Silenced Voices, Recaptured Memories (original) (raw)
Echoes of our forgotten ancestors
The World of Music, 2006
The opinions expressed in this periodical do not necessarily represent the views of the members of the advisory boards nor of the institutions involved. Cover Illustration: see page 7. University of Bamberg the world of music vol. 48(2)-2006 Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors
The Daughters of Memory, Part 3
The selection below is the final part of “The Daughters of Memory,” a chapter from a work-in-progress, intended as a follow-up to my recent book, Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination (Columbia University press, 2013; paperback edition, November 2014). My current project sets out to explore 1) the transformations that narrative and lyric composition underwent when their medium shifted from public performance to private reading and 2) the neurocognitive implications of this shift for visual and auditory imagination. The selection below, Part 3, should be read as a continuation of the argument introduced in Part 1, “Music, Language, and the News from Mt. Helicon” and developed in Part 2, “Music and the Emotional Brain.” In this concluding essay, “The Pleasures of the Inner Dance,” I examine the motor aspects of the Muses art, mousikê, from overt dance movements to covert (inner) speech, and conclude with some thoughts on the pleasure of musical experience.
Entanglements: Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography, 2018
Found and bought a few years ago at an Athens flea market by visual artist and avid record-collector Panos Charalambous, a body of 19 rare acetate 78 rpm. records, made in the United States in the late 1950s by the Greek migrant Konstantinos Chronis and his family, triggers a series of ethnographic and artistic encounters that bring out the role of vocality and phonography in the production and reproduction of memory. Konstantinos Chronis, who migrated to the USA in the beginning of the 20th century, sent these private recordings to his brother and his family back in Greece as a form of vocal letters, including folk songs and nostalgic narratives, family news and highly emotional promises about meeting them once again. Anthropologist Panayotis Panopoulos traces the social life of these records backwards, meeting their original receivers, members of the family and co-villagers of Konstantinos Chronis in Athens and the mountainous village of Roino in Arcadia region, Peloponnese. Vocal traces of more than half a century ago, probably considered forever lost, return to stir up memory, which was also the strong stimulus for the records’ production in the first place. Different layers of memory are assessed and discussed as various performances and levels of (phonographic) vocality accumulate through time. The artist’s intention in the project to resurrect the voices of the dead among their living relatives and village community meet the anthropologist’s interest to reassess the experience of the records’ reception and social life, in a performance of ethnographic/ artistic DJing, through which the recorded voices address their original receivers once again in a meaningful gesture of mending a broken chain of contact and communication.
Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia
Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia, 2020
Edited by Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić In collaboration with Valerija Zabret, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler, and Sophie Uitz Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020 ISBN 978-86-88001-19-9 (CZKD) Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR439 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna The book Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia arose from the research carried out by the PEEK Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, whose full title is “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality.” This is an interdisciplinary arts-and-theory-based research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. During this time, we created an online video archive entitled “Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia.” It consists of seventy hours comprising eighty-two interviews/positions as well as the recordings of the symposium “GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA: Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories” held at the mumok in 2018, Vienna, thus tying together the three sites that constitute the “Genealogy of Amnesia”: Belgium, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska.” This book comprises sixty-six interviews in the form of deep reflections concerning territories and histories of genocides, dispossession, racism, antisemitism, turbo-nationalism, discrimination, silencing, oblivion: Belgium, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska,” Slovenia and Spain. We hope this book will contribute to establishing links between the antagonization of racism/fascism and the critique of (neoliberal) global necrocapitalism as a colonial, racial system of dominance. It means that we are calling for the severing of ties between Eurocentric epistemology and its monopoly on the definition of class-sensitive, as well as feminist and LGBT*QI discourses.
Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature …, 2006
I n his overview of the historic origins in modern thought of ideas playing a central role in the current debate over matters of identity and recognition, Charles Taylor emphasizes that, whether it is a question of individual or of collective identity, "we become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression" (32). Languages, in this context, signify modes of expression used to identify ourselves, including those of art and literature, and all evolve, are developed, and are acquired in a dialogical manner-that is to say, through exchanges with others. By underscoring the socially derived character of identity, this perspective explains the importance of external recognition, both on an individual basis and on a cultural one. In this article, I intend to focus on an aesthetic that, grounded in memory, demonstrates and requests recognition for a particular type of "love of words." The words in question belong to Michif, an oral ancestral language that, despite (or perhaps because of) its endangered status, proves to be a powerful identity symbol. Relegated to an underground existence during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the resurgence of Michif words and expressions in literary texts reminds the community to which they belong, and that they are telling (back) into existence, of its historic, cultural, and linguistic sources, thus relaying claim to a specific and distinct, but unrecognized space on the Canadian word/landscape. In the texts to be considered here, the love and respect for one's ancestral language means no longer feigning its non-existence, but rather revealing the manner in which its words and accompanying world view persist to the point of interfering in the way one apparently conforms or adapts to dominant culture and