Transforming Memories: Cultural Production and Personal/Public Memory in Lebanon and Morocco
Sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
20th century postcolonial Arab historiography has commonly been orchestrated by official discourses designed to unify national history and regulate state and non-state commemorative acts. History was streamlined into a simplifying narrative that rendered alternative stories absent from national accounts. National amnesia was politically formalised through the granting of amnesties. Morocco and Lebanon are exceptional in that since nearly 20 years their respective public cultures are characterised by energetic and experimental forms of cultural production that creatively engage a violent past as an open terrain of dialogue on how to co-exist in the present and future.
The project investigates literature, (auto)biography, film, chronicles, oral histories/ testemonies, pamphlets and manifestoes as countermemory and as transformative practices between personal and public memory. This approach foregrounds how personal and public memory in cultural production calls to account forms of active forgetting. Recent developments constitute what could be called a variable politics of remembering and forgetting/amnesia: In Morocco, the emerging civil society has pressured the state to initiate a truth and reconciliation commission, while in Lebanon the state has been unwilling to formulate any history or memorialisation of the civil war. The project aims at contributing to filling a research gap on the social bases of memory. All three subprojects therefore start from the individual social practice.
Head of Project:
- Dr. Sonja Hegasy (ZMO)
- Monika Borgman (UMAM D&R)
Subproject: The Actualisation of Memory: Cultural Production in Lebanon
Dr Norman Nikro, ZMO
Subproject: Memory and Reconciliation: Conflict on Mount Lebanon
Makram Rabah, M.A., based in Beirut at UMAM D&R
Subproject: Wounded Memories: Present Pasts in Contemporary Moroccan Film and (Auto-) Biography
Laura Menin, ZMO
Subproject: Memory Politics in Morocco in the Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Christine Rollin, ZMO
Activities:
January 18-20, 2012, Casablanca, Morocco
Coalition to Co-Host First Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Sites of Conscience Meeting
with
Monika Borgman, UMAM D&R
Opening workshop in Beirut 10 - 17 April 2012
Friday, April 20th, 2012,
Tufts University, Massachusetts
The War of the Mountains 1982–1983: Oral History and Collective Memory
Lecture by Makram Rabah at the conference 'The Legacy of Kamal Salibi'
Prof. Joseph Massad (Columbia University), guest scholar from 6 to 14 May 2012
Project-related links:
Qantara.de: Das Wort und der Krieg
In English
In Arabic
by Sonja Hegasy, April 25th, 2012
NOW Lebanon: The Syrian Marco Polo
by Makram Rabah, April 15th, 2012
Qantara.de: Streit um ein Schulbuch
In English
In Arabic
by Sonja Hegasy, April 13th, 2012
Homepage of the
Lebanese Political Detainees in Syria
Ali Abou Dehn, President of the LPDS
Egypt Independent: What will happen to Lebanon?
by
Makram Rabah, March 14th, 2012
A History Lesson for Lebanon
Documentation by Hadi Zaccak
|
