Editors: Orquídea Ribeiro (UTAD; CECS), Sheila Khan (UTAD; CECS, University of Minho) and Esser Jorge Silva (UTAD; CECS)
In the last decades, the concept of post-memory has reverberated in several scientific, literary and artistic publications. Like a stone thrown into the immobile and submerged pond of the post-Holocaust, the question was posed by one tireless voice in this work of encouragement and dialogue with memory. We refer to Imre Kertész, to his boldness inspiring us as a legacy of thought and action and to his question: “To whom does Auschwitz belong?” (Kertész apud Ribeiro, 2010: 14). The answer to this daring question triggered what today can lead to a tradition of post-memory. The place of analytical mapping on how the legacies of the various traumatic pasts can represent a present force so strong and impregnable that the transmission of the intergenerational nature of these events can be an experience. While not tangibly manifesting, it resembles a subjective narrative that, not belonging to those who lived it, functions as fully as its own (Hirsch 2008).
In the 21st century, we have seen the expression of an urgent need to understand and deconstruct mechanisms and old logics of the colonial, imperial, and slavery past, among other experiences. The ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’, heirs and witnesses of sorrows, exiles, fractures, and cultural and identity contradictions, aim to respond, refute, equate and reflect on other perspectives and new horizons. In fact, these new generations rise with an unequivocal elasticity and historical disobedience towards repertoires of thought and explanation of human diversity that show great wear and tear and opacity in explaining with justice the imposition of the past on the present. As António Sousa Ribeiro observes: “the subject of post-memory is an active protagonist and,…, literally puts on the scene a set of representations of the past that was not limited to receiving, but rather reconstructs and re-elaborates within the scope of a process of confrontation and intergenerational negotiation” (2021, p.11).
Indeed, the ‘subject of post-memory’ has been reaching levels beyond the spaces of family, domestic and intimate memory. Drawing on a historical conscience, this and other subjects of human diversity also confront the public arena, political discourses, and social and cultural dimensions in a national and transnational way. The Black Lives Matter movement is an inspiring example of this civic duty of post-memory.
Now is the time of dialogue between post-memory, reparation and pedagogy for citizenship rooted in the sense of historical and global fraternity. Aware of this civic duty that requires active and inclusive citizenship, this thematic issue welcomes works that can critically analyse, map and approach the companionship between memory, post-memory and reparative writing, from an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, proposals may focus on the following topics:
– Post-memory: New conceptualizations and challenges;
– Post-memory vs legacies of coloniality and racialization;
– Art and post-memory: deconstructing old narratives of western supremacy;
– The subject of reparative writing and its role in post-memory;
– Historical reparations: new challenges from the visual arts;
– Post-memory and its geopolitical contexts;
– To whom does post-memory belong?
– Post-memory and post-colonialism;
– Cinema, theatre, and documentary in post-memory;
– The world in post-memory, post-memory in the world;
– Reparative writing, remembering and forgetting;
Key Dates:
Deadline for article submission: June 20, 2022 July 15, 2022
Notification of acceptance: September 10, 2022
Publication date: October 15, 2022
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