This conference will be held on the 16th and 17th June 2014, gathering together academics and writers working on memory issues in Latin America, the United States and Europe. The conference will explore the way in which literature has addressed the ‘disappeared’ from the 1970s and 1980s to the present.

Some questions that drive this conference are: what are the common formal strategies, motives, and procedures in the literary representation of the disappeared by the postdictatorship/postconflict second generations? What makes this literature different, in its form and concerns, from both the literature of the so-called ‘1.5 generation’ and from the emerging literary production of the third generation? Are there essential differences between the works by children of the disappeared and works by authors who have no disappeared relatives? Is literature always a progressive discourse when it comes to narrating the collective traumas of the past? Or can it also contribute to constructing social stereotypes such as that of the ‘innocent victim’ or the ‘hero’ and stigmas such as that of the ‘traitor’?

The conference will be held in the Senate House, London.
Organisers: Institute of Modern Languages Research, Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (University of London), ERC – Narratives of Terror and Disappearance (Universität Konstanz).

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

MONDAY, 16 JUNE 2014

9.00-9.15 Welcome and registration: Jordana Blejmar, Silvana Mandolessi and Mariana Eva Perez

9.15-11.00 Autofictions of Disappearance

Silvana Mandolessi (Konstanz), Cuentos para no dormir: Infancia e ironía en la producción de ‘hijos’

Rike Bolte (Osnabrück), Poéticas de la Mascarada y del Camuflaje en tres obras literarias híbridas sobre la des/aparición: Martín Gambarotta, Punctum(1996), Félix Bruzzone, Los topos (2009) y Mariana Eva Perez, Diario de una Princesa Montonera (2012)

Geoff Maguirre (Cambridge), Militancy and Make-Believe: Politicising Childhood in Infancia clandestina (2011)

Ilse Logie (Gent), Usos de la ciencia ficción en dos relatos de ‘hijos’ argentinos

11.15-12.45 Figures of Disappearance

Daniela Omlor (Oxford), The figure of the impostor in Juana Salabert’s El velódromo de invierno (2001) and La noche ciega (2004)

Noa Vaisman (Durham), ‘Living Disappeared’: Liminal figures and ontolgical quandaries

Kirsten Mahlke (Konstanz), In search of a plesiosaur – Monsters and (dis)appearance in Paola Kaufmann’s The Lake

12.45 -14.15 LUNCH

14.15- 15.45 The Disappeared on Screen

Silvia Dapia (CUNY), Exploring Memory in Chilean Television (2011-13)

Philippa Page (Newcastle), Pepsi-for-Coke: Advertising, Neoliberalism and the Real Winner of the 1988 Plebiscite in Pablo Larraín’s Film No (Chile/Mexico,2012).

Sven Pötting (Köln), Para que sobreviva la esperanza (sobre la filomografia de Lucía Cedrón)

15.45-16.00 Break

16.00-17.00 Remembering Malvinas

Victoria Torres (Köln), El pasado para el futuro: Los desaparecidos y los excombatientes de Malvinas en tres novelas juveniles argentinas recientes

Jens Andermann (Zürich), El cuerpo fuera del paisaje: acerca de Malvinas de Juan Travnik

17.00-18.00 Comics and Disappearance

Saskia van Drunen (Independent researcher), Constructing a memory of disappearance through Comics in Argentina

Karen Saban (Heidelberg), Una histori(a)eta para la memoria

18.00-18.10 Break

18.10-20.00 KEYNOTE LECTURE: Martín Kohan (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Discussant: Jordana Blejmar (IMLR/London)

TUESDAY, 17 JUNE 2014

9.00-10.30 Imagining the Disappeared

Roland Spiller (Frankfurt), Desaparecidos en Guatemala: ‘La isla’, el archivo de la policía nacional en remedializaciones literarias y fílmicas.

Gorka Mercero (Birmingham) e Izaro Arroita (Pais Vasco) Desaparecidos en la democracia española y necesidad de una memoria insomne en Twist, del escritor vasco Harkaitz Cano

Laura Alonso (Gent)/ Rodrigo Marcó del Pont, ¿Eres una sombra, un mensajero o un alma en pena?: representaciones de los desaparecidos en La Ilíada de César Brie y El Teatro de Los Andes

10.30-10.45 Break

10.45-13.00 Writers in First Person (Roundtable in Spanish)

Martín Kohan (chair): Patricio Pron, Ernesto Semán, Mariana Eva Perez

13.00-14.15 Lunch

14.15 -14.45 The Disappeared as a Transnational Figure

Claire Launchbury (Chester), Missing Encounters at The Egg, Beirut

Nathalie Ségeral (LLEA/ Hawaii-Manoa): Between Saying and Not Saying: Writing Transgenerational Trauma in Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, rue Labat (1994) and Cécile Wajsbrot’s Mémorial (2005).

Colleen Becker (IMLR/University of London), The Dark Matter of History: Wittgenstein, Salcedo and the Limits of Representation

14.45-15.00 Coffee Break

15.00-16.30 Disappearance, Photography and Social Media

Cecilia Sosa (UEL), Viral Affiliations: Facebook, Kinship, and the Memory of the Disappeared in Contemporary Argentina

Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths), The Performativity of Photography in a ‘Space of Memory’ in Córdoba, Argentina (the D2 archive)

Marcelo Brodsky, Memory Works

16.30-16.45 Break

16.45- 18.35 KEYNOTE LECTURE: Sylvia Molloy (NYU

Beitrag von: Anke Schmidt

Redaktion: Christof Schöch