Start Date
13-1-2012 9:00 AM
End Date
13-1-2012 10:30 AM
Description
The contemporary culture of memory places testimony at the center of historiographic production. The testimony of individualized experiences of suffering and pain are utilized to construe collective memory and social consciousness, to create new moral regimes and disclose previously unknown “truths” about the past. However, the possibilities of enunciation from this space of political representation are restricted as they are inscribed in the language of Restoration and Reconciliation promulgated by Human Rights discourse. Albeit the epistemological turn which privileges narrative truth, testimonies are being commodified by the global industry of transitional politics as they become the object of political negotiation. Archives of biographical memory are employed to lay the moral foundation of political projects of nation-building, conditioning testimony to master narratives of reconciliation and forgiveness. Time itself is objectified, “the past” emerges as a category which contains violence and lived experiences of atrocities, falling back in time it distances itself from the future of democratic peace which the teleology of “political transition” proclaims.
Scholars in the field of “the Politics of Memory” agree that as truths are unveiled, silences are created. Memory comes with forgetting, a forgetting that is institutionalized by transitional mechanisms of truth-telling and truth-finding in “Post-conflict” societies. Standing from a critical approach towards the Study of Political Transitions, this panel will analyze the meanings of the notion of Reconciliation, challenge the healing properties attributed to testimony, and highlight the systemic oppression concealed by emergent nationalisms. The presentations will challenge the epistemological framework underlying the restorative model of justice, criticize the political deployments of empty signifiers such as “reconciliation” and question how the reconciliatory discourse participates of forms of structural and historical oblivion.
Critical Perspectives on Reconciliation and Structural Oblivion
The contemporary culture of memory places testimony at the center of historiographic production. The testimony of individualized experiences of suffering and pain are utilized to construe collective memory and social consciousness, to create new moral regimes and disclose previously unknown “truths” about the past. However, the possibilities of enunciation from this space of political representation are restricted as they are inscribed in the language of Restoration and Reconciliation promulgated by Human Rights discourse. Albeit the epistemological turn which privileges narrative truth, testimonies are being commodified by the global industry of transitional politics as they become the object of political negotiation. Archives of biographical memory are employed to lay the moral foundation of political projects of nation-building, conditioning testimony to master narratives of reconciliation and forgiveness. Time itself is objectified, “the past” emerges as a category which contains violence and lived experiences of atrocities, falling back in time it distances itself from the future of democratic peace which the teleology of “political transition” proclaims.
Scholars in the field of “the Politics of Memory” agree that as truths are unveiled, silences are created. Memory comes with forgetting, a forgetting that is institutionalized by transitional mechanisms of truth-telling and truth-finding in “Post-conflict” societies. Standing from a critical approach towards the Study of Political Transitions, this panel will analyze the meanings of the notion of Reconciliation, challenge the healing properties attributed to testimony, and highlight the systemic oppression concealed by emergent nationalisms. The presentations will challenge the epistemological framework underlying the restorative model of justice, criticize the political deployments of empty signifiers such as “reconciliation” and question how the reconciliatory discourse participates of forms of structural and historical oblivion.