Event date: Monday 15 June 2015, 1 – 2.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Auditorium A

“Transcultural Remembrance / Transnational Accountability: The Act of Killing, Human Rights and the Global Memory Imperative”; given by Prof. Rosanne Kennedy (Australian National University) as part of the Human Rights and the Mobilization of Testimony symposium

Abstract

In this talk, I take Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary film The Act of Killing (2012) as a case study for considering the discourses and networks which enable the memory of a “forgotten genocide” to travel transnationally, to constitute audiences as witnessing publics, and to move human rights norms and practices across national borders. A transnational collaboration between an American and an anonymous Indonesian co-director and crew, The Act of Killing remembers the mass killings of half a million or more suspected communists in Indonesia in 1965-1966. With its controversial methods of capturing on film, and conveying to national and global publics, a perpetrator memory of the killings, the film raises issues that have been at the forefront of the study of history, memory and trauma over the past twenty-five years. I draw on a range of resources – including interviews with the filmmaker, film publicity, human rights campaigns, reviews and commentary by journalists, critics and researchers – to consider the discourses and frameworks that enable the film to travel transnationally.

In particular, I argue that the film assemblage exemplifies features of what Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2010) have termed the ‘global memory imperative’, while also revealing the cultural limits of this conceptual formulation. Their optimistic claims for Holocaust memory as a foundation for a global human rights regime rest, to a significant degree, on the status of the Holocaust as a shared collective memory for the EU, which is constituted through officially sanctioned commemorative rituals such as an International Day of Holocaust Remembrance. Amongst EU nation-states, this shared memory culture promotes respect for Holocaust memory, and, more broadly, memories of genocide, as well as norms about the value of human rights and justice for victims. But how widely and with what effects do the norms and values associated with Holocaust memory travel outside of Europe? In Asia? What kind of commemorative and counter-memory work do these norms legitimate? What resistance do they encounter?

Bio

Rosanne Kennedy is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality, and Culture at the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on trauma, memory, and witnessing in Australia and transnational contexts; life-writing studies; biography; and human rights and justice issues. She is the author of, among many other essays, “Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere” (in Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales; de Gruyter, 2014) and “Memory, History and the Law: Testimony and Collective Memory in Holocaust and Stolen Generations Trials” (in Memory and History: Understanding Memory as Source and Subject; Routledge, 2013). She is also a co-editor of World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (Palgrave, 2003), which blends the study of trauma and memory with perspectives from postcolonial theory to explore a range of traumatic personal and socio-historical experiences.

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.