Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory
An Online Seminar with Michael Rothberg and Vijaya Teelock
in conversation with Ananya Jahanara Kabir 

The seminar (in English) will take place on Tuesday, 1st February 2022 at 4.30pm GMT.
Please register by 30th January 2022 at: https://archipelagicmemory-seminar.eventbrite.co.uk.

This seminar brings together three eminent scholars working on questions of memory, islands and archipelagos to initiate a discussion on practices of memory-making in archipelagic spaces and through archipelagic structures, and on the meanings and possibilities embedded in the notion of “archipelagic memory”. It is intended as a first step in the creation of an intellectual forum to trace fresh trajectories in archipelagic thinking in the light of memory studies and novel forms of discourse, activism, justice and solidarity in the Global South.

Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at UCLA. He works in the fields of Holocaust, trauma and memory studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literature. In his works, he developed the concept of multidirectional memory and the figure of the implicated subject.

Vijaya Teelock is the Vice-President of the International Scientific Committee of the Indentured Labour Route Project and a member of the International Scientific committee of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Formerly Associate Professor of History at the University of Mauritius, she founded the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialization and forgetting. She currently works on creolisation as a historical process and cultural theory, and its applicability to India. 

For more information on the Archipelagic Memory project and conference, please visit the website: https://archipelagicmemory.wordpress.com/.