MEMORY IN THE DISCIPLINES
To
obtain username and password to access papers, please email andrew.newman@stonybrook.edu
Patrick
Hutton (University of Vermont), "“Legends of a Revolutionary:
Nostalgia in the Imagined Lives of Auguste Blanqui.” Wed. April 11, 2012, 12:50-2:10.
SBS N-403
Nostalgia in the Imagined Lives of Auguste Blanqui.” Wed. April 11, 2012, 12:50-2:10.
SBS N-403
Past Seminars:
Crystal
Fleming
(Stony Brook U, Sociology), "Mnemonic
Antiracism: Remembering Slavery
in Metropolitan France." Wed. February 29, 12:50-2:10.
SBS
N-403
Jeffrey Santa Ana
(Stony Brook English), "Emotions as Landscapes: Commodification and
Historical Memory in the Picture Books of Shaun Tan." Wed. Nov. 9,
12:50-2:10. Hum. 1008.
This talk examines the
work of Shaun Tan, a Chinese Australian comics artist who has achieved
international acclaim for his picture books. According to Tan,
Australia has been slow to recognize its “problematic
history” of
racial discrimination against Asian immigrants and Aboriginal
people. The removal of Australia’s bush land to
develop
outer suburbs, Tan contends, has created an “amnesiac
culture” in
Australia that makes people feel alienated because they have become
detached from the natural environment. This alienating detachment
from the natural world makes it difficult to remember Australia’s
problematic history of Aboriginal people who once populated the
bush. Insofar as Tan’s picture books are about the
relationship
between people and places, the rupturing of this relationship, which
Tan depicts in his illustrations of alienation and displacement,
demonstrates both the forgetting and recovering of historical
memory. Tan recovers this forgotten history in his illustrations
through his visual metaphors for emotion. In Tales from Outer
Suburbia (2008) and Lost & Found (2010), for example, a place as
mundane and banal as a bare lawn in a suburban backyard is the site at
which to commemorate indigenous heritage and the spirits of ancestral
immigrants. I will demonstrate in my talk the importance of historical
memory in Tan’s art. I will also discuss how forgetting
history
is, according to Tan, a global problem that is the manifestation of
something systemic, affecting the entirety of human life everywhere in
the world.
Ulrike
Heine (University of
Giessen), "Photographic Memories of Disasters in Climate Change
Communication." Wed. Oct. 5, 12:50-2:10. SBS N403.
In my presentation I will
elaborate on the role of visual memory of natural and man-‐ made
disasters within the transnational public discourse on Climate Change.
Visual memory is first and foremost embodied and enlivened through
photographic images. I argue that, within the Climate Change discourse,
photographs of past events are being reframed and
re-‐contextualised. Here, the anew connotated images serve as
photographic complements to diagrammatic simulations of possible
climate futures. The presentation explores the nexus between future
Climate Change scenarios and media representation of past disasters in
two steps: Firstly, I will sketch out the theoretical framework for the
analysis of visuals within collective memory. Here I will take on
Barbie Zelizer’s notion of "voice" and David D.
Perlmutter’s differentiation of "discrete" and "generic" icons to
explore the assets of association within the understanding of visual
memory. Secondly, I will discuss some of my materials, such as the 2008
Greenpeace Campaign "Your child is growing. Not as fast as the oceans
are rising" and the online photo essay "Climate Change. One Planet, One
Chance" produced by Magnum in Motion in 2008, as a comission for the
UNDP. Each of the projects illustrate ways of approaching different
aspects of visual memory. The presentation highlights one important
aspect of my dissertation project "(Re)Defining Photography in the Face
of Climate Change"*, which I work on as a contribution to the field of
visual studies.