Deadline for abstracts: Nov. 15

Translocal Visuality and European Minority Cultures since 1945

Whereas Europeans in the immediate post-war era grappled with their inability to mourn the genocide, as Eric Santner has pointed out in the case of Germany, minority cultures in Europe today are struggling to articulate a discursive position beyond the ubiquity of that violent memory. Examining how minorities mobilize visual art and expression in the European sub-continent, this workshop also pays close attention to the intellectual, artistic and political heritages that shape, redirect and conflict with them. For instance, would it ever be useful to consider the possibility of a counter-European, post-European or “new” European paradigm of memory studies? Why and under what circumstances does Auschwitz provide (or fail to provide) a material framework for the acculturation of the migrant, the settler, or the queerly racialized and ethnicized other? How do the inheritances of the European intellectual traditions operate in a globalized sphere which consists of encounters between disparate, if not differently interpreted historical traumas?

From the dominance of vision which formed the basis of modern western subjectivity, to the preeminence of the sensory and affective channels within contemporary everyday life, this workshop invites analyses of film, video, photography, sculpture and the museum, highlighting translocal experiences that address the difficulties of locating the origins of a given minority or aesthetic practice.

Paper topics might include:

Global politics and the persistence of Holocaust memory The poetics of translocal experience Critical art practice and resistance movements The aesthetics of racial and ethnic conflict Trauma theory, ethics, politics