Veranstaltungen der Max Planck Research Group "Empires of Memory" (in absteigender Reihenfolge)

Ort: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
Like any city of its size and longevity (but, then, is there any other city of both its size and longevity?), Istanbul can only be described by way of a series of contrasts that both demand and defy reconciliation: both palimpsest of historical strata and kaleidoscope of the contemporary; both text to be interpreted and object that frustrates interpretation; both brand commodity and site of silenced memories; both consumerist utopia and dystopian urban noir; both target of political-economic projects and uneven topography of powers past and present; both mundane lifeworld and myth; both the reflective nostalgia of lugubrious hüzün and the restorative nostalgia of Neo-Ottoman pomp; both May 1st and May 27th; both Gezi and Çamlıca. [mehr]

"Approximately 52 seconds: the time of prior commitment"

Religious Diversity Colloquium Spring/Summer 2017
  • Datum: 12.07.2017
  • Uhrzeit: 14:00 - 15:30
  • Vortragende(r): William Mazzarella (University of Chicago)
  • William Mazzarella is the Neukom Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2001. His work deals with the political anthropology of mass publicity. He is, in addition to a broad range of articles on media, aesthetics, affect, and crowds, the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (2013), and The Mana of Mass Publicity (2017). He is also the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (2016) and the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (2009).
  • Ort: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
  • Raum: Library Hall
Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Diversity and the Max Planck Research Group “Empires of Memory“ [mehr]

"Skopje 2014: Monumentalizing the Past for a Majoritarian Present?"

Workshops, conferences 2017
Over the past decade, Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, has witnessed a spectacular transformation in its urban environment. A project known as “Skopje 2014,” spearheaded by former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, endowed the center of city with a plethora of neoclassical and neo-Baroque monuments, including a victory arch reminiscent of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, a massive statue of Philip II of Macedon, and an even larger version of Alexander the Great, perched on an outsize plinth at the center of the city’s main square. [mehr]
The empires that once defined the political geography of Europe are no more. One cannot meet a Prussian, Romanov, Habsburg, or Ottoman today; these dusty categories of affiliation have ceded to myriad national identities. Yet it would be mistaken to assume that Europe’s bygone empires have become mere relics of history. Imperial pasts continue to inspire nostalgia, identification, pride, anxiety, skepticism, and disdain in the present. The afterlives of empires as objects of memory exceed historical knowledge, precisely because these afterlives shape and recast the present and the future. Simultaneously, present- and future-oriented imperatives accentuate imperial pasts in selective ways, yielding new configurations of post-imperial amnesia as well as memory. Our conference brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on post-imperial legacies in relation to a variety of specific cities, including Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade. Our contributors pursue the politics and cultures of memory in relation to two general, interrelated questions: What are the effects of imperial legacies on contemporary cities? and, How do present-day urban processes reshape the forms of post-imperial memory and forgetting? [mehr]

"Workshop in Visual Ethnography"

Workshops, conferences 2017
organized by the Max Planck Research Group "Empires of Memory" [mehr]
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