Call for Essays: Crossroads of Memory

Call for essays: Culture Theory and Critique special themed issue on
Crossroads of Memory

This special issue on the “Crossroads of Memory” seeks to bring together
scholars of various literary and cultural traditions eager to bring into
dialogue different theoretical approaches to memory. For prominent Memory
Studies critic Pierre Nora, historiography represents the unified language
of nationalism with its sanctioned institutions and apparatuses, while
memory is the dialect of particular loci: regional, local, familial, ethnic,
or racial. Nora’s distinction between history and memory is increasingly
questioned in various disciplines. “Crossroads of Memories” is a
contribution to this questioning. Are mobilizations of the past uniquely
local, national, or global?

This collection seeks a more dynamic view of memory that localizes it
simultaneously in multiple spheres: private and public; local, regional, and
transnational; in written texts and non-written artifacts. Unlike Nora’s
seminal concept of realms of memory, the crossroads of memory would
illuminate how memories can simultaneously carry multiple meanings according
to one’s positioning. Embodied in the metaphor of the crossroads where flows
of populations and cultures meet and leave trails, multilocality often
highlights how memories shift as they circulate within and across local,
national, and ethnic communities. The crossroads, thus, represents a site
where multiple or different kinds of memory are constantly juxtaposed,
contested, rearticulated, and mediated according to different individual
social class, needs, historical contexts, and political ends. As such, the
crossroads demonstrates the potency of conflict and power dynamics
(evidenced in censorship and silences) in the emergence and representation
of collective memories.

We invite essays that explore tensions among different conceptualizations of
memory.

Possible areas of examination include, but are not restricted to:

Race, ethnicity, or immigration and memory

Social class and memory

Memory and space. Localizing memories in museums, monuments, landscape,
cityscape, etc.

Performative memories

Duty to memory

Visual culture and memory

We welcome essays that address any of these issues. The questions are not
meant to be proscriptive, however, and we welcome queries about possible
article content. We welcome submissions from graduate students.

Essays need to be submitted for peer review by Oct 1, 2011; length of final
essays to be 5,000-7,000 words including notes.

Send abstracts and essays to Jen Heusel, editorial assistant to
ctcjourn@indiana.edu

Culture, Theory and Critique is a refereed, interdisciplinary journal for
the transformation and development of critical theories in the humanities
and social sciences. It aims to critique and reconstruct theories by
interfacing them with one another and by relocating them in new sites and
conjunctures. Culture, Theory and Critique' approach to theoretical
refinement and innovation is one of interaction and hybridization via
recontextualization and transculturation.