Who thinks abstractly?

Hegel's short text, available in English here and in French here provides a great refutation of many anti-intellectualist banalities. Indeed, the evocation of "real things" happening to "real people" is often way more "abstract" than any patient conceptual elaboration. Thinking about concrete things does not necessarily lead to concrete thought.

"One who knows men traces the development of the criminal's mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! After all I remember how in my youth I heard a mayor lament that writers of books were going too far and sought to extirpate Christianity and righteousness altogether; somebody had written a defense of suicide; terrible, really too terrible! — Further questions revealed that The Sufferings of Werther were meant.

This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality."

De retour à mon autre maison

Rethinking Human Zoos : conference program

Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies

In association with ACHAC, Liverpool University Press
and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni

Rethinking Human Zoos
Friday 28/Saturday 29 November 2008

Institut Français du Royaume-Uni
17 Queensberry Place
LONDON SW7 2DT

A conference organized to coincide with the publication by Liverpool University Press of Human Zoos: Between Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, an English-language edition of Zoos humains

PROGRAMME

Friday (28 November)

1.00pm
SFPS AGM

Introduction and film projection

3.00pm
Introductory remarks, Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool) - Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires

3.15 pm
Lecture, Sandrine Lemaire et Gilles Boetsch (ACHAC) - 'The Human Zoos project: l'émergence d'un débat'

Gilles Boestch will speak in French, Sandrine Lemaire in English

4.00pm
Éric Deroo (ACHAC), Presentation of the film Zoos Humains

4.30pm
Projection, Zoos Humains (52 mn, d'Éric Deroo et Pascal Blanchard)

5.30pm
Lecture, Nicolas Bancel et Pascal Blanchard (ACHAC) - Impact, spécificité et temporalité des Zoos humains

6.00pm
Débat, réactions et questions autour de l'objet de recherche "Human Zoos" (with the six editors of the collection published by Liverpool University Press)

6.30pm Book launch

Saturday (29 november)

9.30am Session 1 (Historicizing the Human Zoo):
Garry Sandison (University College Cork), Le Mètre du maître: empire, anthropométrie et l'incommensurable
Hilke Thode-Arora, Abraham's Diary (1880/81) - a Hagenbeck Ethnic Show from an Inuk Participant's Viewpoint
Sadiah Qureshi (University of Cambridge), Converting "Unfruitful Wonder": R. G. Latham, Displayed Peoples and the Natural History of Race, 1843-1863'

11.00 am Coffee and poster session
Presentation of poster: Louise Hardwick (University of Oxford), 'Human Zoos: Exotic and Erotic?'

11.45am Plenary lecture
Herman Lebovics (SUNY Stony Brook), Etrangères, Indigènes et les Crocodiles: Odd Neighbors at the Palais de la Porte Dorée

1.00pm Lunch (own arrangements)

2.00pm Session 2 (Viewing the Human Zoo):
Van Troi Tran, An Empire for the Hungry Masses: the Crowd Eats and Meets the Indigènes at the 1889 World's Fair
Jonathan Hensher (University of Manchester), "Pour les enfants et pour toute la famille": Race and Spectatorship in Pre-War French Popular Visual Culture

3.00pm Coffee

3.30pm Session 3 (Legacies of the Human Zoo):
Annette Bickford, "Nice for Daddy": Racialized Theatres of Sexual Alterity
Scott Taylor, The Post-Colonial Anti-Zoo in the United States

4.30pm Concluding remarks
Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool), Situating Human Zoos

5.00pm End of conference

October 2008 issue of History and Theory

Hello from History and Theory:
The October 2008 issue of History and Theory contains four really interesting articles and eight review essays. Consider Susan Crane's "Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography": Crane asks, "have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?" and she answers-against conventional wisdom and practice-that not only have they done so, but that as a result they should be removed from public view or be what she calls "repatriated." The essay is so cogently argued and gracefully written that it will at least stimulate ideas that you may well not have thought of before, or it may actually convince you and lead you to act quite differently. In either case, it is very much worth reading (indeed, we've chosen it to be available at no cost for all those receiving this email. To download a free copy of it, click here: http://www.historyandtheory.org/freearticle.html)

But Crane's is not the only revelatory article in this issue. Anita Kasabova, in "Memory, Memorials, and Commemoration," presents what she calls a semantic account of the relation between the past and the present, and in the process shows the ways memory, memorials, and commemorations function in light of this relation. In this she offers an account at odds with the presentism of Eelco Runia and others who have presented their views on these subjects in our pages. The article is remarkably rich in the way it brings so many topics into focus and shows how they relate to one another.

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen's "Making Sense of Conceptual Change" addresses a fundamental question in intellectual history: what is it about? Some historians, such as Arthur Lovejoy of the great chain of being fame, have claimed that intellectual history is about unit-ideas, but critics have countered that there are no such units that cut across historical epochs; they propose, instead, that it is linguistic entities that are the object of study, or they wonder whether the whole notion of intellectual history isn't a non-starter because there is nothing stable enough to count as the object of such a history. To these critics Kuukkanen responds that we should accept ideas and concepts as the basis for an intelligible history of thought-so his is a return in a way to Lovejoy-but that we have to be more sophisticated than Lovejoy about what this means. He proposes that concepts and ideas are comprised of a core and a margin, and that conceiving of them in this way solves a number of !
problems that Lovejoy's original formulation could not.

I bet most of you don't know what "Froude's disease" is. I didn't before I read Ian Hesketh's "Diagnosing Froude's Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain." Froude was one of the most popular historians in late nineteenth-century Britain, but he denied that history was a science, and claimed that it has more to do with art and drama. Needless to say, professional historians at the time didn't like this approach; indeed, E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they "cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow-worker in the cause of historic truth," and diagnosed him as suffering from "an inborn and incurable twist" that resulted in "Froude's disease"-the inability to "make an accurate statement about any matter." Hesketh unpacks the construction of "Froude's disease," and exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non-scientific mod!
es of thought such as that offered by Froude. The result is not just an elegant revisiting of an earlier time, but a clarifying reminder of the ways disciplinary boundaries are established and enforced.

Click here to read abstracts of the four articles I have just discussed:
http://www.historyandtheory.org/archives/oct08.html

The issue also includes these review essays:

Christopher Lloyd on William H. Sewell Jr., The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation

Michael S. Roth on Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4

Jürgen Kocka on Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

Richard H. King on Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century

William H. Krieger on Peter Kosso, Knowing the Past: Philosophical Issues of History and Archaeology

José Carlos Bermejo-Barrera on Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation

Lionel Gossman on Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe

Abdelmajid Hannoum on François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps

One would have to go some distance to find a list of more distinguished and insightful authors and reviewers than this!

You can, of course, read these reviews by going to our website and clicking on the appropriate links. Note that we are now including links from book review listings in the table of contents on our web pages directly to Amazon.com so that you can easily search inside the book under review and buy it if you wish.

To subscribe to the journal (which you can do entirely over the web with your credit card via Blackwell's secure server), click here:
http://www.historyandtheory.org/subscribe.html
(As a subscriber you also get access to the electronic version of the journal).

I hope you find this issue as thought-provoking as I do. I welcome any comments you have about it or other topics that are germane to the journal. You can contact me at: bfay@wesleyan.edu

Brian Fay
Executive Editor

Sahlins on Iraq and Thucydides

Excerpt from "Interview with Marshall Sahlins", Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, no. 3 (2008), p. 328-329.

Q What can the Peloponesian wars tell us about the contemporary war in Iraq?

A By substituting logos for Herodotus’ mythos, Thucydides usurped the title of ‘father of history’ and became the darling of International Relations Realists and other western devotees of Realpolitik. And no doubt Thucydides’ reputation will remain untarnished among the theorists of national self-interest despite that Bush’s Iraq war may be the most irrational political blunder since the Athenian invasion of Sicily. But the most revealing parallel to Iraq was the anarchic civil strife (stasis) at Corcyra, where the Spartans and the Athenians became engaged in an internal struggle between the local oligarchs and the demos for control of the city. Indeed the conflict was fateful for western political philosophy, inasmuch as Thomas Hobbes, who was first to translate Thucydides directly into English, found in the ancient historian’s description of the breakdown of order at Corcyra the model of his own ‘state of nature’.

At Corcyra, as in Iraq, when the institutions of state lost all legitimacy and violence became the means of every partisan cause, sacred values of justice, morality, and religion were drenched in blood and set to naught. Plato once remarked that every polis is many poleis, because it consists of a city of the rich and a city of the poor, which are at war with one another, and each of these is again made up of contending parties. And when global causes and forces – such as Athenian domination at Corcyra or democratic and Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq – are compounded with local dissensions, the effect is a seeming dissolution of cultural order by the irruption of a brutal human nature. At Corcyra, Thucydides said, ‘even words had to change their ordinary meaning and take what was now given to them’. Cautious plotting became ‘self defense’; moderation, ‘unmanliness’; prudence, ‘cowardice’. Echoing certain sophists’ arguments about the superficiality of culture (nomos) relative to the irresistibility of nature (physis), the ancient historian claimed that such maelstroms of hypocrisy and iniquity will always break out when a natural lust for power and gain is unleashed on the flimsy conventions of social order. The same ideology was echoed again in Donald Rumsfeld’s comments on the disorder following the American occupation of Baghdad: ‘Stuff happens’, he concluded – a cleaned-up version of the proverbial ‘Shit happens’.

It is supposed to be a failing of other people, yet how easily westerners thus conflate culture with nature. Whether in Corcyra or Iraq, it took an enormous array of conflicting moral and political causes to produce this so-called state of nature. In this regard it is difficult to credit Thucydides’ contention that words lost their meanings at Corcyra so much that the hypocritical use of them made people all the angrier at the evident deceit. Living as Americans do under a regime that, in the oxymoronic name of ‘compassionate conservatism’, enriches the already super-wealthy at the expense of the society, one is entitled to doubt that the cynicism changes the meaning of ‘compassion’ so much as it exposes the mendacity of those who so abuse the word. It is not for nothing that George W. Bush is the most hated American president since – well, since Clinton. But then, to attribute the mayhem instigated by the abuse of words to a pre-verbal human disposition is to practice ad absurdum the same kind of verbal deception one is claiming to unmask. In Corcyra and Iraq both, the intervention of fateful larger causes gave new and unconditional values to the internal schisms of the city, rendering them as unconditional as they were abstract and ideological. The fight was now over such ultimate ends as ‘freedom’, ‘slavery’, ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’, ‘dictatorship’, 'terrorism', ‘imperialism’. Which only proves that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.

Autres appels à contribution pour Conserveries mémorielles (Représentations du passé)

LES REPRÉSENTATIONS DU PASSÉ : ENTRE HISTOIRE ET MÉMOIRE

THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PAST : BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY

Appel à contributions



À la fois complémentaires et antagonistes, les relations entre histoire et mémoire en tant qu’appropriations du passé sont une question épistémologique au cœur de la discipline historique. Si la question ne date pas d’hier, elle a pris une importance nouvelle depuis les vingt dernières années sous l’impulsion de ce que les historiens Pierre Nora, François Hartog et Allan Megill ont aptement et respectivement nommé le « moment-mémoriel », le « flot mémoriel » et la « memory craze ». Ce phénomène se caractérise essentiellement par l’irruption de la mémoire dans l’ensemble des sphères de la société générant une « commémorite » aiguë, une (sur)patrimonialisation du passé et surtout un appel à un devoir de mémoire court-circuitant les opérateurs critiques du travail de l’historien. La mémoire tente de s’emparer, au détriment de l’histoire, de la totalité de l’espace représentationnel du passé : elle se place devant l’histoire comme mode de gestion du passé. Ce véritable défi mémoriel a engendré une importante littérature notamment chez les historiens et les philosophes sur la nature des rapports entre histoire et mémoire. Si un constat peut être fait de cette littérature foisonnante, c’est bien la complexité caractérisant ces rapports, complexité qui résulte avant tout de leur historicité. La nature des rapports entre histoire et mémoire a en effet variée tant dans le temps que dans l’espace de l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours.



À cet égard, le présent appel à contributions vise à renouveler la question des rapports entre histoire et mémoire à travers le prisme conceptuel des représentations. Cette approche connaît un succès considérable en histoire et dans l’ensemble des sciences sociales et participe à leur tournant herméneutique et pragmatique ; l’histoire et les sciences sociales s’« humanisent » (François Dosse) en se distanciant du déterminisme, du matérialisme, du structuralisme et du fonctionnalisme leur ayant longtemps servi de matrices théoriques. Le concept de représentations leur permet de mieux établir l’agencéité des dimensions réflexive, discursive et idéelle du comportement des acteurs sans pour autant les désincarner de leur environnement social comme le faisait une certaine histoire des idées maintenant dépassée. Or, les ressources heuristiques de l’approche des représentations ont paradoxalement été peu mises à profit par les chercheurs s’intéressant aux relations entre histoire et mémoire, à l’exception notoire de Paul Ricoeur et de certains adeptes de la new philosophy of history. Pourtant, histoire et mémoire sont, avant toutes choses, comme le rappelle l’auteur de La Mémoire, l’histoire et l’oubli, deux formes de représentation – prise dans l’acception de la présence de l’absence – du passé. La notion de représentation(s) en histoire et en sciences sociales peut à la fois désigner la démarche du chercheur comme opération, être mobilisée dans sa référencialité comme source témoignant d’une réalité extra-langagière et finalement être saisie dans sa performativité comme objet, notamment dans le cadre d’une histoire de la mémoire. En ce sens, il n’est pas exagéré de prétendre que la question des rapports entre histoire et mémoire ne peut se comprendre sans recourir au concept polysémique de représentation(s). Conjuguer la question des rapports entre histoire et mémoire à l'approche théorique des représentations pourra ainsi s'avérer pertinent pour (ré)apprécier la nature complexe de ces rapports, question ayant fait coulé beaucoup d'encre depuis les vingt dernières années, mais qui est toutefois loin d’être épuisée.



Cette mise en relation peut s’effectuer en suivant plusieurs stratégies. Pour cette raison, nous sommes ouverts à des contributions provenant de l’ensemble des horizons disciplinaires des sciences sociales et humanités. Le chercheur intéressé pourra s’inspirer de cette liste (non-exhaustive) d’axes thématiques et de problématisation :



- réflexions épistémologiques sur les rapports entre histoire et mémoire

- les théoriciens facent à la mémoire et/ou à l’histoire

- mémoire de l’histoire et des historiens ; l’ego-histoire

- réflexions historiques sur les rapports complémentaires et conflictuels entre histoire et mémoire de l’Antiquité à nos jours

- représentations du passé comme opération, sources et objets de l’histoire et des sciences sociales

- histoire/sociologie de la mémoire envisagée comme une histoire/sociologie des représentations du passé

- modalités de production et de réception des représentation du passé

- nature et/ou fonctions sociales des représentations historiennes et/ou mémorielles du passé

- tension entre référentialité et performativité dans les représentations du passé

- histoire du temps présent et son rapport à la mémoire

- lieux de mémoire comme outil méthodologique pour réconcilier la mémoire et l’histoire



Ces axes peuvent être abordés tant au moyen d’essais théoriques que de recherches empiriques prenant la forme d’études de cas. Nous encourageons la diversité des cadres spatio-temporels, car envisager les rapports entre histoire et mémoire dans leur inscription historique est une stratégie qui permet d’enrichir leur compréhension.



Dans le cadre de ce numéro de Conserveries mémorielles, journal électronique avec comité de lecture qui est publié par la Chaire de Recherche du Canada en histoire comparée de la mémoire (Université Laval, Québec, Canada), nous invitons les auteurs à soumettre des propositions de contributions (250 à 500 mots) avant le 5 mars 2009. Les articles des propositions retenues (maximum 10 000 mots) seront attendus pour le 5 juin 2009. Les contributions seront acceptées en français et en anglais.



Veuillez envoyer votre proposition ainsi qu’un court c.v. à l’adresse suivante :



histoire.memoire@gmail.com



Pour plus d’informations, consultez le site de la revue :



http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/histoire.memoire/revue.htm



Dirigé par Mélissa S.-Morin, doctorante en histoire, Université Laval et Université de Franche-Comté, et Patrick-Michel Noël, doctorant en histoire, Université Laval, le numéro sera publié à la fin de l’automne 2009.









THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PAST : BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY

Call for papers



Complementary and antagonistic, the relations between history and memory as appropriations of the past are an epistemological question at the heart of the historical discipline. If the question has a long history in itself, it has taken a new importance since the last twenty years under the impetus of what the historians Pierre Nora, François Hartog and Allan Megill have aptly and respectively called the « moment-mémoriel », the « flot mémoriel » and the « memory craze ». This phenomenon is essentially characterized by an irruption of memory in all the spheres of society generating an acute commémorite, a (sur)patrimonialisation of the past and above all a call to a duty of memory short circuiting the critical operators of the historical discipline. Memory attempts to seize, to the detriment of history, the totality of the representationnal space of past : it places itself in front of history as a form of management of the past. This memorial challenge has given rise to an important literature in particular among historians and philosophers on the nature of the relations between history and memory. If an observation can be drawn from this abunding literature, it is the complexity that characterizes those relations, complexity ascribable before anything to their historicity. The nature of the relations between history and memory has in effect varied as much in time as in space from Antiquity to today.



The present call for papers aims to renew the question of the relations between history and memory through the conceptual prism of representations. This approach has a considerable success in history and in the social sciences and participates at their hermeneutical and pragmatical shift ; they humanize (François Dosse) themselves by distanciating themselves from determinism, materialism, structuralism et functionalism that have for a long time served them as theoretical matrixes. The concept of representations allows them to better establish the agency of the reflexive, discursive and idealist dimensions of the historical actors without disembodying them of their social environment like a certain kind of history of ideas used to do. However, the heuristic ressources of the paradigm of representations have paradoxically not been very exploited by scholars interested in the relations between history and memory, except for Paul Ricoeur and some adepts of the new philosophy of history. History and memory are, before anything else, as the author of La Mémoire, l’histoire et l’oubli has underlined, two forms of representation – taken in the sense of presence of the absence – of the past. The notion of representation(s) in history and in social sciences can as much designate the scholar’s practice as an operation, be mobilized in its referentiality as a source attesting of an extra-textual reality and finally be grasped in its performativity as an objet, notably in the form of a history of memory. Thus, it is not an exaggeration to claim that the question of the relations between history and memory can’t be understood without resorting to the polysemous concept of representation(s). Conjugating the question of the relations between history and memory with the theoretical approach of representations will prove relevant in the (re)appreciation of the complex nature of these relations, question that has been under close scrutiny for the last twenty years, but that is far from being resolved.



This conjugation can be effectuated by following different methodological strategies. We are open to papers coming from all the disciplinary horizons of the social sciences and humanities. Submissions may be inspired by this list of possible, though hardly exhaustive, subject suggestions:

- Epistemological reflections on the relations between history and memory

- Theoreticians on memory and/or history

- Memory of history and of historians; ego-history

- Historical reflections on the complementary and conflictual relations between history and memory from Antiquity to today

- Representations of the past as operation, source and object in history and in the social sciences

- History/sociology of memory as history/sociology of the representations of the past

- Modalities of production and reception of the representations of the past

- Nature and/or social function of the historical and/or memorial representations of the past

- Tension between referentiality and performativity in the representations of the past

- Histoire du temps présent and its relation to memory

- lieux de mémoire as a methodological tool to reconciliate memory and history



These subjects can be treated by means of theoretical essays or empirical researches-case studies. We encourage diversity in the spatial and temporal parameters of research : to consider the relations between history and memory in their historical inscription is a way of enriching our understanding of them.



For this number of Conserveries mémorielles, electronic journal with peer review and published by Chaire de Recherche du Canada en histoire comparée de la mémoire (Université Laval, Québec, Canada), we invite authors to submit paper proposals (250-500 words) before 5 March 2009. The articles (10 000 words max.) of the selected papers will have to be submitted before 5 June 2009. Papers can be written in English or French.



Please send your proposal and a short c.v. at :



histoire.memoire@gmail.com



For more informations, please consult the website of the journal:



http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/histoire.memoire/revue.htm



Edited by Mélissa S.-Morin, PhD student in history, Université Laval and Université de Franche-Comté, and Patrick-Michel Noël, PhD student in history, Université Laval, the number will be published in late Fall 2009.

Autres appels à contributions pour Conserveries mémorielles (Mémoire à court terme)

Mémoire à court terme


Numéro dirigé par :

Jocelyn Gadbois, doctorant en ethnologie, Université Laval et École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

Catherine Vézina, doctorante en histoire, Université Laval et Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas


La mémoire collective sera (heureusement pour l’actuel) toujours menacée par l’oubli. Cette menace rend plus précieux encore les témoignages (oraux, écrits, artefactuels, visuels, virtuels, etc.) du passé, voire du présent. Ces témoins sont là pour se souvenir, pour se rappeler, pour raconter.


À mémoire d’hommes, le souvenir est si intimement lié aux témoins, qu’on le relègue volontiers aux sentiments (notamment la nostalgie), aux impressions peu « rationalisables », à la commémoration du Moi. Pour qu’il y ait reconnaissance, valorisation, appropriation et identification, une mise à distance (historique, culturelle, philosophique, etc.) de cette intimité est nécessaire ; le souvenir doit réussir à s’édifier (aussi) comme un vide, comme un manque, comme une absence.


Parfois, les témoins sont seulement absents. Il y a ici un angle mort ; ces témoins vivront le drame de ne jamais passer à l’histoire. Ils mourront dans l’oubli avec leurs souvenirs, malgré leurs tentatives de se (re)mettre en valeur. Ils échoueront complètement à leur tâche de s’épargner du formatage de l’oubli. Pour eux, le dialogue est devenu impossible. En ce sens, le souvenir de voyage rapporté par un ami finira ses jours à la poubelle, les photos d’un parent éloigné ne réussira qu’à présenter un inconnu, un monument sera laissé à l’abandon, des documents seront égarés dans l’indifférence, un sujet ne sera jamais étudié. Pourquoi ces témoins sont-ils condamnés ? Qu’est-ce qui se passe immédiatement avant et après l’oubli ?


Ce questionnement laisse se suspendre la notion de mémoire à court terme. Comment pourrait-on la définir ? Comme une usine de souvenirs à bas prix ? Une épreuve de mise à distance ? Un passage obligé ? Une mémoire affective ? Une mémoire du présent ? Quelle forme peut-elle prendre dans l’actuel ? Peut-elle rejaillir de l’oubli ? Peut-elle être récupérée et remise en valeur ? Et demeurer intacte ?


Le long terme ne semble pas une qualification accessible à tous les souvenirs. Ils doivent attendre, dans l’oubli, d’être en mesure de rendre intelligible (à nouveau) l’actuel. Cette attente peut demeurer vaine et conduire à leur perte. Ces pertes de mémoire laissent cependant la place à de nouveaux souvenirs, à une nouvelle mémoire à court terme qui s’effondrera, elle aussi, dans l’oubli.


Dans le cadre de ce numéro de la revue virtuelle Conserveries Mémorielles, nous invitons les auteurs à réfléchir à cette notion et de mettre à l’épreuve sa pertinence dans l’axe des études sur la mémoire. Les propositions de contributions (autour de 250 mots) sont attendues le 5 janvier et les article (maximum 8000 mots) devront être acheminés au plus tard le 5 mars 2009.


Veuillez envoyer votre proposition et votre article aux adresses suivantes : memoire_courte@yahoo.fr et c.memorielles@celat.ulaval.ca

Pour plus d’informations, consultez le site de la revue :

http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/histoire.memoire/revue.htm

Crowds, Events, Affects

Crowds, Events, Affects

We are seeking academic contributions for a forthcoming edition of Conserveries mémorielles on crowds, events and affects. Crowds may weigh on social life as phantasmatic entities and ghostly presences or as material and sensuous immediate realities involving corporeal experiences of excess, whether overwhelming or pleasurable. In this special issue of Conserveries mémorielles, we wish to explore the eventness of crowd phenomena: how the presence of crowds introduces ruptures of sense, new practices and new intelligibilities.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to :
- Crowds and memory
- Affects and events in crowd theory and literature
- Crowds and material culture
- Imagined communities, imagined crowds.
- Sensuousness of crowds
- Crowds and event theory (Davidson, Ricoeur, Badiou, Deleuze, etc.)
Conserveries mémorielles is a peer reviewed e-journal published by the Canada Research Chair in Comparative History of Memory.
Deadline for submissions is February 28, 2009. Papers shall be written in French or English (MLA citation style) and not exceed 10 000 words.
Please send your submissions with a 250-abstract and a short cv at:
crowdseventsaffects@gmail.com

Publication is expected for Fall 2009.

For further information, visit the website (in French):
http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/histoire.memoire/revue.htm


Foules, événements, affects


Nous recherchons des contributions pour un futur numéro de la revue Conserveries mémorielles sur la thématique Foules, évnements, affects. Les foules peuvent peser sur la vie sociale en tant qu'entités phantasmatiques ou présences spectrales ou comme réalités immédiates, matérielles et sensibles, impliquant une expérience corporelle d'excès pouvant procurer un sentiment d'inquiétude ou de jouissance. Dans ce numéro spécial de Conserveries mémorielles, nous désirons explorer l'événementialité des phénomènes de foules: comment la présence des foules introduit des ruptures de sens, de nouvelles pratiques et de nouvelles intelligibilités.

Les sujets d'intérêt comprennent mais ne se limitent pas à :

- Foules et mémoire
- Affects et événements dans la théorie des foules et la littérature sur les foules
- Foules et culture matérielle
- Communautés imaginées, foules imaginées
- Foules et sensibilité
- Foules et théories de l'événement (Davidson, Ricoeur, Badiou, Deleuze, etc.)

Conserveries mémorielles est un journal électronique avec comité de lecture qui est publié par la Chaire de Recherche du Canada en histoire comparée de la mémoire.
La date de tombée pour la soumission d'articles est le 28 février 2009. Les textes seront rédigés en français ou en anglais avec références en format MLA et ne dépasseront pas 10 000 mots.
Pour plus d'informations, visitez le site internet :
http://www.celat.ulaval.ca/histoire.memoire/revue.htm
Envoyez vos propositions accompagnées d'un résumé de 250 mots et d'un court cv à :
crowdseventsaffects@gmail.com

La publication est prévue pour l'automne 2009.