Event date: Tuesday 21 April 2015, 5.30 – 7 p.m.
Venue: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Auditorium D

“Public Apology as Cultural Performance: Bloody Sunday 1972-2010”; given by Prof. Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)

In the last half century public apology has become a transnational template for conflict resolution across the globe. This talk will build a bridge between transitional justice and cultural memory studies by examining public apology both as a technology of reconciliation and as a historically-specific cultural practice. In particular, it will show what a cultural analysis focussing on the role of media, performance, and narrative might bring to our understanding of the transformative potential of such events. It does so by offering a detailed analysis of the apology offered by the British Prime Minister on 15 June 2010 in relation to the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland in January 1972. It is argued that the force of this apology lay in the highly-mediated circumstances in which it was performed, but also in the asymmetries of its interpretation among multiple (trans)national constituencies.

Ann Rigney holds the chair of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the
Netherlands. She coordinates the Utrecht Forum in Memory Studies as well as NITMES (Network in Transnational Memory Studies). She has published widely in the field of cultural memory studies, philosophy of history, and historical fiction. She is author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation (Cambridge UP, 1990), Imperfect Histories (Cornell UP, 2001) and The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford UP, 2012). Recent (co)edited collections include a special issue of Memory Studies on reconciliation and remembrance (2012; with N.Immler and D. Short), Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2014; with Joep Leerssen); and Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (de Gruyter, 2014; with Chiara De Cesari). She is currently developing a new project relating to the cultural memory of protest.

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