There are many shared experiences that have unified individuals. Watching the Red Sox win their first world series in 86 years, participating in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and attending the inauguration ceremony of the President of the United States are but a few. But what about the experiences that force individuals to share devastation, rather than joy: massive earthquakes, such as those that recently struck Haiti, Chile, and China, hurricanes, mass shootings, like the Virginia Tech or Columbine shootings, or the Sept. 11 attacks?
Shared moments of joy may be savored and then tucked away in one’s memory for future comfort, but shared tragedies do not offer the same consolation.
Stanford University’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) is co-sponsoring the second part of the series of events and research projects entitled “History, Memory, and Reconciliation.”
According to the DLCL website, the series aim to examine scholarly and institutional efforts to create new national narratives that walk the fine line between before and after, memory and truth, compensation and reconciliation, justice and peace. In effect, the series partly explore the ways that memory is involved in process of healing and moving forward after experiencing a tragedy.
“When a catastrophe (natural disaster, war) occurs, there is a before, and an after. Looking at the before could certainly help people think about how to look at the after, or how to manage the after. This ‘after’ includes diverse elements: reconstruction from a purely material point of view, but also psychological and emotional reconstruction, possibly through individual verbalization or construction of personal or collective narratives.
“Recollecting and giving form to experience by organizing its different components can help alleviate the trauma,” said Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at Stanford University, in an interview on the university’s humanities website.
The “History, Memory, and Reconciliation” series' exploration of the concepts of memory is of interest to scholars who study the ways in which people from all around the world document the human experience. The humanities recognize philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history, and language as tools that have been used to record the human experience.
This year’s events featured a visit by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, the internationally renowned Columbia University scholar of comparative literature, who addressed the subject of cultural and linguistic memory. Anthropologist Harri Englund from Cambridge gave a talk on April 6, and the University of Chile law professor José Zalaquett has been scheduled to take part in several events on April 22 and 23.
The series are co-sponsored by the Stanford University’s Human Rights Program at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.
