[Linganth] CfP: AAA panel on Place-Making and Social Memory in Post-Colonial/Post-Conflict Cities

[Stephanie Love]

Below is a call for abstracts for the 2020 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Conference in St. Louis. We are organizing a panel entitled, "Promiscuous Signs: Place-Making and Social Memory in Post-Colonial/Post-Conflict Cities." See the full CfP below.



Thank you,



Stephanie Love

City University of New York (CUNY), The Graduate Center

Linguistic Anthropology Ph.D. Program

365 5th Ave.

New York, NY 10016

slove at gradcenter.cuny.edu


Promiscuous Signs: Place-Making and Social Memory in Post-Colonial/Post-Conflict Cities



Organizers:

Kristin Gee Hickman, Croft Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi

Stephanie V. Love, Ph.D. Candidate, City University of New York (CUNY), The Graduate Center



Panel Abstract:

Literature on the relationship between place-making and social memory in post-colonial, post-conflict urban spaces tends to home in on one particular event or moment of violence, which seeps into and animates social relations, spatial formations, and identity in the present.  Certain events of originary violence—whether the dispossession of land, a massacre, a revolutionary or civil war, etc.—become tropes or prisms through which anthropologists and local informants alike process and interpret everyday life and social relations (Huyssen 2003).



Yet recent work in both urban anthropology and archaeology have focused on how urban imaginaries come to be shaped by paradoxical and competing memory work, in which complex temporal layerings and composite overlapping pasts become materially embedded in urban landscapes (Munn 2013). Social actors, in turn, must creatively (albeit unpredictably) draw on material and palimpsestic signs of various pasts to negotiate fraught presents and potential futures, including fears over the inevitable ‘return to violence’ (Nucho 2016). This urban memory work can play out in contested place-naming and cartography (Azaryahu 1996; Massad 2006); archaeology that excavates alternative pasts to justify present and future territorial control (Abu El-Haj 2001); public photo exhibitions of desaparesidos in South America that get framed in terms of the Holocaust (Huyssen 2003); urban politics of despair and senses of loss that reach beyond a single event (Oushakine 2009); among other contested urban place-making and memory practices.



In this panel, we seek to re-examine how post-colonial, post-conflict place-making and interpersonal identity formation draw on and unevenly pull together a multiplicity of signs of violence and pasts. By doing so, we hope to open up the possibility of seeing signs in and of the present not only as indexical of one originary moment, but rather consider the way that urban space “excessively gathers stories, memories, and feelings” and “releases them with a promiscuous indexicality” (Gray 2011).



We particularly encourage papers from a variety of regional focuses that cover topics such as:

  *   Various semiotic processes which engender complex temporalities in urban spaces
  *   Complex and/or paradoxical signs of violence that recruit people into particular and paradoxical urban imaginaries
  *   The materiality of urban landscapes which do specific types of memory work
  *   Memories of violence or other problematic pasts which (dis)orient people in and mitigate how people move through urban landscapes



We welcome papers with diverse regional foci that speak broadly to these themes. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with your name, title, institutional affiliation, and email address to Stephanie Love (slove at gradcenter.cuny.edu) and Kristin Hickman (kghickma at olemiss.edu) by Monday, March 23rd.



Works Cited:

Abu El-Haj, Nadia. Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Azaryahu, Maoz. “The Power of Commemorative Street Names.” Enivornment and Planning D: Society and Space14 (1996): 311–30.

Gray, Lila Ellen. "Fado's City." Anthropology and Humanism36, no. 2 (2011): 141-163.

Huyssen, Andreas. Present Past: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Massad, Joseph A. “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel.” InThe Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, 13–40. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Munn, Nancy D. “The ‘Becoming-Past’ of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Nineteenth-Century, Pre-Civil War New York.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 2 (2013): 359–80.

Nucho, J. R. “All That Endures from Past to Present.” In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Oushakine, S. A. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

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