Kieran Rock. “‘May in time become great trees’: Wartime and Deep Time in Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands”
Much of Jamaican-British nurse Mary Seacole’s memoir, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), covers her time serving on the frontlines of the Crimean War. As she actively imagines new modes of memorialization and elaborates distinctive logics of temporal experience, Seacole’s memoir provides fertile ground for exploring the epistemology of war that we have inherited. This essay argues that Seacole’s memoir figures a unique logic of war and wartime. That logic is at once traditional: reaching back into the past to create continuity and view war as generative, as well as ambiguous: imagining a future touched by war that outlasts humanity and recognizes its stratigraphic inscription on deep time. In both schemes, war is presented as an ongoing phenomenon; defying traditional historical markers that would affix strong beginnings and endings to it. Wartime as a stable historical mode is altered as its boundaries expand outward in competing directions. Locating the spatiotemporal concerns of witnessing and memorialization in Seacole’s memoir as well as in war poetry by the more canonical figure of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, this essay asks how the logic of wartime, and the fault lines revealed in it, give way to the temporality of what Paul Saint-Amour has called “deep war time.” Placing the memoir in conversation with work on the temporality of war, memory, and ecological thought, this essay argues that the logic of durational wartime indexed by Victorian era writers prefigures the recurrence of war’s violence, as well as the reemergence of war’s waste across time.
Katherine Campbell. “‘I Carry My War with Me Wherever I Go’: Modeling a Post-War Collective Identity for Lebanese Women in Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues”
After the Lebanese Civil War, several Lebanese authors wrote novels that attempt to transform the collective amnesia surrounding the war into what Carol Fadda-Conrey refers to as a “collective remembrance.” Hanan al-Shaykh’s 1992 novel Beirut Blues is representative of such novels as the author works to both memorialize the war through her writing and, in the protagonist of her story, model what she presents as a necessary collective post-war identity for Lebanese women that resists binaries and embraces, rather than ignores, the memories of war and violence. In her novel, which takes place during the war, al-Shaykh emphasizes the complexities associated with and the interchangeability of supposedly mutually exclusive binaries in both spaces and time as they are shaped and transformed by the war. The specific binaries explored in the novel and in this paper are those that supposedly exist between exilic and non-exilic experiences of the war; East and West Beirut – which also represents the perceived opposition between different religious groups; urban and rural experiences of the war; and pre-war memories and present war-affected realities. By deconstructing these binaries, al-Shaykh creates space for all Lebanese women, regardless of their experiences of and location during the war, to share in a collective, unified identity. The necessity of this unifying identity, as well as the necessity a collective embrace of the violent memories of the war, is signified at the conclusion of the novel when the protagonist refuses to flee the country and instead says that she must “confront” the war and her transformed country. It is only through confronting the war in one’s memory, al-Shaykh indicates, that such senseless and bloody conflict may be avoided in the future.
Lindsey Pelucacci. “Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018): What Gets Preserved (A Video Essay)”
In Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), a dual male departure alters a family’s world. The boyfriend of Cleo, the housekeeper, abandons her and their unborn baby, while the man for whom she works forsakes Sofía, the household’s matriarch, and his four young children. Faced with these desertions, the women do not collapse but persevere, banding together to steel the bonds of their overlooked community.
Cuarón preserves those who persevere. Largely autobiographical, his film recounts the extraordinary resilience of the women who raised him, paying special homage to Liboria “Libo” Rodriguez, the indigenous Mixtec nanny who joined his family in his infancy, and who inspired the character Cleo. Libo/Cleo is hardly the figure her machismo-loving society reveres; such a society renders her, a lower-class woman pregnant out of wedlock and tasked with menial labor, negligible. In contrast to this society, Cuarón not only acknowledges her, but he also centers her. With his cinematic camera, he patiently pays attention to this patient woman, adopting a lens of artistic compassion that she herself practiced, taught, and inspired. In Cuarón’s remembered world, the last come first.
I will show how Cuarón combines Christian iconography with a narrative of women’s perseverance to articulate a convergence of time and eternity. His film, which he created in memory of his beloved Libo, and which he described as “a ghost of the present visiting the past,” communicates a vision in which those who act with love are preserved, while those who reject love write themselves out of the story.
I will deliver my work not as a traditional presentation but through a premade video essay. Implicit in this delivery is a call for new media approaches to scholarship – suitable for our presently altering Academy.
