccan youth

Randi Marselis (PhD) is associate professor at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests are on ethnic relations and the media in multiethnic societies with special focus on Denmark and the Netherlands. The aim of her current research is to examine the role of the Web in the

remediation of migration memories. She has published on the subject cultural memory of migration in European Journal of Cultural Studies, Mediekultur and Social Semiotics (forthcoming).

In the late 1960’s and the 1970’s the Netherlands experienced a series of violent actions by young second-generation Moluccans who supported the fight for an independent Moluccan republic. These actions culminated with a double hijacking of a train and a primary school in 1977. In the train hijacking two hostages and six hijackers were killed, when Dutch military stormed the train. These events have resulted in painful memories within the Dutch-Moluccan community as well as amongst the Dutch majority population. On May 3, 2009, the television movie, de Punt, which gives a fictionalized account of the train hijacking by the village de Punt in 1977, had premiere on Dutch national television. After the premiere the television station made commenting possible on their website and more than 600 comments were posted by both Dutch-Moluccans and by viewers of majority background. The Web debate can be read as an intense negotiation of how to understand this collective trauma. This paper will focus on the Web debate as a case of performative memory work (Kuhn 2002) that have an inquiring attitude towards the events in 1977 and more broadly towards Dutch, postcolonial history. Many so-called, third-generation Dutch-Moluccans took part in the Web-debate, although they were not born at the time of the events. For young Dutch-Moluccans the radicalization and actions of the 1970’s are still felt as a collective stigma that questions their belonging in Dutch society. The analysis will examine how belongings to Dutch national space as well as to the Moluccas are negotiated in the Web debate. In order to examine these articulations of belongings the analysis will draw on Benedict Anderson’s classical concept of long distance nationalism as well as on Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller’s concept of simultaneity. Christine Lohmeier Same old – same old or new media – new memory?: Collectively Remembering Cuba in Miami, Florida Christine Lohmeier works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Munich. Before moving to Munich, she completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow where she was based at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research. Christine’s thesis focused on Spanish- and English-language media of the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida. Previously, she earned an M.Sc. in Media Research at the University of Stirling. Her first degree was in ‘Languages, Economics and Cultural Studies’ at the University of Passau, Germany. Christine’s research comprise issues at the intersection of media, migration, diasporas, belonging and identity. Memory has always been essential to collective and individual identities. What and how a community remembers can tell us something about who they are and where they want to go as a group. This paper considers memory practices of the Cuban-American community in Miami. Following the Cuban revolution under Fidel Castro in 1959, Miami developed into the capital of the Cuban diasporic community. Over time, the highly homogenous group of the early exiles became more and more diverse as later Cuban migrants arrived in Miami and South Florida. Later migrants not only brought experiences of life in a socialist country, they also held very different memories of Cuba and everday life on the island. This article considers how different, overlapping and at times contradictory memories are voiced or neglected in Miami-based media. It traces the interrelations of memory and belonging within the Cuban-American community. The underlying structures of who is allowed to remember and engage in practices of remembering publicly are simultaneously an indication of who has the power to remember and decide on what is worth remembering. In the first couple of decades following the revolution, Cuban-American journalists were consciously or perhaps unintentionally complicit with these ‘rules of remberring’. The advent of new media and with it changing practices of journalism, allowed for these dynamics of remembering to be challenged. Especially, the rising popularity of blogs and discussion forums – often linked to the websites of traditional media – has unveiled the complicit behaviour some journalists have shown in the past. At the same time, it transformed the local Cuban-American ‘memory sphere’ of Miami and South Florida into a national and transnational one, in which Cuban migrants based elsewhere were able to participate. However, these options have not altered memories of Cuba as dramatically as one could have expected. Well-familiar discourses which celebrate pre-revolutionary times and are used as the foundation of calls for radical and violent political action are still to be heard and read in abundance. In addition, there seems to be little serious engagement with views and memories of other groups pointing towards a persistent resilience in memory practices and established discourses. Kim Simonsen Are you Really Danish? Memory and Migration in new Avantgarde Danish Poetry. The Case of Eva Tind Kristensen’s “Do/-“.

Kim Simonsen is a PhD Fellow in European Cultural Studies, at the Institute for Culture and Identity, Roskilde University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and has published extensively on the topic of migration and national belonging. Andreas Huyssen has shown how German literary studies have not been able to properly understand the new migrant voices in German Literature in a more multicultural and changing Germany. As Connerton implies, modernity has its own place memory and especially a topography of forgetting. My paper deals with memory and the theme of migration in the emergence of the migrant voice in modern Danish migrant literature, in this case in the debut poetry collection “Do/_” by the Danish/Korean poet Eva Tind Kristensen. One task in understanding migrant writers and artists is to look at them in the light of the growing research on memory and literature (Nünning, Jan and Alaida Assmann, Rigney, Seyhan and Erll). I will analyse a certain form of memory and a way of administrating and using the past, referred to as nostalgia (Boym) as seen in Kristensen’s poetry and in her photos. Furthermore I will analyse a problem in the field for migration literature in Denmark, where ethnical and paratextual sociological discourses are used in the literary field to ‘stereotype’ migrational writers using an ‘etchnic filter’ (Magnus Nilsson’s concept), therefore I will analyse how Kristensen uses and plays with these conventions in her poetry, just as well as how she ‘performs’ a counter discourse and memory using and fictionalizing her autobiography. Additionally I will make an argument for a broader understanding of migration and literature (than to see migrational writers as for example younger Muslims), and by doing so I will make an argument for also seeing Danish writers as migrational writers as well, therefore I will put forward a typology (see the appendix) of migration literature.

(11) Borders: Geopolitics, Movement Control and Liminality Chair: Moritz Schramm, University of Southern Denmark

Jesper Gulddal Movement Control and Migration in German Interwar Fiction Jesper Gulddal holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen. He has published widely on passports and movement control in literature as well as on the literary history of European anti-Americanism (most recent book publication: Anti-Americanism in European Literature, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). On leave from his senior lectureship at the University of Newcastle, Australia, he currently pursues postdoctoral research at the University of Copenhagen.

Following a long period of almost unrestricted freedom of movement, the First World War saw the introduction of highly restrictive passport regimes as a means of safeguarding the integrity of national borders. Originally conceived only as wartime measures, these passport regimes were made permanent after the cessation of hostilities, and in the course of the 1920s they were gradually codified into an elaborate international system of movement control, tasked not only with border security, but also, importantly, with the handling of post-war migratory flows of stateless and displaced persons. As a result, the possession of a valid passport became an almost indispensable condition for cross-boundary mobility – and in this sense, the passport decided the fate of millions of interwar migrants. In this paper, I argue that the establishment of a modern international passport regime in the interwar period led to a fundamental reconfiguration of geopolitical space, which was explored trenchantly in contemporary literature focusing on the migrant experience. Taking my cue from Stefan Zweig’s mournful reflections on the annulment of his Austrian passport and citizenship (Die Welt von Gestern), I analyse the representation of passports and passport control in three German novels: B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff, Anna Seghers’s Transit, and Erich Maria Remarque’s Die Nacht von Lissabon. My hypothesis is that passport institutions are evoked in these novels as textual interfaces bringing together a specific historical situation and a specific literary mode of expression. Thus, the often highly detailed accounts of contemporary movement control serve, on the one hand, to anchor the narrative plot historically; on the other hand, they are used constructively as a way of articulating the spatial, narrative and thematic dimensions of the individual novel. As the paper argues, this dual structure enables the analysed novels to conduct multifaceted investigations of migration, territoriality and freedom under the condition of universal movement control.

Ana Mendes ‘I pity those people who dream about Europe': a comparative reading of Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and Damjan Kozole’s Spare Parts Ana Cristina Mendes is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Sudies, Portugal. Her interests span postcolonial cultural production, the role of the visual in practices of cultural memory and border cinema. Her publications include articles on British, Indian and British Asian film cinema, with an emphasis on diasporic filmmaking. Her edited collection Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders was published in 2011.

Even though nation-states at the centre of the global order increasingly present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter border security (prompted by traumatic events such as the London Underground bombings, the riots in Paris’s “banlieues” and the September 11 attacks) undermine utopian notions of a “postnational New Europe”. Around “Fortress Europe” there are concrete walls, barbed wire and razor blade fences, provided with electronic sensors, under constant surveillance of Frontex, the European Union agency for external border control. The guards of Frontex act as a biopolitical filter that exclude the unwanted migrants and undocumented asylum-seekers from the territorial boundaries of Europe and place them in holding camps for refugees such as the ones in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, and Nicosia, divided between Turkish-occupied North Cyprus and Greek South Cyprus. If cinema has been instrumental to nation building processes during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has been equally central, as a “traveling technology”, to making sense of migration, journeying and other forms of border-crossing. Against this backdrop, this paper attempts a comparative reading of Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Damjan Kozole’s Spare Parts (2003) focusing on the un-demonization of both refugees and traffickers.

Natasa Sardzoska Liminal boundaries and nomadic captures of space

Mrs Sardzoska, poet, journalist, Italian language professor, translator and interpreter (FR/EN/IT/ES/PR/Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian), is currently a PhD candidate at the Karls Eberhard Universität in Tübingen, Università degli Studi in Bergamo and Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Besides her main domain of cultural studies research, he is interested in developing researches in migrating arts, such as the jazz and the Argentine tango, located in the Latin American literature and in cases where the intereference between art and culture is flagrant. Having an academic background in literature, communications, media and philology, she has previously worked in the field of communication, in the editorial and publishing field and in EU-funded projects and international affairs. She has published essays in Macedonian magazines, Brasilian reviews and electronic literary journals, translated books (Pasolini, Tabucchi, Buzzati, Carducci, Collodi) from Italian into Macedonian and published them as well as her own poetry book “The blue room”, for which she was presented in the Antology of Young Macedonian Poets.

I am particularly interested in attending this conference because my PhD research is intrinsically linked to the core subject of this Conference. Migrating art, longing for a home, capturing nomadic spaces, shifting borders and nostalgia for a liminal space are the main features on which I wish to focus my presentation. In the contemporary world where notions of boundary and borders are continuously blurred and shifted, we need to redefine notions such nomadic identity and mobile space as they are in phenomenological evolution. My paper proposal’s goal is to explore the informal logic of culture of those artists who are in continuous dialectic with borders, for instance: the border inhabitants and the exiled artists. I draw my focus on the case of some Ex-Yugoslavian exiled or migrating artists because I want to demonstrate how the political factor has influenced the awkward building of mobility and the management of space and memory. These expatriated artists, e.g. Slavenka Drakulic, Marina Abramovic, David Albahari, Mehmed Begic and Korana Delic Segetalo, have undergone the impact on the human condition and the authorship by the dissolution of the borders. The case studies will offer provocative meanings of ethnical non-belongings, longings for a home, nostalgia of a space in motion, feelings of being uprooted. The borders will be argued as liminal spaces in the cultural geography within the impact the dissolution of the Ex-Yugoslavian borders has had on their life. I shall argue the nexus between borders and migrations, the cultural complexity arising from the mobility, the liminal spaces and the non-spaces and focus on the contemporary nomad, as a wanderer, as an exiled citizen, as a person who is in perpetual search for a home, who is nostalgic about a space but is in the same time is a sort of a liminal (cultural) non-space-in-motion.

(12) Embodied perspectives on Place, Memory and Migration

Chair: Sten Pultz Moslund, University of Southern Denmark

Maria Oikonomou Interstitium: Spatial Bodies and the Literature of Migration

Assistant Prof. Dr. Maria Oikonomou studied Comparative Literature and Modern Greek —as well as Theater and Italian Literary Studies—at the universities of Ioannina, Thessaloniki and Munich. From 2001 to 2007 she worked as a lecturer at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Munich. Since 2008 she has held an assistant professorship at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna. Her main fields of research are comparative aesthetics, migration studies, and literary / translation theory; her recent publications include: Images of the Other: Migration and Exile in International Cinema (ed., transcript 2009), “Feeling Sick in Foreign Places. On Nostalgia and a Remote Literature” (article, 2010), “The Money from America: Migration, Capitalism, and Vampirism (article, 2011), and Greek Dimensions of South Eastern European Culture (ed., Peter Lang 2011). Her current project (Transcribing Borders) deals with the aesthetic aspects of a “literature of migration.”

The lasting theoretical interest in space—which in recent years has triggered the so called spatial or topographical turns—has led to several approaches which invariably seek to explain space as a discursive or symbolic construction: from the topotropography of Hillis Miller, who highlights the performative constructedness of every topography, and the graphein of Sigrid Weigel, who situates space within differentiated symbolic systems, to the idea of geopoetics (Kenneth White, Marszalek/Sasse), which argues for the shifting of space within the fields of semiotics and medial factitiousness … In view of this general ‘de-naturalization’ and ‘signification’ of space it is not surprising that ever more studies on the literary depiction of migration stress the connection between space and migration as a decidedly textual strategy. But while scientific attention has mainly focused either on the fundamental dynamism, insecurity and instability of literary spaces that are affected or determined by migratory processes, or on spatial practices of exclusion, demarcation and territorialization, the examination of the migratory body in space has not received much attention. Given, however, that migration leaves behind detectable traces in the text-subject, whose experience of foreignness/alterity inevitably intrudes into the realm of the corporeal, and that the migrant influences and renegotiates spatial relations in the process of moving, it is of great interest to direct an inquiry onto this transitional body in literature and its connection to its fictional environment. That migration literature often depicts the body of the emigrant as abnormal — as ill and suffering from homesickness, as ‘vampiric’ or ‘undead’, as a body which orients itself towards foreign, nonhuman life-forms or nonorganic constellations — allows the conclusion that the body is fundamentally affected by the experience of migration and migratory spaces, that it incorporates this space and thereby becomes a ‘map’, which accurately records the change and (de-)territorialization of the subject’s existence and environment (the machine body as analogue to a machine space of migration, the animal body as analogue to an animal space and so on). Body and space seem to penetrate each other as equally concrete and metonymic categories and affect one another in characteristic ways; space becomes interstitium, a space between the organs of the subject, and thus merges the diverse topographical, corporeal and textual aspects of migration.

Georgina Ramsay The Experiential Constituting of Everyday Life: The Lived, Bodily Experiences of Central African Refugee Women Living in Australia Georgina Ramsay is a PhD candidate in the discipline of Anthropology from the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include embodiment; refugee and migrant diasporas; health and wellbeing; and everyday life.

For Central African refugee women, experiences of settlement in Australia can potentially be characterised by ontological insecurity and uncertainty. Extending on social science research that recognises the uncertainty characterising displaced life for refugees or forced migrants, the current research aims through an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how the uncertainty characterising particular aspects of life for Central African refugee women living in Australia is reoriented within the lived bodily experiences and materiality of domestic spaces

to eventually constitute familiarity and ‘everydayness’. The current research develops the notion that ‘everyday’ life is not an abstract temporal field of study; instead, the ‘everyday’ represents an experiential process in which the situating of lived experience amalgamates imaginatively remembered past experiences, contemporary bodily practice, and imagined futures. The current research proposes that the constituting of ‘everyday’ life in domesticised space for Central African refugee women living in Australia reveals the orienting of a cosmological order encapsulating socially, historically, and culturally informed practice in, through, and from the body. Additionally, the continuous reconstituting of understandings of ‘everyday’ as grounded in principles of practice oriented in the body presents the opportunity for a unique theoretical application of the concept of ‘reflexive’ habitus, which, extending on understandings of ‘torn’ habitus, suggests that people who frequently experience uncertainty in their ‘everyday’ life may paradoxically constitute contemporary experiences of ontological insecurity as familiarity. In accordance with this perspective in which bodily experience mediates constitutive perceptions of the world, this research aims to reveal the body as the intersubjective tool through which the experiencing subject amalgamates imaginatively remembered past experience with an imagined future to constitute and experience the contemporary as familiar and ‘everyday’.

Lenore Metrick-Chen The Need for Ruins in Visual Art: Paul Ricoeur and Cross Cultural Memory- Beijing, New York City Lenore Metrick-Chen is Associate Professor of Art and Cultural History at Drake University. Metrick-Chen specializes in imagology and examines visual art’s function as a language of cultural communication, ideas of social efficacy and memory, exemplified in articles and book chapters such as “Andy Goldsworthy’s Art as a Visual Measure” in (Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time (2008), and in exhibitions such as “Cultural Intersections in the Colonial Period: Africa, China, France, Japan and the United States” (2010). Much of her research concentrates on transnational relations of art and people, especially between the United States and China. Her interest in immigration and its impact throughout culture lead her to look beyond legal policies in exploring the reception and effects of Chinese people upon 19th century American visual culture. Her book Collecting Objects/ Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and the American Visual Culture 1870-1900, is upcoming this September from SUNY Press. My paper highlights representations of place and temporal and spatial displacements, as it investigates the role(s) of memory in extreme urban transformation. During the last century, overwhelming migration into cities has led to violent adjustments of urban structures to accommodate human beings physically, and to remove buildings perceived (by those in power) as having lost their ability to perform needed functions. With the transformation, or erasure, of place, the daily rituals it gave rise to (walking a path, glancing in a window) are curtailed. Previously performed actions and, with them, the body knowledge intimately bound up with space, becomes re-formed as memory. To visualize, and thereby give language, to memory’s responses and interventions with radical urban change, I examine Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘anarchitectural’ projects in the United States and France, in conjunction with RongRong and inri’s photographs of urban ruins in contemporary China. These artworks don’t illustrate memory but engage it. They perform the dislocations in space and time that is their subject. Memory has a disarming opacity, but Paul Ricoeur provides more than a hint in how to proceed. In Oneself as Another, he distinguishes experiential deictic time and space from the categorical time and space that is inscribed onto objective coordinates. His distinctions are surprising parallel to Li Shiqiao’s assertion that Chinese memory is distinct from the Western “archival” memory, which he describes as linking memory to a fixed, mapped place. Chinese place-memory, alternatively, can shift sites without losing its sense of continuity. Defining the word “transmit,” Vera Schwartz recalls its dual root: “to grasp” and “to set free.” When handing on the past is not an attempt of mimesis but a lived action, it provides a place for freedom. I interrogate the importance of these artworks, and the importance of embodying memory, for human ethics and action.

(13) Urban Spaces I Chair: Jesper Gulddal, University of Copenhagen

Amila Sirbegovic Shift the city – The Temporary Lab of Non | Permanent Space

Amila Sirbegovic, born 1978 in Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, architect. PhD candidate at the Vienna University of Technology, Visual Culture Program (since October 2008). Works in Office for City renewal in 17th and 18th district (Gebietsbetreuung Stadterneuerung), on projects related to migration and city development. Co-founder of the interdisciplinary group Was wohnst du? (What do you inhabit?), which is focused on forms of habitation of “the others”, connections between prejudice, culture and architecture.

The temporary lab of non | permanent change is a research project on relations between migration and city change, visible phenomena, transnational identities and its visibility in public space. This public portal is a methodological experiment and part of my PhD-work “Inhabiting for / as Migrants – temporary / permanent, formal / informal”. For analysis of the visible phenomena of migration in the urban context, I have developed own method, attempting to record the global, transnational, yet locally anchored space, and simultaneously produce a tool out of my practice, which can be used and reshaped by other city researchers. The work focuses on migrants from Bosnia and migrants in Bosnia, linking three cities: Vienna (A), Sarajevo (BiH), and St. Louis (USA). Permanent temporariness is the connecting link between these three cities, whose city parts have been renewed by migrants and their transnational practice. In order to understand these practices it is necessary to research beyond state borders. Migration is a global issue and has to be researched in its global context.

“I started off by making a film about the Chinese in Bosnia but in the process I realized I was also making a film about the Bosnians in exile.“ Duska Zagorac, director of the movie PATRIA MIA, nomad direction International movement of people affects and changes space, recreating, redefining and reshaping it and every individual involved. Migration results in creating a new, vibrant, ever changing identity of individuals as well as of the cities, which are embedded into the new created transnational space. How is the built environment modified by this transnational identities? Can migration be seen as a tool for reshaping the city, opening new possibilities and visualizing the unplanned, unthinkable and unregulated city?

Claire Lévy-Vroelant Who cares? Hospitality and re-membering in Parisians furnished hotels Claire Lévy-Vroelant is a Professor in Sociology at the Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University. She is qualified for the functions of Professor in two sections of French National Committee of the Universities: 19 (demography-sociology) and 24 (urbanism and urban planning) Since 1990, she is a researcher in Centre de Recherche sur l’Habitat (UMR 7218 LAVUE, CNRS) and she has been in the leading board of this centre until 2006.

Furnished hotels in Paris seem to be meaningless and poor rests of ancient times. Stigmatized as places where migrants of the colonial period have been living and finally have established themselves definitely – while there were expected not to stay and be back “home” -, they are at the same time object of scandal, and invisible in the “global city”; In this communication, we intend to develop the idea of hotels for migrants as both milieu de mémoire, and heterotopy (following Maurice Halbwachs for the first statement, and Michel Foucault, for the second). We then intend to contribute to the critical reflection on existing theoretical discourses about those durable transit places as possible places for activating migrants’ memorial activity. Our approach puts the subject in the center of the attention by comparing two discursive modes: conversations, stories, anecdotes resulting from long time participant observation that we have conducted in 22 Parisian hotels, and literature (novels, diaries mainly) selected among francophone authors (with and without migrant background) expressing the relation of the narrator with the hotel. Intermediary places, between private and public, namely façades, courtyards, bars; corridors, staircases, cellars, etc. are supports and occasions of re-membering. We intend to address the question of transmission in a context of non-patrimonialisation, indifference of public and local authorities concerning the value of such places, and conversely social interest for accommodating families coming from the new post-colonial immigration. Two ways are particularly explored: one is the capability of telling and transmitting that results from the hostellers’ specific position (themselves having most of the time a migrant background), second is literature and the mobilization of “urban imaginaries”. Kathleen Waller Migrant Identities in the Filmic Apartment Ellipsis Kathleen Waller is a PhD student in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong where she is conducting research on urban space, identity politics, and global migrants. Waller's publications include "Echoes

of Sophocles's Antigone in Auster's Invisible" and "Redefinitions of India and Individuality in Adiga's The White Tiger," both in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, and her recent Asia Cinema Studies Society conference paper “Hong Kong Female Migrant Workers in the Filmic Apartment Ellipsis” is currently under peer review.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand how migrants re-form their personal and cultural identities within the space of the filmic urban apartment. A network of contemporary quasi-real films explore the way the framing of an immigrant’s domestic space creates an ellipsis or gap where personal memories and those of the collective city’s inhabitants come into contact and create new culture, or postculture as coined by Hong Kong culture scholar Ackbar Abbas. Film allows this private world to be made visible, giving the public a window by which to explore ethical considerations related to gray laws about migrants. Further, these marginalized individuals are given a voice, which, although fictive, is a representation of reality. The paper shall include examples from the contexts of New York and Hong Kong, cities where these laws are in current debate and where there is a constant shift of culture due to their high volumes of migration. Both the specific urban place and the non-place of the apartment are important in the interaction with personal and collective memories. Each city’s architectural uncanny, as defined by Anthony Vidler, provides the topography by which the immigrant’s apartment becomes a mise-en-abyme, creating near-infinite reflections and possibilities for culture. However, due to the marginalized and purgatory-like situation of many immigrants, the space inversely can create a black hole of anti-matter where their ability to Become as an individual and as part of the collective culture is thwarted. The more we can understand a system of frameworks that the individual immigrant is working within in an urban context, the better we can find solutions for their personal freedoms and assimilation into society.

(14) Writing in Exile I Chair: Kathrin Maurer, University of Southern Denmark

Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez Spain is dead. Memory and non-memory in three Spanish writers experience of exile Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez is doctor, master degree and graduate by the University of Salamanca (Spain). Currently he teachs and researchs as Post-Doc at the University of Aarhus. In this University he is member of the research group “The novelized memory”. His areas of investigation are the Spanish Golden Age Literature and contemporary novel about memory in Spain and Latinamerica. He is co-editor with Hans Lauge of the book La memoria novelada: Hibridización de géneros y metaficción en la novela española actual (2000-2010) sobre la guerra civil. Peter Lang, 2012. In this book he has written the article “Literatura y memoria cultural en España (2000-2010)” (with Hans Lauge). He has published some articles on Spanish literature in the Baroque period and right now he is working as co-editor in the book La memoria novelada II.

In his poem “Idea of exile”, Luis Cernuda describes a regular afternoon in London. Cernuda, exiled from Spain, expresses this loss using some apparently banal verses. But the significant part of the poem rises when the poet introduces a question: Spain? That word hits the poet as an echo from the past, forcing him to remind all the cultural imaginary connected to that concept-place. After the question a second voice answers at last: Spain is dead. The possible way back home is blocked: the individual is for first time completely free. And, precisely, that is the reason of his deepest pain. Three centuries before, Francisco de Quevedo suffered a quite different type of exile: as a punishment Quevedo was forbidden to leave Spain for years. In the development of his posterior works we notice how the poet defines his idea of Spain. Through the construction of this issue, Quevedo claims a historical and political position for this country and, at the same time, defines the characteristics of the “hardest reading” of the supposed Spanish identity. In 1943 Jorge Semprún was captured in France by the German troops and sent to Buchenwald´s concentration camp. After that traumatic experience he used literature to demystify the sense of belonging to a specific cultural identity. According to his thought, the geo-political dimension linked to the concept of identity is substituted by the more open concept of literature. To migrate to that “new place” Semprún deconstructs the idea of homeland and, as a consequence, he locks out any possibility of getting back there. In this paper I will link those different ideas of exile in order to depict how this “forced migrations” represent three particular vision of Spain and how the conception of this country has been altered along the years, according to its controversial idea of nation and

identity. Through this lecture I will conclude that these visions sign a way to eradicate the difficult concept of place of origin and, finally, open a possible interpretation to mark the defeat of the geo-political identity of the individuals in modern societies.

Andrea Castro Horror, exile and language in novels on post-dictatorship Argentina Andrea Castro was born in Buenos Aires and moved to Sweden as a young adult. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the Göteborgs universitet, Sweden. Currently she is an Associate Professor in Spanish at the Department of Languages and Literatures at the same university. Her main area of research has been fantastic literature, it’s borderlands and silences. In the last years she has more and more turned her interest towards translation, movility (voyages, expeditions, exilie) and transculturality.

During the last decades, Argentinian literature and art have been working through the traumatic memories of the seventies and eighties. Quite a few novels, have dealt with the memories of repression, such as heroic portraits, stories of treason, disappearance and torture. In the last years, reflection about exile as a consequence of militancy has started to be focused, being language one of the central issues in these reflections. In this presentation, drawing on La Capra’s (1999) distinction between absence and loss, as well as in hauntology (Davis 2007, Schwab 2010) and translation studies (Bartoloni 2008), I will study the relationship between exile, terror and language in María Negroni’s La Anunciación (The Annunciation, 2007), Laura Alcoba’s Jardín blanco (White Garden, 2010), and Susana Kesselman’s Crónica de un exilio (Chronicle of an Exile, 2011). While both Negroni’s and Kesselman’s novels are written in Spanish, is Alcoba’s novel first written in French and translated to Spanish by Jorge Fondebrider. Questions I will look into are: How are the traumatic memories worked through or acted out in the new contexts of exile? How are the transcultural connections and processes represented through language when many of the contexts of language no longer exist and translation is needed? In what ways can the new languages encountered obscure or shed light on the experience of displacement, homelessness and a shattered memory? Eneken Laanes Losing ground: Andrei Ivanov and the post-Soviet experience of Russian minority in Estonia Eneken Laanes, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. She has published the book Lepitamatud dialoogid (Tallinn, 2009) on the role of the Estonian novel in the post-Soviet memory culture. Her current research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of fiction on historical traumas. My presentation will deal with the literary work of the Russian-language Estonian author Andrei Ivanov (b. 1971) and his representation of the post-Soviet experience of the Russian speaking generations who were born in Estonia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union its offspring Russia shrinked, leaving part of the former citizens of the Soviet Union outside its new borders. Ivanov’s protagonists belong to a particular group within the Russian minority in Estonia, the stateless persons – people who did not want to become Russian citizens but were also unable to acquire Estonian citizenship because of language requirement or other matters. Ivanov describes the experience of these people as becoming migrant and losing ground. The experience of becoming migrant in Ivanov’s autobiographical texts is further complicated by the migration of his protagonists to Western countries, in particular to Denmark. Through the representation of the life of his protagonist in a Hesberga hippy commune the post-Soviet experience is tied to a more general European experience of globalisation, migration and crisis of capitalism. My presentation will concentrate on Ivanov’s short story Ash (2008) and the novel A Handful of Dust (2011). I will inquire into the use of spatial metaphors in the representation of the anquishing experience of rootlessness and of the attempts at living inbetween cultures in a nationally divided world. The presentation shows how in Ivanov’s texts the feeling of non-belonging to the political spaces is juxtaposed with the sensory rootedness of memory of his protagonists in the everyday places in Tallinn, Estonia. The representation of the common everyday space is also one of the reasons Ivanov has had a powerful breakthrough in Estonian literature. For the first time he represents the Estonian post-Soviet experience from the perspective of a stateless person thereby destabilizing the collective memory of these events. Although welcomed by Estonian readers and critics, the uncategorizability of his work in Estonian literature defined by strict criteria of language has also

provoked a number of literary debates. The presentation shows how the crisis his work generates in the delineations of Estonian literary and cultural space mirrors the disturbing effects of the stateless and migrant in the definition of political spaces and its categories in his work.

(15) Memories of Contested Homelands

Chair: Mary Watkins, Pacifica Graduate Institute Santa Barbara

Rehnuma Sazzad “Poetry changes only the poet”: Representation of Rootlessness in Mahmoud Darwish

Rehnuma Sazzad is in the final year of a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies. In 2004, I achieved an MA in English Studies from Manchester University. In 2003, I completed an MA in English Literature from Dhaka University, Bangladesh. My current research focuses on Edward Said and some of the most prominent Middle Eastern intellectuals. I have published and got contributions accepted in journals like Middle Eastern Studies, Postcolonial Text, and Human Architecture. I have also presented a good number of papers in various postgraduate conferences. Darwish lived the paradoxical life of a physically present but officially absent entity, since he was exiled from his village at the age of six, when the Palestinians faced the catastrophe called the ‘Nakba’. When he snuck back into the country, he was branded as an ‘illegal infiltrator’ and a ‘present-absentee’. His aesthetics, however, was sharpened by his experiences of migrations in the Arab world and the West, which followed the ‘Nakba’. Darwish’s integration into places like Beirut and Paris gave him a new outlook on the idea of place and belonging. He used the Arabic concept of ‘bayt’, which means both the poetic verse and the house, to turn his writing into a near literal home in his homelessness. Simone Bitton’s As the Land is the Language brings out Darwish’s passionate transformation of the figurative to the real. In the process of this merge between the real and the metaphorical, Darwish put forward a new style of poetry that he called ‘lyric epic’, a form of tale of the Palestinians, which included even the memory of the anemones and the house sparrow of his village. This is through which, however, he transformed the memory of dislocation into a humanistic vision of coexistence with the ‘other’. It is because he saw Palestine as a palimpsest holding many layers of memory of the passers-by from time immemorial. I believe that the pluralism was enhanced by Darwish’s love for Rita, an imaginary name given to his Israeli beloved. Darwish recreated the complexity of his love and his pluralistic vision for the homeland without trying to resolve the tension inherent in them. In the end, though, he admitted that his poetry was unable to materialize the coexistence he envisaged in his troubled land; it only changed the poet through enhancing his ‘universal humanism’.

Sophie Ernst The HOME project, 2006-2012

Sophie Ernst was born in Munich in 1972 and grew up in Drenthe, in the northern Netherlands. She trained as a industrial mechanic with BMW before graduating from the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam in 2000. Ernst worked as Assistant Professor at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan for several years (2003-2007), where she started the HOME project. HOME is a long-term project that explores the notion of “ideal space” as a memory of the recent or distant past. In the first stage of the project she explored how artists, writers and filmmakers remembered the places they had left behind during the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947. In 2008 she extended the project to include architectural memories of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs living in Palestine and Israel. In 2009 HOME has been exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society, UK (2008) Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2009), Johnson Museum at Cornell University, USA (2012), was awarded the Golden Cube in Kassel, DE (2009) and is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2012). In 2012 the book HOME: Architecture of Memory was published (Wakefield, YSP, (2012). Since 2009 Ernst is working towards a PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

"Amnesia is a sin", says Aamer Hussein a Pakistani writer living in the UK. In a recorded interview for the HOME project he reflects on memory, the craft of storytelling as well as impacts of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent (1947) today. In this paper I should like to share processes of the artistic research project HOME. HOME is an attempt to map space through memories. It looks at historic instances of migration like the Partition. I construct installations

by layering imaginary spatial worlds with aural, visual and material elements. Questions I should like to address in this paper are, how do artists, architects, writers and other cultural practitioners deal with migration, place, identity and memory in their work and how do I transform these stories into moments of experience in the HOME installations? Notions like memory, identity and experience are instruments to articulate claims to space. Space is a fundamental resource and instruments for articulating claims to space share a deep relationship with any fight for space. The idea of shelter is an important issue in contemporary urban discourse. My work, HOME, takes up the idea of home and shelter by way of lived experience. Questions such as how does spatialization of experience transform claims to a space and what is the relationship between the idea of historical continuity and lived experience are key to how I approach my project. Over the years I have used the re-telling of experiences as stories to understand the various ambiguities embedded within claims to space. By being complex, ambivalent, contradictory and slippery, stories give us an opportunity to understand the various geographies of difference and similitude in a critical manner. Merav Yerushalmy Migration and Boundaries in the discourse of contemporary art in Israel-Palestine I am a researcher and lecturer in the arts department at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. My work focuses on issues of migration, communality and documentation, and my interests more generally lie in the consideration of social and political engagement in contemporary art. My current research explores the work of contemporary artists who address these issues in the particular contexts and histories of Israel-Palestine. This paper explores the migrations and boundaries between Israeli and Palestinian discourses of contemporary art. Following decades of post-modernist and post structuralist thought, the discourses of both Israeli art and Palestinian art have acknowledged (to some extents) their immediate and often adversary others, but very little has been done in terms of understanding these discourses as being-in-common. This paper examines one particular case of Israeli and Palestinian art discourses focusing on the work of Asim Abu Shaqra and seeks to formulate new ways of thinking and embodying contemporary art practices which offer us a more communal, if highly fraught, vision of Israel-Palestine. Despite the divisive political conditions in Israel-Palestine, contemporary artists such as Asim Abu Shaqra, as well as Rana Bishara, Yochai Avrahami, Ilana Salama Ortar, David Reeb, Manar Zouabi and others have found highly productive practices and sites in which to perform a contested being-in-common in which Israeli-Palestinian histories and narratives are understood as working communally while maintaining difference and alterity. However, the theoretical discourse addressing these practices has remained firmly couched in the postmodern recognition of the other (and the maintaining of its distance from the various centres), and has thus come short in addressing the complex communalities formed and performed in Israel-Palestine. Exploring the discourse of Asim Abu-Shaqra's work in the 90's and the 21st century, and its competing but often limited readings as a case in point, the paper will argue that contemporary and modern models of communality, ranging from Hannah Arendt's understanding of the sensus communis, to Martin Buber's positing of relationality within the realm of Israel-Palestine, as well the work of contemporary artists, may help us develop more suitable models allowing not only for difference but also for solidarity.

(16) Migration, Home and Family (Visual Arts) Chair: Nikos Papastergiadis

Mia Hannula Towards a Migratory Aesthetics: Social-cultural ruptures and reconciliations in contemporary video art Mia Hannula is a Finnish art historian. She has studied both art history and political science as her majors. Hannula has worked as an assistant lecturer at the department of Art Studies in University of Turku. She has held several courses and lectures on contemporary art and theory, and also worked as a curator. Hannula has published articles on contemporary art, migratory aesthetics, and aesthetics of conflict imagery and violence. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled Towards an Intercultural Aesthetics. Cultural movements, conflicts and encounters in contemporary art. Hannula is a project researcher at the Network for Research on Multiculturalism and Societal Interaction (MCnet, University of Turku).

In my presentation, I consider how art and experimental documentary can be part of social and cultural processes in multicultural societies. I address the aesthetic means of audio-visual media as inquiry of construction of identity against a traumatic backdrop of war/political violence, exile/emigration and displacement. The close analysis of the film Separations (2009) by Mieke Bal & Andrea Seligmann Silva demonstrates how experimental documentary can serve as a site for memory acts that enable working through the social-cultural ruptures and support efforts towards reconciliation in intercultural contexts. This art film measures a multitude of cultural differences between conceptions of self and social relations, home and exile/emigration, violence and safety, and experiencing and translating through autobiography and artistic invention. It implies processes wherein the subjects are constructed through the expression of various cultural differences; it is a process of constructing self-conception, characterised by the dynamics of disintegration and reconnection. The presentation is concerned with how cultural memory and conception of family history are constructed through memory acts enabled by the film camera. The approach allows studying the connections and discontinuities of personal and collective memory. It demonstrates how cultural representations give voice to collective thinking and imagining, and personal experiences are affected by such memory frames, possibly even to such an extent that they can alter the lived experience itself. The memory frame is constituted by social, political as well as cultural conditions, but importantly also by individual subjects. Tension and friction between an individual experience and a collective thinking can motivate alternative ways of thinking and knowing and modes of agency. Cultural frames thus also evolve along with new representations and art provides a context to examine these conditions. Deborah Schultz Investigating the unknown: crossing borders in contemporary art Deborah Schultz, Regent’s American College London, Assistant Professor of Art History at Richmond, The American University in London. Her primary areas of study focus on word-image relations, photography, and memory in 20th century and contemporary art. She is the author of ‘Crossing Borders: Migration, Memory and the Artist’s Book’, in Moving Subjects, Moving Objects: Migrant Art, Artefacts and Emotional Agency, Maruška Svašek (ed.) (Oxford: 2012), 201-221; ‘Photographic traces of history and memory’ in Julia Winckler, Traces/Spuren, (London, 2012), 5-6; Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (Oxford, 2007); and ‘“The Conquest of Space:” On the Prevalence of Maps in Contemporary Art’ (Leeds, 2001). She is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and other contemporary art journals. She is currently working on a book on the representation of memory in contemporary art.

Borders function on two levels: they not only define spaces at their limits but they also draw attention to the relationship between spaces. They act as markers where two spaces meet, highlighting the limits of spaces and the borderlands between them. Crossing or leaving a border suggests a step into the unknown, into a less defined territory. The notion of unknown, unstable spaces has been explored by a number of contemporary artists. This notion relates both to the mobility of movement and the physical possibilities of exploring new territories found in modern societies, as well as wider postmodern concerns with the unstable nature of language and, in turn, concepts. People move, definitions and meanings change; contemporary artists seek the formal and conceptual means to bring these concerns together in modern forms of representation. In Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis, Inge E. Boer has noted that ‘Boundaries and globalisation appear at odds with each other’ (2006, 1). In this sense she refers to boundaries as limits, globalisation as ‘movement, free flow’ and the absence of boundaries. However, the two do not need to be perceived as oppositional terms, or in conflict with one another. Instead, we may productively explore the combination of the two in terms of the in between territories outlined above. Thus, the synthesis of boundaries and globalisation produce unstable spaces in which there are no limits, either physical or conceptual. This paper discusses concepts of crossing borders in relation to the works of contemporary artists, in particular the project The Other in Me (2010) by Magda Biernat. A collection of photographs of people and interiors, the project explores the relationship between immigrants, their homes and a lack of fixed identity.

Layli Rakhsha A journey toward home Layli Rakhsha was born in Tehran-Iran in 1976. She migrated to Western Australia to complete her study in art while she had her Diploma of Fine Art from Azad Islamic University in 1999. She completed a Masters of Visual Art in the

School of Communications and Contemporary Arts at Edith Cowan University. Layli Rakhsha is currently PhD candidate at Curtin University of Technology. Her research is about the cultural influence of Iranian diaspora on the Australian contemporary art. Rakhsha investigates how the idea of home is intentionally or unintentionally embedded in Iranian diasporic art in Australia with key theory based on Avtar Brah’s idea of diaspora and home. Rakhsha’s art project is based on exploring the idea of home in Australian landscape photography and printmaking.

Diaspora is an important aspect of understanding migration. It can provide opportunities to experience something new. Although the migrant faces lots of social and cultural problems in the host society, the host country can also be a site for exploring and discovering something different. It can open doors to new knowledge, meanings and understandings. Remembering memories and home, creating hybrid activities and referring to his/ her identity in the host society are the common solutions for dealing with new social and cultural situations for most diasporic people. Diaspora also causes the individual to feel separation from ‘home’ for an uncertain period of time and provokes the individual’s feelings, memories and emotions into positive and negative attitudes toward the new. One’s place of birth often creates an eternal image of ‘home’ for the individual. This image of ‘home’, I argue, carries through that person’s artwork and this paper aims to test this assertion. Do diasporic artists really represent ‘home’ in the host society or in a new place? In this paper, I largely focus on Avtar Brah’s theory about diaspora and home. In addition, I discuss the intertwined relationship between diaspora and home with Iranian- Australian artist Hossein Valamanesh who is practicing art in Australia since the 1973. I will do this by analysing some of his artworks, which in turn will open up my debate surrounding the Iranian cultural influence in Australian contemporary art. I will also examine my own artistic practice and explore the idea of home from my position as part of Iranian diaspora in Australian.

(17) Urban Spaces II Chair: Lenore Metrick-Chen, Drake University

Katy Beinart Intangible heritages: re-making the material culture of migrant memory Katy Beinart is an artist, architectural designer, writer and educator, currently pursuing a PhD by Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Having trained as an architect at UCL and Oxford Brookes University, and completed a Masters in Development Practice, she went on to develop an interdisciplinary practice combining art, architecture and participatory methodologies. Since 1999, she has completed a range of public art commissions and projects and in 2005 & 2007 she received the Art Plus Award for Art in Public Places from the Arts Council England and SEEDA. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. She teaches architecture at the University of Brighton and University of Hertfordshire.www.katybeinart.co.uk

Through using participatory art practices in a public place, my research attempts to understand connections between migrant memory and current contestations over place identity. In gathering, translating and re-presenting collective memories of varied journeys and genealogies, the artworks offer possible routes to unpicking the complex inheritances of place, and how these can relate to questions of gentrification, ownership, and diversity. Brixton Market is at the centre of a culturally diverse area of London which is rich in migrant history, but which has also been the focus of past and present contestations over place. In the 1980s, riots brought Brixton to the world's attention and these resurfaced more recently in the riots of summer 2011. Additionally, what was mainly a market catering to the specific needs of the various migrant communities resident in the area, has recently become increasingly gentrified, igniting local debate and raising issues about the intangibility of migrant heritage. Meanwhile, nearby sites are being promoted as 'heritage sites' for specific elements of that heritage/history. Recent research by Stevens (2009) highlights the question of the 'intangible heritage' in the memorialisation of migrant history. Basu and Coleman (2008) explore how the material culture of migration is transformed and reformed in different contexts, a process of re-enactment which becomes an act of 'translation' between past and present, origin and destination. My research took the form of a month-long market stall residency in Brixton Market, collecting memories of migration and family history, in an exchange for salt, a trope of my own family history and migrations. The multiple meanings and associations of salt and memory provided a starting point for conversations which resulted in 54 individual narratives. These have formed the basis for works which collectivise memory to form a biography of place, in which totemic relics

of migrant memories are re-fabricated, reproduced or re-imagined. I propose that through materialising intangible heritages, the ghosts of migrant history can be better heard in current struggles over geography.

Andrew Hennlich Re-reading the ‘Rainbow Nation’: Identity, Migration, and the Absurd in William Kentridge’s The Nose Andrew Hennlich is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Frostic School of Art, Western Michigan University. He is currently preparing a manuscript, (un)Fixing the Eye: William Kentridge and the Optics of Witness, examining Kentridge’s use of optical tools as metaphors for witness and memory in the artist’s films and works for theatre. He has written more widely on contemporary art and culture for publications including Image & Text (Pretoria, South Africa), esse, and Etc. and several galleries. He is also with Paul Clinton preparing an edited volume of parallax on the theme of stupidity.

During the spring of 2008, anti-immigrant riots broke out in South Africa targeting immigrants arriving from other nations on the continent. A number of “absurd” photographs of these riots were captured, where protestors brandish golf clubs, a curio giraffe, and a tetherball pole; using images of suburban leisure as weapons. For the South African artist and filmmaker William Kentridge, these images represent an absurd logic. The absurd as Kentridge understands it, forces people to come to terms with how they make sense of the bits of information received, placing these fragments of information into a narrative, which makes it a potent historical tool. During these riots, Kentridge was working on a production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, itself an absurd narrative. Reading Kentridge’s use of anamorphic sculptures in the set designs for The Nose and the narrative of opera itself, my talk reads the anxiety of a man who awakens to find his nose missing as a metaphor for a loss of identity, into Kentridge’s South African context. The use of anamorphic sculptures, which force the viewer to be situated in the correct perspective to perceive the image’s intended shape, I argue functions like the absurd. This position highlights the relationship of South Africa (and its townships) to the rest of Africa; the problems highlighted by the immigration crisis radically shift the ANC’s pan-African claims. The narrative of The Nose centers on questions of identity and exodus, by bringing its themes back to South Africa. Using the absurd to read these threats uncovers a complex series of negotiations over space, ownership and African identity in the post-apartheid era; interrogating South Africa’s relationship with the rest of the continent.

Sarra Kassem Mobility and the urban landscape in the films of Fatih Akin Sarra Kassem is currently a second year Ph.D student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her study looks at representations of Turkish migrants in the film of Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin. Sarra graduated from Panteion University of Social and Political sciences with a BA in sociology in 2004 and has completed an MA in Criminology at Middlesex University, London in 2005. Her research interests are very broad and cross different disciplines. Primarily she is interested media representations and their role in constructing identities and definitions of otherness, world cinema, crime cinema, youth cultures, migration, deviance and social exclusion. This paper explores the representation of space in Turkish-German cinema and more specifically in the films Kurz and Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand by Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin. During the 1960s and 1970s films about migrants in Germany tended to focus on the problems of integration. With regard to the mise-en-scène, a key convention was the dominance of claustrophobic spaces. Narratives unfolded predominately within private spaces, a pattern that emphasized that the others were kept away from the public sphere. Fatih Akin abandons the domestic sphere as a setting in favor of urban landscapes. Both Kurz and Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand take place in the ethnically diverse area of Hamburg Altona with great part of the narrative being captured out in the streets. Although one could argue that this approach signifies a shift in the representation of migrants in terms of acknowledging their presence in contemporary cities, on closer inspection it can be noticed that even in Akin’s films, migrants are not practically allowed great mobility, with their presence in the streets being restricted to the borough of Altona rather than the city as a whole. Given that Akin’s approach to space is not a singular phenomenon, in the sense that similar uses of the urban landscape can be identified in other Turkish-German films as well as hyphernated films beyond the German context, it could be argued that the new trend in migrant cinema is to move beyond claustrophobic spaces to urban multiethnic

neighbourhoods. This paper will examine the transition from private to public spaces and explore whether this shift could be considered as a step forward with regard to representations of migrant populations.

(18) Writing in Exile II Chair: Søren Frank, University of Southern Denmark

Tania Ørum Expatriate or Refugee? Tania Ørum is a senior lecturer at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has been the co-ordinator of the Danish research network ”Avantgardernes genkomst og aktualitet” supported by the Danish Research Council. 2004-2009 director of the Nordic research network for Avant-Garde Studies, supported by Nordforsk. 2007-2009 Chairman of EAM, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. 2009- Member of Steering Committee of EAM, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies. Editor of 4 vols of The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 2012-.

During the first half of the 20th century Paris was the art capital of the world, drawing artists of all kinds from all of the world to its cultural centre for shorter or longer periods. Among the American artists drawn to Paris, the writer Gertrude Stein came to stay for more than a generation. Her home in 27 rue de Fleurus was the centre of a large international circle of expatriate artists, notably modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso and the group of American writers whom Gertrude Stein named ”the lost generation” (Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fiztgerald and others). Between 1904 and her death Gertrude Stein never went back to the USA, except for a lecturing tour in 1934. She even chose to stay in France during the second world war, although she was not only a jew and a lesbian, but also an ”entartet” writer whose books were prohibited during the German occupation. Yet she consistently saw herself as an American. A recent novel contrasts Gertrude Stein’s life in Paris with that of a Vietnamese refugee who worked as a cook in Stein’s household. My paper takes this as its cue to look at what constitutes the similarities and differences between the expatriate artists of the 20th century and the many refugees who have settled in Paris. When and why is exile experienced as a home? What kinds of identity construction are possible in a foreign metropolis, but not ”at home”? And what part does post/colonial experience, class and nationality play in belonging somewhere?

Lorenzo Mari “Of Tamarind & Impossible Getting Back”: Images of Mogadishu in the Somali Diaspora Literature Lorenzo Mari is a PhD candidate in Comparative and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Bologna. His research project focuses on family narratives in Somali postcolonial and diasporic literature, both in English and in Italian. Together with Raphael d’Abdon, he has translated into Italian Bless Me Father (Rome: Compagnia delle Lettere, 2011) by the South African author Mario d’Offizi.

In his brilliant article “Of Tamarind & Cosmopolitanism” (2002), Nuruddin Farah recounts the history of Mogadishu’s Tamarind Market, or Bakhaaraha Market, prior to the Somali civil war and the staging in that place of the so-called “Battle of Mogadishu”, which has been represented from a fully neocolonial perspective in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down (2001). Farah’s piece of writing is placed on a vaguely lyrical and mythical background, which, however, doesn’t exclude a strong political attempt to counter postcolonial and neocolonial perspectives on the present and the future of the city, deeply ravaged by the conflict. This paper seeks to illustrate how “lost cosmopolitanism” constitutes the key concept of Nuruddin Farah’s project of postcolonial historical “re-vision” and might help to analyze how other Somali migrant authors are dealing with their past(s). In fact, many writers from the Somali diaspora have engaged themselves with images of Mogadishu as a destroyed and, consequently, “lost” city. A peculiar effort, in this sense, is to be found in Igiaba Scego’s blending of Rome and Mogadishu’s city maps in her La mia casa è dove sono (2010). Also Shirin Ramzanali Fazel (1994) and Cristina Ubax Ali Farah (2007) have depicted an impossible return to the city – reinforcing, thus, the double bind of nostalgia and impossible return, which is typical of every diasporic condition, through the material, physical and political impossibility of getting back which is due to the atrocities of the ongoing

conflict. Cosmopolitanism”, however, is a key attitude to cope with this sense of material loss, placing the process of re-imagining Somalia and Mogadishu in the diaspora within a fully transnational perspective, mixing the nostalgic attitude towards the “lost” country and city with a renewed attitude to the intercultural issues raised in the present diasporic condition.

Alan Robinson Locating Representations of British Asians Professor Alan Robinson is Head of English Department (since 1990) at the University of St Gallen. His main areas of interest include The History and Culture of London. His book length publications include Imagining London, 1770-1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

The experiential worlds inhabited by British South Asians have been shaped by both geography and history. Migrants often came from regions particularly associated with imperial service (e.g. the Punjab, Sylhet); the collective memory of these, and/or their socialisation into British culture, coloured first-generation migrants’ expectations of Vilayat and their subsequent disillusionment. Equally, the ‘host’ community’s evolving expectations, perceptions and treatment of migrants, expressed in daily interactions, popular culture, and framed in successive government policies (assimilation, integration, multiculturalism, community cohesion), have also affected the self-perception and self-concept of migrants. Although the Parekh Report, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), advocated the promulgation of a new, more inclusive ‘national story’, its liberal attitudes were soon overtaken by a conservative backlash after 9/11 and the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. Thus, the sense of identity or belonging of young British Muslims is subject to competing pressures or affiliations: hostile or Islamophobic responses to what Melanie Phillips has termed Londonistan; the attractions of an urban, increasingly mediatised youth culture; and a politicised identification with the global ummah. My paper will comprise two sections. First, in locating representations of British Asians in some of the discursive contexts outlined above, and in relation to postcolonial theory, I will refer illustratively to works by Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali. Secondly, to explore deracination and nostalgia, and traditionalist and modernist constructions of religious and cultural identity, I will examine Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), set in an unnamed Northern British town which its South Asian inhabitants have renamed Dasht-e-Tanhaii, ‘The Wilderness of Solitude’.

(19) Redefining Belonging

Chair: Kim Simonsen, Roskilde University

Venla Oikkonen Geographies of Belonging: Time and Space in Population Genomics Dr Venla Oikkonen is a University Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives forthcoming from Routledge in 2013. She has also published articles in Modern Fiction Studies and Science as Culture. For the next three years, she will be an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher working on national narratives in the age of genomics.

Population genomics – the study of genetic variation within and between populations – has played a key role in debates about human ancestry especially since the late 1980s. In particular, the models of matrilineal genetic inheritance traced through mitochondria and patrilineal ancestry studied through the genetic variation of Y-chromosomes have proven highly culturally resonant and widely debated. Crucially, these new forms of molecularized history refashioned ideas of individual genealogy by conceptualizing kinship and belonging in terms of global movements of prehistoric populations. In such accounts, the genetic material carried by human bodies is imagined as a foundational record of generations of ancestors. As such, it is seen as indicating both individual uniqueness and a more abstract but deeply affective sense of communal belonging. Furthermore, these ideas of genetic individuality and evolutionary community are underwritten by notions of evolutionary time and global space. I will focus on these new forms of temporal and spatial belonging. My paper examines the conceptual connections among human genetic material, the global movements of embodied populations, and ideas of individuality and communality in scientific and

popular debates surrounding population genomics. In such debates, the modern individual and the imagined genetic community are conceptualized as mutually constitutive, as bodies are the literal embodiment of global patterns of movement, and prehistoric migrations of populations are productive of new kinds of gendered and individualized bodies. I argue that these conceptual shifts in the understanding of migration and belonging are fundamentally entangled with larger cultural and geopolitical debates. By imagining historically and geographically specific bodies through such binaries as local/global, national/transnational, and origins/destinies, population genomics has engendered and, to an extent, naturalized a new set of racial, gendered, and sexualized differences. A careful analysis of the geographies of belonging in population genomics may thus provide new insights into the cultural politics and epistemic investments implicit in current ideas of roots, kinship and migration. Anne Magnussen Using History to Belong in Gonzales, Texas: An analysis of the participation of European Americans, African Americans and Mexican Americans in the construction of place at the beginning of the 20th century Anne Magnussen is Associate Professor, PhD, at the Institute of History and Civilization, University of Southern Denmark, Odense (Denmark). Her research includes studies of uses of history, identity, power and transnational/transcultural processes as part of an historical project based in Texas, as well as in comics studies, where her focus primarily is on conflictive memories of dictatorships in Spain and Argentina. She has published a series of articles within both fields.

In 1910, the population of Gonzales, Texas, witnessed the inauguration of the town’s two first historical monuments,

both positioned on centric squares right next to the county court house. One monument honored Gonzales’ role in

Texas independence from Mexico in the 1830s, and the other, the Confederacy and its losses during the American Civil

War. This presentation will use the monuments as the point of departure for an analysis of how the past was used to

construct and reproduce Gonzales as a place with a specific focus on the dynamics between the town’s three ethnic

groups; African Americans, European Americans, and a fast growing population of Mexican Americans.

The fundraising and inauguration of the monuments represented and involved almost exclusively the European

Americans, but to fully understand the celebrations dynamics it is crucial to focus on the communities’ relationships,

not least of power and belonging. As I will argue, all three communities used references to the complex regional past

in terms of migrations from Mexico, Europe, the African continent and the US Southern states in their construction of

themselves as communities and in their insistence that they all belonged in Gonzales.

The analysis and discussion is based on a theoretical framework that primarily combines Charles Peirce’s semiotics

with Doreen Massey’s conception of space.

Moritz Schramm Defending diversity: Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen and the new German Heimatfilm Moritz Schramm is Assistant Professor, PhD at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark In cultural and theoretical debates one often operates with the well-known distinction between the rootedness in Heimat, soil and heritage on the one hand versus the openness and rootlessness connected to modern migratory movements on the other hand. While Heimat here often by definition is seen as conservative concept of homogeneity and stability, the migratory experience seems to overcome the individual’s attachment to one place and opens for a more diverse form for belonging. In the German-Turkish film-director Fatih Akin’s latest movie “Soul Kitchen” this quite well known distinction is, however, challenged. In this highly acclaimed movie from 2009, Heimat is no longer seen as the contradiction to movement, diversity and plurality, but is now redefined as a specific space of postmigrant diversity, which is threatened by economic globalization, new media end gentrification. In other words: the movie points at the need to defend the rootedness of a specific place and a specific tradition of plurality against an international flow of capital and people, which seeks to destroy the historical grown place of a postmigrant diversity. In my paper I will discuss this new concept of Heimat as a divers and heterogeneous place. As I will show, Akin in his movie uses specific elements and the structure of the traditional German Heimat-movie, but redefines the concept of Heimat and the threat, this has to deal with: “tradition” is here explicit connected to the diversity of an alternative

cultural lifestyle, while the threat against this new concept of Heimat comes from a rootless culture of economic speculation and globalization. Thus, in Akin’s movie the well known contradiction between rootedness and rootlessness is turned upside down. While the rootedness in old days may have included the idea of an inborn identity, conservative heritage and cultural homogeneity, it seems now to be redefined as a place of diversity and plurality, directly connected to postmigrant spaces. Hence, my paper will explore the upcoming of a new genre, a new German Heimatfilm, and - at the same time – it will try to introduce a more complex understanding of the relation between tradition, rootedness, locality and place in postmigrant societies.

(20) Translocal and Transnational Art Practices

Chair: Anne Ring Petersen, University of Copenhagen

Sidsel Nelund Translocality: studying the local through global contemporary art practices Sidsel Nelund is a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen. Her PhD dissertation investigates the field of knowledge production in contemporary art, especially the divergence between theories of knowledge production and art practices of knowledge production. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen and Université Denis Diderot – Paris 7 and an MA in Modern Culture from the University of Copenhagen with additional MA studies in Aural and Visual Cultures (with distinction) at Goldsmiths University of London. She has collaborated on a series of independent art projects concerned with knowledge production, performative art writing and site-specificity mainly in Beirut, Copenhagen, Santiago de Chile.

Global contemporary art practices have developed since the late 1980’s mainly through the appearance of international mega exhibitions and increased circulation of artists and curators. A consequence of this development is ‘the translocal’ (Andreas Broeckmann); to be grounded locally and connected globally. The term is mostly used to define the condition of artistic practices and networked communities, but this usage overlooks the impact exhibition practices have on shaping the translocal. Based on the assumption that global contemporary exhibition practices and artistic practices are strongly interconnected in developing the translocal this paper investigates the translocal through two different art practices; the Indian artists’ collective Raq’s Media Collective and the Medellín Biennial in Colombia. Using multi-sited ethnography (George Marcus) and site-specificity (Miwon Kwon) I show that translocal practices are to be analysed in relation to a multiple of sites that each have a local grounding. The analysis reveals that the The Raq’s Media Collective is an example of a nomadic practice that return to a local place, whereas the Medellín Biennial is an example of a local place that invites artists, curators and academics from abroad to analyse, comment and better a local situation. I therefore propose that the local is emphasised and scrutinised in its condition of being globally connected and that translocal art practices contribute to constantly modifying our idea of the local. Final reflections will consider the influence of translocal art practices on the production of cultural memory.

Chu YinHua Staging Memories Chu is Assistant Professor in Fine Arts at TungHai University, Taiwan. She receives her practice-based Ph.D at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster, London. Her work has been published in magazines and exhibited internationally, at the 2008 Biennale at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the 2009 London Design Festival, the 2010 Fringe Arts Bath, and the 2010 Cuneo ZooArt Exhibition in Italy. In 2010 Chu also exhibited work at the Taiwan Photo Museum and presented a solo show at London’s Gallery West. In 2009 she was invited to represent the Taipei Artist Village in an exchanging artist with Tokyo Wonder Site.

This presentation proposes to explore the idea of memory and place through the body of photographic practices. My practice-based research arises from the experience of travelling between different cities, which induces a state wherein perceptions of the physical environment are overlaid with memories. The physical space that reflects actual light into one’s eyes is transformed, through and across the spaces one remembers, imagines or fantasises, into what I call the ‘imagined city’. I use mise en scène in photography as the methodology to examine the detail of architecture

and the domestic in order to explore how I interact with the physical environment. Through revealing the hidden secrets that exist in memories, fantasies and imagination, the idea of ‘staging memories’ takes mise en scène beyond its associations with staging technique, developing it as a methodology for representing and experiencing the idea of solidarity of loneliness.

Vlad Glaveanu and Satkeen Azizzadeh Diasporic Art as Narrative: The Creative Construction of Self, Memory, and Place

Vlad Glaveanu obtained his PhD in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and is now Associate Professor at Aalborg University as well as Associate Researcher at Universite Paris Descartes. He published several articles on creativity and art in both social psychology and creativity journals. Vlad is also editor of Europe's Journal of Psychology (EJOP). Satkeen Azizzadeh is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics. Her current research in Organisational Psychology is on external policy implementations. She also holds an MA in Post War and Contemporary Art from Sotheby's Institute of art and is a specialist in Middle Eastern Contemporary Art. This paper is concerned with an exploration of how diasporic art creatively constructs a sense of self, memory and place for both artists and viewers, for migrants as well as the communities they come from and arrive into. It conceptualises art, diasporic art in particular, as a form of narrative and by this it does not take away anything from the figurative quality of artistic depictions but adds to them a key narrative format. Artworks are stories, stories that include the self and are meant to be told to present and imagined audiences. This is all the more interesting in the case of diasporic art whose stories often represent authors in an effort to draw on connections with their place of origin in order to create new connections with members of host communities. This kind of symbolic labour is necessarily one that involves both creativity and memory in an act of communication, of storytelling. To illuminate some of the processes specific to this act of communication we use the case study of a celebrated artist of Iranian origin currently living and working in London. Her works combines text and images (in the form of linocut, photography, collage, etc.) lending support to a research perspectives that considers the verbal and the visual as deeply interconnected. In this presentation we will focus on one particular project in which traditional Iranian sayings are depicted by the artist in series of collages meant to create a bridge between her Eastern legacy and Western audiences, to simulate the creative construction of meaning and problematisation of self and place by revealing similarities and differences in the ways in which we talk about and see the world. Conclusions are drawn regarding the value of theorising art as a narrative for our understanding of selfhood, migration, and memory.

(21) Migration and the Idea of Home I (Cinema) Chair: Randi Marselis, University of Southern Denmark

Patti Gaal-Holmes Liliesleaf Farm – Excavations in Film and Fragments Lost in the Ether Patti Gaal-Holmes is an artist/filmmaker and historian. Her cross-disciplinary practice includes working with moving image, drawing, artists' books, photography, tea and performance. Work is informed by her cross-cultural background (born to German and Hungarian immigrants in South Africa), travelling/living in various countries, and by discourses on migration, colonialism/postcolonialism'. Her PhD on 'A History of 1970s British Experimental Film' (2011) was completed at the University of Portsmouth. She is Reviews Editor for the Intellect journal, Transnational Cinemas and is currently working on the projects 'Liliesleaf Film: Excavations in Film and Fragments Lost in the Ether' and a project exploring the meaning of 'home' with Australian singer/songwriter Emily Barker. She recently returned from an International Artists Residency at the Nirox Foundation, South Africa where she continued to develop the projects. Her article '(Re)calling home': An artist's negotiation and (re)negotiation between memory, geography, history and language' is published in the latest issue of Crossings Journal of Migration and Culture (Nov 2012). In this paper I will be considering the roles that personal and political histories play in opening up the narratives of a place. The film project, Liliesleaf Farm – Mayibuye (currently being worked on) focuses on the farm of the title, which

is located in Rivonia, South Africa. The farmhouse has particular historical significance as it was the headquarters of the military wing of the African National Congress, ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe’, in the early 1960s. The notorious Rivonia Trial took place in 1963, resulting in the lifetime imprisonment of anti-apartheid activists such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Ideas for the project originated with 8mm film footage of my immigrant family at Liliesleaf Farm, as this was our family home in the late 1960s. My German and Hungarian parents had recently moved from the Congo to settle in South Africa. The house acts as a palimpsest, holding multiple layers of memory and history within its walls. Using 1960s home-movie footage and documentary reconstructions on film, as well as still photographs of the site, the multiple histories are brought to the fore to reflect on the lived experiences intersecting in a given space over a short period of time. The challenges of combining personal and political histories lie at the forefront of this project, as do the challenges of dealing with the problems of history, memory, home and nostalgia. Critics and historians such as Paulo Magagnoli and Svetlana Boym’s concepts related to nostalgia are important in opening up spaces for these investigations. Breyten Breytenbach’s writings on exile and memory are useful for reflecting on the meaning of place, home and landscape. The processes of working with film – as opposed to digital media – enable particular modes of entry into the site (Liliesleaf) and facilitate the opening up spaces within the family archive.

Annika Lems and Christine Moderbacher Homelonging in an Age of Movement Annika Lems studied social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna and is currently writing her PhD at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. In her thesis she looks at the narration of place and belonging (or becoming) in the life stories of three Somalis in Melbourne.

Christine Moderbacher studied social and cultural anthropology at the University of Vienna and completed a Masters in ethnographic filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in Manchester. Currently she is working for the NGO Sireas in Brussels and finishing her first featurelength documentary on post-revolutionary Tunisia.

Our time, an era some have reluctantly come to call ‘postmodern’, is marked by travel and migration. John Berger once described the feeling of uprootedness this brings with it to be the ‘quintessential experience’ of today’s world. In some theoretical texts migrants and refugees have been celebrated as champions of a placeless, deterritorialized, or dis-placed imagination of belonging. Although the fascination with a sense of homelessness that marks these works seems to echo a sentiment many Western intellectuals can identify with, the question of how being at-home or being without-home is actually lived often remains unanswered. Bearing these debates in mind, anthropology students Annika Lems and Christine Moderbacher started thinking about ways how to visually represent displacement and its links to people’s experience of emplacement in a world of movement. As a result, we made the film heimweh/homelonging. In restless walks through midsummer Vienna, the short documentary shows the story of the fortyfive years old Austrian Gabi. She was forcibly removed from the United States after she had lived there for over fifteen years. From one day to the other she was accused of leading a fake‐marriage, imprisoned and sent back. Two times Gabi attempted to re‐establish her life in Los Angeles, entering the United States as an illegal immigrant through Mexico. After two more deportations, Gabi now lives in Vienna, a place where she doesn’t feel at home. An initial phase of physical homelessness has been replaced by an existential feeling of estrangement from what others regard to be her ‘own’ country. By showing fragments of the film and focusing on Gabi’s story, we aim to reverse the debate from common representations of deportees or displaced as the ‘others’. Instead, we want to take her story as a starting point to ask: How are displacement and emplacement linked? And in how far can Gabi’s story lead us towards a genuinely existential understanding of the way people connect to places of belonging?

Palle Nørgaard Biographies en Route - and the question of presenting the lost war photography of The Mexican Suitcase

Palle Nørgaard, PhD-Scholar, Aesthetics and Communication, Spanish, Aarhus University. MA from Aarhus University in Spanish philology and Comparative Literature and have since January 2011been working on a Ph.D.-thesis on: Life Writing and Cultural Memory in Spain post 2000 – a narrative investigation of autofictive, autobiographical and biographical self representations in new Spanish literature concerning the civil war and Franco dictatorship. The Thesis

is founded by the National Research Counsel in the collective Research Project The Novelized Memory also at Aarhus University.

The centerpiece of the documentary-film discussed in this paper is the mexican suitcase (The Mexican Suitcase/ La maleta mexicana, T.Ziff, 2011). This was the lost suitcase, that contained 4500 negatives of wartime photographs taken by photography legends Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David “Chim” Seymour during the Spanish Civil War, which was not recovered until 2007. The three photographers were moving around Spain during the Civil War focusing on different motifs such as frontline photography, war ruins, and daily routines among victims through wartime as well as documenting emigrants’ waves to France and Mexico. Their photographs were distributed in many international magazines during the Civil War and the post war period having a high impact on the conception of the war in Spain. By way of narrating the intertwined biographies of the three photographers, the documentary film constructs the mystery itinerary of the lost suitcase, which parallels the story of a large part of the approximately 200.000 emigrants forced into Mexican exile by the Civil War. Consisting of present day-testimonies from emigrants and their descendants in Mexico alongside expert interviews, the documentary frame a universal right of the victim of war. It is the right to have access to the truth of the family-narrative, and accordingly the necessity of telling the full story of the migration, which becomes a parallel narrative to the process of the uncovering of the political neglected historical memory of Francoist Spain. An argument of this documentary is that the intermediate, uncertain and imagined character of migrant memory en route, at the moment between forced exodus and diaspora in exile, must be understood through the narrative’s recontextualization as proposed by this documentary. In proposing this parallel narrative, constructed between the itinerary of the emigrants and that of the photographies, the documentary suggest an alternative memory culture implying a critical reflection to an urban fragmented representation of memory discussed in relation to The Mexican Suitcase Exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York (2010-2011). A narrative analysis of Trisha Ziff’s documentary film is the basis for this paper’s discussion of a more general use of photography, auto/biography and narrative meta-strategy in documentary film and in narrative fiction. This discussion serves as a perspective in trying to describe the representation of the redemptive forces of memory, the interplay of past and present in memory, and the signification of a chronotopic sensibility in migrant and intergenerational memory.

(22) Migration and the Idea of Home II (Visual Arts) Chair: Tania Ørum, University of Copenhagen

Burcu Dogramaci My Home Away From Home. Artistic Reflections of Immigration to Germany Burcu Dogramaci is Professor of 20th Century and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at University of Munich since 2009. She is currently a fellow of the Senior Research in Residence Program at the Center for Advanced Studies at the LMU and organized a conference in June 2011 at the University of Munich about Migration and artistic production. Although for decades the Federal Republic of Germany did not consider itself a country of immigrants, the immigration of several million foreign nationals since the 1960's has changed German society. The influence immigration has had on German culture can be seen not only in the growing number of artists of non-German decent, but more specifically in the topics, motifs, techniques as well as practices of artistic creation. Until now, hardly any attention has been paid to the fact that immigration, since the 1970's – thus as a direct consequence of the large waves of immigration – has become a topic in contemporary German art. In this respect, what stands out is that many artists, in their treatment of immigration, deal particularly with (metropolitan) locations and (interior) spaces. In this process, the artists have approached the terms “homeland” and “home” from two perspectives: on the one hand, as a microcosm of immigrants in Germany and on the other hand, as a space of memory or projection for the immigrants. Examples include conceptional works by the photographer Candida Höfer from the 1970's and by the artist Mischa Kuball from the 2000's, who both sought out and photographed immigrants in their private and work environments. Höfer photographed Turkish immigrants in Cologne while Kuball looked at immigrants from 100 different countries in the Ruhr region. In different ways, both series show how immigrants live in Germany, the image they have of

themselves, their home and their homeland and how they are seen by the photographers. In these works, which focus on the immigrants' most intimate cosmos – on their home – ideas of the own and the foreign converge just as memories of the native culture and the present in the new homeland and hopes and desires for the future meet. Along side the aforementioned works by Höfer and Kuball, artists such as Nevin Aladag or Anny and Sibel Öztürk, who deal with immigration and space, will also be incorporated into the presentation.

Ailbhe Greaney The Concept of ‘Home’; conceptual reproduction, repetition and doubling within photographic practice Ailbhe Greaney was born in Galway, Ireland in 1979. She holds a B.A. (Hons) Degree in Communication Studies from Dublin City University and an MFA with Distinction, in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Award 2000, Aaron Siskind Memorial Scholarship 2000, SVA MFA Chairman’s Award 2000, SVA Graduate Assistantship 2001-2003, The Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary 2006 and The University of Ulster Research Institute Art & Design (RIAD) Grant 2008, 2010 & 2011. She has worked as a Curatorial Intern under Jennifer Blessing at the Guggenheim Museum New York, as Editorial Assistant at Blind Spot Magazine New York and as Advanced Digital Imaging Artist with Lux Imaging, New York. She is currently Lecturer in Photography, B.A. (Hons)/MFA Photography, at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her work has been published and exhibited both nationally and internationally. It is held in the collections of the School of Visual Arts New York and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. “We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place…. In a world of transition and revolution … Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.” (Berger, 1972)

The paper explores the photographic image as both document and construct in relation to the study of place as ‘Home’ or ‘Not Home’. It investigates the intrinsic link between the photograph as document of place and as creator of place, by looking at how human migration effects the physical structure of existing public and domestic spaces. This questions how we reconcile ourselves with place so as to understand, that, which is unfamiliar. The re-creation of place through photography, re-photography, repetition, doubling and mimicry in an effort to “re-member” and/or identify is examined. The paper investigates the camera’s ability to create a “third place”, neither here nor there, and to realise the imaginary aspects that embody any emotive place. I consider the transformative powers of photography within our culture, particularly how these powers relate to the reformulation of place and the reconfiguration of memory. This critically reflects on my own photographic practice as well as the work of Bruno Rosier, Dinu Li, Roni Horn, Gerhard Richter and Hans-Peter Feldmann so as to link critical investigations of photography, re-photography, repetition, mimicry and doubling with sociologist Ulrich Beck’s (2000: 73) concept of “transnational place polygamy.” Most specifically this linkage examines the person’s relationship with time, distance and the home-place through photography and the creation of a family album. The paper emerges out of history, "family photographs sustained sentimental ties in a nation of migrants,” (Sekula, 1986: 8) and moves into the present, reflecting on conceptual reproduction in photography within the domestic and artistic sphere.

(23) Filmic Memories of Migration Chair: Ana Mendes, University of Lisbon

Dagmar Brunow Multiple occupancies: de-essentialising strategies in filmic memory on migration Dagmar Brunow has been a lecturer in film studies at Halmstad University (Sweden) since 1999, and has also been teaching at the universities of Lund, Växjö and Södertörn and Hamburg. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. project on documentary film-making and cultural memory at Hamburg University. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema Studies and has also worked as a literary translator, as a radio journalist and a contributor to the critical journal of popular culture testcard.

This aim of this paper is to bring together cultural memory studies and transnational film studies in taking a closer look at documentary film-making as a practice of remembrance to acknowledge the experiences of 'first-generation' immigrants – an experience which more often than not exists as a form of communicative memory (A. Assmann) alone. These works can be regarded as a counter-historiography challenging the hegemonic national discourse which marginalises migration. Yet, in becoming a counter-discourse to the master narrative of national historiography, the films could easily be subsumed as representations of a homogenous community. While counter practices often imply taking an essentialist stand (AS a migrant, AS a diasporic subject), I am interested in analysing how filmmaking can deal with the paradox of on the one hand attempting to represent migrant and diasporic experiences while on the other hand trying to avoid essentialism. Comparing Fatih Akin's Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren/We forgot to go back (Germany 2001) to Martin Scorsese's Italianamerican (1973) this paper examines how filmmaking can contribute to de-essentialising concepts of nation, belonging and home. While both films can be perceived as prosthetic memory (A. Landsberg), inviting a wide range of audiences to acknowledge the cultural memory of immigration, I argue that Akin's film – unlike Scorsese's – deconstructs essentialist notions of home, belonging and identity and the sense of container-cultures (see A. Erll) through its aesthetic politics: by pointing at the situatedness of knowledge as well as the decoupling of belonging, identity and territory through the use of space and music. Akin's film illustrates the need to complicate and challenge the essentialising tendencies that can be observed in contemporary cultural memory studies (cf. A. Erll 2011).

Alexandra Stara Ghosts of Place: Displacement and identity in the work of Ori Gersht Alexandra Stara directs graduate history & theory and the MA Thinking Building at the School of Architecture & Landscape, Kingston University, UK. She is a qualified architect with Masters degrees from the Bartlett and the University of Cambridge, and holds a doctorate in the history of art from the University of Oxford.

Artist Ori Gersht (b.1967, Israel) has been engaged consistently with themes of displacement and forced migration in recent history, and ensuing issues of memory and identity. Working with photography and film, Gersht’s strategy is to address these themes obliquely, mostly without depicting human action, but focusing instead on its aftermath and emotional residues. The places in Gersht’s images are simultaneously palpably real and haunted with indeterminacy and the weight of human suffering. Sarajevo in AferWars (1999), a train journey from Krakow to Auschwitz in White Noise (2001), Gaza/Israel in Ghost (2003), the Ukraine in The Clearing (2006) are some of the sites where Gersht seeks loss as a presence, and wrestles with the paradoxical quest for identity at the sites of its uprooting. Expanding on his earlier work, Gersht has more recently included people in two of his films addressing similar issues: a fictionalised Walter Benjamin on his fatal journey on the Lister Route in Evaders (2009), and a real-life survivor of Auschwitz in Will You Dance For Me? (2011), maintaining, however, the investment in abstraction and ellipsis, which have characterised his work from the beginning. Gersht’s images have a dream like quality, which is haunting and engaging even as it distances the reality of the subject. This indirect reference to events, embedded in the horizon of unpopulated landscapes, occasionally juxtaposed by close-ups of unsituated figures, is resonant with metaphor and metaphysical allusion. The device of distancing is a crucial hinge in a body of work that eschews rhetoric and invests, instead, in the power of poetry to carry the weight of meaning and affect. This paper proposes to discuss the work of Ori Gersht drawing from phenomenology and hermeneutics in order to address the inherent ambiguity in the idea of displaced identity, the dialectic between imagination and memory, and the role of art in the (re)construction of place.

Karina Horsti Mediated memorials in Europe: Creative visualities on undocumented migration as performance of citizenship

Dr. Karina Horsti is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a visiting scholar and adjunct instructor at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University for the academic year 2011-2012. Horsti’s research interests focus on qualitative and critical media studies in the contexts of migration, ethnic relations, and humanitarian action. Currently she examines how changing technology and journalism shape immigration debates in Europe. Her recent research project, which analyzed cultural diversity in media policies resulted a co-edited volume National Conversations that will be published by Intellect in 2013. Horsti’s work has appeared in journals such as International Journal of Cultural Studies and Communication, Culture & Critique.

This paper examines how Europeans engage with undocumented migration and mediatized happenings at the European border and (re)construct cultural memory in light of recent tragic deaths in the Mediterranean sea. A coalition of European human rights activists estimate an almost 16,000 deaths at the borders of Europe in the past 18 years. Although some of the tragic events have been covered widely in the news media the European Union or the European states have not officially remembered those who have died at the borders. The paper identifies how the fields of civic action, religion and arts have countered ’cultural amnesia’ (Sturken, 1997: 6-8) in memorial projects. In addition, it examines the ways in which the new media has facilitated individual engagement with the issue of undocumented migration, and how people perform citizenship in creative ways. Particularly the paper scrutinises YouTube clips in which citizens creatively recycle popular music and news images of ’migration emergencies’. On the one hand the clips recycle hegemonic framings of undocumented migration. However, on the other hand they can be seens as mediated visual memorials for those who died on their migration journey. In addition, individuals engage in human rights activism by articulating resistance against ’regime facilitated disaster’ (ref. Azoulay, 2011) and as EU citizens denounce their membership among the ’perpetrators’.