Call for Chapters: Performativity and the Representation of Memory (extended deadline: 09.12.23)

Call for Chapters: Performativity and the Representation of Memory: Resignification, Appropriation, and Embodiment

Proposals extended Submission Deadline: December 9, 2023
Full Chapters Due: March 10, 2024
Submission Date: March 10, 2024

More information here.

The work of memory has been the object of inquiry by scholars who seek to understand how we process our experience and how we perceive its role in the configuration of individual and collective identities. Concepts of collective memory, memory theatres, memory-habit, places of memory, incorporated memory, post-memory, memory linked to places and memory re-enactment have helped to describe complex relations between past and present. "Images from the past” or “knowledge remembered from the past” in some way contribute to the objectification of culture as a 'natural' entity, made up of material evidence, traces, and marks. In these circumstances, whenever individuals and communities conceive of something as being part of “their culture” or certain aspects of their lives with “cultural” properties, this recognition is largely due to the production of discourses; these have diverse origins and are not always critically scrutinized, being then transformed or reappropriated by the communities.

Objective

This book aims to explore contemporary practices that confront memory, history, heritage and art with a “repertoire in intermedial mode”. Assuming that memory is a continuous performative act, the role of memory in contemporary creation by discussing (i) the process of creation and its relationship to memory work, (ii) memory as a territory under construction (codes, mediums, texts, sounds, images, and narratives) through research and (iii) the politics of memory in today's societies and new forms of creation. Countless examples of these processes are known, both in the Europe of nations and identities, as well as in the manipulation of the public space that emerges in globalized intercultural societies. Society and the individual are therefore confronted with the politics of memory and with the problem of control, ownership, and transmission of memory. What specifically distinguishes contemporary digital culture, in its relationship with heritage and the construction of memory, is the way it exposes grammar, mediations, and the processes of construction of meaning.

Target Audience

Thinking about the practices of the social and artistic repertoire that define the contemporary intermediate regime puts at stake the supports (techniques and technological devices), the modes of signification, the power relations, the economic and social asymmetries, the modes of transmission and accessibility, as well as the current dynamics of appropriation, adaptation, and recycling, affecting the general public, professionals and scientific community, policymakers and stakeholders.

Recommended Topics

- Shared memory of experiences and knowledge; - Participatory research and practice as testimony of (the) memory; - Community generated memory and political identity(ies); - Arts-based research; - Processes of re-creation/re-contextualization; - Identity, narrative(s) and memory sharing; - Artificial and digital memory; - From “stock memory” to “flux memory”; - Memory and the irruption of the Real.