Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke (University of Bonn) North American Studies Program

Memory, Trauma, Mediation

Due in part to a shift in our understanding of identity and representation, cultural memory – especially of historical experiences as traumatic as American slavery, the Holocaust, or the treatment of native populations in the US, Canada, and Australia – has become a part of cultural politics globally. And as more and more people live to an older age, failures of memory and conditions such as aphasia and Alzheimer’s have not only turned into severe social problems; like the Holocaust and trauma, they have also turned into recurrent tropes of cultural practice.

Examining a selection of critical and theoretical texts and cultural practices, including literature, film, art, and museum cultures, the seminar interrogates the prominence of concepts and cultures of memory in cultural studies critically and raises questions such as: Why have cultures of memory gained such significance in constructions of individual, cultural and national identities, relegating considerations of the future to the periphery of our attention? How do modes of mediation inform and affect processes of cultural memory? What do cultures remember, what do they prefer to forget? And how do cultural memory and forgetting interrelate?