WHEN MEMORIES MEET: MOBILITY, PLACE, AND THE (RE)MAKING OF IDENTITY IN ABIAYALA | THE AMERICAS
Migration, diaspora, and displacement continuously shape and reshape individual and collective memories and identities. Across Abiayala | the Americas and beyond, movements of people, voluntary or forced, have generated complex relationships between memory, place, belonging, and loss. As people move, memories travel with them, entering into contact with other histories, narratives, and forms of remembrance (remembering and forgetting). These mnemonic encounters can produce conflicts, tensions, and|or solidarities through which new identities and sites of belonging are constantly engendered. Considering memory, not as a fixed inheritance preserved within particular communities, but as a relational process, this symposium examines what happens when different memories meet in contexts of migration, diaspora, and displacement.
To that end, we invite papers from diverse linguistic and theoretical contexts and perspectives and historical junctures or periods that address the dynamics and politics of memory formation in Abiayala | the Americas and its impact on the present. The following questions, intended as points of departure rather than limitations, represent some possible issues for consideration: How do encounters between multiple pasts and memories reshape and|or serve to maintain identities and relations or forms of belonging? How are these memories and identities (dis)embodied and (re)mediated? How are historical or mnemonic narratives and claims contested or reinforced? How do interactions among diverse memories create new political, ethical, and cultural possibilities? What kind of futures do they project, imagine or imply and what or whose interests do they serve? More specifically, what is the relationship of particular mnemonic encounters and|or transcultural processes of memory formation to settler-colonialist, liberal, and neoliberal ideologies and discourses? How do they relate to particular political-economic formations? In particular, what role do memories play in (de) and|or (re)constructing ethnic, racial, class, sexual and gender discourses and identities? How do they relate to anthropocentric, heteropatriarchal, abilist and other forms of social and discursive domination, exclusion, alienation, or silencing? How does trauma, both individual and collective, shape memory formation and thus mnemonic encounter|s and, in turn, in what ways have memories and their creation and (re)mediation played a role in responding to it?
Potential topics include the following:
Colonial and Decolonial Archives
Colonial and Decolonial Remembrance | Memorialization
Contested Memories
Diaspora and Memory
Digital(ization of) Pasts
Entangled Memories
Future Memory
Hauntings | Specters | Returns
Heterotopic Memory|ies
Mediation | Remediation of Memory
Memorialization and Counter-Memorialization
Memory and Power
Memory and Translation
Memory and Transmigration
Memory and Trauma
Mnemonic Crossings and Encounters
Prosthetic Memories
Silenced or Forgotten Memories
Transcultural Memory
Traveling Memory
In sum, this symposium approaches Abiayala | the Americas through the lens of memory. By bringing together diverse perspectives and disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, it examines the (re)making of identity, mobility, and place when memories meet and explores possibilities for more just and equitable futures.
