Lincoln Hirn, "Waiting for the Call: Memory, Legacy, and the Immortal Liberation"
This paper argues that, for a generation of freedom fighters, activists, visionaries, and thinkers, the world ended just after the turn of the twentieth century. Figuratively, at least. Because, by 1900, the last Americans who could remember their own enslavement – and, by extension, their own liberation – were beginning to die. And while this was, perhaps, a fairly mundane, slow-moving sort of apocalypse, it was an apocalypse nonetheless. An entire group of people – people who, through their own ingenuity, bravery, sacrifice, and perseverance, had toppled the American slave regime and helped to create a free society from its ashes – was vanishing. And this, I contend, presented no small problem. In studying the published autobiographies of four formerly-enslaved women – Bethany Veney, Lucy Delaney, Kate Drumgoold, and Susie King Taylor – this essay finds that aging Black activists recognized the critical importance of their own liberatory histories, and worked hard to ensure that they were not forgotten by rising generations.
Moreover, this essay finds that we, as human beings facing our own Armageddon, can learn a lot from Veney, Delaney, Drumgoold, and Taylor. Their narratives, published between 1889 and 1902, provide a roadmap for preserving resistant histories in the face of extinction, and demonstrate how cross-generational solidarity enabled activists born after emancipation to build upon the work of their forebears. If we are to confront the crises facing our contemporary world, we must draw upon the liberatory resources provided by women like Veney, Delaney, Drumgoold, and Taylor while, at the same time, preserving a record of our own struggle for those who will, inevitably, succeed us. There is, this paper concludes, an immortal power hidden within the collective histories of liberation. Which is a fortunate thing. Because, if we want to succeed, we’re going to need it.
Anandi Kar, "Materiality of Memories in the Cultures of Northeast India"
The Northeastern regions of India are marked by a history of marginalization and volatility. With its complex ecosystems and diverse landscapes, the Indian Northeast, is home to many Indigenous communities who have suffered racial violence and displacement and in response, have organized resistance and environmental movements to protect their lands and cultural heritage. The region has also experienced continuous population movements due to geographical and cultural proximity to countries, such as, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, and Myanmar. In fact, since the partition of India, there has been a persistent influx of immigrants into this area, making it essential to any discussion on postcolonial citizenship in context of India and South Asia.
My paper seeks to foreground a theory of material memory as seeming to have the potential of retaining the relational bearing of a substance loaded with mnemonic charge to its human and non-human environment which becomes especially important in case of the cultures in Northeast India. Material memories have important things to say about the lived cultures from this region by highlighting the eco-materiality of landscapes, the elementariness of the cultural practices and arts and crafts of the vulnerable communities on the verge of extinction to help them conserve and reclaim their ethnic identity more securely. Unlike oral histories, material memories extract cultural memory from the garb of matter where history and tradition are solidly condensed and evade escape. The postcolonial condition is characterized by various practices of memory that incorporate visions of resilience, justice and sustainable futures. My paper will argue that the ‘thingness’ of memory can be theorized as one such form of practice.
It will further investigate how the cultures of the peripheral communities contest or expand liberal justice theories and decolonize environmental knowledge by privileging their material mnemonic rites to re define ‘citizenship.’ To be more specific, it will aim to show how the radical possibilities generated by the entanglements of environmental justice and material memories can challenge the triumphant narratives of nation-building, predicated on the erasure of subaltern histories and the fetishization of capitalist development. For exploring the multidimensionality of material memory, my paper will use and go beyond the works of Pierre Nora, Jan Assmann and Aanchal Malhotra to explore memories contained not only in material objects but also in sites and symbols of religious and cultural practices. It will also use arguments from contemporary philosophical developments, such as, new-materialism and object-oriented ontology to probe the ‘thingness’ of memory without turning away from the ‘human.’ My paper will also ask related questions like: Is memory confined to past events, or does it encompass elements like soil, climate, flora, fauna, and spatial existence? How does material memory mediate the relationships between personal, 3 state and collective memory? What role does material memory play in the rehabilitation and settlement of displaced individuals in new environments? How does the affective dimension of material memory aid peripheral communities in reconciling with a traumatic past?
Lara Sabra, "Possibilities of Care and Survival in Lebanon’s Prisons"
In Lebanon, prisons are located in abandoned buildings, underground parking lots, police barracks, and other such structures. These carceral spaces are marked by brutality and neglect: mattresses are moldy and bug-infested, infections rampant, and drugs or sexual favors used as exchange currencies. Lebanon’s prisons, in short, are spaces where people live in utter depravity – a depravity purposefully orchestrated by powerful actors that epitomizes the state of precarity in which the world finds itself. How do people survive and live amidst these circumstances?
To answer this question, I employ creative ethnographic methodologies involving testimony, storytelling, and material artifacts. More specifically, my paper centers on the possibilities of life within Lebanon’s carceral network by drawing on the memories and keepsakes of one formerly incarcerated woman named Sana. Sana’s stories are supplemented by letters, notes, and drawings she preserved from her time in prison. I conceptualize these artifacts as “memory-objects,” a term that encapsulates how “persons, memories and objects are interconnected and mutually constitutive” (Frykman 2016).
By engaging with Sana's memory-objects, I learned about the bonds and solidarities that prisoners forged with one another. In my paper, I accordingly show how prisoners mobilized these bonds to subvert the suppression of intimacy and care that is endemic to prisons. In a context that is becoming exceedingly unlivable as a result of Lebanon’s ongoing range of catastrophes (e.g. socio-economic collapse, political violence, and war), these relationships function as livable collaborations or “workable living arrangements” (Tsing 2017). I argue that Sana's relationships point to cracks or openings within “seemingly all-consuming” carceral systems (Rhodes 2001): small spaces of alterity where prisoners care for and collaborate with one another to transform everyday life inside the prison. My paper, in sum, examines how practices of care and bonds of relatedness made life possible amidst carceral precarity.
