Books by Ihab A M Saloul
Research Teaching Society Nexus , 2024
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/AHM-2024
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This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of... more This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve as an opening to a discussion of current social issues.
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
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This interdisciplinary open access and peer-reviewed edited volume explores (self)representations... more This interdisciplinary open access and peer-reviewed edited volume explores (self)representations of diasporic heritages and memories and the ways in which diasporic identities, subjectivities and communities forge means of belonging and connection to nations, (im)material objects or spaces. Conceptualisations of diasporic heritages and memories can be expressed through a variety of narrative, mediatic, artistic and memorial strategies. The proceedings aim to provoke discussion and improve understanding of how these diasporic identities come into being, evolve and are performed through different heritage domains and practices. Rather than seeing diasporic heritages and identities as those with a nostalgic romantic longing for the past, the contributions in this volume stratify the range of positive or negative emotions and memory narratives that can emerge in diasporic communities. What narrative choices do diasporic individuals and communities adopt to define and challenge essentialised conceptions of heritage, identity, homeland, home and home-making? What counts as diasporic heritage, and how do diverse diasporas respond to, represent and perform their identity through the ever-changing cultural and global contexts? How does diasporic discourses interact with (post/de) colonial narratives, xenophobic and right-wing movements, migration, displacement, conflict and transnationalism? The proceedings explore discourses of diasporic heritages and memories which correspond to the plethora of media, museological, political, historical and journalistic narratives and literary texts that structure a public and common understanding of identity, and offer a mere excerpt of the richness and diversity of the advancements in the fields of heritage and memory Studies and material culture by focusing on the material and intangible remains of the past, the reciprocal relations between objects and meanings, and the dynamics of memory from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives.
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
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W. G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies: Memory, Word, and Image
When the mind turns more than one ... more W. G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies: Memory, Word, and Image
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
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This open access peer-reviewed edited volume (online and in print) explores the crisis of witness... more This open access peer-reviewed edited volume (online and in print) explores the crisis of witnessing as well as the individual and collective positions and responsibilities of the witness in times of crisis: How can various aspects of witnessing across disciplines and contexts enrich our understanding of our realities? And how do current changes to mediums of witnessing (both physical and digital) impact the way we receive, experience and share information? This interdisciplinary volume includes twenty papers that explore the potential roles and responsibilities of witnesses and the uses of different mediums of witnessing such as life-writing, memoirs, photographs, epistolary exchanges, newspapers, testimonies, legal hearings, art, video, or social media, which reflect upon memory and heritage in today’s societies.
Edited by Ihab Saloul, Anna Schjøtt Hansen, Réka Deim, Dawid Grabowski, Mehmet Sülek, and Jante van der Naaten.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/AHM-2022
ISBN: 978-94-6372-4494
e-ISBN: 978-90-4855-7578
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
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Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The phenomenon of martyrdom is more than 2000 years old but, as contemporary events show, still v... more The phenomenon of martyrdom is more than 2000 years old but, as contemporary events show, still very much alive. This book examines the canonisation, contestation and afterlives of martyrdom and connects these with cross-cultural acts and practices of remembrance. Martyrdom appeals to the imagination of many because it is a highly ambiguous spectacle with thrilling deadly consequences. Imagination is thus a vital catalyst for martyrdom, for martyrs become martyrs only because others remember and honour them as such. This memorialisation occurs through rituals and documents that incorporate and re-interpret traditions deriving from canonical texts. The canonisation of martyrdom generally occurs in one of two ways: First, through ritual commemoration by communities of inside readers, listeners, viewers and participants, who create and recycle texts, re-interpreting them until the martyrs ultimately receive a canonical status, or second, through commemoration as a means of contestation by competing communities who perceive these same people as traitors or terrorists. By adopting an interdisciplinary orientation and a cross-cultural approach, this book goes beyond both the insider admiration of martyrs and the partisan rejection of martyrdoms and concisely synthesises key interpretive questions and themes that broach the canonised, unstable and contested representations of martyrdom as well as their analytical connections, divergences and afterlives in the present.
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462988187/martyrdom
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Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories, 2012
Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination explores the cultural memory of al-Na... more Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination explores the cultural memory of al-Nakba (1948 Israeli independence, or The Catastrophe as it is known in Palestine) and its significance to the modern Palestinian imagination. Ihab Saloul addresses concepts central to debates on identity such as nostalgia and trauma, notions of home and forced travel, and geopolitical continuity of loss of place. Through an integrated method of close narrative and discursive analysis of a variety of literary texts, films, and personal narratives, this study offers an analytical account of the preservation of cultural optimism in the face of the ongoing catastrophe, as well as the ways in which aesthetics and politics intersect in contemporary Palestinian culture. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137001375
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Encyclopedia by Ihab A M Saloul
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC) is an interdisciplinary encyclopaedia which critically analyses the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict as well as the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of competing heritages and memories of the..., 2024
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC) is an interdisciplinary encyc... more The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC) is an interdisciplinary encyclopaedia which critically analyses the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict as well as the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of competing heritages and memories of the past in the present. The encyclopaedia brings together leading and junior researchers and professionals from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to provide the state of the art and most comprehensive overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cultural heritage and conflict. The encyclopedia covers the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, arts and cultural studies, media studies, cultural analysis, literature, semiotics, performative and postcolonial studies, ethnology and anthropology, oral history, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology and material culture studies, landscapes, conservation and restoration, and critical and digital heritage studies. The interdisciplinary scope of the encyclopaedia breaks new ground in the study of contemporary narratives of cultural heritage and conflict and the ways in which they broaden public understandings of the complex spacio-temporal dynamics between collective memory and identity. By crossing academic and professional boundaries, the encyclopedia aims to offer an open space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which practices and discourses of cultural heritage and conflict operate at local, national, transnational levels worldwide.
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https://meteor.springer.com/chandc/
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict ... more https://meteor.springer.com/chandc/
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC) is an interdisciplinary encyclopaedia which critically analyses the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict as well as the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of competing heritages and memories of the past in the present. The encyclopaedia brings together leading and junior researchers and professionals from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to provide the state of the art and most comprehensive overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cultural heritage and conflict. The encyclopedia covers the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, arts and cultural studies, media studies, cultural analysis, literature, semiotics, performative and postcolonial studies, ethnology and anthropology, oral history, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology and material culture studies, landscapes, conservation and restoration, and critical and digital heritage studies. The interdisciplinary scope of the encyclopaedia breaks new ground in the study of contemporary narratives of cultural heritage and conflict and the ways in which they broaden public understandings of the complex spacio-temporal dynamics between collective memory and identity. By crossing academic and professional boundaries, the encyclopedia aims to offer an open space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which practices and discourses of cultural heritage and conflict operate at local, national, transnational levels worldwide.
https://meteor.springer.com/chandc/
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International Peer Review Open Access Journal by Ihab A M Saloul
https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/26665050, 2020
Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal (HMC) is an International peer-review open access Journal... more Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal (HMC) is an International peer-review open access Journal that critically analyses the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of the past in the present, as well as the remaking of pasts into heritage and memory, including processes of appropriations and restitutions, significations and musealization and mediatisation. This interdisciplinary journal addresses the dynamics of memory and forgetting, as well as the politics of trauma, mourning and reconciliation, identity, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and restoration, material culture, conservation and management, conflict archaeology, dark tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, terrorscapes, migration, borders, and the mediated re-enactments of conflicted pasts.
HMC covers the fields of memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, arts and media and performative studies, postcolonial studies, ethnology, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology, material culture and landscapes, conservation and restoration, cultural, public and oral history, critical and digital heritage studies. By crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the journal aims to offer an interdisciplinary space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which memory sites and discourses operate as vehicles at local, national and transnational levels.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/26665050
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Book Series by Ihab A M Saloul
The Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict book series explores the relationship be... more The Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The series analyses the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations and mediatizations in the present. These processes include the impact of cultural artifacts on modern society’s collective memories and representations of historical conflicts.
https://www.springer.com/series/14638
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638
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This ground-breaking series examines the dynamics of heritage and memory from a transnational, in... more This ground-breaking series examines the dynamics of heritage and memory from a transnational, interdisciplinary and integrated approaches. Monographs or edited volumes critically interrogate the politics of heritage and dynamics of memory, as well as the theoretical implications of landscapes and mass violence, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and conservation, archaeology and (dark) tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, the power of aesthetics and the art of absence and forgetting, mourning and performative re-enactments in the present. https://www.aup.nl/en/series/heritage-and-memory-studies
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Research Exhibitions by Ihab A M Saloul
https://objects-and-stories.com/exhibition-2023-2
Encountering Absence is a multimedia and multil... more https://objects-and-stories.com/exhibition-2023-2
Encountering Absence is a multimedia and multilingual exhibition serving as the second edition of the SPEME Research Exhibition Series ‘Objects & Stories.’ The project aims to investigate how traumatic pasts are preserved, remembered, and transmitted in the present through space, and to promote knowledge exchange through an international and intersectoral research network. Encountering Absence combines objects of traumatic pasts with personal stories and artistic expressions in order to shed light on the experiences of those who are haunted by the absence of people disappeared, homelands lost, or histories too painful to pass on. With this exhibition, we seek to create a space that allows the viewer to encounter such intimate traumas in a dynamic space of daily life—huddled around a cafe table in the oldest Dutch artists’ association, Arti et Amicitiae. The stories and expressions of those who live in the shadows cast by the presence of absence provide insight to the many ways that traumatic heritage can transcend spatio-temporal and cultural boundaries. Such forms of remembering reveal how traumatic heritage can be transformed in the present, even as the events themselves recede further into the annals of history.
Curatorial Statement
The objects and artworks exhibited coalesce around the question: What emerges out of a void? Encountering Absence creates living spaces for artists and viewers to reflect upon traumatic pasts and experiences in the present. Objects, in their brutal materiality, can be powerful conduits of memory in the absence of the people and places to which they are intimately associated. In each of the spaces in which the exhibition takes place, the objects exhibited tell the personal stories of alienation, emptiness, or dislocation which arise from the silence, often passed down over generations, surrounding unspeakable historical injustices. The artists we have invited to participate respond to these notions and explore diverse contexts of absences, silenced narratives, displacement and loss. We see these inherited pasts and traumas of absence as in a perpetual state of pending, hesitating between here and there, then and now.
By encountering material and artistic expressions of absence and trauma, visitors are invited to contemplate what is missing through what has been made present. Personal objects, artworks, and narratives of traumatic heritage have traditionally been confined to personal collections or conventional heritage sites. Encountering Absence re-contextualizes these expressions of historical silences and absences within the context of a living space. By creating this intersection of private and collective spaces of conscience in the midst of daily life, we hope to foster new understandings which only arise from liminal spaces of transition. Split between spaces, grounded in the in-between, the exhibition addresses the complexities of traumatic heritage and (post)-remembering through a multimedia display approach which triggers all senses:
What do you hear in silence? What can your eyes make out in the dark? What do you imagine when trying to fill in the gaps? In the presence of absence, your mind wanders.
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https://objects-and-stories.com/about-1
Objects & Stories is a research exhibition that combines... more https://objects-and-stories.com/about-1
Objects & Stories is a research exhibition that combines tangible objects of trauma with personal stories and oral histories from witnesses and subsequent generations to shed light on the complexities of trauma, (post)-remembering, and heritage narratives in the present. Recounted through the lens of object biographies, these personal stories encompass several cases of traumatic pasts connected to the Netherlands such as the Second World War, the Srebrenica genocide, and colonial heritage in an effort to re-imagine what constitutes ‘traumatic heritages’ and ‘victim-perpetrator’ dualities. Through a multimedia approach, viewers are invited to reflect upon how competing narratives of the past are negotiated and reconfigured in archives, cultural practices, and public spaces. Who remembers and who forgets, and how are memories narrated, silenced, or forgotten? Why and how do we remember traumatic histories?
Two-Part Podcast Series
The first part of the podcast series looks at the Srebrenica genocide of 1995 and the perspectives of remembrance. Srebrenica can be seen as a Dutch traumatic site of memory outside of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, Srebrenica is mostly remembered in the context and from the perspective of Dutchbat. This might be the most obvious connection between the Netherlands and Srebrenica but it is not the only one. The war in Bosnia caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee. 60,000 Bosnians – among them survivors and relatives of victims of Srebrenica – found their home in the Netherlands. In the podcast, we look at the second generation of these people: the children who left Bosnia at a young age and grew up in the Netherlands. How do they remember what happened? What does it mean to be both Bosnian and Dutch in the context of what happened in Srebrenica?
The second part of the podcast series investigates the Second World War and the archives as spaces of conflict as well as the contested authority of archives. By making use of the archives of H401, a cultural foundation based on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, this podcast explores the story of Thülö Röhl (1920-1943), a promising student with artistic aspirations who slowly evolved to be an ambitious Nazi soldier. The mother of Thülö Röhl was a good friend of the people who lived at this historical house at the Herengracht in Amsterdam; they found each other in their shared interest in German poetry and literature. After the death of Alexandra Röhl in 1975, the archival material was stored in the historical house at the Herengracht. By finding a location for her son’s archive, Alexandra Röhl secured his artistic legacy and place in history. Looking through her eyes we see Thülö Röhl as a young artist exploring his many talents. But does the archive tell the complete story? In the form of imaginative storytelling, this podcast will focus on many issues related to archives such as the authority of the archive and the under-representation or even the lack or absence of representation of specific narratives of the past.
University of Amsterdam, 17 December 2021-25 February 2022
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Open Access Conference Proceedings Series by Ihab A M Saloul
History, Culture, and Heritage Proceedings Series, 2022
The proceedings series 'History, Culture, and Heritage' aims to publish proceedings from conferen... more The proceedings series 'History, Culture, and Heritage' aims to publish proceedings from conferences on history from late antique, medieval, and early modern European history to broader cultural heritage and contemporary studies, including topics such as memory studies, conflict, war and genocide in strong collaboration with the The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) under the editorship of Prof. Ihab Saloul. All proceedings include open access peer-reviewed fulllength articles.
The series aims to publish proceedings from conferences on history from late antique, medieval, and early modern European history to broader cultural heritage and contemporary studies, including topics such as memory studies, conflict, war and genocide, and to help PhDs, (Re)MA students and conference organizers to publish interdisciplinary articles on-site conferences as ‘Peer-reviewed Open Access Edited Volumes’ (online and in print).
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/2949-737X.
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Articles, Papers, Lectures, Special Journal Issues by Ihab A M Saloul
Open Access Special Journal Issue, 2022
https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/issue/3549/
The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) is an ... more https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/issue/3549/
The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) is an international, peer-reviewed, diamond open access Journal that critically analyses the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of the past in the present, as well as the remaking of pasts into heritage and memory, including processes of appropriations and restitutions, significations and musealization and mediatisation. This interdisciplinary journal addresses the dynamics of memory and forgetting, as well as the politics of trauma, mourning and reconciliation, identity, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and restoration, material culture, conservation and management, conflict archaeology, dark tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, terrorscapes, migration, borders, and the mediated re-enactments of conflicted pasts. Aim The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) covers the fields of memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, arts and media and performative studies, postcolonial studies, ethnology, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology, material culture and landscapes, conservation and restoration, cultural, public and oral history, critical and digital heritage studies. The journal will offer a publishing opportunity for early stage and senior academic researchers in the interdisciplinary fields of Heritage, Memory, Conflict in and beyond Europe. By crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the journal aims to offer an interdisciplinary space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which memory sites and discourses operate as vehicles at local, national and transnational levels.
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Visioning Israel-Palestine: Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict. Gil Pasternack (ed), London: Bloomsbury , 2020
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/visioning-israel-palestine-9781501364624/
About Visioning Israel... more https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/visioning-israel-palestine-9781501364624/
About Visioning Israel-Palestine
In this interdisciplinary book, a group of international authors strives to cultivate a better future for the people of Israel-Palestine through recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other.
Contributors to Visioning Israel-Palestine analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. They largely draw on the legacy of nonconformist intellectual Edward Said, who saw culture as a participant in the perpetuation of the conflict, as well as a vehicle capable of leading the way towards its just resolution. The chapters in the volume consider Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories to expand the conflict's historical imagination and nurture suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Series Preface-New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock
Introduction: Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict
Gil Pasternak
PART I: PRODUCTS OF CONFLICT
1 A Country as a Map of Itself: On the Historical, Cultural and Theoretical Rendering of Palestine in Sobhi al-Zobaidi's Part-ition (2008)
Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh
2 Laughter 'In Between' Time: Temporality, Iconography, and the Burden of Proof in Palestinian Art After Oslo
Chrisoula Lionis
3 Impossible Intimacies: Towardsa Visual Politics of 'Touch' at the Israeli-PalestinianBorder
Anna Ball
4 Dreams or Nightmares: The Artworking of Return in And Europe will be Stunned (2007–11) by Yael Bartana (with Slawomir Sierakowski)
Griselda Pollock
PART II: PRODUCTS IN CONFLICT
5 Scandal! Images, Discourses, and the Image of Discourse that 'Hurt People's Feelings'
Rhoda Rosen and Sander L. Gilman
6 Showcasing Conflict: Notes and Observations on Photographic Representation in Israel and Palestine
Huw Wahl
7 Visibility, Photography, and the Occupation: The Case of The Activestills Collective
Simon Faulkner
8 At Home with 'Palestine': Performing Photographs of the West Bank in Israeli Households
Gil Pasternak
9 Postmemory and Oral History: Intergenerational Memory and Transnational Identity in Exile
Ihab Saloul
Appendix
Invention, Memory, and Place
Edward W. Said
Notes
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Reviews
“This rich volume introduces the inspiring neologism “visioning” to make the hyphen between Israel-Palestine a sign of bonding and correlation instead of its common perception as a sign of distance and separation. Chapter-by-chapter it brilliantly demonstrates Gil Pasternak's conviction that the arts matter to the future of Israelis and Palestinians – a conviction which I share.” – Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
“This rich and innovative volume draws on a wide range of aesthetic sources to show how cultural products can review and reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can then see that visual art, broadly understood, not only engages past trauma but also opens up possibilities for a more peaceful future.” – Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland, Australia
“The title of this remarkable collection telegraphs its fundamental message. A hyphenated “state” (in the sense of an actual condition rather than a political entity) already exists in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This state is a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of cooperation and conflict, inequality and co-presence that eludes all one-sided nationalist narratives, most notably the long-imagined “two state solution” which now belongs in the dustbin of history. Focusing on “cultural products” (images, texts, exhibitions, films, and stories), Visioning Israel-Palestine provides an account of contemporary experiences and encounters that promise to assemble this puzzle as a compellingly legible mosaic.” – W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA
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International Conference 12-14 December, 2019
Artists tend to work across disciplines and “art cannot be disciplined” (Hito Steyerl). Taking th... more Artists tend to work across disciplines and “art cannot be disciplined” (Hito Steyerl). Taking the case of W.G. Sebald’s interdisciplinary word and image practice on memory and presences of (migratory) lives as touchstone for our discussions, this conference seeks to foster academic, professional, artistic and public scholarship by exploring cutting-edge interdisciplinary research, findings, techniques, practices and theoretical advances in the areas of memory, word and image. Which role do art and literature play in this regard?
The conference turns to a fascinating author, whose work resonates with questions of memory, interdisciplinarity and related artistic practice. Sebald was engaged with the “enigmatic difference” between material truth and historic truth that Jacques Derrida notes in Archive Fever. His literary prose, which exists in the interspace of poetry, novel, essay, (auto)biography, Shoah memorial and travelogue, contains meticulous reflections on non-human entities and natural phenomena. Sebald’s writing generates peculiar relationships between the world of words, objects and the world of images, manifested in his specific practice of embedding images into the tissue of the text. It is not surprising that artists have been among his most prolific interpreters. Sebald’s work serves as a model for current “writing with images” (Elkins) and interdisciplinary projects on the present-day aftermath of wars, as well as today’s plight of migrants and refugees. Exhibitions gathering Sebald’s artistic legacies multiply issues of memory and heritage relevant to this conference theme.
The conference invites scholars, artists and other practitioners with a stake in these questions to present papers, posters or workshops, which critically analyze these issues and especially consider the role of interdisciplinarity in their case studies. Topics include, but are not limited to considering memory and interdisciplinarity in relation to:
art’s responses to literature
politics of memory, identity and cultural imagination
writing with images
migration and borders
museums and (literary) exhibitions
politics of intervention and resistance narratives
artistic, writerly and scholarly strategies to deal with post-war realities
non-human witnesses of trauma
crossing disciplines to slow down reception
Please send abstracts (250 words max), including a short bio (150 words max), by 20 June 2019 to AHMsebaldconference2019@gmail.com. Registration/coffee: 50 Euro; students etc. 25 Euro
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The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over the claims to the land has in many ways als... more The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over the claims to the land has in many ways also been fought out through images via different mechanisms. This talk addresses the questions of what happens when the activity of storytelling is fragmented in a case of historical disaster. And how are competing memories of forced displacement and exile circulating in wider social worlds, helping to reshape cultural imaginations and political orders in the Middle East? The lecture will explore some of the ways in which images of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are represented, performed and re-negotiated in contemporary heritage and museum discourses, and consider the interventive possibilities as well as limitations of aesthetic and cultural memory acts in times of conflict.
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Books by Ihab A M Saloul
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Edited by Ihab Saloul, Anna Schjøtt Hansen, Réka Deim, Dawid Grabowski, Mehmet Sülek, and Jante van der Naaten.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/AHM-2022
ISBN: 978-94-6372-4494
e-ISBN: 978-90-4855-7578
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462988187/martyrdom
- https://www.amazon.com/Zoom-Palestinian-Refugees-Remembrances-English/dp/9089790713/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463697265&sr=8-1&keywords=zoom+in:+Palestinian+Refugees+of+1948,+Remembrances
- https://www.haaretz.com/1.5019844
Encyclopedia by Ihab A M Saloul
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC) is an interdisciplinary encyclopaedia which critically analyses the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict as well as the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of competing heritages and memories of the past in the present. The encyclopaedia brings together leading and junior researchers and professionals from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to provide the state of the art and most comprehensive overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cultural heritage and conflict. The encyclopedia covers the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, arts and cultural studies, media studies, cultural analysis, literature, semiotics, performative and postcolonial studies, ethnology and anthropology, oral history, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology and material culture studies, landscapes, conservation and restoration, and critical and digital heritage studies. The interdisciplinary scope of the encyclopaedia breaks new ground in the study of contemporary narratives of cultural heritage and conflict and the ways in which they broaden public understandings of the complex spacio-temporal dynamics between collective memory and identity. By crossing academic and professional boundaries, the encyclopedia aims to offer an open space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which practices and discourses of cultural heritage and conflict operate at local, national, transnational levels worldwide.
https://meteor.springer.com/chandc/
International Peer Review Open Access Journal by Ihab A M Saloul
HMC covers the fields of memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, arts and media and performative studies, postcolonial studies, ethnology, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology, material culture and landscapes, conservation and restoration, cultural, public and oral history, critical and digital heritage studies. By crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the journal aims to offer an interdisciplinary space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which memory sites and discourses operate as vehicles at local, national and transnational levels.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/26665050
Book Series by Ihab A M Saloul
https://www.springer.com/series/14638
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638
Research Exhibitions by Ihab A M Saloul
Encountering Absence is a multimedia and multilingual exhibition serving as the second edition of the SPEME Research Exhibition Series ‘Objects & Stories.’ The project aims to investigate how traumatic pasts are preserved, remembered, and transmitted in the present through space, and to promote knowledge exchange through an international and intersectoral research network. Encountering Absence combines objects of traumatic pasts with personal stories and artistic expressions in order to shed light on the experiences of those who are haunted by the absence of people disappeared, homelands lost, or histories too painful to pass on. With this exhibition, we seek to create a space that allows the viewer to encounter such intimate traumas in a dynamic space of daily life—huddled around a cafe table in the oldest Dutch artists’ association, Arti et Amicitiae. The stories and expressions of those who live in the shadows cast by the presence of absence provide insight to the many ways that traumatic heritage can transcend spatio-temporal and cultural boundaries. Such forms of remembering reveal how traumatic heritage can be transformed in the present, even as the events themselves recede further into the annals of history.
Curatorial Statement
The objects and artworks exhibited coalesce around the question: What emerges out of a void? Encountering Absence creates living spaces for artists and viewers to reflect upon traumatic pasts and experiences in the present. Objects, in their brutal materiality, can be powerful conduits of memory in the absence of the people and places to which they are intimately associated. In each of the spaces in which the exhibition takes place, the objects exhibited tell the personal stories of alienation, emptiness, or dislocation which arise from the silence, often passed down over generations, surrounding unspeakable historical injustices. The artists we have invited to participate respond to these notions and explore diverse contexts of absences, silenced narratives, displacement and loss. We see these inherited pasts and traumas of absence as in a perpetual state of pending, hesitating between here and there, then and now.
By encountering material and artistic expressions of absence and trauma, visitors are invited to contemplate what is missing through what has been made present. Personal objects, artworks, and narratives of traumatic heritage have traditionally been confined to personal collections or conventional heritage sites. Encountering Absence re-contextualizes these expressions of historical silences and absences within the context of a living space. By creating this intersection of private and collective spaces of conscience in the midst of daily life, we hope to foster new understandings which only arise from liminal spaces of transition. Split between spaces, grounded in the in-between, the exhibition addresses the complexities of traumatic heritage and (post)-remembering through a multimedia display approach which triggers all senses:
What do you hear in silence? What can your eyes make out in the dark? What do you imagine when trying to fill in the gaps? In the presence of absence, your mind wanders.
Objects & Stories is a research exhibition that combines tangible objects of trauma with personal stories and oral histories from witnesses and subsequent generations to shed light on the complexities of trauma, (post)-remembering, and heritage narratives in the present. Recounted through the lens of object biographies, these personal stories encompass several cases of traumatic pasts connected to the Netherlands such as the Second World War, the Srebrenica genocide, and colonial heritage in an effort to re-imagine what constitutes ‘traumatic heritages’ and ‘victim-perpetrator’ dualities. Through a multimedia approach, viewers are invited to reflect upon how competing narratives of the past are negotiated and reconfigured in archives, cultural practices, and public spaces. Who remembers and who forgets, and how are memories narrated, silenced, or forgotten? Why and how do we remember traumatic histories?
Two-Part Podcast Series
The first part of the podcast series looks at the Srebrenica genocide of 1995 and the perspectives of remembrance. Srebrenica can be seen as a Dutch traumatic site of memory outside of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, Srebrenica is mostly remembered in the context and from the perspective of Dutchbat. This might be the most obvious connection between the Netherlands and Srebrenica but it is not the only one. The war in Bosnia caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee. 60,000 Bosnians – among them survivors and relatives of victims of Srebrenica – found their home in the Netherlands. In the podcast, we look at the second generation of these people: the children who left Bosnia at a young age and grew up in the Netherlands. How do they remember what happened? What does it mean to be both Bosnian and Dutch in the context of what happened in Srebrenica?
The second part of the podcast series investigates the Second World War and the archives as spaces of conflict as well as the contested authority of archives. By making use of the archives of H401, a cultural foundation based on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, this podcast explores the story of Thülö Röhl (1920-1943), a promising student with artistic aspirations who slowly evolved to be an ambitious Nazi soldier. The mother of Thülö Röhl was a good friend of the people who lived at this historical house at the Herengracht in Amsterdam; they found each other in their shared interest in German poetry and literature. After the death of Alexandra Röhl in 1975, the archival material was stored in the historical house at the Herengracht. By finding a location for her son’s archive, Alexandra Röhl secured his artistic legacy and place in history. Looking through her eyes we see Thülö Röhl as a young artist exploring his many talents. But does the archive tell the complete story? In the form of imaginative storytelling, this podcast will focus on many issues related to archives such as the authority of the archive and the under-representation or even the lack or absence of representation of specific narratives of the past.
University of Amsterdam, 17 December 2021-25 February 2022
Open Access Conference Proceedings Series by Ihab A M Saloul
The series aims to publish proceedings from conferences on history from late antique, medieval, and early modern European history to broader cultural heritage and contemporary studies, including topics such as memory studies, conflict, war and genocide, and to help PhDs, (Re)MA students and conference organizers to publish interdisciplinary articles on-site conferences as ‘Peer-reviewed Open Access Edited Volumes’ (online and in print).
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/2949-737X.
Articles, Papers, Lectures, Special Journal Issues by Ihab A M Saloul
The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) is an international, peer-reviewed, diamond open access Journal that critically analyses the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of the past in the present, as well as the remaking of pasts into heritage and memory, including processes of appropriations and restitutions, significations and musealization and mediatisation. This interdisciplinary journal addresses the dynamics of memory and forgetting, as well as the politics of trauma, mourning and reconciliation, identity, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and restoration, material culture, conservation and management, conflict archaeology, dark tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, terrorscapes, migration, borders, and the mediated re-enactments of conflicted pasts. Aim The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) covers the fields of memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, arts and media and performative studies, postcolonial studies, ethnology, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology, material culture and landscapes, conservation and restoration, cultural, public and oral history, critical and digital heritage studies. The journal will offer a publishing opportunity for early stage and senior academic researchers in the interdisciplinary fields of Heritage, Memory, Conflict in and beyond Europe. By crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the journal aims to offer an interdisciplinary space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which memory sites and discourses operate as vehicles at local, national and transnational levels.
About Visioning Israel-Palestine
In this interdisciplinary book, a group of international authors strives to cultivate a better future for the people of Israel-Palestine through recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other.
Contributors to Visioning Israel-Palestine analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. They largely draw on the legacy of nonconformist intellectual Edward Said, who saw culture as a participant in the perpetuation of the conflict, as well as a vehicle capable of leading the way towards its just resolution. The chapters in the volume consider Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories to expand the conflict's historical imagination and nurture suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Series Preface-New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock
Introduction: Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict
Gil Pasternak
PART I: PRODUCTS OF CONFLICT
1 A Country as a Map of Itself: On the Historical, Cultural and Theoretical Rendering of Palestine in Sobhi al-Zobaidi's Part-ition (2008)
Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh
2 Laughter 'In Between' Time: Temporality, Iconography, and the Burden of Proof in Palestinian Art After Oslo
Chrisoula Lionis
3 Impossible Intimacies: Towardsa Visual Politics of 'Touch' at the Israeli-PalestinianBorder
Anna Ball
4 Dreams or Nightmares: The Artworking of Return in And Europe will be Stunned (2007–11) by Yael Bartana (with Slawomir Sierakowski)
Griselda Pollock
PART II: PRODUCTS IN CONFLICT
5 Scandal! Images, Discourses, and the Image of Discourse that 'Hurt People's Feelings'
Rhoda Rosen and Sander L. Gilman
6 Showcasing Conflict: Notes and Observations on Photographic Representation in Israel and Palestine
Huw Wahl
7 Visibility, Photography, and the Occupation: The Case of The Activestills Collective
Simon Faulkner
8 At Home with 'Palestine': Performing Photographs of the West Bank in Israeli Households
Gil Pasternak
9 Postmemory and Oral History: Intergenerational Memory and Transnational Identity in Exile
Ihab Saloul
Appendix
Invention, Memory, and Place
Edward W. Said
Notes
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Reviews
“This rich volume introduces the inspiring neologism “visioning” to make the hyphen between Israel-Palestine a sign of bonding and correlation instead of its common perception as a sign of distance and separation. Chapter-by-chapter it brilliantly demonstrates Gil Pasternak's conviction that the arts matter to the future of Israelis and Palestinians – a conviction which I share.” – Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
“This rich and innovative volume draws on a wide range of aesthetic sources to show how cultural products can review and reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can then see that visual art, broadly understood, not only engages past trauma but also opens up possibilities for a more peaceful future.” – Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland, Australia
“The title of this remarkable collection telegraphs its fundamental message. A hyphenated “state” (in the sense of an actual condition rather than a political entity) already exists in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This state is a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of cooperation and conflict, inequality and co-presence that eludes all one-sided nationalist narratives, most notably the long-imagined “two state solution” which now belongs in the dustbin of history. Focusing on “cultural products” (images, texts, exhibitions, films, and stories), Visioning Israel-Palestine provides an account of contemporary experiences and encounters that promise to assemble this puzzle as a compellingly legible mosaic.” – W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA
The conference turns to a fascinating author, whose work resonates with questions of memory, interdisciplinarity and related artistic practice. Sebald was engaged with the “enigmatic difference” between material truth and historic truth that Jacques Derrida notes in Archive Fever. His literary prose, which exists in the interspace of poetry, novel, essay, (auto)biography, Shoah memorial and travelogue, contains meticulous reflections on non-human entities and natural phenomena. Sebald’s writing generates peculiar relationships between the world of words, objects and the world of images, manifested in his specific practice of embedding images into the tissue of the text. It is not surprising that artists have been among his most prolific interpreters. Sebald’s work serves as a model for current “writing with images” (Elkins) and interdisciplinary projects on the present-day aftermath of wars, as well as today’s plight of migrants and refugees. Exhibitions gathering Sebald’s artistic legacies multiply issues of memory and heritage relevant to this conference theme.
The conference invites scholars, artists and other practitioners with a stake in these questions to present papers, posters or workshops, which critically analyze these issues and especially consider the role of interdisciplinarity in their case studies. Topics include, but are not limited to considering memory and interdisciplinarity in relation to:
art’s responses to literature
politics of memory, identity and cultural imagination
writing with images
migration and borders
museums and (literary) exhibitions
politics of intervention and resistance narratives
artistic, writerly and scholarly strategies to deal with post-war realities
non-human witnesses of trauma
crossing disciplines to slow down reception
Please send abstracts (250 words max), including a short bio (150 words max), by 20 June 2019 to AHMsebaldconference2019@gmail.com. Registration/coffee: 50 Euro; students etc. 25 Euro
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Edited by Ihab Saloul, Anna Schjøtt Hansen, Réka Deim, Dawid Grabowski, Mehmet Sülek, and Jante van der Naaten.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/AHM-2022
ISBN: 978-94-6372-4494
e-ISBN: 978-90-4855-7578
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462988187/martyrdom
- https://www.amazon.com/Zoom-Palestinian-Refugees-Remembrances-English/dp/9089790713/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463697265&sr=8-1&keywords=zoom+in:+Palestinian+Refugees+of+1948,+Remembrances
- https://www.haaretz.com/1.5019844
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PECHC) is an interdisciplinary encyclopaedia which critically analyses the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict as well as the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of competing heritages and memories of the past in the present. The encyclopaedia brings together leading and junior researchers and professionals from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to provide the state of the art and most comprehensive overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cultural heritage and conflict. The encyclopedia covers the fields of heritage and memory studies, museum studies, arts and cultural studies, media studies, cultural analysis, literature, semiotics, performative and postcolonial studies, ethnology and anthropology, oral history, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology and material culture studies, landscapes, conservation and restoration, and critical and digital heritage studies. The interdisciplinary scope of the encyclopaedia breaks new ground in the study of contemporary narratives of cultural heritage and conflict and the ways in which they broaden public understandings of the complex spacio-temporal dynamics between collective memory and identity. By crossing academic and professional boundaries, the encyclopedia aims to offer an open space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which practices and discourses of cultural heritage and conflict operate at local, national, transnational levels worldwide.
https://meteor.springer.com/chandc/
HMC covers the fields of memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, arts and media and performative studies, postcolonial studies, ethnology, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology, material culture and landscapes, conservation and restoration, cultural, public and oral history, critical and digital heritage studies. By crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the journal aims to offer an interdisciplinary space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which memory sites and discourses operate as vehicles at local, national and transnational levels.
https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/26665050
https://www.springer.com/series/14638
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638
Encountering Absence is a multimedia and multilingual exhibition serving as the second edition of the SPEME Research Exhibition Series ‘Objects & Stories.’ The project aims to investigate how traumatic pasts are preserved, remembered, and transmitted in the present through space, and to promote knowledge exchange through an international and intersectoral research network. Encountering Absence combines objects of traumatic pasts with personal stories and artistic expressions in order to shed light on the experiences of those who are haunted by the absence of people disappeared, homelands lost, or histories too painful to pass on. With this exhibition, we seek to create a space that allows the viewer to encounter such intimate traumas in a dynamic space of daily life—huddled around a cafe table in the oldest Dutch artists’ association, Arti et Amicitiae. The stories and expressions of those who live in the shadows cast by the presence of absence provide insight to the many ways that traumatic heritage can transcend spatio-temporal and cultural boundaries. Such forms of remembering reveal how traumatic heritage can be transformed in the present, even as the events themselves recede further into the annals of history.
Curatorial Statement
The objects and artworks exhibited coalesce around the question: What emerges out of a void? Encountering Absence creates living spaces for artists and viewers to reflect upon traumatic pasts and experiences in the present. Objects, in their brutal materiality, can be powerful conduits of memory in the absence of the people and places to which they are intimately associated. In each of the spaces in which the exhibition takes place, the objects exhibited tell the personal stories of alienation, emptiness, or dislocation which arise from the silence, often passed down over generations, surrounding unspeakable historical injustices. The artists we have invited to participate respond to these notions and explore diverse contexts of absences, silenced narratives, displacement and loss. We see these inherited pasts and traumas of absence as in a perpetual state of pending, hesitating between here and there, then and now.
By encountering material and artistic expressions of absence and trauma, visitors are invited to contemplate what is missing through what has been made present. Personal objects, artworks, and narratives of traumatic heritage have traditionally been confined to personal collections or conventional heritage sites. Encountering Absence re-contextualizes these expressions of historical silences and absences within the context of a living space. By creating this intersection of private and collective spaces of conscience in the midst of daily life, we hope to foster new understandings which only arise from liminal spaces of transition. Split between spaces, grounded in the in-between, the exhibition addresses the complexities of traumatic heritage and (post)-remembering through a multimedia display approach which triggers all senses:
What do you hear in silence? What can your eyes make out in the dark? What do you imagine when trying to fill in the gaps? In the presence of absence, your mind wanders.
Objects & Stories is a research exhibition that combines tangible objects of trauma with personal stories and oral histories from witnesses and subsequent generations to shed light on the complexities of trauma, (post)-remembering, and heritage narratives in the present. Recounted through the lens of object biographies, these personal stories encompass several cases of traumatic pasts connected to the Netherlands such as the Second World War, the Srebrenica genocide, and colonial heritage in an effort to re-imagine what constitutes ‘traumatic heritages’ and ‘victim-perpetrator’ dualities. Through a multimedia approach, viewers are invited to reflect upon how competing narratives of the past are negotiated and reconfigured in archives, cultural practices, and public spaces. Who remembers and who forgets, and how are memories narrated, silenced, or forgotten? Why and how do we remember traumatic histories?
Two-Part Podcast Series
The first part of the podcast series looks at the Srebrenica genocide of 1995 and the perspectives of remembrance. Srebrenica can be seen as a Dutch traumatic site of memory outside of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, Srebrenica is mostly remembered in the context and from the perspective of Dutchbat. This might be the most obvious connection between the Netherlands and Srebrenica but it is not the only one. The war in Bosnia caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee. 60,000 Bosnians – among them survivors and relatives of victims of Srebrenica – found their home in the Netherlands. In the podcast, we look at the second generation of these people: the children who left Bosnia at a young age and grew up in the Netherlands. How do they remember what happened? What does it mean to be both Bosnian and Dutch in the context of what happened in Srebrenica?
The second part of the podcast series investigates the Second World War and the archives as spaces of conflict as well as the contested authority of archives. By making use of the archives of H401, a cultural foundation based on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, this podcast explores the story of Thülö Röhl (1920-1943), a promising student with artistic aspirations who slowly evolved to be an ambitious Nazi soldier. The mother of Thülö Röhl was a good friend of the people who lived at this historical house at the Herengracht in Amsterdam; they found each other in their shared interest in German poetry and literature. After the death of Alexandra Röhl in 1975, the archival material was stored in the historical house at the Herengracht. By finding a location for her son’s archive, Alexandra Röhl secured his artistic legacy and place in history. Looking through her eyes we see Thülö Röhl as a young artist exploring his many talents. But does the archive tell the complete story? In the form of imaginative storytelling, this podcast will focus on many issues related to archives such as the authority of the archive and the under-representation or even the lack or absence of representation of specific narratives of the past.
University of Amsterdam, 17 December 2021-25 February 2022
The series aims to publish proceedings from conferences on history from late antique, medieval, and early modern European history to broader cultural heritage and contemporary studies, including topics such as memory studies, conflict, war and genocide, and to help PhDs, (Re)MA students and conference organizers to publish interdisciplinary articles on-site conferences as ‘Peer-reviewed Open Access Edited Volumes’ (online and in print).
https://www.aup-online.com/content/proceedings/2949-737X.
The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) is an international, peer-reviewed, diamond open access Journal that critically analyses the tangible and intangible remnants, traces and spaces of the past in the present, as well as the remaking of pasts into heritage and memory, including processes of appropriations and restitutions, significations and musealization and mediatisation. This interdisciplinary journal addresses the dynamics of memory and forgetting, as well as the politics of trauma, mourning and reconciliation, identity, nationalism and ethnicity, heritage preservation and restoration, material culture, conservation and management, conflict archaeology, dark tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, terrorscapes, migration, borders, and the mediated re-enactments of conflicted pasts. Aim The Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict (HMC) covers the fields of memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, arts and media and performative studies, postcolonial studies, ethnology, Holocaust and genocide studies, conflict and identity studies, archaeology, material culture and landscapes, conservation and restoration, cultural, public and oral history, critical and digital heritage studies. The journal will offer a publishing opportunity for early stage and senior academic researchers in the interdisciplinary fields of Heritage, Memory, Conflict in and beyond Europe. By crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the journal aims to offer an interdisciplinary space for the rich scholarship in these fields, and to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which memory sites and discourses operate as vehicles at local, national and transnational levels.
About Visioning Israel-Palestine
In this interdisciplinary book, a group of international authors strives to cultivate a better future for the people of Israel-Palestine through recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other.
Contributors to Visioning Israel-Palestine analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas. They largely draw on the legacy of nonconformist intellectual Edward Said, who saw culture as a participant in the perpetuation of the conflict, as well as a vehicle capable of leading the way towards its just resolution. The chapters in the volume consider Israeli and Palestinian films, art installations, street exhibitions, photographs and oral histories to expand the conflict's historical imagination and nurture suitable cultural conditions to revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Series Preface-New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock
Introduction: Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict
Gil Pasternak
PART I: PRODUCTS OF CONFLICT
1 A Country as a Map of Itself: On the Historical, Cultural and Theoretical Rendering of Palestine in Sobhi al-Zobaidi's Part-ition (2008)
Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh
2 Laughter 'In Between' Time: Temporality, Iconography, and the Burden of Proof in Palestinian Art After Oslo
Chrisoula Lionis
3 Impossible Intimacies: Towardsa Visual Politics of 'Touch' at the Israeli-PalestinianBorder
Anna Ball
4 Dreams or Nightmares: The Artworking of Return in And Europe will be Stunned (2007–11) by Yael Bartana (with Slawomir Sierakowski)
Griselda Pollock
PART II: PRODUCTS IN CONFLICT
5 Scandal! Images, Discourses, and the Image of Discourse that 'Hurt People's Feelings'
Rhoda Rosen and Sander L. Gilman
6 Showcasing Conflict: Notes and Observations on Photographic Representation in Israel and Palestine
Huw Wahl
7 Visibility, Photography, and the Occupation: The Case of The Activestills Collective
Simon Faulkner
8 At Home with 'Palestine': Performing Photographs of the West Bank in Israeli Households
Gil Pasternak
9 Postmemory and Oral History: Intergenerational Memory and Transnational Identity in Exile
Ihab Saloul
Appendix
Invention, Memory, and Place
Edward W. Said
Notes
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Reviews
“This rich volume introduces the inspiring neologism “visioning” to make the hyphen between Israel-Palestine a sign of bonding and correlation instead of its common perception as a sign of distance and separation. Chapter-by-chapter it brilliantly demonstrates Gil Pasternak's conviction that the arts matter to the future of Israelis and Palestinians – a conviction which I share.” – Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
“This rich and innovative volume draws on a wide range of aesthetic sources to show how cultural products can review and reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We can then see that visual art, broadly understood, not only engages past trauma but also opens up possibilities for a more peaceful future.” – Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland, Australia
“The title of this remarkable collection telegraphs its fundamental message. A hyphenated “state” (in the sense of an actual condition rather than a political entity) already exists in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. This state is a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of cooperation and conflict, inequality and co-presence that eludes all one-sided nationalist narratives, most notably the long-imagined “two state solution” which now belongs in the dustbin of history. Focusing on “cultural products” (images, texts, exhibitions, films, and stories), Visioning Israel-Palestine provides an account of contemporary experiences and encounters that promise to assemble this puzzle as a compellingly legible mosaic.” – W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA
The conference turns to a fascinating author, whose work resonates with questions of memory, interdisciplinarity and related artistic practice. Sebald was engaged with the “enigmatic difference” between material truth and historic truth that Jacques Derrida notes in Archive Fever. His literary prose, which exists in the interspace of poetry, novel, essay, (auto)biography, Shoah memorial and travelogue, contains meticulous reflections on non-human entities and natural phenomena. Sebald’s writing generates peculiar relationships between the world of words, objects and the world of images, manifested in his specific practice of embedding images into the tissue of the text. It is not surprising that artists have been among his most prolific interpreters. Sebald’s work serves as a model for current “writing with images” (Elkins) and interdisciplinary projects on the present-day aftermath of wars, as well as today’s plight of migrants and refugees. Exhibitions gathering Sebald’s artistic legacies multiply issues of memory and heritage relevant to this conference theme.
The conference invites scholars, artists and other practitioners with a stake in these questions to present papers, posters or workshops, which critically analyze these issues and especially consider the role of interdisciplinarity in their case studies. Topics include, but are not limited to considering memory and interdisciplinarity in relation to:
art’s responses to literature
politics of memory, identity and cultural imagination
writing with images
migration and borders
museums and (literary) exhibitions
politics of intervention and resistance narratives
artistic, writerly and scholarly strategies to deal with post-war realities
non-human witnesses of trauma
crossing disciplines to slow down reception
Please send abstracts (250 words max), including a short bio (150 words max), by 20 June 2019 to AHMsebaldconference2019@gmail.com. Registration/coffee: 50 Euro; students etc. 25 Euro
AHM Conference 2017: Materialities of Postcolonial Memory
Materialities of Postcolonial Memory
This conference is the annual international conference of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) of the University of Amsterdam. This year, the focus is on key public debates around colonial legacies, the slavery past, migration and the materiality of postcolonial heritage.
The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture
AHM fosters a dynamic, interdisciplinary and transnational research of heritage and memory, organizes PhD training, seminars, reading groups, workshops, public debates, and international conferences, and stimulates scholarly cooperation in an international setting.
The school brings together researchers working in diverse areas and fields heritage and memory studies, cultural studies, museum studies, archaeology and material culture, art history, media, conservation and restoration, archival studies, digital humanities, postcolonial and performative studies, religious studies, music and theatre studies, conflict and identity studies, Slavonic languages and cultures, Holocaust and genocide studies, European memory studies, Middle Eastern studies, and cultural, public and oral history.
More information and updates: www.ahmpostcolonialmemory.humanities.uva.nl
Located within a UNESCO World Heritage site” the 17th century canal ring” the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the perfect location to discuss the relationship between past and present, especially regarding heritage’s impact on the lived experience and how and in what ways archaeological research impacts society.
We welcome papers discussing ethics, responsibility and professionalism in archaeology, memory and heritage politics, transmission and engagement with art and cultural heritage, and any other themes that help us explore how heritage, art, memory and agency impact societal actualities as well as how archaeological research can be a force for societal change.
The workshop invites abstracts (250 words max) that respond to these scientifically and politically urgent questions from junior and senior academics. Research areas include, but are not limited to:
— Images of war and conflict; photography, painting, destruction, displaced people
— Architecture and memory— The politics of remembrance and identity
— Archaeologies of heritage dynamics; daily life, performance
— Counter-cultures; street art, music, fashion
— Heritage and digital culture
— Collections and collectors
— Heritage, tourism, and representations of place
— Photography; aesthetics, automatism, agency
— Postcolonial heritage and memory
— Contemporary art and culture; hybridity and ambivalence
— Urban archaeology and public space
We welcome proposals for papers, posters, films and installations that respond to the conference theme and follow the above or alternative lines of enquiry. As always, proposals from disciplines outside archaeology are welcomed.
The call for papers will close on 31st March 2017. Abstracts should be send to:
CHAT2017Amsterdam@gmail.com
QAS-Berlin: Migratory Peoples, Migratory Images is being funded by the Global Research Initiatives, Office of the Provost, New York University; NYU Berlin; Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University; NYU Gallatin Office of Global Study; and the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation, a private foundation established as an extension of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press) to promote transdisciplinary aesthetic inquiry.
Between Politics and Healing: Understanding trauma in Recent Violent Transformations and Conflicts from a Comparative Perspective
Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Cologne
20 - 21 November, 2014
Friday, 9 January, 10:15 a.m.–12:00 noon, 301, VCC West
Presiding: Margaret W. Ferguson, Univ. of California, Davis
1. "Bush Sites / Bush Stories: Politics of Place and Memory in Indigenous Northern Canada," Peter Kulchyski, Univ. of Manitoba
2. "Mediation: Historical Memory against Incarceration and Punitive Actions," Wai Chee Dimock, Yale Univ.
3. "The Politics of Competing Memories: Performing Palestinian and Israeli 'We' in the Aftermath," Ihab Saloul, Univ. of Amsterdam
4. "Literary Archaeology at the Temple Mount: Recovering the Comic Version of the Sacrifice of Isaac," Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem
5. "The Northern Phase of a Southern Problem: The Slave Girl Arrives in the Slum," Saidiya Hartman, Columbia Univ.
Thursday, 8 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., 8, VCC East
Program arranged by the MLA Executive Council
Presiding: Roland Greene, Stanford Univ.
Speakers: Marianne Hirsch, Columbia Univ.; Kevin M. F. Platt, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Ihab Saloul, Univ. of Amsterdam; Yasemin Yildiz, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana
Session Description:
How do scholars of literature and the humanities interpret recent developments in European geopolitics? How can our scholarship and teaching respond to these events? The association will also announce its first overseas conference, Other Europes: Migrations, Translations, Transformations, to be held in Düsseldorf, Germany, 23–26 June 2016.
Information event
This program is a cooperation of Spui 25 with the Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage & Identity (ACHI), the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) and the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (ASHMS).
The program brings together leading scholars and activists working on topics ranging from critical cartographies of borders and migration, to those promoting alternative and indigenous mapping practices and acts of storytelling across borders.
The event will be introduced by Julia Noordegraaf (ACHI), Luiza Bialasiewicz (ARTES) and Ihab Saloul (ASHMS), and will be moderated by Robin Boast (Media Studies).
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
27 November 2014