The Scholar and the Feminist XXVII:
Public Sentiments: Memory, Trauma, History, Action – February 16, 2002

Conference Program (PDF, 140 KB)

Public Sentiments: Memory, Trauma, History, Action will continue the Center’s ongoing discussion of social justice by considering how emotions, so vital to the formation of our communities, help define and determine the course of our struggles. In the aftermath of devastating September 11 attacks, American citizens have been called upon not only to consider the social and historical conditions that enable injustices both domestically and abroad, but also, one would hope, to take action against them. But what role do public emotions play in these endeavors? How do public sentiments enable-or block-movements for social change? And if we consider such movements broadly, so as to include socially conscious art and performance, then how do artistic renderings of public sentiment contribute to or intervene in processes of community formation and action?

Morning Plenary

Memory Trauma, History, Activism

By examining public emotional responses to such historical traumas as the Holocaust, American slavery, the AIDS pandemic, and military dictatorship in South America, as distinguished panel of feminist scholars, activists, and artists will examine how the experience of community injury can be translated into public expression and action.

Nieves Ayress is a former militant with the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (Left Revolutionary Movement) in Chile, who was detained and tortured during Pinochet’s dictatorship. After spending years in prison, she was exiled and then traveled throughout the world, finally settling in New York City. In 1987, she co-founded a local grassroots community center in the South Bronx.
Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas in Austin. A recent Rockefeller Fellow at the Oral History Research Office of Columbia University, she is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism and the forthcoming Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke University Press)
Saidiya Hartman, Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, she specializes in feminism and psychoanalysis in African American contexts and visual arts in African American culture. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America.
Marianne Hirsch, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support completion of Czernowitz Album, a collaborative book that follows the varied fates of four Jewish families from the same eastern European town through the Holocaust and beyond. Her most recent book, Familial Gaze, is an anthology of essays that scrutinizes family photographs to reveal the power to shape our personal memories and self-conceptions.

Lunchtime Workshops

1. Public Memory, Private Narratives, and the Commemoration of Trauma: The September 11 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project
   Mary Marshall Clark, Director, Oral History Research Office at Columbia University
   Based on the collection of over 300 oral histories dealing with September 11, this workshop will focus on the role of oral history in the struggle for public and private meaning in the wake of catastrophe.
2. Memorial Photography: The Mural of Pain. The Wall of Prayers.
   Peter Lucas, Professor of Human Rights Education, NYU
   By Preparing spontaneous photo memorials from around the world this workshop will discuss the profound need to represent violence with images, and the role photography ultimately palsy in responding to violence and stimulating peace.
3. Defending Civil Liberties
   Judy Rabinovitz, ACLU
   Senior Staff Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, Judy Rabinovitz brings us up to date on the consequences that a war on terrorism may have on civil liberties.
4. Young Afghan Women Dream of Just Reconstruction
   Sanita Mehta, Women for Afghan Women
   Sanita Mehta and other activists from Women for Afghan Women lead a discussion on current issues facing women in Afghanistan.
5. Fear, Fury, and Feminism: Finding a Way to Peace in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
   Sherry Gorelick and Irena Klepfitz
   Professors Gorelick (Sociology and Women’s Studies, Rutgers) and Klepfitz (Women’s Studies, Barnard College) discuss their longtime peace activism for the Middle East and around the world.

Afternoon Plenary

Performing Affect
Anna Deavere Smith is best known as the author of two one-woman plays about racial tensions in American cities-Twilight Los Angeles (Obie Award-winner and Tony Award nominee) and Fires in the Mirror (Obie Award-winner and runner-up for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize). Hailed by Newsweek as “the most exciting individual in the American theater,” Ms. Smith received a 1996 MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship for creating “a new form of theater-a blend of theatrical art, social commentary, journalism, and intimate reverie”. She teaches at Stanford University where she is the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of the Arts.
Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of California at Irvine, and author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Race, Staging Psychoanalysis. She co-authored, with Janet R. Jakobsen, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (forthcoming, NYU Press).