Academic Sessions: Belfast 2007
The Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis in a Post-Traumatic World
Convenor:
Griselda Pollock, CentreCATH, University of Leeds g.f.s.pollock@leeds.ac.uk
Many activists in post-traumatic societies resist the psychologisation of conflict survivors because this appears to allow pathologisation of individuals to displace the collective weight of the political. In a contrary direction, some formerly very Foucaultian thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler acknowledges as ‘the psychic life of power’. Yet a third strand of trauma and memory studies openly espouses a psychoanalytical model for dealing with major historical traumas such as the Holocaust. Building on the expanding interest in Aby Warburg’s early 20th-century attempt to conjugate a social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analysis of the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of western modernity, this panel calls for papers dealing with any historical moment or cultural geography that explores the continuing tensions between the psychoanalytically theorised dimensions of resistance, contestation and transformation and the social processes and representational economies in which these are forged and intervene. At the contested intersection of post-colonial critique, analysis and aesthetics of transformation and those of an international feminist theoretical and practical inclination, this panel would like to receive proposals that dare to think the political with the psychoanalytical in the visual arts in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide.
Speakers:
Suzanna Chan (University of Ulster)
Race, Psychoanalysis and the Middle Passage: Ellen Gallagher at the Freud Museum
Kristin Huneault (Concordia University)
Miniature Objects of Cultural Covenant: Transition and Translation in British North America
Emily Mark FitzGerald (University College, Dublin)
The Irish ‘Holocaust’ and the Commemoration of Famine
Sharon Sliwinski (McMaster University)
Transfixed: The Expression of Emotion as a History of Images
Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck College)
The Psychic Life of a Divided City: Visualising Space in Nicosia
Paula Carabell (Open University)
Surveillance Society and the Notion of the Uncanny
Olivier Chow (Independent Scholar)
Exception, subjection, abjection: the relations of torture at Abu Graib
Henrik Ole Holm (National Gallery of Art, Copenhagen)
Contest-nations
Griselda Pollock (CentreCATH University of Leeds)
I Alfredo Jaar: Not Forgetting Rwanda
Jennifer Tennant Jackson (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Courbet’s Trauerspiel: Trouble with Women in the Studio