This panel brings together posthumanist memory studies, postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and ecocriticism to inquire into how contemporary literature explores the intersection of diverse violent (post)colonial histories and their environmental impact in different cultures in and around Europe. Both memory studies and postcolonial studies have recently turned their attention to exploring the environmental impact of violent histories, while environmental humanities are interested in the ways in which non-human and more-than-human phenomena can function as agents of memory or alternative natural and cultural archives. These concerns are at the centre of the papers exploring transnational Palestinian, Ukrainian, and Greek literatures to highlight how landscape, water, and insects act as mnemonic agents and carriers of memory. We investigate how literature experiments with different genres and aesthetic practices to represent the non-human scale of the environmental impact of wars and the transcorporeal enmeshment of human subjects in ecocidal violence.
Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University
Decolonisation and the Memory of Ecocide
This paper offers an introduction to the panel by reviewing recent debates in posthumanist memory studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism about the study of the environmental impact of colonialism and war. Current wars in Gaza and Ukraine have highlighted the damage wars do on ecosystems and have also revived the memory of the environmental impact of past wars and colonialism in these regions. Even if postcolonial studies have delved into these issues for quite some time, there is a resistance to the use of these insights, particularly for Ukraine, for the reasons of racial difference. The paper carefully analyses relevant debates in postcolonial and Slavic studies to offer a theoretical framework for exploring the environmental impact of wars and authoritarianism and/or colonialism both in the past and present. The paper draws on wartime poetry in Ukraine to show how literature contributes both to the memorialisation and theoretisation of the environmental impact of wars and colonialism.
Angelika Bammer, Emory University
What Does the Land Remember: Adania Shible’s Minor Detail and Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks
The two texts I want to discuss and put into conversation with each other are by two contemporary Palestinian writers: Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail (2016) and Raja Shehadeh’s autobiographical essays Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2007). Politically, and historically, both texts describe the process by which a people is destroyed through the destruction of the land—and the landscape—on and from which they live. My particular focus will be on Shibli’s text and the ways in which, on a narrative level, the land itself is revealed to be a character in the story as the land—and the landscape—itself acts as a force that effects the actions of the human characters. The central question I propose to explore is whether, and in what ways, the land (not the characters who inhabit it, but the land itself) is a carrier of memory and how, under what circumstances, can the memories that the land carries be activated?
Aigi Heero, Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University
Liquid Archives: Transgenerational Memory and Ukrainian Present in Natascha Wodin’s Sie kam aus Mariupol and Tanja Maljartshchuk’s Forgottenness Drawing on relational memory studies (Erll, Rigney, Craps) and Blue Humanities (Mentz, Oppermann, Dobrin, Neimanis, Alaimo), we will present the environment and the element of water as mnemonic agents and sites for the interplay of temporalities and spatialities that exceed the human, framed, solid or directional scales. We will show how memory travels not only between cultures, but also beyond the human, and explore the ability of nonhuman archives to operate on a scale that humans cannot perceive or imagine. The exploration of two case studies – Natascha Wodin’s Sie kam aus Mariupol (2017, She Came from Mariupol) and Tanja Maljartshchuk’s Zabuttya (2016, Forgottenness 2024) – focus on present day Ukraine, Ukrainian diaspora in Germany and intersections of Ukrainian Polish history, tracing how transgenerational trauma shapes contemporary narratives of belonging, loss and rootlessness. The individuals’ search for roots and a haunting persistence of historical violence (Red Army’s violence in Ukraine after 1917 revolution, Ukrainian forced labour under National Socialism, genocidal Soviet Holodomor) are transmitted through silence, narrative fragments, superimposition of historical scales, and an active presence of landscapes and seascapes (the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, the Dnipr, the rivers and lakes of Germany and Austrian Alps, the planes of Ukraine and Poland), which are both vulnerable and agentic. The paper focuses on the physicality of living in time and environment, materiality of memory, and the agency of water in its various phases and forms examining how it becomes a central medium of remembrance and a site where trauma is not only recalled, but continually reconfigured and reshaped.
Evgenia Dourou, Saarland University
Europe as an Ecosphere? Rethinking European Memory Through Insects in Dimitra Kolliakou’s Primer of Insects
Building on posthumanist and transnational approaches to memory as well as on postcolonial perspectives on Europe, this paper proposes a reading of acclaimed Greek author Dimitra Kolliakou’s Primer of Insects (Αλφαβητάρι Εντόμων, 2018) as an innovative, literary work that irritates conventional notions of European memory and invites readers to “think with insects”. This as-yet untranslated text is read as a European “insectopedia,” where both fictional and “real” insects contribute to weaving an alternative cultural archive of the continent. By employing insects as a means of narrating European memory, the text challenges static conceptions of the region, presenting it instead as a contested space shaped by continuous transnational entanglements and pointing to its inextricable connections with other world regions. Moreover, the focus on insects amplifies marginalized perspectives often excluded from dominant narratives of European memory, bringing to the fore forgotten or repressed aspects of the continent’s past. Given the interrelatedness between insects and the ecological crisis, the text also implicitly envisions a utopian future rooted in environmental ethics, ultimately reimagining Europe not only as a semiosphere, but as an ecosphere: a multispecies community, where species and memories meet and in(ter)sect.
20260731T110020260731T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires8.10. Memory and Environment in Transnational LiteraturesSV305MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
