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“Fragmented Memories of a Haunting War: Anamnesis and the Francophone Cultural Production of the New Millennium” a talk by Carla Calargé

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

3 pm, Pugh Hall 210

 

Carla Calargé is Associate Professor of French and Francophone studies at the Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. She is a specialist of the Francophone novel of the Arab World and has published numerous articles about the cultural production of North Africa and Lebanon. She has co-directed a special issue of the Cincinnati Romance Review dedicated to the work of Assia Djebar, co-edited a collective about Haiti entitled Haiti and the Americas, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2013 and has been the Secretary-Treasurer of the Conseil International d’Etudes Francophones since 2012.

Her last publication, Liban. Mémoires fragmentées d’une guerre obsédante (Brill Academic Publishers, 2017) examines the ways in which Lebanese writers, artists, and filmmakers have revived the collective memory of the (un)civil war that ravaged their country between 1975 and 1990. Their works both defy and critique the politics of forgetting that was actively pursued by the country’s postwar leadership. Her central argument is that the pictures and literary representations of the war that emerge from the cultural sphere between 2000 and 2015 attempt to fill a gaping void in Lebanon’s national historical narrative. Nonetheless, such efforts are limited by both the persistent feeling that the war is not (yet) over and by the limits of personal narratives in the absence of a national project that ensures and facilitates a collective memorialization of the war. The mnemonic effort is thus condemned to circle iteratively, unable to explain the causes of the war or to connect with the memory/memories of the Other whom the war placed in enemy camps.

 

This event is free, in English and open to the public.

With the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States

For more information, please contact Alioune Sow (sow@ufl.edu) or Sarah Pugliese (sarahpugliese@ufl.edu)