Idea Transcript
Remembering and Forgetting – Memory in Images and Texts June 13th-14th 2008, Room D3-121 University of Bielefeld Organizers: Stephen Joyce, MA, Julia Andres, MA, Prof. Dr. Wilfried Raussert (University of Bielefeld)
--ABSTRACTS--
Marie Knoflickova Charles University, Prague “The Memories of Africa in the Works of 20th Century African American Writers” The African heritage of African Americans winds like a red line through the works of their writers. Since none of them can have a direct memory of their African ancestry, and very few of them can actually trace their roots on the African continent, their Africa seems to bear hardly any resemblance to the Africa of the 20th century. The lack of the actual memory of Africa creates an immense imaginative space for a mythical topos from which the African American people can derive their self-definition and thus overcome the centuries of systematic annihilation of their national and ethnic pride, their tradition and worth. Thus the “American Africa” stems not from the memory of Africa but rather from the lack of it; yet, it is a formative aspect of the development of the Black culture in the United States. By analyzing the images of Africa and allusions to the African culture in the works of the African American writers (such as T. Morrison, L. Hansberry, I. Reed, A. Walker, E. Knight, A. Baraka, D. Randall, C;. McKay, L. Hughes or C. Cullen) and contrasting them to the authentic African traditions, we are able to describe this topos of “American Africa”. It brings to life aspects of the variety of African cultures to create a unique assemblage of visual, verbal and musical elements that have given new meanings to their roots. Thus we will uncover African American culture as a culture of intertextuality and new juxtapositions that create a new Africa, one that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
Jana Dreserova Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic “Remembering and Forgetting as an Ideological Tool in the Poetry of Alice Walker and Rita Dove” This paper deals with the power of remembering and forgetting when perceiving past events and their (mis)interpretations. The analysis is based on the poetry collections Her Blue Body Everything We Know by Alice Walker and On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove and focuses on the events of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Besides other factors, the characters of Walker’s and Dove’s poems are shaped by history—both by the memorable events that have entered official history books and the “small” ones that have not. As one of the active revolutionaries of the 1960s, Walker explores the discrepancies between history as it was reported and history as she experienced it. She points out the overlooked events and revolutionaries that are not “meant” to be remembered, e.g. the assassination of Martin Luther King’s mother, and looks for the purpose of distorting or forgetting these historical facts. In a similar way, Dove distinguishes between official history, personal history and speculative history and attempts to place her characters at the “crossroads” of these histories, e.g. she explores the motives of Rosa Park’s deed from several points of view in order to present its complexity. By stressing the importance of individuals and their acts in history, Walker and Dove warn against the tendency to act and think in masses. Moreover, by presenting individuals and events from multiple angles they disrupt the schematic approach to history.
Karina Habermann Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Deutschland “My education has been very limited, yet my memory is good.” – Practices of Memory in the 19th-Century Testimonials of Californiana Women In the mid-1860s, Hubert H. Bancroft, a well-to-do San Francisco-based bookseller and publisher, set out on a project of gathering information on the Californian past. Among the California residents whose narratives Bancroft and his research assistants recorded were at least 62 californios, or Spanishspeaking residents, from various settlements across the state. In addition to their testimonials, the californios contributed family documents such as letters, property titles, or limpieza de sangre certificates, and artifacts such as wedding dresses and jewelry to the project in order to substantiate the claims they made in their dictations. While several californios refused participation, many viewed the project as an effective means of countering Anglo-centric representations of the past and hoped that their recollections would find their way into the “true history of the country” they expected Bancroft to compile (cf. Dorotea Valdez, Salvador Vallejo). Counteracting attempts at “falsifying the record” by same-ethnic political rivals seems to also have been a prime motivator (Mariano G. Vallejo). Most of Bancroft’s informants made remembering a significant theme in their narratives, addressing issues ranging from harmless, agerelated memory loss, to traumatic memories of the occupation, to incidents in which rituals of remembering are frustrated by the intervention of cultural outsiders. The paper I propose here will focus on the testimonials of 14 californiana women who between 1874 and 1878 met with Bancroft’s agents to tell their stories. It will explore the ways in which these narratives use memory to make meaning of the past and present. Foregrounding memory as a contested cultural site, my paper will address questions such as: What types of sources of remembering do the narrators draw upon? Are these sources always readily accessible? What strategies do the narrators adopt to recover what is obscured, lost, and irretrievable? What is more, are these practices genderspecific?
Julia Andres Universität Bielefeld, Deutschland Tu eres mi otro yo – Your Story is my Story Caramelo: Strands of Memory woven into a Universal Pattern Luis Valdez’s poem “Pensamiento Serpentino” expresses the ancient Mayan belief of the interrelatedness of all human beings, closely linked to one another to create a larger whole: Tu eres mi otro yo - You are my other self Sandra Cisneros’s latest work, the 2002 novel “Caramelo”, makes use of this philosophy as befits the author’s style and notion of writing; instead of identities Cisneros ties and knots lifestories together, imitating the intrinsic pattern of the eponymous caramelo rebozo, a traditional Mexican shawl which reappears as a motif throughout the narrative. In 86 loosely connected chapters Cisneros lets Celaya Reyes, the youngest of 7 siblings of MexicanAmerican parents, recount her family’s story which features such outstanding female characters as the Awful Grandmother and Aunty Light-Skin. As in her most widely-known first novel “The House on Mango Street” Cisneros employs with Celaya a child narrator to give a voice to the disempowered and underrepresented, as Virginia Brackett observes in “A Home in the Heart – The Story of Sandra Cisneros” (79). Thus, as readers we follow Lala on her quest to make sense of her existence – her life, her family members’ lives and the abstract entity “life” itself- until as a teenager freshly heartbroken in Mexico City we witness her epiphany: “The universe a cloth and a humanity interwoven”(Caramelo 389). This conclusion is supported by the narrative strategy of the novel which not only mingles voices and versions, truth and fiction but also individual with political history. Numerous footnotes add historical facts to the fictionalized lives and link the characters’ experiences to those of bygone celebrities; the Mexican empress Carlota and the dancer Josephine Baker, to name only two. Critical reviews of “Caramelo” tend to reduce the novel to a semi-autobiographic bildungsroman from a Chicana perspective. In my paper I will argue that “Caramelo” most elaborately continues Cisneros’s approach to writing with a socio-political mission: embroidering life stories with imagined details, connecting fact and fiction, memory and vision, the individual and the representative to encourage and empower her mostly female readers. As Celaya learns to appreciate her closely-knit ties to other human beings, their parallel mistakes and grievances, she realizes what Valdez in his poem calls: “Your faults are my faults”. We cannot exist in isolation but are vital parts of a larger social fabric.
Annette Rukwied Universität Stuttgart, Deutschland “Negotiating Cultural Memory in Chicano/a Literature Past and Present” The debate was heated: in his memoir Hunger of Memory (1982), Richard Rodriguez, a first generation Mexican American and high-achieving Ivy League graduate, had publicly spoken out in favor of assimilating into U.S. mainstream culture. Accordingly, the surrender of his native Spanish for the “public” language English was presented as a painful but necessary ordeal in order to achieve upward mobility, even at the cost of the resulting shift in his family’s communication dynamics and, in turn, the embarrassment, alienation, and changing power relations this entailed. At the same time, Rodriguez denounced not only the then very popular practice of bilingual education but also the entire philosophy of affirmative action that had only recently come into full swing. Naturally, his book was not favorably received by the majority of the Chicano/a academic community: the way many saw it, of all Mexican American voices out there, it was “sell-out” Rodriguez who, thanks to the nationwide media recognition, was assigned the role of “expert” on Chicano affairs, thus gaining the much desired visibility many Chicano/a writers and political activists had been striving for. As a result, there was a general feeling among Chicanos/as that Rodriguez’s success mocked their long-standing efforts to address all aspects of U.S. culture and politics that would deny Mexican Americans their basic civil rights. Moreover, they felt he was sabotaging their project of providing narratives foregrounding a set of culturally shared values that would bind the historically and geographically diverse Mexican American communities together as a group, “La Raza.” Not surprisingly, one of Rodriguez’s most prominent critics was author/scholar Tomás Rivera, whose own works propagated the search for identity, the importance of remembering, the rejection of superimposed cultural stereotypes in favor of what he called “invention,” – the creation of inspirational role models – , and an emphasis on Chicano/a traditions, as implied by his metaphors of la casa (the Chicano family), el barrio (the community), and la lucha, the struggle for recognition and empowerment. Of course, Rodriguez was not the only author of the 1980s who was chided for deviating from what had been established as the norm. Arturo Islas and Sandra Cisneros are two among a number of nonconformist authors whose childhood memories, like Rodriguez’s, were rejected as “disloyal” testimonies, potentially reinforcing rather than refuting negative stereotypes, and, especially in the case of Rodriguez, stressing individuality rather than common denominators while refusing to yield positive role models and thus betraying “their own people.” Still, it was Rodriguez who received the greatest share of criticism. The Rodriguez vs. Rivera debate marked a decisive moment in Chicano/a literary production, and its repercussions are still audible today. Based on a reevaluation of this debate, I will investigate how and to which degree Luis J. Rodriguez, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Oscar Casares, members of a younger generation of Chicano writers, have engaged in the project of establishing a shared cultural memory. I have chosen texts by these male authors not only on grounds of their literary merits but also because of the greater visibility of Chicana literary production. Two of the works are literary “firsts,” and all three are to varying degrees autobiographically inspired, thus conforming to the term of “memory genres” (Erll & Nünning). The title of Luis J. Rodriguez’s memoir Always Running. La Vida Loca. Gang Days in L.A. (1993) speaks for itself; since its publication, the book has been incorporated into high school curricula throughout the U.S. In his memoir, Nobody’s Son (1999), Urrea describes his coming of age in a bicultural family in the borderlands of Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California. Casares’s Brownsville (2003) is the most discreetly autobiographical of the three as it is not centred on one integrative main character but rather on the author’s hometown with its specific sense of place and its Mexican American community as a possible composite protagonist.
Yuliya Kozyrakis Leibniz Universität Hannover Remembering the Future: (Ethnic) Memory in Middlesex by Geffrey Eugenides “I was born twice”, states the narrator of the novel Middlesex by Geffrey Eugenides. In terms of memory the protagonist goes to the extreme: Claiming to remember his life from the moment of his conception on, Cal/Callie even goes as far as narrating grandparents’ memories. In a compelling combination of a first- and third-person omniscient narration, this family saga of three generations of Greek immigrants from Asia Minor to the United States challenges not only the framework of the novel, but also the constructions of remembering and forgetting. As I will show in my investigation, through a complex network of individual and collective memories the protagonist emerges as a medium of (ethnic) memory. In my paper I will concentrate on the narrative memory construction in Middlesex paying special attention to the ambivalence between a poststructuralist understanding of identity and an effort to embrace several generations of the Stephanides family by common (even if at times dissonant) memories. In a comparison of fictional strategies with the actual process of Greek immigrants' assimilation in the American society, I will analyze the dialectics of how (ethnic) memory is transmitted in cultural and political discourse. Finally, I will put the novel into the context of current U.S. debates. By evolving around remembering and forgetting, this epic novel offers a critical reevaluation of the legacy of immigrant assimilationist practices, since forgetting “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”1.
1 Renan, Ernest. "What is a Nation?" Bhabha, H. (Ed.): Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990 (1882), 8-22 (11).
Attilia Kárai University of Debrecen, Hungary The Scottish Remembrancer of Montana—The Narrative Recall of Immigrant Past in Ivan Doig’s Dancing at the Rascal Fair At two significant turning points of Ivan Doig’s novel, the teacher-narrator makes his students read and listen to what Mieke Bal describes as an embedded narrative text, namely, the story of the king’s remembrancer. Considering the relationship of this deliberately incomplete fable to the primary fabula of the novel proper, it turns out to be based on resemblance instead of causality. According to Bal, such embedded narratives often function as mirror-texts or “directions for use” in fiction, calling attention, in the case of Dancing at the Rascal Fair, to such epistemological issues as the human compulsion for remembering and commemorating, or the linguistic and cultural conditioning of memory. Complemented with other textual hints, the story of the king’s remembrancer invites the professional reader to study the mechanisms of narrative recall in Doig’s fictional account of late-19thearly 20th-century Scottish immigrant life in Montana. Accepting that invitation, I initiated a search for narrative traces of a potential Scottish American group consciousness and collective identity, only to find out that the text does not align with the major tendencies of contemporary First-World minority fiction arising from pockets of disempowerment that Fredric Jameson collectively terms an “internal Third World.” After reaching this negative conclusion and gaining inspiration from semiotic descriptions of remembering/(re)coding processes by Umberto Eco and Yuri Lotman, I attempted to identify the cultural codes that conditioned the narrative recall of Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Such an investigation finally revealed that Doig’s novel is more inclined to remember and re-imagine the immigrant past in terms of certain hegemonic discourses than through the filter of a supposed underprivileged communal memory.
Yu-Yun Erica Hsieh National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan Remembering and Forgetting in Narrative: From Vladimir Nabokov to Milan Kundera As Wordsworth’s dictum goes that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” memory essentially inflames the narrative imagination of authors and directly determines the final representation of their arts. To name authors who are able to articulate memory, Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera are epitomes of this exquisite craft. Although they take diametrically opposed attitudes when verbalizing the recollections of the past—one speaks of memory to remember the past, the other, to forget—Nabokov and Kundera share many similarities in terms of their émigré identity and antiCommunist background, and hence it is crucial to pinpoint this difference by comparing their autobiographical writings. Thus, I shall investigate the autobiographical narrative of both writers, and meanwhile contrast the roles of memory played in Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory (1967) and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), which is a novel composed of fiction and the autographical narrative.2 In Speak, Memory, Nabokov embraces memory since it is “the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate” that has trained him to endure his later mishap, while Kundera speaks of it with caution: “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,”3 and vice versa. Notwithstanding that they are on opposite edges when conceiving memory, Nabokov and Kundera reveal alternatives, either by remembering or forgetting, to represent memory within arts.
2 Milan Kundera has stated the composition of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in The Art of the Novel. Unlike Nabokov, Kundera is modest about his personal affairs. 3 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Vintage, p.40. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, F&F, p.4.
Rudvan Askin Freiburg University, Deutschland Mneme, Anamnesis and Mimesis: The Function of Narrative in Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of Memory In “Memory and Forgetting” (1999) and his seminal Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) Paul Ricoeur develops his theory of memory. As a first step, he distinguishes between mneme, memory as trace, and anamnesis, memory as the praxis of recollection. He then correlates these two aspects, or rather dimensions, of memory to different dimensions of forgetting producing a dense account of their interrelatedness and interdependency. Finally, this interplay of the dimensions of memory and forgetting is said to call for and lead towards an ethics of forgiving. Narrative occupies a central position within this account: it is constitutive for memory. Ricoeur introduces narrative in his discussion of the praxis of recollection recalling Aristotle’s reminiscentia and understanding it as a fundamentally narrative reconstruction of the past. Remembering thus becomes a sort of narrative. The aim of my paper is twofold: first, to highlight the importance of narrative for Ricoeur’s theory of memory by tracing the ramifications of his account of remembering and forgetting. And second, to formulate a critique not only of the role and function of narrative in his theory, but also and first of all of his purely Aristotelian concept of narrative, which, as I will show using some literary narratives as examples, falls short of his otherwise complex analysis.
Christine Schwanecke Universität Heidelberg, Deutschland Human misconception and photographic truth? – Memory in Penelope Lively’s The Photograph (2003) In her meta-historiographic novel, Penelope Lively tries to explore the nature of memory. Glyn, landscape historian and university professor, is profoundly disturbed when he finds a photograph that hints at the fact that his late wife betrayed him some years ago. From one moment to the other, his understanding of the past is thoroughly changed: […] A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else (Lively, The Photograph, 59). By way of her story, she reveals not only the unreliability of human memory; she also examines the relationship between human memory and two means by which it is mainly conveyed as well as constructed: pictures and stories. Photographical technology seems to promise a more authentic and objective representation of the truth than narratives, which are often associated with fictionality. Lively’s novel shows that this belief might be erroneous and consequently makes the reader think about the following questions: Which medium is to be trusted? Which one is more truthful in representing reality and thus more reliable? Which one is more likely to cause a distortion of past events? These questions are to be considered by observing the differences and similarities of photography and narratives and the role they play when it comes to ignoring, remembering, and forgetting.
Marcus Hartner Universität Bielefeld, Deutschland “‘Poststructuralist Decentring’ and ‘Polymorphic Identities’: Postmodern Rhetoric and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger” Since Linda Hutcheon declared Historiographic Metafiction to be the essence of Postmodernism, much ink has been spilled over the intersection of history, memory, and identity in literary works of fiction. Undoubtedly, much valuable criticism has been inspired by a heightened awareness of the theories of Postmodernism and its tendency to destablize meaning. Yet, at the same time there also seems to exist a counterproductive trend among many literary critics to uncritically adopt the rhetoric of postmodern analysis. In this context, Penelope Lively’s Booker-Prize winning novel Moon Tiger (1987) and its academic response can serve as a prototypical example. For this reason, my paper is going to take a close look both at the novel’s text as well as the scholarly criticism that has been published on Moon Tiger. Particularly in respect to the aspects of memory and identity, most of the academic discussion of the novel so far has insisted on the unconventional fluidity of these concepts in Lively’s text. A careful analysis of the novel, however, does not support such prototypically postmodern claims. By juxtaposing a close reading of Moon Tiger with the novel’s academic reception, my paper will illustrate how superficial metafictional commentary and a moderately experimental narrative form can trigger rhetorically exaggerated and inappropriate readings of an otherwise essentially conventional narrative. My analysis of Moon Tiger shall thus serve as a reminder of the seductive power of academically fascinating concepts like Postmodernism, and the danger of abandoning traditional tools of text analysis in favour of fashionable but occasionally ill-fitted literary or cultural theories.
Eniko Maior Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania “The type figure of the schlemiel as the carrier of collective memory” My paper deals with the type figure of the schlemiel as the carrier of collective memory of Jews. It appeared in Yiddish to guide Jews to God on the old continent. With the mass immigration of Jews it traveled to America and after the first few years it got into the American mainstream literary life. As we can follow its various incarnations we will see how it changes according to the changing needs of the ethnic group of Jews. Its meaning varies from the one trying to make Jews to remember their God and obey him to the rebellious son who wants to be more American than Jewish. Its main task remains to make Jews not to forget who they are in their relation with God and their environment. The concept appeared as a result of Jews’ centuries long persecutions and its main characteristic was to remain passive in front of life’s hardships and firmly believe in God. But in America the situation was different. There were no persecutions and pogroms so the configuration of the schlemiel had to take a new meaning. The task of this paper is to show the type figure’s struggle to remain the carrier of collective memory and fight against American individualism and whether it succeeds or not?
María Jesús Fernandez-Gil University of Salamanca, Spain “Memory as a Weapon against Suffering in the Jewish Community” Since the beginning of the “revival process” in the 1980s, memory has occupied a central position in all realms of society (history, philosophy, literature, etc.). Moreover, it has been used to determine who we are, where we come from and where we direct ourselves, to overcome patterns of suffering and to establish the facts of past atrocities (retrospective justice). The memories of our past, thus, have lately been granted a privileged position. Society’s obsession with memory has not escaped the Jews. The Hebrew Bible, the text around which Jewish life is shaped, repeatedly commands the Jewish community to remember their history and to observe their rituals of faith through remembrance. Using Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl as a basis for our article, we intend to show that memory is an intrinsic element of the Jewish community, to the extent that it is at the grounds of this group’s notion of identity. Torn between the fear of trivialising the Holocaust and the belief that failing to represent the enormity of this event is to misrepresent the Jewish experience, this writer comes to the conclusion that memory is the sole means to pay tribute to her co-religionists. In view of the impossibility of restoring Holocaust victims to life and of the difficulty of determining the precise level of complicity of those who participated in such an all-consuming tragedy, Ozick champions the idea that memory is the best weapon against Jewish suffering; that is, she writes from the premise that six million victims must not be consigned to oblivion.
Bela Gligorova University of Leeds, England “‘Baiting History, Baiting Memory’: the ‘Contact Worlds’ of David Albahari’s Bo(a)rder Narratives” David Albahari (b. 1948, Peć, Kosovo) has been one of the leading literary voices in the former Yugoslavia since the 1970s. When the writer moved with his family to Canada in October of 1994, his work was made available to a larger audience, mostly due to the publication of the English translations of three of his books, of fictional/non-fictional prose, by Northwestern University Press (namely, the collection Words Are Something Else, the multi-layered narrative Tsing, and the award-winning auto/ethno/biographical novel Bait). In my reading of Albahari’s work (including the most recent English publication of his testimonial narrative Götz and Meyer (2004)), I examine these narratives, particularly focusing on Bait, as primer stories of individual (authorial) displacement whence at the same time labyrinthine recollections of multi-cultural ‘othering’. Reading the ‘contact worlds’ of this seeming triptych as spaces where silences take turns, we encounter a ‘national self’ which undergoes a painfully unavoidable self-invention, coming to terms with a conscious choice of exiled ‘bo(a)rdering’ (that is, the practice of negotiating with oneself the tacit impossibility of living without one’s culture and yet within one’s language), while beginning to understand the narrative of past familial lives, those of the Jewish minority in the former Yugoslavia. Consequently, to represent an ‘objective historical record’ does not necessarily inform the aim of Albahari’s auto/ethno/biographical fiction, whose spatially and temporarily displaced selves (that of the son, writer, husband, friend, ‘exile’, ‘globetrotter’) conjure a kaleidoscopic view of memory and forgetting, of love and loneliness, mirrored through the ‘trans-national’ consciousness of an Eastern European bo(a)rder in the New World.
Julia Roth University of Potsdam / Humboldt-University Berlin, Deutschland “‘(Re)Constructing Frida’ The Politics of Memory and Identity in two Biopics on Frida Kahlo” The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has by now become an exoticized pop-icon on an international scale. Julie Seymor’s Hollywood-biopic Frida (2002) starring Salma Hayek had a decisive impact on that hype. The earlier Mexican film Frida, Naturaleza Viva (1983) by Paul Leduc much lesser known outside Mexico (and Latin America). Both movies focus on Kahlo’s person and her relationship to the muralist Diego Rivera, interpreting her art psychoanalytically as an expression and illustration of her life and suffering. In contrats to the Hollywood film, however, the Mexican movie does not veil Kahlo’s political activities. In our culture of mass media, films serve as (one of) the most popular, widespread and influential sites and archives of aesthetic (‚collective’ and historical) memory. In the tradition of the biography or the portrait, the genre of the biopic is a useful form for he „retrospective construction of an identity, disguised as a re-construction“.4 Whether a (filmic) representation becomes part of a „global memory“ (Bhaba)5 or is ‚forgotten’ or remains local, however, depends strongly on the access to an international market and interpretive community and the speaking position of the producers. Against this backdrop, the talk will examine the different strategies of (re)constructing local and global memories of Frida Kahlo’s life and work applied in the two biopics. In a second step, I will take a look at her own transcultural identity constructions and inscriptions into the cultural memory in a selected choice of Kahlo’s autobiographical/self-portraying works (essays, painted diary, self-portraits), trying to offer a reading beyond the purely personal and psychoanlaytical. Julia Roth is a doctoral student of the University of Potsdam graduate school „Cultures in/of Mobility“ and associate member of the graduate programme „Gender as a Category of Knowledege“ at Humboldt-University Berlin. Her dissertation project „Transamerican Border Crossers?“ examines the reception of and production of knowledge about Latin American women in the U.S.. She has written her M.A. thesis on Toni Morrison’s essays as critical interventions. Research interests: Feminist Criticism, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Gender and Genre, Transculturality and Intersectionality. Selected publications: „’Stumm, bedeutungslos, gefrorenes Weiss’. Zum Umgang mit Toni Morrisons Essays im weißen deutschen Kontext“, in: Mythen Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland. Hrsg. von Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba Ferreira, Peggy Piesche, Susan Arndt (Unrast Verlag 2005)
4 Nadj in Nünning 2006: 197. 5 In his keynote “On Global Memory: Thoughts on the Barbaric Transmission of Culture” opening the exhibition „ReImagining Asia“,at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, March 14th, 2008.
Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt University of Dortmund, Deutschland “Flags of Our Memories: Personal and National Memories of the Battle of Iwo Jima” The practice of honoring and remembering those who have fallen in wars which memorials is a common in most cultures. In the United States there are a lot of memorials and holidays commemorating crucial events in American history. Most memorials do not only serve as an architectural reminder of a person or an event but they become national landmarks as well. This proves true as well for the Marine Corps War Memorial which depicts the flag raising of six marines on Iwo Jima during the Pacific War. The statue was modeled after the famous Joseph Rosenthal picture, which captured the hoisting of the flag. Almost immediately, the picture became an epitome of American heroism and triumph and was used to sell war bonds and to boost the morale. My paper focuses on this famous photograph and the memorial and their their impact on the culture and collective memory of the United States. Clint Eastwoods movie Flags of Our Fathers is of special interest in this context, since the movie centers around memories and the question of how the United States created heroes and national icons and how the battle of Iwo Jima is remembered in America. Flags of Our Fathers deconstructs this myth of heroism and juxtaposes the personal memories of the marines with the national memory, revealing that the picture does not show the triumphal end of the battle, but only the second raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. Biography Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt received her master’s degree in American, English and Film Studies from the Ruhr-University Bochum in November 2003. She is writing her doctoral thesis on transnational cultural exchanges between Japan and the USA, with a focus on the representation of Japan and Japanese people in contemporary American movies. Her research interests include Japanese popular culture, the influence of Japanese culture in the United States, Film Studies, Hawaiian Culture, Masculinity Studies, Memorial Culture and Disney Studies. Currently she is teaching cultural studies courses at the University of Dortmund.
Stephen Joyce Universität Bielefeld The Fear of Erasure: The Japanese Occupation in the Cultural Memory of Korean American Literature The Japanese annexation and colonization of Korea from 1910-1945 deeply scarred Korean culture. For centuries Japan and Korea had been equals in a worldview centered on China, the Middle Kingdom. In the latter half of the 19th century, the dramatic rise of Japan and the dominance of European colonial powers overturned all traditional modes of thought and Koreans watched helplessly as Japan annexed their ancient nation, outlawed the Korean language, implemented industrialization and modernization programs, press ganged 200,000 women into service as comfort women for the imperial army, and forced millions of slave laborers to toil for the empire. The years of occupation are widely regarded in Korea as an attempt at cultural genocide and were the moment when Korea was wrenched into the 20th century. Korean American literature repeatedly returns to the occupation, even in works by authors who have been born and raised in the USA. Many of the themes facing the immigrant are similar to those faced by Koreans during those dark years - the forced change of language, the lack of political representation, and the fear of losing one’s cultural heritage. The memory of the occupation in Korean American literature speaks to the new immigrant’s fear of erasure, not just by the dominant American culture but also by Asian American culture. My paper will explore how the occupation is represented in Korean American literature and how the memory of the occupation distinguishes Korean Americans from the more established Japanese American community and helps establish an alternative literary tradition running parallel to mainstream American and Asian American literary culture without being subsumed by them.