Blog​​​​​​ ​​​​ – NELK

Tuesday, January 21, 4pm CET
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

From states to activists, people and communities insert their politics into memorialisation of deaths of unknown strangers at Europe's borders. Memorializing tells something about those who memorialize. This talk discusses the intersections of different memorials and memorial performances, focusing on a decade of afterlives of the Lampedusa shipwreck in 2013. It shows how public memorializing of migrant deaths at borders in Europe serves two functions. First, memorialization is instrumentalized to make a political point or to create a community. Second, memorializing serves a therapeutic function as it helps people to cope with loss or having witnessed mass death – either in person or through the media. The politics of memorialization are multifaceted and can be transformative. In the afterlives of the Lampedusa disaster, Eritrean diasporic politics intersect with European politics creating new identities as survivors and the families of the victims make border violence visible, real and grievable. In doing so, they question the honesty of European values of equality and democracy. They project the unsustainability of the horrific present and future, and in doing so they become part of Europe. 

The talk is based on a book Survival and Witness at Europe's Border (Cornell UP 2023) and a documentary film project Remembering Lampedusa. It is followed by a 15 min section of documentary film The Night My Brother Disappeared (2022) by Anna Blom and Adal Neguse where survivors of the Lampedusa disaster narrate their memories of the disaster and their process of survival.  

November 19, 2024, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

The vast amount of data that is readily uploaded through the internet and cloud computing and made accessible to the public has produced a substantial archive of information, which requires the excavation from artificial intelligence now to allow the biological memory to cope with overinformation that it is unable to accommodate by itself. Nevertheless, this emerging technology in the form of artificial intelligence is no longer innocuous. It is capable of not only supplementing human memory in the form of supporting it but also manipulating and even replacing it. This leaves us with more questions than answers concerning the nature of memory regarding human understanding and creativity when dealing with the electronic species capable of exerting influence largely independent of any human involvement.

The discussion here will focus on cinema, which could be considered a repository of human memory to address questions of this nature. Cinema has always sought to position itself as an “intellectual robot" (Jean Epstein) equipped with a “kino-eye" (Dziga Vertov) capable of revealing things that humans may never be able to discern on their own. Nevertheless, cinema has so far been subject to the controlled manipulation of humans. Nonetheless, AI has enabled the intellectual robot to become free, as can be seen in the work of AI Benjamin, a scriptwriter for a few films, whose vision was then interpreted by actors. When given the opportunity, AI Benjamin wrote, directed, and even “acted" in Zone Out, a film prepared from open-source data of online films. Is there anything creative about what AI Benjamin did with its algorithmic manipulation and what it means for human memory when interacting with an active “new memory?"

Wednesday | 13 Nov 2024 | 6-8 PM 

Room IG 311

For minoritised persons allowed to move across territories or given leave to remain, human mobility is usually "sanctioned" in the double sense of this term: permitted and penalised. Sanctioned travellers (and their locally born descendants) are usually required to take up certain positions, betray particular behaviours, and subscribe to pecific values if they are to live unmolested as legitimated citizens. Yet their existence remains ever shadowed by the spectre of prejudice and the threat of expulsion. In this presentation, I consider the literary and cultural representation of seemingly fortunate travellers who threaten to break the terms of their sanctioning and pursue relations out of bounds -- an activity I conceptualise in terms of trespass. How might the critical agency of trespass -- as both a wandering and a wondering -- challenge the prevailing gatekeeping of transpersonal relations? By explore some select examples from contemporary Anglophone writers, I consider if trespass engenders significant dissident traction in twenty-first-century representations of human mobility.

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture (LUP, 2024), Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), and Beginning Postcolonialism (MUP, 2000), as well as co-editor of the Ohio State University Press book series, 'Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture'.

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