Abstracts
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (University of the Western Cape)
“
Re-Locating Memories: Narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town
”
This paper plays on the word re-location to examine the memories of Indians in South Africa as revealed through oral histories with respect to their relocation to the former Indian group area in Cape Town, Rylands, to memories of parents and grandparents relocating to South
Africa from India and to memories of journeys to India and back. It begins with a survey of oral history practices in South Africa and the different intellectual approaches adopted by oral historians in the writing of South African histories and the more current use of oral history in heritage and public history. It then shifts to a specific analysis of Indian memories of place and space in Cape Town. Dispossession has been a significant thrust of oral history research in South Africa and this paper locates Indian narratives of dispossession and relocation against broader South African narratives of destruction of community and loss.
Additionally, it explores transnational memories and the place of India in life narratives. The idea is to identify ways of narrating, themes of narration and the meaning of such memories noting the (re)location of memory construction against the backdrop of South Africa ’s democratic transition and the 150 commemorations of the arrival of indentured Indians to
South Africa.
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is a Senior Professor in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape and the Deputy Dean of Research and Postgraduate Studies of the
Arts Faculty. She is author/editor of From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian
South African Life (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2000); Sita: Memoirs of Sita Gandhi (Pretoria and Durban, Local History Museums and South African History on Line, 2003); Gandhi's
Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi ’s Son, Manilal (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2004). She has recently edited a special issue of the journal Kronos titled Paper Regimes in Southern Africa
(2014). Her recent research focus has been on Indians in Cape Town. Recent articles include `Gujarati Shoemakers in Twentieth Century Cape Town: Family, Gender, Caste and
Community
’
(2012); `Cultural Crossings from Africa to India : Select Narratives of Indian
South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s ’ (2012) ; `Speaking About
Building Rylands, 1960s to 1980s: A Cape Flats History ’ (2014); `False Fathers and False
Sons: Immigration Officials in Cape Town, Documents and Verifying Minor Sons from India in the First Half of the Twentieth Century ’ (2014),`Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape
Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s ’, (2014).
S ébastien Fevry (Catholic University of Louvain)
“
Beyond National and European Frames: The Commune
’s Memory in Films”
My purpose is to show how the Paris Commune ’s memory could constitute an alternative mode of remembering, allowing us to understand several films and cultural productions that echo contemporary protest movements, such as Indignados or Occupy Wall Street.
Inspired by the work of Kristin Ross, and particularly her latest book Communal Luxury: The
Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2015), I would like to suggest that the Commune ’s memory constitutes a template for remembering which doesn
’t meet the predominant concepts developed by the field of Memory Studies (e.g. with trauma as central category, the Nation State as determinant framework). Deviating from these concepts is what I call the
Commune ’s memory, which designates a memorial dynamics turned towards the future, one that is characterized by a utopian dimension and that goes beyond national and European frames to link micro- and macro-levels (from the Commune to the Universal Republic).

To go further in this direction, my attention focuses first and foremost on Rabah Ameur-
Za ïmèche’s film, Les Chants de Mandrin (2012), which tells the story of the followers of the famous 18th century brigand, Louis Mandrin, loved by the people and feared by the powerful. After Mandrin ’s death, his friends developed his utopian project, creating free markets across the French countryside. Even though the film takes place in a distant past, prior to the Commune and the contemporary protest movements, I would like to show how
Les Chants de Mandrin can be connected to these two events. The film has an exemplary value, which allows me to add several narrative elements to the Commune
’s memory: the importance of celebration rather than commemoration, the presence of media which disseminate the memory of the struggles within the film itself, and the importance of delimited places which are the scale models of the new society to come.
Professor at the School of Communication in the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium),
S
ébastien Fevry
works in the field of Memory Studies, focusing on cinema and image. He has recently co-edited a collection of articles on the images of the Apocalypse in cinema
(2012). His latest book, La com édie cinématographique à l ’épreuve de l’Histoire, has been published by L'Harmattan (2013). He is also the author of numerous articles, including
“Immigration and Memory in Popular Contemporary French Cinema. The Film as ‘Lieu d ’Entre-Mémoire’” (2014), published in Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte
Contempor áneo.
Birte Heidemann (University of Potsdam) & Pavan Kumar Malreddy (Goethe University
Frankfurt)
“ Subaltern Memories? Gender, Nation and ‘Immediation’ in Sri Lanka ’s Ethnic
Conflict
”
In the spirit of Dipesh Chakrabarty ’s (in)famous proclamation that “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the political modernity of non-Western nations
”, this paper examines the relevance of the decolonizing turn in memory studies to postcolonial societies. In particular, it focuses on the controversial public discourse on the authenticity, authorial ethics and representational impasses surrounding
Niromi De Soyza
’s memoir
Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka
’s Bloody
Civil War (2011) . While much of the controversy on De Soyza ’s book stems from normative claims over truth, trauma and victimhood, the paper points to both the limits and merits of memory studies
’ approaches in registering submerged voices of the gendered subaltern that unfold deep within nationalist discourses, local traditions and regional power structures. For instance, instead of acknowledging the role of female soldiers in the insurgency as portrayed in Tamil Tigress , the ongoing controversy surrounding De Soyza
’s memoir has evolved into a discourse of competing memories between former (male) LTTE insurgents, diasporic Sri
Lankans and Sinhalese nationalists.
Corresponding to these debates, this paper argues that the existing approaches in memory studies, particularly those built on European examples, require further theoretical realignment to fruitfully engage with the memory practices of non-European societies. For instance, although memory studies debates on both sides of the Atlantic have moved away from the lieux de m
émoire
model for its reductionist tendencies, the paper suggests that memory practices in a postcolonial society such as Sri Lanka cannot be understood in isolation from an ethno-national framework. This is largely due to the fact that, unlike the post-national turn in Europe, nation-building projects in the postcolonial world have remained unfulfilled, if not incomplete, due to their complex colonial legacies. To that end, this paper proposes ‘immediation’ (unrelated to ‘immediacy’ which pertains the medial effect of “unmediated memory”; Erll and Rigney 2009: 4) as an analytical category that helps

uncover subaltern memories from the masculine discourses of postcolonial nation building.
Accordingly,
‘immediation’ refers to the urgency of constructing memory practices where no apriori institutional memory exists, or where censorship regimes have selectively deinstitutionalized or destroyed ‘sites of memory’ through the use of necropolitics and genocidal violence.
Birte Heidemann has recently completed her doctoral dissertation on negative liminality in contemporary Northern Irish literature at the University of Potsdam. From 2008 to 2014, she has taught at the Department of English at Chemnitz University of Technology. Her research interests are in postcolonial theory, literary and cultural expressions of post-conflict societies, particularly
Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka, and the post-9/11 novel. She has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2011; 2012), and the volumes ‘From Popular Goethe to Global
Pop’: The Idea of the West between Memory and (Dis)Empowerment (Rodopi, 2013) and
Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Palgrave, 2015). She is currently preparing her doctoral dissertation for publication (with Palgrave Macmillan).
Pavan Malreddy is a Researcher in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. He has previously taught at Chemnitz University of Technology, York University, Toronto and the
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, and has worked with various research organisations
(Canadian Council on Learning, Ottawa, Aboriginal Education Research Center, Saskatoon) as a commissioned writer and editor. He is the author of Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South
Asian Readings in Postcolonialism (SAGE, 2015) and co-editor of Reworking
Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Palgrave, 2015). He has co-edited special issues with the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012) and ZAA: Journal of English and American
Studies (2014), and has authored over twenty academic essays and chapters on terrorism, race and postcolonial theory in journals such as The European Legacy, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Intertexts.
John Njenga Karugia (Goethe University Frankfurt)
“ Connective Indian Ocean Memories: Towards a Braver Afrasian History ”
How do Afrasian memories travel, crisscross and connect across the Indian Ocean and beyond, and how do such memories inform ‘African’, Chinese and Indian memory cultures today? Who are the keepers and carriers of connective Indian Ocean memories? What contemporary remembrance activities connect Africa and Asia? Why are certain Afrasian memories kept alive? In the past two decades, transcultural and transnational memory projects have been undertaken in the Indian Ocean world with the support of local, state and transnational actors. In the course of these efforts, we have witnessed the travelling of memory practices, and a gradual yet subtle shift from competitive memory towards multidirectional memory. Furthermore, negotiation of various national, transnational and transregional Indian Ocean imaginaries are ongoing amongst Afrasian societies. This paper conceptualizes the Indian Ocean as a connective memory space. It analyses the aforementioned processes as being aimed at a braver Afrasian history that connects
South(ern) and East(ern) Africa, Mauritius, Indonesia, China and India amongst others. It attempts an understanding of identity and heritage politics tied to individuals and groups connected to and by the Indian Ocean. It debates concepts related to remembering and forgetting and how these interact within the Indian Ocean as a memory space. It dissects the political economy of
‘connective Indian Ocean memories’ in light of contemporary Africa-
Asia relations in a transregional and transnational perspective. A couple of insights related to the nexus between policy and ‘doing memory’ in the Indian Ocean world are proposed.

John Njenga Karugia is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Goethe University
Frankfurt within the AFRASO project funded by the German Ministry of Education and
Research. He is also a member of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. He acquired his
PhD in African Studies from the University of Leipzig after research on Chinese Migration to
Tanzania that involved research stints in China, Tanzania and American Chinatowns. At
Goethe University he is involved in two projects; Indian Ocean as Memory Space and Indian
Ocean Imaginaries. His current work has so far involved research in India, Malaysia, China,
East Africa and South Africa. He has been a visiting scholar at various Asian and American universities.
Rosanne Kennedy (Australian National University, Canberra)
“Provincializing Post-Memory: Memoirs from Sierra Leone and Palestine”
—
Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
“The Reception of Walter Scott in India: Remembering as Anti-Colonial Resistance.”
This talk will examine some of the ways in which the work of Sir Walter Scott, the putative inventor of the historical novel, was appropriated and adapted as a model by writers in British India. It will show how the Scottish writer's works was adapted and indigenized in the service of an anti-colonial counter-memory, and reflect on the implications of this case for our understanding of the transnational circulation of cultural memory.
Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and founder of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies. She has published widely in the field of cultural memory including The Afterlives of Walter Scott (Oxford UP, 2012),
Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (edited, with J. Leerssen; Palgrave
2014), and Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulaton, Scales (edited, with C. De
Cesari, De Gruyter, 2014).
Frank Schulze-Engler (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
“Remembering South-South Solidarity”
—
Barbara T
örnquist-Plewa (Lund University)
“Memory Politics in Contemporary Ukraine. Some Reflections from a Postcolonial
Perspective ”
Reporting from the events of the so-called “Euro-Revolution” in Ukraine 2013, the Western media were prompt to point out the excessive use of national symbols, including those connected to the Ukrainian nationalist organizations
“OUN” and
“UPA”, which for some periods of time had cooperated with Nazi Germany and were involved in the killing of civilians. The paper aims to explain this phenomenon as well as some other elements of the politics of memory in contemporary Ukraine by using a postcolonial perspective. Special attention is paid to Homi Bhabha
’s idea of hybridity and its realization in Ukraine.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, professor of Eastern and Central European Studies, head of the Centre for
European Studies at Lund University in Sweden and chair of the COST-action “ In Search for
Transcultural Memory in Europe”. In her research she focuses on nationalism, identity and collective memories in Eastern and Central Europe. She is the editor and author and of many books and articles in English, Swedish and Polish, all with dealing modern history and culture of Eastern and Central
Europe. The latest one is "Which Memory, Whose Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansings and Lost
Cultural Diversity in Central, Eastern and South-eastern European Cities" to be published by
Berghahn: London – New York 2016.
Paolo Vignolo (National University of Colombia, Bogota)
“On the Ruins of a Foundational Myth. Postcolonial Paradoxes of a Memorial Site of the Spanish Conquest in Colombia
”
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