Recent developments in cultural memory studies have moved away from ideas of memory as simply being linked to the shared past of a social, ethnic or national community to explore the ways in which memory ‘travels’ across communities and nations, especially in the contemporary age of global communication flows. An accompanying development suggests that memory is not a fixed monument to the past but is, instead, a dynamic, productive and imaginative process which is performed in the present. In my own contribution to these debates, in relation specifically to memories of the Holocaust and colonialism, I have used the figure of the palimpsest and the notion of ‘noeuds de mémoire’ (knots of memory) to highlight the unstable, hybrid and impure nature of memory as traces of different voices, times and places are interwoven, overlaid, rewritten and transformed through their interaction. In this session I will discuss these aspects of memory while highlighting questions of ethics and performance. Regarding ethics, if memory is not a pure phenomenon but is a hybrid constellation of traces from elsewhere, then it poses the question of whose memory is being recorded in any narrative or image. A radical understanding of transcultural memory is one that embraces the vulnerability of our stories of the past to otherness (in Judith Butler’s terms) and attempts to formulate a corresponding ethics which eschews self-sufficiency and autonomy. Regarding performance, memory is always staged in the present, which suggests that the conjunction of different pasts is an act of construction in the present, not simply a pre-formulated narrative that is inherited by the next generation. If a new ethics of memory must accommodate how we are bound to others’ voices, memory as performance means that individuals and communities also actively redefine themselves through this interaction.

Masterclass: Palimpsestic Memory, Ethics and Performance
Max Silverman, University of Leeds
Tuesday 21 August
1pm-2.30pm, Milgate Room, AD Hope
To register for this Masterclass and receive the set readings, email rosanne.kennedy@anu.edu.au by noon, Monday August 20

Max Silverman is Professor of French at the University of Leeds, UK, working across French, Literary, Cinema and Memory Studies. Professor Silverman has published widely on cultural memory and the Holocaust, trauma and violence, colonial and post-colonial theory and cultures, immigration, race, nation and citizenship. Among others, his books include Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France, Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society, Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, and the volumes Concentrationary Cinema, Concentrationary Memories, Concentrationary Imaginaries and the forthcoming Concentrationary Art.