International Postgraduate 
Symposium
Call for Papers!
Submissions closed!
When: 25th/26th June 2015 Where: University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ Submission deadline: 30th April 2015
This symposium sets out to explore the productive tensions between forgetting and remembering and their effects on culture.
Preserving and handing down history and its influence on the cultural memory of modern societies is the conventional provenance of the humanities scholarship. At the same time, the construction of any historical narrative assumes the erasure of any competing narrative, an erasure that is forgetting.
If we assume that cultural memory is built upon suppression and forgetting, then memory as a personal and collective reality implies that the past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory.
We may thus challenge the assumption that cultural identity is about creating a narrative on one’s own place in history and what happened in the past: it might rather be that what cultures treasure as memory is important for identity formation as much as what it is forgotten.
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. […]" Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, IX, 1940