Fwd: H-Dis: CFP: Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives

[Leila Monaghan]

Interesting call for papers that I thought might be of interest to the more
history oriented folk.  Would be nice to get some ling anth people in on
such a project.

500-word abstracts and a short 150-word bio must be submitted before May
31, 2013, to Dana Mihailescu (dmihailes at yahoo.com) and Mihaela Precup (
mihaela_precup at yahoo.com). Final papers of notified authors (8000-9000-word
long, written in accordance with the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers, 6th ed.) will be due on August 31, 2013.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Penny L Richards <turley2 at roadrunner.com>
Date: Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 8:45 AM
Subject: H-Dis: CFP: Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American
Narratives
To: H-DISABILITY at h-net.msu.edu


Call for Articles: Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American
Narratives (essay collection to be published by Dr. Roxana Oltean, Dr.
Mihaela Precup, Dr. Dana Mihailescu as part of PN-II-RU-TE project no. 64 /
2011, Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A
Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories)
We are looking for authors to contribute to a collection of essays entitled
Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives. Submitted
proposals are expected to explore the connection between the performance of
post-traumatic memory and urban space in the United States. Identifying the
mechanisms of traumatic memory for various generations of trauma survivors
has been an increasing focus of scholarship and public attention in recent
decades, in the works of important scholars such as Mieke Bal, Shoshana
Felman, Dominick La Capra, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Nancy K. Miller,
Michael Rothberg, Cathy Caruth, and others. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of
“postmemory” (1997) as a type of memory transmitted from generation to
generation through family ties, responsibilities and storytelling, as well
as Peggy Phelan's “performative memory” (1997), Dora Apel’s “secondary
witnessing” (2002), Alison Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory” (2004) and
 Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” (2009) are all essential to
current scholarly examinations of generations of (post)traumatic memory and
their manifestation in a public space which is often that of the city. In
the US, this research topic has regained momentum especially after the
events of September 11. The area is rapidly growing, especially because
mapping generations of traumatic memory lends itself to an extremely
productive interdisciplinary framework, from psychology to literary,
visual, ethnic and gender studies.


The connection between memory and the city has been most famously explored
by Pierre Nora’s monumental collection Lieux de mémoire/Sites of Memory
(1984, 1989), where he diagnosed the death of “authentic memory” and its
replacement in the urban space with sites such as memorials, museums, and
other visual representations that, together with various commemoration
practices, regulate national life frames (cf. Butler). More recently,
Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory (Stanford, 2003) emphasized the high stakes of urban spaces and
media as material palimpsests offering “traces of the historical past in
the present.” More specifically related to the American urban space, Marita
Sturken’s Tourists of History (2007) demonstrated the embeddedness of
trauma in particular American urban spaces, such as Oklahoma City and
Ground Zero.

This volume is part of this particular conversation as it attempts to
explore the innovative insights American Studies scholars can gain from
analyzing particular features of cross-generational traumatic memories that
inscribe themselves in urban spaces, past and present.

We particularly welcome proposals addressing one of the following topics
(applied to literature, film, popular culture, visual culture, media etc.):

- urban spaces and the poetics/politics of memory
- personal/historical traumas of the city
- U.S. cities/city narratives as sites of traumatic memory / comparative
perspectives on U.S. and Eastern European cities/city narratives as sites
of traumatic memory
- utopian/dystopian cities and trauma
- gendered traumas and city life
- violence, genocide, and traumatic transmission in the city
- city memorials/museums constructed as sites of mourning
- commemoration practices related to post-war/post-traumatic events
- cross-generational configurations of trauma and city life
- celebrity deaths and urban shrines
- violence and public mourning (as in public riots etc.)
- autobiography, trauma, and the city
- visual and verbal accounts of trauma and the city
- contested spaces of memory and trauma in the city
- the post-human and post-traumatic in fantastic urban spaces or cities of
the future (SciFi, fantasy)

500-word abstracts and a short 150-word bio must be submitted before May
31, 2013, to Dana Mihailescu (dmihailes at yahoo.com) and Mihaela Precup (
mihaela_precup at yahoo.com). Final papers of notified authors (8000-9000-word
long, written in accordance with the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers, 6th ed.) will be due on August 31, 2013.



Dana Mihailescu (dmihailes at yahoo.com)
Mihaela Precup (mihaela_precup at yahoo.com)



-- 
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Anthropology
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyoming