Islands of Memory and the Memory of Islands

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel features multi-disciplinary approaches to Adriatic islands as sites of accrued memory, asking questions associated with heritage, migration, language, politics, and cultural belonging both in the present and over long historical periods. Participants on the panel employ research methods including literary and linguistic analysis, cinematic representation, ethnic studies, and environmental humanities in the search for commonalities across space and time, and the essential role that the multiple layers of Adriatic memory have played in defining the sea’s islands as distinctive places. All the presentations highlight the intersection of memory with imagination in the understanding of place as what poet Kei Miller has called “a distorted way of seeing, an insufficient imagining.” Aida Vidan explores the concept of “slow violence” with a focus on the island of Šolta. Mladen Zobec sifts through the remains of socialist military infrastructure in the search for the bases of contemporary notions of heritage on Lastovo. And Russell Valentino follows the spirits of donkeys, real and metaphorical, through a series of islands that bear their names, linking ancient and contemporary relationships of humans with animals and the land.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Ellen Elias-Bursac, American Literary Translators Association

Papers

• The Bay of Silence: What’s in a (Literary and Cinematic) Landscape - Aida Vidan, Tufts U

• 'Where Donkeys Go to Die' - Russell Scott Valentino, Indiana U Bloomington

Discussant

• Ellen Elias-Bursac, American Literary Translators Association