Associate Professor, Polish Studies Department, Jagiellonian University, Krakow; Head of the Research Center for Memory Cultures, Jagiellonina University, Krakow
April 6, 2017
4:15pm - 6:00pm
CGIS South, Room S-354
Central and
Eastern Europe—the scenes of brutal genocides during the last century—are
dotted with sites of trauma. Only some of those potential sites of memory are
now marked with plaques, gravestones or memorials. This talk will focus on the
sites that have been left behind, contested or forgotten and that still contain
the bodies of victims. Because the problematic sites are kept out of the social
imaginaries, responses to them are not part of an easily-readable symbolic
system within official culture. An alternative approach is therefore needed, a
more sensitive tool that may spot and assess interactions.
“Immemory” is different from forgetting. It combines dismantled
means that are symbolic (mythologized narratives, pronouncements, isolated
sentences) and extra-symbolic (non-verbal elements of speech, gestures) with
somatic actions and performative acts (interactions with the locations and
people). In the realm of “immemory,” “tacit knowledge” and “forbearance of
speech” take their place in the transmission of an experience of the past that
has yet to be determined, that is not yet ready to be pronounced and that is
emotional and corporeal.
About
Roma Sendyka is an Associate
Professor at the Polish Studies Department and the head of the Research Center
for Memory Cultures at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Currently, she
works on two research projects: Awkward
objects of genocide. Vernacular art on the Holocaust and ethnographic
museums and Unmemorialized
Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity,
Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland.