Mapping Memory: History, Texts and Cultures

The Departments of English and History, Loreto College, Kolkata organized an ICSSR-ERC sponsored international conference on “Mapping Memory: History, Texts and Cultures” on February 22 and 23, 2024. The conference featured multidisciplinary presentations on the concept of “memory” and its dynamic interrelationships with history, literature, art, politics, and society. Over 300 students, faculty members, research scholars, and practitioners from institutions in India and other parts of the world such as France, Belgium, Serbia, UK, USA, and Canada participated in the conference and enlivened the critical discussions that unfolded over two days.

The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Avishek Parui (Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras and Founding Chairperson of the Indian Network of Memory Studies), who set the tone for the conference by foregrounding the idea of memory as a map with porous borders, involving a complex interplay of remembering and forgetting. This was followed by the first plenary session of the day, in which Prof. Shukla Sanyal (Retd. Nurul Hasan Professor of History, University of Calcutta) studied the relationship between history and memory through an analysis of the memoirs written by revolutionary nationalists in Bengal. In another plenary session, Ms. Roberta Bacic (Founder and Curator of Conflict Textiles) displayed moving testimony pieces from an extensive archive comprising arpilleras, quilts, and wall hangings that document memories of political repression and violence.

The second day of the conference began with a plenary lecture by Dr. Prachi Deshpande (Associate Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata) on how the memoir of the Marathi writer and activist Durga Bhagwat occupies a liminal space between fact and fiction while articulating deep truths about the culture at large. This was followed by a presentation by Prof. Ira Bhaskar (Retd. Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) which examined the role of cinema in shaping historical memory and highlighted how collective trauma may be both liberating and malignant. In the final plenary session, Prof. Stef Craps (Professor of English and Director of the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, University of Ghent, Belgium) underlined the role that the creative arts can play in countering planetary amnesia and encouraging transformative environmental action.

The plenary sessions were interspersed with twelve technical sessions featuring 40 papers on a wide range of subjects by scholars and faculty from various institutions in India and abroad. Papers on themes as diverse as partition, literary historiography, oral narratives, collective memories, city spaces, music, art, and photography brought researchers from different disciplines in conversation with one another and illustrated how knowledge sharing can open up new avenues of enquiry in the burgeoning field of memory studies.