"Displaced Children: Photography and Postmemory in Liquid Time."
Photographs serve as important media of memory crossing generational and geographical divides. They are both material remnants and haunting reminders that can bring a lost and distant past into the present. But how and what do photographs transmit? How do they live in time? This talk will focus specifically on the neglected genre of school photos and on their historical and ideological functions as technologies both of social assimilation and of exclusion. Through a close look at several postmemorial art projects that use school photos from American Indian boarding schools, Armenian schools before the genocide, and Jewish schools during the Holocaust, I will attempt to theorize the liquid time of possibility and repair.
Dr. Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (University of Washington Press, 2020), and the co-edited volumes Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Steidl, 2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Location: This event will be held in person at Cherpack lounge in 543 Williams Hall.
Time: 5 p.m.
Co-sponsors: Department of English, the Jewish Studies Program Kutchin Seminar Series, and FQT/GSWS.
Masks and Green Pass through Penn Open Pass, as well as sign-in are required to attend in person!