An Argentine Genocide? Individual Accountability and Collective Guilt during 1976-83 Dictatorship

A talk by Antonius Robben, Anthropology,
Utrecht University
Monday, November 25
4:00p.m.
125 Nolte Center



The sentencing of Argentine officers for carrying out genocide by disappearing tens of thousands of citizens has opened a public debate about agency and accountability during the 1976-83 military dictatorship. This presentation analyzes how this shift from gross human rights violations to genocide is having extensive implications for national memory, political responsibility, international law, and the concept of genocide.

Antonius Robben (PhD, Berkeley, 1986) is Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. He has been a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the David Rockefeller Center, Harvard University. His most recent books include Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005) that won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006, and the edited volume Iraq at a Distance: What Anthropologists Can Teach Us About the War (2010).

Organized by the IAS Reframing Mass Violence: Human Rights and Social Memory in Latin America and Southern Europe Collaborative. Cosponsored by the Human Rights Program, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Recovering Humanity, Repairing Generations

A lecture by Jeffrey Prager
Saturday, October 5
9:00 a.m.
20 Mondale Hall

In this presentation, UCLA Sociology Professor Jeffrey Prager explores the difficulties in overcoming a traumatic past: how psychic trauma restricts individuals from fully engaging their post-traumatic world and how, unless treated, the trauma gets passed on to the next generation, emotionally and often unconsciously. Transmission of trauma is possible over many generations and interferes with a healthy engagement in the present-day world.

Prager considers specifically the South African case, especially their establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end of apartheid, to describe the necessity of the public world recognizing the sufferer and collectively acknowledging various forms of private pain and suffering. Finally, he describes trauma as the severing of an implicit, taken-for-granted social contract, which, if it is to be repaired, requires the restoration of interpersonal trust and belief in a social world protective of the individual from psychological and physical harm.

Jeffrey Prager is Professor of Sociology at UCLA and a practicing psychoanalyst. He is a former Co-Dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, where he serves as a member of the Senior Faculty. He has published widely at the intersection of sociology and psychoanalysis, especially in the areas of trauma, recovered memory, racial conflict, intergenerational transmission of trauma, forgiveness and reconciliation.
He is the author of Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Harvard 1989) and several articles on how societies respond to their traumatic pasts. He currently participates in a working group in South Africa focusing on the disruption of traumatic transmission in post-apartheid South Africa. In addition, Dr. Prager is the co-editor (with Anthony Elliott) of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Sponsored by the Department of English, University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and co-sponsored by AAPCSW, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights Center, and Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). The event has been organized by Elise Sanders, Hal Steiger, and Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether.
For more information please visit the Department of English website.

Unspoken: IAS Panel Discussion Concerning Trauma

Institute for Advanced Studies Thursday Speaker's Series
Unspoken
Thursday, September 12, 2013
4:00 pm
125 Nolte Center

Panel Discussion Featuring:
Rebecca Krinke, Professor of Landscape Architecture, UMN, has an art practice and research agenda focused on trauma and responses to trauma. Krinke has invited five distinguished scholars to help her explore this issue through short individual presentations and reflective discussion.

Panelists
David Beard, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, UMD, speaking on the 1920 lynchings in Duluth and their ongoing impact.
Jeanne Kilde, Religious Studies, UMN, speaking on issues related to the Muslim Community Center proposed near ground zero, NYC.
Kevin Murphy, Associate Professor of History and a UMN leader of the multi-institutional "Guantanamo Public Memory Project."

Discussants
Naomi Scheman, Professor of Philosophy, UMN.
José Medina, Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University.

Fro more information visit the IAS website.

Workshop: Trauma and Text: Approaches to Teaching the Literature of Atrocity

July 23-July 27, 2012
9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.
Room 614 Social Sciences
University of Minnesota
30 CEUs
2 graduate credits available for additional fee (contact outreach@umn.edu if interested)
Registration deadline: July 9, 2012


How do we read narratives of trauma? What does it mean to experience the suffering of others through hart? What role can literature and film play in helping trauma survivors recover and heal? These are questions with which English, history, and art educators must grapple a twenty-first century populated with media images of tragedy and suffering. This institute will provide the opportunity for middle and high school teachers from across disciplines to think through the ways in which we approach the difficult task of engaging historical and personal trauma through creative works. We will examine closely both the positive uses of "trauma texts" and the risks that teaching such texts involves (secondary trauma, voyeurism, reductionism, pity). Importantly, we will spend time discussing the place of hope and agency, and the ways in which the artistic voice can promote growth and healing, both for the trauma survivor and the reader/spectator.
We will read a variety of theoretical and primary texts across genres (short stories, poetry, film, theater). Guest speakers will provide the institute with outside expertise and perspectives from a diversity of contexts. Institute participants will develop and receive feedback on a micro unit constructed around a text (film, poem, play, novel, etc.) for use in their classroom and will participate in creative writing exercises that model ways in which students can use their own stories as potential sites for healing and growth.
Register Online here.
If you have any questions, please contact Deborah LeClaire at outreach@umn.edu or 612-624-7346.

Ghost Stories: Five Writers Read Works on Historical Trauma

Tuesday, Nov 8, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Homewood Studios, 2400 Plymouth Ave N, Minneapolis 55411

African- American, Hmong, Japanese-American, Jewish and White Earth Anishinabe writers explore how the stories of their parents, grandparents and historical communities impact the writers' own lives. From the ridiculous to the tragic, the writers examine the legacies of the Holocaust, war, racism and genocide.
The Readers: Carolyn Holbrook, Mai Neng Moua, Margie Newman, Marcie Rendon, Joan Maeda Trygg.
Admission: Five dollars includes a chapbook containing work by the five writers. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
This project was made possible, in part, with the support of Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, an initiative of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, and with the support of the St. Paul JCC.
This project is funded, in part, by the Minnesota State Arts Board through the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.
For further information contact: Mai Neng Moua, mainengmoua@comcast.net, 612 226 6046.

Laughing with Traumas: Humor about the Holocaust in Contemporary German and Israeli Popular Culture

A Talk by Ofer Ashkenazi, Ph.D.
Wednesday, October 19
11:45-1p.m.
Room 1210 Heller Hall

The talk examines comic references to the Holocaust in contemporary Israeli and German mainstream culture. Ashkenazi will argue that during the last two decades, Holocaust-related humor has been often used as a means to criticize the fundamental premises of the political discourse in these countries.
In blurring the boundaries between the sacred and the mundane, it provided an alternative language for the discussion of the return of the past as a culturally mediated trauma. The endeavor to represent the Holocaust, and to display its 'meaning,' has been an essential element in post-1945 Western culture.
In numerous works dedicated to this effort scholars have documented and analyzed its role in the formation of current 'trauma-cultures,' in which mediated traumas have become key components of collective identities (as well as popular commodities). For various reasons, these studies tend to focus on somber - often melodramatic -images and narratives, which aim to envisage Holocaust reality "as it was," or could have been. Such inquiries have a particular importance in the examination of popular culture in Israel and Germany, where the memory of the Holocaust still determines not only the national self-perception but also the national and international politics.
A close look at the mainstream culture of these countries since the early 1990s, however, reveals a flood of humorous references to the Holocaust and its iconography (in television shows, films, popular magazines, and file-sharing Internet-sites). In analyzing this phenomenon, Ashkenazi will argue that rather than ridiculing or denying the horrors of the Holocaust, these references often work to expose the (political) implications of the current trauma-culture and warn against its exploitation.
Sponsored by the History Department, University of Minnesota

Ghost Stories: Five Writers Read Works on Historical Trauma

Thursday, July 14, 2011, 6 PM
Amherst H. Wilder Center
451 Lexington Pkwy N, St. Paul


African- American, Hmong, Japanese-American, Jewish and White Earth Anishinabe writers explore how the stories of their parents, grandparents and historical communities impact the writers' own lives. From the ridiculous to the tragic, the writers examine the legacies of the Holocaust, war, racism and genocide.
A facilitated discussion will follow.
The Readers: Carolyn Holbrook, Mai Neng Moua, Margie Newman, Marcie Rendon, Joan Maeda Trygg.
Admission: Five dollars includes a chapbook containing work by the five writers. Refreshments will be served.
For further information contact Margie Newman at 612-532-7238, margienewman@comcast.net