10.16. Haunted Pasts: Postmemory Across Text, Performance, and Form [ES/EN]

This paper investigates memory projects that make use of oral history for the development of theatrical performances. It shows how such projects can follow both consensus-driven and agonistic approaches to historical conflict, and asks what strategic value these differing approaches may have depending on the circumstances in which individual projects are carried out. The paper analyses performance not simply as a theatrical text or the performance of that text for an audience, but as a collaborative process that can allow participants to work through historical antagonism. It will compare two multidisciplinary projects involving theatre performances and oral histories as a means to address the complex, entangled memories and difficult histories of two borderland areas. Moush, Sweet Moush was a performance that emerged in 2011-2012 in the context of a broader, multi-phase reconciliation project between Armenia and Turkey. The performance involved young people exploring the everyday memories of two places: Moush, a town in Turkey from which Armenians fled during the Genocide, and villages in Armenia where those escaping the Genocide found refuge. The Sejny Chronicles is an ongoing theatre workshop and play, organised by the Borderland Foundation and performed by young people, aimed at rediscovering the rich multicultural history of Sejny located on the Polish/Lithuanian border using oral histories handed down by its residents. Through a series of interviews related to both case studies, the paper examines the philosophy that underpins these projects in relation to memory work, highlighting how consensus or agonism may emerge in such projects in response to local conditions and the needs of participants.

This paper examines the porous boundary between fictionality and factuality in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), exploring how the novel’s engagement with silenced memories resonates beyond the text through its reception and controversy. Its publication provoked debate in Turkey after nationalist lawyers accused Shafak of “insulting Turkishness,” claiming that her Armenian characters’ reference to the genocide violated Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (Lea, 2006). Situating Shafak’s work within Turkish debates on memory and identity, this paper argues that the novel functions both as a constructed narrative and as a cultural event—its fictional confrontation with denial mirrored extratextually in the author’s trial. Textually, Shafak’s memory work reflects Barry Schwartz’s (2009, p. 23) insight that “remembering and forgetting are unevenly distributed across communities, groups, and individuals.” Through her interwoven Turkish and Armenian- American family narratives, Shafak enacts Astrid Erll’s (2011) notion of “mnemonic multiperspectivity,” demonstrating literature’s capacity to mediate and uphold together divergent cultural memories amid historical amnesia, while affirming that “what is forgotten need not necessarily be lost forever” (Assmann, 2010, p. 106) but can be neglected and reappear from the ‘archive.’ What begins textually as “collective forgetting” (Beiner, 2018) within the subconscious of Turkish “implicated subjects” (Rothberg, 2019) is extratextually unfrozen into public awareness. The memories of the Armenian Genocide are mediated through fiction and remediated across courtrooms, interviews, and public debate, embodying Erll and Rigney’s (2009) concept of cultural memory circulation. Historical denial thus moves from textual representation to extratextual presence, reconstructed through medial and social frames (van Dijck, 2007; Hoskins, 2018). Ultimately, The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) demonstrates literature’s performative power, showing how representations of historical trauma generate extratextual reactions. Viewed through the lens of cultural memory and authorship, Shafak’s storytelling becomes a dialogue that both reflects and enacts the tensions it critiques.

How to commemorate ‘the aftermath’ has long been a point of contention among memory studies scholars, artists, and activists. Since the field’s transcultural turn, numerous inquiries into the memorial intersection of victims and perpetrators have been redeveloped through Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ and Schwab’s ‘haunting legacies.’ Building on this vocabulary recently, Rothberg (2019) has introduced the concept of ‘implication’ to transcend binaries and engage the opaque of neither—the—either. This paper expands Rothberg’s figuration within the enduring settler-colonial present. It examines my mother’s ‘complex implication’ while growing up on an abusive farm in Canada and the intergenerational responsibility I now carry as the neophyte keeper of these (hi)stories. The Canadian family farm, however, “is not only a settler colonial lieu de mémoire but one of innate historical privilege” (Wallace-Lewis, 2024, p. 96). That its contemporary built environment is refracted through ongoing Indigenous dispossession creates a contradiction. How do I, then, ethically commemorate my mother’s private childhood trauma without overshadowing Indigenous resurgence? Where, if at all, does this interrogation of settler trauma & privilege fit? I present an autoethnographic restory to explore “what it means to ‘feel implicated’ in injustice” (Rothberg, 2023, p. 266). It analyses data generated in collaboration with my mother from several memory work sessions, a creative intervention into our family photographic archive, and a series of monotype prints. Her book of poetry, “There Is No Need to Talk About This,” is also considered. The results are then examined through Hirsch’s ‘connective arts of postmemory’ to ethically navigate between Indigenous + settler memory. In conclusion, my presentation argues that the agrarian family/farm/history is a co-dependent ecology that continues to remediate “settler moves towards innocence” across contemporary imaginaries (Tuck & Yang, 2012). I aim to both contest and reframe this ecology as a generative site to ‘transfigure (my) implication.’

This paper explores how contemporary German-language artists employ transtemporality and transmediality to not only mirror but also perform the ethical imperative to engage with the spectral legacies of difficult pasts in non-ideological, non-binary, and democratic ways. We present German-Indian writer Mithu Sanyal’s time-travel novel Antichristie (2024) and Laura Laabs’ time-jumping film Rote Sterne überm Feld (2025) as case studies. The two works exemplify how fictional remediations of traumatic memories can help to confront the present moment of increased polarization and anti-democratic tendencies. While covering different pasts – overlapping histories of British colonialism and 20th century nationalistic movements in Germany and India (Sanya), and the Nazi past, socialist dictatorship, and the RAF (Laab)– they do so in strikingly similar ways: both employ transtemporal plot structures and spectral figures such as ghosts and corpses; lean heavily on the detective crime genre; and explicitly foreground intermedial aesthetic practices. Sanyal and Laab create complex works that frustrate the resolution audiences normally derive from the Krimi genre so popular in German culture. They refuse the linear temporality and closure typical of the Krimi, instead embracing a transtemporal logic where memory is recursive, history is spectral, and resolution is deferred. Through this lens, haunting becomes a mode of historical reckoning, and the crime genre a vehicle for confronting the debris of unresolved trauma and political violence. Emphasizing the past as an arena of contradictions and tensions, strange allegiances, and ideological shifts that defy strict polarities, the works highlight the implicated nature of human action (Rothberg) and portray the past as messier and more nuanced than polarizing memory discourses suggest. The works presented here experiment with aesthetic forms to avoid didactic models that attempt to explain the past, instead allowing viewers room for interpretation, speculation and confusion via remediated memories.

The analysis of both works draws on the concept of the “implicated subject” developed by Michael Rothberg in Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, which argues that descendants remain connected to the past actions of their forebears. In Entre hienas (2018) by Loreto Urraca and Dicen (2015) by Susana Sánchez Arins, that connection emerges through emotions that do not align with family loyalty. On the contrary, there is a disaffiliation from the figure of the grandfather and an act of disobedience against inherited silence. In both cases, the authors, as “implicated subjects,” assume a moral responsibility to do justice to the victims by acknowledging, in their literary works, the violence perpetrated by their grandfathers. In this way, private and intimate memory becomes social and collective memory.