Belarusian Culture II: Post-2020 Memory Practices

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The study of memory in the context of the 2020 Belarusian protests is crucial as it illuminates the complex interplay between collective memory, political resistance, and authoritarian control, offering insights into how historical narratives shape national identity and political landscapes in post-Soviet spaces and beyond. Memory is hardly reducible to a static act of recalling the past; it is an active and often contested force that shapes identities, kindles political mobilization, and inspires cultural resistance. This panel examines practices of remembering and recollecting the past in the wake of the 2020 protests and the subsequent brutal repressions. Focusing on the operations of personal and collective memory in language revitalization, literature, digital culture, and performing arts, the four papers in this panel trace how by engaging in various kinds of memory-making, Belarusians have attempted to resist erasure and reimagine their future since 2020.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 21st Century

Chair

• Jenya Mironava, Harvard U

Papers

• Language Revitalization in Exile: Language Ideologies and Language Practices of Belarusian 'New Speakers' among the Post-2020 Diaspora in Poland and Lithuania - Curt Woolhiser, Boston College

• Remembering Belarus’s Revolutionary Summer: Memory, Outrage and Mobilization in Contemporary Belarusian Literature - Simon Lewis, U of Bremen (Germany)

• Building Infrastructures of Care in Belarus from a Museum of Stones - Alana Christine Felton, Pomona College

Discussant

• Jenya Mironava, Harvard U