Oct 29, 2016 | 2:40 PM - 4:10 PM | STUDIO THEATRE

Dr. Cezary Galewicz, Dr hab.

A Palimpsest of Contesting Memories: Calicut, the pearl of Malabar

The city of Calicut marks a long vertical coastline of Malabar on the map of Kerala, the southernmost state of India boasting over 90% of literacy in contrast to the Indian average of 52%. Morning scenes of mass reading on buses and trains in the bustling city contrast with fragmented contradicting urban memories and the recent anxiety over its history still to be written.  A nostalgia for the irretrievably lost glory (and cultural memory) of the past pervades recent attempts to describe “The land that lost its history.” To a newcomer Calicut is conspicuous by its Muslim population dominating the city’s trade. Yet it is the Hindus who are most numerous only to be followed by Muslims and Christians. All the three are composed of numerous groups of different identity, most often helplessly misunderstood when stuck with gross denomination labels. All those communities cherished their own favorite stories of the past, praised their own heroes and paid respect to their own gods in their own temples within their own socio-cultural spaces. The spaces open for social transactions remained the court, the market and the street festivals.

In search of their common past the citizens of Calicut are left to the accounts of outsiders since the cosmopolitan conventions of Sanskrit literary tradition for centuries preferred models over the particulars of time and space. How does the urban memory work for a city like Calicut today? When mobilized today it is not through rescuing remnants of architectural past or erecting monuments but by reviving social institutions labeled “traditional”. In their attempts to reconnect to the past the actors of new urban memory happen to turn to once despised textualized histories produced by the ethnographic imperial state of the colonial period with all their contested claims to truth and implied lies involved.

Mr. Wondwosen Seide, MA

Collective Memory over the Nile: Remembering Aswan High Dam and Imagining Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Dam collects both water and memory. Dams are the ‘lieux de memoire’ (by using Nora, 1989). The Nile River does not respect boundaries. Yet, dams force it to respect boundaries. Dam animates the waterscape into national space.  Nilescape, just like landscape, can easily be transferred into a site of collective memories. In the Nile Basin, the Egyptian Aswan High Dam, AHD and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, GERD have been defining water structures. Both dams collect not only Nile waters, but also collective memories. But, Egypt and Ethiopia have different, if not divergent, collective memories over the Nile. Memory, just like power, is contestable. As Foucault (1977) put it, ‘memory is actually a very important factor in struggle, if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism” and hence there is ”counter-memory…that differ from, and often challenge, dominant discourses” (cited in Ibid.:126). Hodgkin and Radstone (2003) succinctly put that “to contest the past is also, of course, to pose questions about the present, and what the past means in the present. Our understanding of the past has strategic, political, and ethical consequences. Contests over the meaning of the past are also contests over the meaning of the present and over ways of taking the past forward.” (ibid. 4). In similar vein, Edward Wadie Said (1979) once said that appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

In the Nile Basin both power and memory have been countered and contested. The Nile politics of memory is full of fierce struggles and misperception. There are contesting perceptions of the Nile and that they may reflect divergent memories about the Nile and “the other”. These conflicting memories that Egypt and Ethiopia accumulated over hundreds of years impinge on the past water agreements, the present dams (AHD and GERD) and future water security. Put differently, Egypt romanticizes the past and wants to sustain the status-qou, while Ethiopia regrets the past and imagines a different Nile-scape. This paper, therefore, tries to respond to the following questions: What do the Basin people remember and forget about Aswan High Dam and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam? What role does collective memory play in transboundary water analysis? What is the role of collective memory and the dominant ways in which the Nile River in Ethiopia and Egypt were imagined at a popular “national” level?  How do such memories and imageries shape the politics of the Nile, its ‘cooperation’ and ‘conflict narrative?

Ms. Jo Roberts, Masters

Constructing and Disrupting Collective Memory: The Contested Landscapes of Israel

A physical landscape may seem natural, neutral, and permanent, yet in reality it is malleable, and available to be used in the construction of national memory.  After a war, contested landscapes can be refashioned to make manifest the victors’ collective memory of the past. In post-1948 Israel, empty Palestinian villages were demolished and trees planted over their remains, ensuring that physical traces of centuries of Arab presence in the land became ahistorical ruins, leached of their specific past. Power relations between Jews and Arabs were inscribed definitively into both the political landscape and the land itself.

“Within nation states, history and heritage tell powerful stories, often ones that stress stability, roots, boundaries and belonging,” writes anthropologist Barbara Bender. “We need to be alert to whose stories are being told, and to be aware that they naturalize particular sorts of social relations.” At historical sites such as Sataf, where signage recalls the lives of its Neolithic inhabitants, and al-Kabri, which commemorates a Yishuv victory in the 1948 War, no mention is made of the thriving Palestinian Arab communities expelled from these sites during the conflict.

NGO Zochrot (“Remembering” in Hebrew) aims to challenge that erasure. It does so through performative political acts aimed primarily at a Jewish-Israeli audience, such as organizing tours to the sites of former villages and posting bilingual place-names on their remains. By making visible the history of Palestinian presence in, and removal from, the land, Zochrot’s work allows space for the Palestinian narrative of 1948 to emerge within the Israeli landscape, both physical and political.

Using original interview material, this presentation will explore how landscape can be constructed and appropriated in the service of collective memory, and how that project can be disrupted by counter-cultural memory-work.

Mrs. Margherita Sulas, PhD in Modern and Contemporary History

THE REMOVED STORY OF THE ITALIAN POPULATION OF ISTRIA AND DALMATIA.

The forced migrations do not end with the conclusion of the Second World War, but lead to an unprecedented redistribution of ethnic groups. This dramatic and massive shift of the European population plays a fundamental role in the definition of the Twentieth Century as the “Century of Refugees” coined in 1959 by C.D. Wingenroth. My speech focuses on the Italian case, with a concentration on the events that involved Istrian, Giulian, and Dalmatian refugees, beginning in 1943. Between 1943 and 1945 thousands of Italians living in Trieste, Gorizia and the Istrian peninsula were tortured, shot or pushed to their deaths in rocky chasms by communists determined to cleanse Yugoslavia of its Italian population. They were left, some still alive to rot in natural ditches known in Italian as foibe.

The Adriatic region has been divided by conflicting memories for more than half a century. For example there are the memories of the Italians forced to flee from the advancing army of Marshal Tito. Certain never to return, they leave the more than one hundred Italian villages “beyond the water” and return as exiles in Italy. There are also the memories of the 35,000 Italians that courageously choose to remain beyond the border whom, in the following years, suffered the attempts of forced assimilation by the Slavic people.  In common they are all victims of an extreme period in history in this borderland region that becomes amplified with the symptoms of the Cold War. My paper aims to explore this removed history and the problems and  that arise in the context of the representation of perpetrator in Italians and Croatian medias, in the international historical debate, in the public discourse and in cultural representations.

Biographies

Dr. Cezary Galewicz

My recent research focuses mainly on the history of knowledge systems and anthropology of knowledge and intellectual practices, learned communities, ancient scriptural traditions of South Asia, their performative aspects and relationship with rituals and power, their transformations and persistence in the changing social and historical context of pre-modern and contemporary South India. My research projects since 1999 combine textual close reading with historical perspective, field studies and ethnographic cum anthropological film documentation. Selected publications: A Commentator in Service of the Empire: Sāyaṇa and the Royal Project of Commenting on the Whole of the Veda, Wien: DeNobili 2009

Living libraries of South Asia: ars memorativa of the Nambudiri Brahmans of Kerala [in Polish],    Krakow: WUJ 2015

Text Divisions and Early Classifications of Knowledge in Literary and Epistemic Cultures of South    Asia, ed. by C. Galewicz, Krakow: Wydawnictwo Akademickie 2011

Texts of Powers. The Power of the Text. Readings in Textual Authority Across History and Cultures, ed. by C. Galewicz, Krakow: Homini 2006.

"Anxiety and Innovation: on denial of sacrifice in Vedic ritual" in: Udo Simon and Ute Huesken, eds., The Ambivalence of Denial,"  Harrassowitz 2016

“A Socio-Textual Ecology of the Ṛgvedadaśagrantha,” in:  D. Deak, D. Jasper, eds., 3.4. Rethinking Western India. The Changing Contexts of Culture, Society and Religion,  New Delhi: Orient Blackswan 2014, pp. 48-71

Wondwosen Seide

Biography Wondwosen Michago Seide is a PhD student at Lund University. He was a Louse Water Scholar, at Oxford University where he got his MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management. Over the past ten years he has worked as a researcher and consultant with regional and international experience in the area of water, land, climate change, environment and development for various organization such as EIID, UNDP, Institute of Development Studies, IDS, University of Sussex, Institute for Security Studies, ISS, Ethiopian International Institute for Peace and Development, EIIPD; Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD and Nile Basin Discourse Forum. He has produced articles, policy briefings and newspaper pieces in related to the Nile and land management, environmental governance issues.

Publication Book Chapter: •       Wondwosen Michago Seide (2016). “Lease the land, but use the water:” The case of Gambella, Ethiopia” In Book Land and Hydropolitics in the Nile River Basin: Challenges and new investments,’ eds. Emil Sandström, Anders Jägerskog and Terje Oestigaard. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138921757

•           Nathanial Matthews, Alan Nicol and Wondwosen Michago Seide 2013. ‘Constructing a new water future? An analysis of Ethiopia’s current hydropower development,’ In Handbook of Land and Water Grabs in Africa: Foreign direct investment and food and water security, Edited by John Anthony Allan, Martin Keulertz, Suvi Sojamo,Jeroen Warner, Published 23rd August 2012 by Routledge. 446 pages. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781857436693/

Report •            Earle, Anton; Nordin, Kikki; Cascao, Ana Elisa; Rukundo, Drake; Seide, Wondwosen Michago Seide; Björklund, Gunilla. 2013.Independent Evaluation of the Nile Basin Trust Fund (NBTF) : Final report. Washington, DC : World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/06/19779850/independent-e...

Research Papers: •        Voices from the source: Struggles with local water security in Ethiopia, WaterAid, ODI, IDS and Ripple, 2013. http://www.odi.org.uk/projects/2574-ethiopia-water-resources-water-secur... •        Large-scale land deals in Ethiopia: Scale, trends, features and outcomes to date, published by International Institute for Environment and Development, EIID, http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/12575IIED.pdf

Policy Brief Paper •       Churning Waters: Strategic Shifts in the Nile Basin, 2013. Rapid Policy Briefing, RPB, co-authored with Jeremy Lind, Institute of Development Studies, University of Susex, http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/123456789/2907/Nile%...

Short Piece •     Hydro-Mentality over the Nile, Global Water Forum, GWF, February 16, 2015, http://www.globalwaterforum.org/2015/02/16/hydro-mentality-over-the-nile/ •         Emerging Regional Security Threats in the Nile Basin, page 11-14, No. 13, August 2010. www.iss.co.za/uploads/No13Aug2010.pdf

Jo Roberts

Jo Roberts received a Bachelor of Laws from the University of East Anglia (UK), and a Masters degree with distinction in the Anthropology of Conflict, Violence, and Conciliation from the University of Sussex (UK). Her first book, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe (Dundurn 2013), placed second for the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It has garnered very positive critical feedback across the political spectrum – it was a Finalist in the 2013 National Jewish Book Awards and was favourably reviewed by the Journal of Palestine Studies and the Electronic Intifada, the Times of Israel, America, the Political Quarterly, and the Oral History Review, among others. (For reviews, please go to www.joroberts.org.) Jo’s reportage from Israel and from the West Bank has appeared in Embassy, Canada’s foreign policy weekly. She lives in Toronto.

Dr. Margherita Sulas

Margherita Sulas  (Oristano, Italy, Sardinia 1982) Ph.D Contemporary History, University of Cagliari Department of Historic Studies and Culturale Heritage. Member of the Italian Society of historic contemporary studies since 2010 (SISSCO). Cooperates with the Museum of the Italian  Financial Police for the organization of conferences and exhibitions. Her studies focus on dynamics of the eastern Italian border since 1800 to our days. 2-5 dicembre 2015, New York Columbia University ,International Affairs Building (IAB). Partecipation at the annual conference “The Politics of Memory: Victimization, Violence, and Contested Memories of the Past” whit the relation “Trieste and the istrian question from 1943 through the postwar period. The case of Italy’s eastern border between national dynamics, international conditioning and archival documentation.”

Pubblications: M. Sulas, Alberto Ferrero della Marmora. 1789-1863, in G. Pellegrini (a cura di), L'esploratore innamorato: Alberto Ferrero della Marmora e la sua Sardegna, Abba, Cagliari, 2009,  pp. 17-20

M. Sulas,  Il confine orientale italiano. L'armistizio, le foibe e l'esodo, Caravella,  Cagliari 2011

M. Sulas, curatela note biografiche, in AA.VV. Tra figurativo, astratto e nuova figurazione, Caravella, Cagliari 2011

M. Sulas,  La bambina esule giuliana: storia di un’immagine, in “Fiume. Rivista di studi adriatici”, a. XXXII, luglio-dicembre 2012, n° 26, n° 7-12

M. Sulas, In ricordo di Alceo Riosa Convegno in occasione del 150°anniversario dell’Unità italiana Un’altra Italia ancora Repubblica e minoranze nazionali al confine orientale, STUDI E RICERCHE, ISSN: 2036-2714, Cagliari 2012

M. Sulas, Il confine orientale italiano tra contesto internazionale e lotta politica: 1943-1953, tesi di dottorato in Storia Moderna e Contemporanea (tutor prof. F. Atzeni), Cagliari 2013

M. Sulas, Lo spettro populista sulle elezioni europee, in Eurasia – Rivista di studi Geopolitici, 30 aprile 2014

M. Sulas, Trieste 1953. La rivolta della bandiera,  in Nazioni e Regioni. Studi e ricerche sulla comunità immaginata nr.4 (dicembre 2014).

M. Sulas, Profilo storico del soggetto produttore: il museo storico e l’archivio della Guardia di Finanza. Studi e ricerche, ISSN: 2036-2714