Communities of Memory in Practice: A Reflection on the Montreal Life Stories Project

Friday 7th October 2011, 9:30am in Village Roadshow Theatre

The Montreal Life Stories Project (www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca ) is recording the life stories of those displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations. These stories are then incorporated into online digital stories, arts and performance, radio programming, scholarly writing, commemorative activity and pedagogical resources. As a “community-university research alliance”, the project is premised on the idea of communities becoming partners in research and not simply objects of study. Survivors of mass violence are therefore an integral part of the project. My keynote address will reflect on the “community of memory” idea as revealed in our collaborative practice.

Steven High: Chair in Public History and co-director of the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Montreal; publications include Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (2007). See

http://storytelling.concordia.ca/high/

Memory and Diaspora: The Vietnamese Refugee Experience

Saturday 8th October at 9am, Village Roadshow Theatre

The Vietnamese diaspora that followed the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was one of the largest and most visible mass migrations of the late twentieth century. More than two million Vietnamese left their homeland in the two decades that followed. The main countries of resettlement were the United States, Australia, Canada and France. In Australia, the number of Vietnamese grew from only 1,000 in 1975 to nearly 200,000 now or just under one percent of Australia's population.
This paper will explore the memory of war and the refugee experience in Vietnamese narratives.

Nathalie Nguyen: Australian Research Fellow, University of Melbourne; publications include Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (2009) and Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives (2005). See http://www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/aboutus/people/nguyen.html

The Limits of Oral History

Sunday 9^th October 2011 at 3:30pm, Village Roadshow Theatre

38 Londres (St,)  Santiago, was an infamous torture and extermination centre in the early years of the Pinochet regime in Chile. After it reopened to the public, amidst much controversy, in 2008, a historical exhibition was curated by some of the survivors, not much more than explanations and illustrations of what had occurred, on the walls of each room. In 2009 that included a hand drawing of a naked human form, held by the legs, being up-ended into a barrel of sewage. (This form of torture, and the drawing itself, are relatively well known in the histories of the dictatorship.) The following year the display had not changed very much, but the drawing had gone. The guide, who had no close personal connection with the building, knew nothing about its disappearance.

I shall use this example to begin a discussion of the apparent limits of what can be publicly shown or heard using material drawn from oral history. Who did,and who did not, want the Londres drawing displayed?  Why, and why not? What types of things that victims remember and want to communicate are too terrible to display publicly?  What are the constraints? Who is, and who deserves to be, the final arbiter

Peter Read: Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow, University of Sydney; publications include Tripping Over Feathers. Scenes in the Life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams. A Stolen Generations Narrative (2009) and Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (1996). See http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/staff/profiles/read.shtml