Call for Papers - Rethinking Flight, Persecution, Destruction and War: how do we define postmemory now
The Centre for the Movement of People, Aberystwyth University 20-22nd June 2022
It seems strange, now, to think that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is less than 30 years old. Memory Studies and Trauma Studies have become large academic fields in their own right, spanning the arts, humanities and sciences, but few single concepts have dominated the field in the way that postmemory does.
Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory (2012) acknowledged the way postmemory studies had found productive ways of extending the concept beyond its original parameters. This, then, is an appropriate time to bring together researchers who are using and developing the concept of postmemory to explore how and why this concept speaks to us so strongly now. Why does it speak to so many people, in such widely varying places and situations? And how it has proliferated, how it is developing? What do we mean when we say postmemory?
The conference offers five themed panels with plenary speakers. We invite proposals for papers for each panel: