April 10-12, 2013

Limited seating. PLEASE NOTE: Online registration closed on 4/10 at 2 p.m. However, this does not mean event is full, so you are welcome to attend without registration.

In connection with this conference, there will be an art exhibit April 10-May 4: Cambodia, The Memory Workshop: Artworks by Vann Nath, Séra, and Emerging Cambodian Artists. Official exhibit opening April 10, 6-8 p.m. Registration required, please click here.

Conference opens on April 10th at 2:30 p.m. with keynote by Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College): Small Acts of Repair: The Unclaimed Legacy of Transnistria

The aftermath of mass murders is felt not only by the victims and their families but also by their descendants, who find themselves in the paradoxical situation of suffering the psychological effects of events they did not experience themselves.

It is this transmission of trauma that the notion of postmemory – developed in 1997 by Marianne Hirsch in her book Family Frames: Photography Narra­tive and Postmemory, and more recently in her 2012 book The Generation of Postmemory -- attempts to describe. Hirsch demonstrates how an indirect form of memory may develop in individuals who did not experience a traumatic event personally but feel its active presence within their family.

Since postmemory is unable to draw on precise recollections, great importance is given to imagination and creation. Art has a major part to play in this process, since in some cases it is only through the works created by survivors that subsequent generations can access the traumatic event. Art also constitutes an ideal means for later generations to attempt to imagine an unknown past and discover its implications in their lives.

The conference and art exhibit are part of the city-wide Season of Cambodia Festival. The events at the Maison Francaise aim to examine how the arts and other creative forms harness indirect memory and ensure its transmission through a variety of archives and traces. Although the Cambodian genocide will be the primary focus, other genocides of the 20^th century, such as the Holocaust and the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, will be discussed in a comparative perspective.

Program:

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

AFTERNOON

2:30 p.m. – Conference opening

3:00 p.m. –Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Darmouth College), Keynote Address

4:00 p. m. – Film Screening, Vann Nath, the Memory-Painter (2013, 26 min.) by Pierre Bayard and Soko Phay-Vakalis

4:30 p. m. – Roundtable on Postmemory

6:00-8:00 p.m. – Public exhibition opening, Columbia Maison Française and Italian Academy

6:30 p.m. – Performance by Séra

Thursday, April 11, 2013

MORNING

9:30 a.m. – Michael Levine (Rutgers University), Technology, Postmemory and the Archive: Derrida’s Archive Fever

10:15 a.m. – Alex Hinton (Rutgers University), Darkness into Light: Art, Politics, and Memory at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Cambodia

11:00 a.m. – Break

11:30 a.m. – Khatharya Um (Berkeley University), Memory Etchings: History, Memory and Identity Among Second Generation Cambodian-Americans

12:15 p.m. – Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University), Performing the Post-Holocaust Self: Testing the Limits of Postmemory

1:00 p.m. – Lunch

AFTERNOON

2:30 p.m. – Soko Phay-Vakalis (Paris 8 University), Missing Images of the Genocide and Creation in Cambodia

3:15 p.m. – Emmanuel Alloa (St. Gallen University), Afterimages: The Belated Witness

4:00 p.m. – Break

4:30 p.m. – Pierre Bayard (Paris 8 University), Collective Rapes and Postmemory in Bosnia

5:15 p.m. – Roundtable on Postmemory and Image

6:30 p.m. – Film Screening, Mon voisin, mon tueur (2009, 80 min.) by Anne Aghion

Friday, April 12, 2013

MORNING

9:30 a.m. – Catherine Perret (Paris 8 University), The Body of Exile: Ekphrasis and Photography in Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

10:15 a.m. – Annie Epelboin (Paris 8 University), Polytraumatic Memory in the USSR: Where Does the Holocaust Fit ?

11:00 a.m. – Break

11:30 a.m. – Frédérique Leichter-Flack (Paris 10 University), Second Generation, Third Generation, and State Political Postmemory : Holocaust and Creation in Contemporary France

12:15 p.m. – Sonali Thakkar (University of Chicago), Blood and Imagination: Adoption and Postmemory in Contemporary Fiction

1:00 p.m. – Lunch

AFTERNOON

2:30 p.m. – Douglas Irvin (Rutgers University), Traditional Midwives and Postmemory in Cambo­dia

3:15 p.m. – Assumpta Mugiraneza (Iriba Center, Kigali), Transmission of Childrens' Names and Postmemory in Rwanda

4:00 p.m. – Break

4:30 p.m. – Nela Navarro (Rutgers University) and Tom LaPointe (Bergen Community College), Educational Spaces : Erasing and Embracing Postmemory

5:15 p.m. – Bachir Souleymane Diagne (Columbia University), Closing Remarks

6:00 p.m. Conference ends

Sponsors of exhibition and conference: Paris 8 University, Columbia University Maison Française, Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, and School of the Arts, Columbia University Seminars, Rutgers University, Institut Français, Mémorial de la Shoah, Institut Universitaire de France, Labex Arts H2H, Centre de resources audiovisuelles Bophana, Phare Ponleu Selpak, Art Absolument, Season of Cambodia Festival, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris-Nord

For more information on the Season of Cambodia Festival, please click here.

Lead support for Season of Cambodia is provided by Ford Foundation, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. Season of Cambodia is a project of Artspire, a program of New York Foundation for the Arts.