Diaspora and memory : figures of displacement in contemporary literature, arts and politics / / edited by Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen.

• Superior document: Thamyris, intersecting place, sex and race, no.13
• TeilnehmendeR: Baronian, Marie-Aude.; Besser, Stephan.; Jansen, Yolande.
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Language: English
• Series: Thamyris intersecting ; no. 13.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (213 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Experiences of migration and dwelling-in-displacement impinge upon the lives of an ever increasing number of people worldwide, with business class comfort but more often with unrelenting violence. Since the early 1990's, the political and cultural realities of global migration have led to a growing interest in the different forms of “diasporic” existence and identities. The articles in this book do not focus on the external boundaries of diaspora – what is diasporic and what is not? – but on one of its most important internal boundaries, which is indicated by the second term in the title of this book: memory. It is not by chance that the right to remember, the responsibility to recall, are central issues of the debates in diasporic communities and their relation to their cultural and political surroundings. The relation of diaspora and memory contains important critical and maybe even subversive potentials. Memory can transcend the territorial logic of dispersal and return, and emerge as a competing source of diasporic identity. The articles in this volume explore how, shaped by the responsibilities of testimony as well as by the normalizing forces of amnesia and forgetting and political interests, memory is a performative, figurative process rather than a secure space of identity.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Marie-Aude Baronian , Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen -- Introduction: Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics / Marie-Aude Baronian , Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen -- Figures of Diasporic Cultural Production: Some Entries from the Palestinian Lexicon / Carol Bardenstein -- Comparing to Make Explicit: Diasporic Articulations of the Herero Communities in Namibia / Anette Hoffmann -- Home or Away?: On the Connotations of Homeland Imaginaries in Imbros / Elif Babul -- Longing for Home at Home: Armenians in Istanbul / Melissa Bilal -- Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a Spatio-Temporal Perspective on Diaspora / Esther Peeren -- Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts / Andreas Huyssen -- Adopted Memory: The Holocaust, Postmemory, and Jewish Identity in America / Pascale R. Bos -- Memory’s Exiles / Hanadi Loubani and Joseph Rosen -- The Refusal to Mourn: Confronting the facts of destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne / Karolina Szmagalska -- Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender and Transmission / Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer -- Imaginary Lands and Figures of Exile in Elia Kazan’s AMERICA, AMERICA / Sylvie Rollet -- The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in present-day South Africa: André Brink’s On the Contrary / Saskia Lourens -- Memory and Forgetting: Traces of Silence in Sarkis / Soko Phay-Vakalis -- Recollective Processes and the “Topography of Forgetting” in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz / Silke Horstkotte -- The Contributors / Marie-Aude Baronian , Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen -- Index / Marie-Aude Baronian , Stephan Besser and Yolande Jansen.