Trauma, Memory, and Disruptive Genealogy

Speaker: Max Silverman (Leeds)

In recent years, transnational and transcultural approaches to memory have expanded the scope of memory studies beyond the framework of nation and community. But to what extent is this new phase of ‘interconnected’ memory studies still premised on trauma theory and its accompanying vocabulary of violence, the wound, transmission, belatedness, haunting, victimhood and melancholia? Silverman argues that although this approach has provided a much-needed focus on the ways past violence continues to affect the present in invisible ways, it tends to foreclose a broader intersectional analysis of cultural works in which traumatic memory, loss and mourning – no matter how entangled – are always articulated with other, often contradictory and paradoxical, processes. He applies this approach to the film Memory Box (2021) by the Lebanese filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, in which multiple intersections not only connect ‘disparate’ histories of violence (colonial and postcolonial France, Lebanon and Canada, and the Lebanese civil war) but also tell a knotted story about genealogy, gender and culture. Can theory open up cultural works to ambivalent encounters in a way that readings through the lens of traumatic memory rarely allow?

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, trauma, race and violence. His monograph Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013) considers the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone imaginary. He has published four co-edited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme of the 'concentrationary': Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011), Concentrationary Memories (I.B. Tauris, 2014), Concentrationary Imaginaries (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and Concentrationary Art (Berghahn, 2019). His recent work questions traumatic memory studies in relation to contemporary Lebanese film. 

All are welcome to attend this in-person lecture. Advance online registration is essential as seats are limited.

This lecture is sponsored by the University of London John Coffin Trust and is organised in conjunction with the workshop Spatio-Temporal Entanglements of European memory Narratives in Contemporary Literature, for which separate registration is required: https://ilcs.sas.ac.uk/events/spatio-temporal-entanglements-european-memory-narratives-contemporary-literature

Image: © Max Silverman