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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'.

More on the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures:

Goethe University’s “Kleine Genderprojekte” has funded a new project! In the coming year, Jules Bündgens-Kosten will interview trans stakeholders about their experiences with and perspectives on English language teaching. 

November 12, 2024, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

Narrative Pace offers a unique perspective for the analysis of memory literature. In memory literature, the change in narrative pace is particularly evident because the representation of memory encourages a variety of narrative pacing strategies – from acceleration to deceleration. My argument is that the five narrative paces influence the way memory is conceptualized. I will use the novel The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni as the basis for my discussion in this lecture. A rewrite of the Indian epic novel Mahabharata is attempted in this novel from the perspective of Draupadi (the female protagonist). In this novel, Draupadi recalls all the events of her childhood, her young self, and everything leading up to the Mahabharat War.  On a self-reflective level, her process of remembering enables her to identify herself.

Through the iterative-durative contraction, a more explicit emphasis is placed on the character's trauma or the timelessness of the content remembered. In contrast, narrative pace summaries and ellipses emphasize the complexity of remembering, the sense of loneliness, and the tension inherent in the story. The use of ellipses does not necessarily mean that the memory is less important, but is rather used in order to advance the plot or to show memory gaps. Due to the narrative pace stretch, a psychological impact is generated, as well as a detailed evaluation and observation of memories. Additionally, the narrative pace pause can sometimes serve as a catalyst for contemplative reflection on one's own existence, as the character recalls. A narrative pace pause may be used to highlight different emotions. As a result of the narrative pace scene, the act of remembering is perceived as a reflexive and dialogic activity. This helps in the process of suturing the memory threads for the purpose of understanding oneself.

Of course these five narrative pace serve a variety of functions that go beyond these; their more significant contribution is to aid in conceptualizing memory.

Tuesday, Nov 5, 4.15 pm
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

In recent years, postcolonial struggles over memory have produced a wave of film productions across various European cinemas. In 2020, the Dutch film De Oost [The East] was released on Amazon Prime. Three years later, in 2023, Der vermessene Mensch [Measures of Men] hit theatres across Germany. These films have a commonality: they cinematically represent underrepresented colonial histories. Moreover, both films were widely promoted as being the first to address particular episodes in Dutch and German colonial history that had been silenced in public discourse/memory. For De Oost it is the structural violence committed by Dutch perpetrators during the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949); for Der vermessene Mensch it is the German genocide against the OvaHerero and Nama people in Namibia (1904-1908). While these topics may seem to promise a decolonial perspective on history, we argue that the films' selective narratives and stereotypical visual representation patterns impose restrictions on this potential. Instead, we will focus our comparative study on the production context of these films with a particular emphasis on distribution and promotion. We contend that the most comprehensive way to understand the cultural meaning of these postcolonial films is to analyse what Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka (2008) call “plurimedial constellations", meaning how these productions evolve in networks of media and social practices of collective memory. We do this by analysing the public debates around these films, asking how these films have been framed in promotion events, and by focusing on the media that are tied into the films. By analysing these plurimedial constellations, we map out how these films – each in its own way – are ambivalent and paradoxical. While they perpetuate elements of colonial thinking, their contextual existence simultaneously destabilises dominant structures of knowledge about the colonial past. Their seeming incongruity is what we propose to be a key element of contemporary European postcolonial memory films.

Arnoud Arps is Assistant Professor of Extended Cinema, Film Heritage and Memory at the University of Amsterdam and Academic Staff Member at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. Prior to this he was a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial and Memory Studies at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Los Angeles. His work investigates how the colonial era is transculturally, transnationally, and cross-medially remembered in Indonesia and the Netherlands with a special interest in cinema, literature, and popular culture. More information can be found on his website: www.arnoudarps.com

Kaya de Wolff is a research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. As a media scholar, she engages critically with the intersections of memory, media and communication, (post)colonialism and social justice. Kaya gained her PhD with a dissertation on the struggle for recognition of the genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama in the German press coverage (published by Transcript, 2021, Open Access). She works – jointly with Prof. Dr. Astrid Erll – within the interdisciplinary regional research network “Transformations of Political Violence Centre – TraCe" (2022-2026). Her post-doctoral research project investigates collective memories related to the histories of enslavement, colonialism and dictatorship in Brazil. For more details, see her profile on Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.