Abstracts: Panels 1-80
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Abstracts: Panels 1-80 PANEL 1: ADMINISTRATIONS OF MEMORY 1, ROOM 4A.0.68 Chair: Sara Dybris McQuaid, Aarhus University 1. Sarah Gensburger, French National Center for Scientific Research: Are memory public policies really about governing memory? This paper seeks in methodological and theoretical terms to open up a conversation between Public Administration, Public Policy Analysis, Government and Memory Studies. So far researches about “politics of memory” have focused on narrative contents and commemorative events. When attention to social actors has been paid, it had always been limited to a thematic memory such as memory of World World I, the Holocaust or Slavery. In doing so, the existing scientific literature have missed the birth of a new public field of public policy and has taken for granted that these public actions dealing with the past aim at the transmission and the imposition of a shared (or a dominant) version of it. However the recent works in Public Policy Analysis, Government or Public Administration have unanimously stressed the limits of such a paradigm and called for paying particular attention to institutional mechanisms in addition to strategies and symbolism. This paper calls for the opening of the black box of the state when conducting memory public policies. It will develop its argument through the study of the French administration which has been in charge of the implementation of a “memory public policy” since the 1980s. 2. Linda Hasunuma & Mary McCarthy: Franklin and Marshall College and Drake University: Monuments, Museums, and the Contentious Politics of Memorialization in Japan and South Korea Memory politics is institutionalized through the creation of monuments, memorials, and museums (Assman 1995), and like all political outcomes, the institutionalization and administration of memory is shaped by competing interests and the collective action of various actors with governmental bodies. This paper examines how such contestations of memory are negotiated in Japan and the two Koreas. Both experienced collective traumas from their own experiences during World War II and then the Korean War respectively, and scholars have analyzed the ways in which the Japanese narrative of victimhood can diminish the former Empire’s wartime responsibilities and reconciliation efforts between Japan and the countries it occupied during military expansion (Dower 2014; Southard 2016). The Comfort Women issue, in particular, remains hotly contested and that is partly due to its evolution from a bilateral to a global human and gender rights issue, that is also shaped by local politics involving the Korean diaspora in the US (McCarthy and Hasunuma). This project aims to compare the ways in which Japan and South Korea choose to remember their collective past, and the various local, national, and international political contexts in which such outcomes are negotiated. We contribute to the discourse by expanding the debate on these issues to include the repatriation of forced laborers, the abduction of Japanese individuals by the North Korean government and the treatment of Korean residents in Japan, and memorialization of the Korean War. We also expand on the framework and analysis of Japan’s victimization by including the Triple Disasters of March 11, 2011. Through crisis, disaster, and war, the ways in which different actors contest and negotiate the collective traumas and memories of these countries has significant implications for domestic and international politics, and the prospects for peace and reconciliation in the region. 3. Sarah Maddison, University of Melbourne: Uncovering the truth about foundational con ict: Inquiries and institutional legitimacy Many nations have attempted to address historical injustice through processes of public inquiry and truth telling. In this paper, the authors extend their conceptualisation of foundational conflict—that is, conflict over the foundational settlement of the contemporary nation state—to consider its implications for practices of ‘truth-telling’ as a supposed pathway to reconciliation. Foundational conflicts endure beyond actual or overt violence to structure subsequent forms of democratic interaction and standards of legitimacy and success. They are foundational in that they are historically anchored, rather than foundationalist in being totally determined by their origins. Rather, foundational conflicts are re- inscribed within contemporary contexts through the dominant approaches to democratic inclusion and reconciliation that, in their very attempt to overcome such conflict, fail to work against the continuing conditions that foundational conflict places on democratic interaction. This paper argues that this understanding of foundational conflict can shed new light on the legitimacy of state institutions and their (in)capacity to provide redress for historical injustice. Through a comparison of recent inquiries or truth-telling processes the paper highlights the contradictions inherent to such institutional responses to historical injustice, arguing that these same institutions charged with the responsibility to address past harms are in fact generative of ongoing foundational conflict. 4. Thomas van de Putte & Aleksandra Kubica, King’s College: Remembering Jews in Poland: the encounter between Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and rural memories of Jewish absence - divergent aims and needs The Museum of the History of Polish Jews (POLIN) runs a travelling project Museum on Wheels (MoW) as one of their outreach activities. MoW visits, since the summer of 2014, ten to twenty towns and villages around Poland each year. The initiative has been inspired by new museology (Vergo 1989) striving to be an inclusive and participatory project, which places much emphasis on the collaboration with local activists. The project’s core aim is to teach about ‘the centuries of coexistence Jewish and Polish culture’ and to support local leaders who engage with Jewish heritage. POLIN aims to impose its agenda as part of MoW, emphasising Jewish life in Poland throughout centuries, showing the Holocaust as only one of its elements but not a central one. On the other hand, our analysis of data gathered through content and lexicometric analysis of semi-structured interviews with visitors during the 2015 tour of MoW, indicates that the needs articulated by local visitors are different than POLIN’s agenda. Qualitative and quantitative analysis shows that the Holocaust and Jewish absence in the rural Poland of the present are the most prominent topics appearing, not Jewish culture and life before the Nazi occupation. This paper argues that this discrepancy originates from the structure of the project and the institutional framework in which its funding, pooling of different (political) interests, planning and evaluation are set. These factors make that MoW (and POLIN more generally) misunderstand the need of significant strata of the rural Polish society to engage with the Holocaust and absence of Jews, which causes a paradoxical encounter with POLIN’s idea as a ‘museum of life’. This paper proposes an alternative approach to bridge the divergence of needs between the POLIN Museum and local audiences of MoW. It would give POLIN more of a short- and long term role of consultancy and coaching for initiatives that emerge bottom-up within specific rural communities in Poland. 5. Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and Tomas Brudholm, University of Copenhagen: The law as a memory discourse: European Anti-Hate Crime Policy and Holocaust Remembrance Where does memory policy begin and end? This paper engages the transferability of memory policy by studying the intersections between, on the one hand, remembrance policies centered on the Holocaust and, on the other hand, emerging European anti-hate crime policy. It explores the different logics and, sometimes, contradictory registers of mobilization and remembrance at stake in the meeting between these two domains and the possible transferal of roles, stakes and emotional import that this intersection invites. This investigation is framed by a more general interest in the law as a memory discourse in which memory is at once used to obtain the respect of the law (and for the law), while memories are also laid down by law to be protected in the public sphere. PANEL 2: WAYS OF REMEMBERING GENOCIDE, ROOM 27.0.49 Chair: Wulf Kansteiner, Aarhus Universitet 1. Dana Mihailescu, University of Bucharest: e Input of Ghost-Writing on Eastern European Survivors’ Memories of the Holocaust in Post-Cold War Western Societies Memory studies scholars have lately underscored the need to disentangle the study of cultural memory practices from a Western paradigm dominating the field until the 2010s, especially broadening the scope of their theoretical and practical analyses to (post)colonial, African or South American perspectives and contexts (Michael Rothberg 2009; Stef Craps 2013; etc). The last decade has also been characterized by an increased scholarly interest vested in the specifics of Eastern European memory practices of World War II (and beyond) that had previously been lumped together under the category of Western approaches usually drawing inspiration from U.S. perspectives (Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor 2013; Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney; Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, Pieter Vermeulen 2016; Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel 2016). My paper continues in the direction of the most recent findings considering Eastern European case studies alongside the entanglements