Symposium Abstracts and Biographical Notes on Speakers
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ANNETTE KUHN
“Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media”
My talk will focus on re-enactments of the past through performances of memory in and with visual media, and will be looking at how these may embody, express, work through, and even unpick, interconnections between the private, the public and the personal. It will explore some questions around visual media/visual discourses, memory and collective identity by looking filmic and photographic examples from England, Scotland, Canada and China. It will also raise some questions about how institutions such as museums and archives may figure in some of these collective activities, practices and performances.
Dr. Annette Kuhn is Professor of Film Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London, and an editor of the journal Screen. Her books include: Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995 and 2002); An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002); (co-edited with Kirsten Emiko McAllister) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (2006); Ratcatcher (2008); and (edited) “Screen” Theorizing Today: a Celebration of “Screen”’s 50th Anniversary (2009).
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LEITH DAVIS
“Robert Burns and Cultural Memory”
2009 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the poet Robert Burns. Recognizing Burns’s global importance and hoping to attract members of the diaspora back to Scotland to celebrate his birthday, the Scottish government has also declared 2009 to be the year of Homecoming; Burns is, after all, worth 157 million pounds a year to the Scottish economy. This paper will consider the question of why Burns remains such a powerful figure in Scottish and North American contexts. I apply the theories of Jan Assman, John Czaplicka and Ann Rigney regarding "cultural memory" to Burns’s case, suggesting that the legacy of the Scottish bard derives its power from its appeal to the notion of “communicative memory” early in its institutionalization and then later in its circulation. I will examine the vestiges of “communicative memory” in two texts that profoundly influenced the way that Burns was consumed both in Scotland and abroad – James Currie's Works of Robert Burns (1800) and John Lockhart's Life of Robert Burns (1838). Then, focusing on North American examples, I will suggest how vestiges of that “communicative memory” are traceable in texts that established his reputation in the New World. I conclude by considering how Robert Burns came to serve as, in Rigney’s terms, a “mediator between memory communities” in Scotland and in North America.
Dr. Leith Davis is author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford UP, 1998) and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish Identity, 1725-1875 (Notre Dame UP, 2005) as well as co-editor (with Ian Duncan and Janet Sorensen) of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). She is currently working on a monograph, Transnational Articulations: Print Culture and the Imagining of Global Communities in Britain and Ireland, 1690-1820. She is a co-founder of the Department of English's MA with Specialization in Print Culture and currently serves as Director of Simon Fraser University's Scottish Studies Centre.
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GEORGE NICHOLAS
"Cultural Memory, Traditional Knowledge, and the Challenges of Intellectual Property in the Modern World"
One key distinction between Indigenous societies worldwide and those of the Western world is that the former lack many of the dichotomies that characterize the latter; thus, there may be no real separation between the "natural" and "cultural" worlds, the "real" and the "supernatural," and "past" and "present." Anthropology provides the means to contextualize such unfamiliar conceptualizations, particularly as they pertain to cultural identity and cultural memory, and this enables a fuller and more complete understanding of cultural diversity. At the same time, such cultural differences offer significant challenges when it comes to understanding and protecting traditional knowledge, particularly in the context of descendant communities who make little distinction between cultural (i.e., tangible) and intellectual (i.e., intangible) property. In this presentation I will explore some of the conceptual and methodological challenges that relate to protecting traditional knowledge and intellectual property in the realms of cross-cultural scholarship, the appropriation and commodification of images and knowledge, and what constitutes "best" practices.
Dr. George Nicholas is Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. He was founding director of Simon Fraser University's Indigenous Archaeology Program in Kamloops, BC (1991-2005). Nicholas is also the director of the international research initiative "Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, Policy," a 7-year initiative funded by SSHRC's Major Collaborative Research Initiatives program. Nicholas' research focuses on Indigenous peoples and archaeology, intellectual property issues relating to archaeology, the archaeology and human ecology of wetlands, and archaeological theory, all of which he has published widely on. He is series co-editor of the World Archaeological Congress' Research Handbooks in Archaeology, and former editor of the Canadian Journal of Archaeology (2000-2007).
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DAVINA BHANDAR
“Migratory Memories: Examining the Practice of Subject Making, Emplacement and Belonging”
Histories of migrant communities are often shelved and hidden within obscure spaces in national archives. These migrant memories are in themselves difficult to trace, substantiate and make concrete. In this paper I query a distinction between immigrant histories that forge and substantiate national history and the absence/presence of migrant traces that exist on the borders, in the marginal spaces and the darkened corners of national representations. The importance of memory work in these migrant communities is possibly an attempt to substantiate a history, a location and thereby an act of belonging - to shed light on these darkened corners of the founding of the nation state. By examining various collected and archived media, contemporary documentary film and cultural memory projects, this paper examines the strategies of subject making that take place in the attempt to revive and create memory. Do memories of migrant subjects remain migratory and fleeting, or are these memories rooted and thereby central to the process of making subjects and citizens. What kind of citizen is being produced through these memory games?
Dr. Davina Bhandar, a visiting scholar in Canadian Studies, is assistant professor in the Department of Canadian Studies at Trent University. Her current research engages in contemporary critiques of the concept of citizenship that have emerged through notions of transnationalism and politics of diaspora, particularly focused on examining the notion of the migrant concept of citizenship. Her teaching and research intersect in the fields of contemporary political and social theory, critical race studies, post-colonial theory and feminist theory. Dr. Bhandar’s work focuses on the examination of citizenship practices from “below” or rather through acts of governance, freedom, migration and immigration.
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