Afterlives: Trash as a Form of Memory

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Memory studies typically involve artefacts or monuments that have been preserved intentionally, as repositories of collective memories. But artefacts that have been discarded - trash - often bear the trace of memory as well: littering the landscape, refusing to depart from cultural space even when they have been discarded. This panel proposes to examine a variety of ways in which trash bears cultural meaning, from the literal waste of nuclear contamination in central Asia to the thematization of trash in the works of the Polish modernist writer Bruno Schulz, the theme of surfeit in post-communist writing, and the meta-trash (as it were) of discarded but recurring cultural theory.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Meghan Vicks, Independent Scholar

Papers

• Trash in the Provinces: The Dreams of Bruno Schulz - George Z Gasyna, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Delusions of Manure: Postcommunist Literature and the Myth of Disposable Culture - Benjamin Paloff, U of Michigan

• The Invisible Present: Visualizing Nuclear Contamination at the Semipalatinsk Test Site - Assel Uvaliyeva, U of Southern California

• Makula-kul'torologiia: The Afterlife of Cultural Studies - Nancy Condee, U of Pittsburgh

Discussant

• Thomas Seifrid, U of Southern California