[Linganth] CfP: AAA 2023 panel "Narrating Memory"

[Dominika Baran, Ph.D.]

Dear Colleagues,

I plan to organize a panel for AAA 2023 titled “Narrating Memory” and I welcome paper ideas! The panel abstract is pasted below. It is a draft that can be revised to reflect the participating papers. I am looking for both paper contributions and potential co-organizers. Please email me in the next week if you are interested!

Best,
Dominika

Panel title: Narrating Memory
Organizer: Dominika Baran

Narrative and memory are inherently and inseparably connected, and both are closely bound up with identity and the self, as has been observed by scholars across the humanities and social sciences since the beginning of what has been termed “the narrative turn” (Riessman 1993). Thus, Giddens (1991) reflects on identity as rooted “in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going” (54). Polkinghorne (1988), having defined narrative as “the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful” (1), observes that narrative cannot exist without the plot: “The plot functions to transform a chronicle or listing of events into a schematic whole by highlighting and recognizing the contribution that certain events make to the development and outcome of the story” (18-19). A similar point is made by Hinchman and Hinchman (2001), in their edited collection Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences: “Through narrative emplotment, we organize, integrate, and seek an accommodation with temporality… emplotment humanizes our experience of time, making its passage meaningful to us” (1).

The construction of a plot, or emplotment, is crucially dependent on remembering, but remembering is not a straightforward process. Psychologists researching memory have pointed to numerous ways in which memory is an ongoing and changing construct, a continuous re-invention and re-interpretation of the past rather than its precise recording, marked by such phenomena as transcience, blocking, misattribution, and bias (Schacter 1999, 2001; Schacter et al. 2003). Meanwhile, King (2001), in her book Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self, discusses various approaches to memory, contrasting the psychoanalytic metaphor of memory as an archaeological excavation with the more dynamic view of memory as a retrospective reinterpretation and reinscription. For King, collective memory and, correspondingly, collective forgetting, are both crucial for the construction of group identities and cultural belonging. Relatedly, the imperative to recall and name traumatic memories has been explored by scholars writing about institutional interviews with asylum seekers (e.g. Signorini 2015).

In linguistic anthropology specifically, Ochs and Capps (2001), in their book Living Narrative, observe that “Putting the pieces of one’s life experiences together in narrative is one way in which a human being can bring a sense of coherence and authenticity to his or her life” (252), and propose a framework of narrative dimensions through which to examine how people tell stories in this coherence-seeking effort. Turning to the notion of memory, the authors discuss the implications of the dimensions of tellability, tellership, linearity, and moral stance for what is remembered and what is forgotten, for which memories may be highlighted or erased, and for how memories are collaboratively – and sometimes combatively – re-constructed in narrative practice. The goal of this panel is to apply the tools of linguistic anthropology to explore the various ways in which memory and narrative are mutually constitutive and implicated in each other, and what this might mean for individual and group identities, or for the ethnographic practice of narrative collecting itself. The panel seeks to address such questions as, for example: How are memories framed in narrative? How do speakers reflect on their own memories, and on these memories’ relationship to their present-day selves? How is the past policed in collaborative storytelling? How are memories of traumatic events elicited, expressed, and even instrumentalized? What is the role of collective memory in oral histories? Who “owns” collective memories and the right to recount them? and, How do various linguistic resources contribute to the telling of particular remembered events?



Dominika M. Baran
Associate Professor
English Department
Duke University
Allen Building 303
Durham, NC 27708

Pronouns: she/her/hers

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