Events

‘Impossible Narratives’ - Historicizing Mass Trauma

This full-day conference explores individual and social memory of mass trauma.

What are the conditions for individual memory of the kinds of mass historical experience now generally labeled "traumatic" to become social memory - i.e. both capable of and amenable to persuasive public narration? What factors prevent or delay the process -- psychological, political, or social -- and through what mechanisms does such social memory emerge? This workshop seeks to examine ‘impossible narratives' of such experiences, especially inasmuch as they are incongruent with competing narratives of self, state or society represented as essential or primordial in the wake of mass trauma; the ways in which their "impossibility" persists for long periods of time; and how it might be overcome.

Conference Agenda:

9:30AM - 10:30AM: Keynote Address

Eelco H. Runia Department of History, University of Groningen

• Of Two Minds. Why the concept of dissociation might help to understand history

10:30AM - 12:30PM: Obstacles to Memory

Moderator: Brigitte Sion, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Program in Religious Studies, New York University

Adam D. Brown, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine

• Remembering and Forgetting the Unforgettable: The Dynamics of Individual and Social Memory Following Traumatic Events

Denis Peschanski, Research Director, CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

• The French Exodus of 1940 and Hidden Children during the "Dark Years"

Vincent Crapanzano, CUNY Graduate Center

• Double, Triple Entrapment: The Harki Story

12:30PM - 2:00PM: Lunch Break

2:00PM - 4:00PM: Public Secrets

Moderator: Carol Gluck, Committee Member, Committee on Global Thought; George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University

Jens Meierhenrich, Senior Lecturer, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics

• Lieux d'Oubli: Sites of Forgetting

Florent Brayard, Research Fellow, CNRS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

• A History Written Before the End - and After: The Holocaust between Fear, Memory and Trial.

Selma Leydesdorff, Professor of Oral History and Culture, University of Amsterdam; Fellow, Remarque Institute, New York University

• Writing Interview Testimony of Collective Trauma into History: The Case of Srebrenica

4:00PM - 4:15PM: Coffee Break

4:15PM - 6:15PM: Traumatic Memory in the Middle East

Moderator: Salim Tamari, Professor of Sociology, Bir Zeit University; Arcapata Visiting Professor, Center for Palestine Studies/Middle East Institute, Columbia University

Thomas J.W. Hill, Research Scholar, Committee on Global Thought; Lecturer, Department of History, Columbia University

• ‘Events are Continuous': Impossible Narratives in Gaza

Peter Lagerquist, Writer and Journalist

• Making the Modern Primitive: Humanitarianism and Ahistoricity in the West Bank

Sinan Antoon, Assistant Professor, Gallatin School NYU - Arabic Literature

• Recognizing Violence: On the Late Poetry of Sargon Boulus (1941-2007)

6:15PM: Concluding Remarks

Carol Gluck, Committee Member, Committee on Global Thought; George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University

Conference Organizers: Carol Gluck (Columbia University), Thomas J.W. Hill (Columbia University), and Denis Peschanski (CNRS)

Photo Credit: Eyad Baba/AP