4 August 2008

CFP - EMPA's Annual Postgrad Symposium (16-17 Oct 2008; UNSW) Deadline: 1 Sept 2008

CFP

EMPA’S Annual Postgraduate Symposium
16th and 17th October 2008

Living Memory: Remembering, Reinventing and Forgetting

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
– Walter Benjamin

One of the most significant and exciting recent developments in the contemporary humanities has been the rapidly expanding preoccupation with the study of memory. Memory has the capacity to challenge the idea of truth and to rewrite empirical histories. In an age of digital reproduction, globalization, trans-nationalism and increasing challenges to the metanarratives of history, memory has the potential to destabilize the past and reshape the present. In one way or another Literature, Music, Visual Art and Performance have always traded in the tensions between memory and history, truth and falsehood, the objective and subjective. But is memory more than a deconstructive tool? What is memory itself? How do we write, dance, figure, or perform memory? What is the relation between memory and history, and what role do art, music performance and the body play in preserving or re-writing the past?

The School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW welcomes proposals from postgraduate students and encourages engagement with an array of critical and creative approaches to this year’s theme. Key words that may inform your proposal include:

Affect Image Simulacram

Amnesia Mnemonics Simulation

Aural Memory Monument Sound

Cognition Nation Temporality

Creative Process Nostalgia Time

Delusion Oral Memory Unconscious

Dementia Preservation Vision

Diaspora Prosthetic Memory Visual Memory

Embodiment Reparation Waste

Hearing Representation Wound

Identity Sexual Memory Youth

To register your interest, please email a 250 word abstract, as a Word document, to Chiara Gamboz at unsw.empa.pg@gmail.com no later than 1 September 2008.

Please include a title of your work, your name, institution, email address and contact details. Proposals for academic papers, creative works and performance pieces all welcome. Presentations are for 20 minutes.

Registration is free.