“The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in Contemporary Media – Analyzing the Social Amnesia Surrounding the Marichjhapi Massacre.” Pratiti Roy, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal.
In the remembrance and forgetting of traumatic events, media acts as an agency that helps a community or an individual decide on what to memorialize and what to forget. It further influences the collective memory of society and its following generations. Aligning itself to the understandings of Memory Studies and Trauma Theory, this article will focus on the aftermath of the Marichjhapi Massacre (1979) and use the derived concepts to analyse the memory and social amnesia surrounding the massacre. This article will draw from the different facets of remembering and forgetting while concentrating on the relationship between media and memory as propounded in various literary and anthropological studies.
The Bangladesh War of Independence (1971) had witnessed a massive influx of migrants entering the Eastern part of India searching for safe refuge. Their coerced displacement continued in India, as they were forced to move between several refugee camps. The hostile situations of a few camps in the Dandakaranya region in Central India compelled one such refugee group to relocate to an isolated island called Marichjahpi in the Sundarbans in 1978, only to be violently ousted by the then West Bengal government in 1979. There was an overall silence in society surrounding the state-sponsored genocide, referred to as the Marichjhapi Massacre, which therefore enabled the state to establish a political monopoly over the details of the pogrom. This article proposes to look at the Marichjhapi massacre as a forgotten genocide by evoking relevant memory debates, while simultaneously gauging the counteractive effect of willful amnesia. Finally, this paper will aim to locate the varied representations of the Marichjhapi Massacre in contemporary media and determine how both remembering and forgetting, influenced by mass media, are essential for any individual or community.
Pratiti Roy is a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India. She has completed her Masters in English Literature from Banaras Hindu University, India and has worked as a school teacher, before beginning her doctoral journey. Her research interests include Refugee Studies, Trauma Studies, and Displacement Literature. She has previously presented at International and National Conferences.
“Visualizing Trauma and Healing in East Indonesia: Remembering “Forgotten” Cold War Memories through Arts-based Research.” Julie Gaynes, University of California, Los Angeles.
Between 1965-1968, over 800,000 unarmed Indonesian civilians were slaughtered due to their supposed affiliation with the PKI/Communist Party, leading to one of the greatest stains on human rights history in Southeast Asia. Women accused of communist affiliation, many of them teachers and women’s rights activists, were systematically raped by military personnel and subsequently stripped of their livelihoods. The Suharto regime, which lasted from 1967 to 1998, spread fear-inducing propaganda to silence all discussion surrounding the 1965-1966 violence, preventing communities from publicly addressing legacies of trauma. Recent film and photo-essays have notably reduced stigma around discussion of Suharto-era violence in central Indonesia; however, as few cameras existed outside of Java and Bali, researchers have yet to visually document 1965-68 violence in Indonesia’s east. The erasure of memory around the mass killings now occludes critical consciousness in one of the most disadvantaged regions of Southeast Asia. How can the 1965 Indonesian mass killings be visually and humanistically represented in the absence of photographs, ideally through visual art workshops? Drawing from years of art facilitation in the US, my pilot project alongside JPIT (Women’s Network of East Indonesia) will explore how the 1965 conflict can be represented visually and humanistically in the absence of photographs. Using my book-length MA pictorial of oral histories with Indonesian women healers as a template, I contend that collage art book anthologies serve as micro-ecologies which partially transport the complexity and integrity of local voices whose messages on critical consciousness, almost sixty years after the 1965-68 violence, remain buried by invisibility, stigma, and erasure.
Julie Gaynes researches healing relationships between human and non-human persons/spirits in the Solor Archipelago of East Indonesia. She specifically studies how ancestral healing knowledges inform local conceptions of self, society, and reality. On the island of Lembata, she works alongside Sahabat Penyu Loang, a local non-profit geared towards increasing environmental, cultural, and academic literacy in times of rapid change. Her training in religious studies, creative writing, dance-acrobatics, and visual art prompts her to explore co-authored mixed-media storytelling as a means for transitioning local/geographically-situated knowledge systems across time and space. Her Masters project, an artisan book featuring curated and translated writings from her oral history collaboration with women healers on the island of Lembata, proposes means of cultural curation which appeal to empathy rather than logic. She now pursues her PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA, and uses arts-based research to explore how oral histories and co-authored art books can voice critical, under-represented narratives in landscapes of trauma.
“In(ter)ventions: Technologies of Memory, and a Post-human Imagination.” Sonakshi Srivastava, Indraprastha University Delhi.
“There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it. It made you feel like God.” (Oryx and Crake)
When Paul Crutzen ushered the “homo sapiens” into the postmodern world, declaring, “We are now in the, the Anthropocene”, a transition was marked by signposting time, where the human species mutated from Homo Sapiens into Homo Dominatus, influencing, and dictating the present as well as the future of the planet by bio/technoscripting their presence on the various life forms.
This paper reads such influence that humans have on their nonhuman counterparts by taking into consideration two key texts – R.K Narayan’s “The Man-Eater of Malgudi”, and Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”
A re-animation of animal species is enacted in the aforementioned texts – taxidermy in the former, and electric cloning in the other. While taxidermy hinges on the past (dead animals are preserved), and electric cloning on the future, the two find common ground in the attempt to re-represent, to “restore to origin” (Haraway) what is gone, or feared to be extinct – they serve as means of preservation.
In Narayan’s novel, Nataraj develops a kinship with the temple elephant, and attempts to save it from the clutches of the poacher-cum-taxidermist, Vasu, and in Dick’s novel, Iran, the wife of the hunter Deckard grieves the loss of intimacy with “real” animals, ready to look after an electric toad by the end of the novel, my project is to consider these ties of memory and kinship, and the associated fear of loss as the launchpad of my enquiry.
The paper attempts to navigate through the ties of the im/materiality of memory, and how it informs the technologies (taxidermy, and electric cloning) that serve as a means of repossessing what is feared lost – an animal, or the entire species in the mentioned texts. Taking from Haraway and Aloi, I aim to understand the implications of such interventions as means to counter anthropocenic mass-extinctions, and erasures, and the possibilities that such interventions open up to “cognize”, to imagine “cultured” zootopias as means of preserving or rather re-creating memory in the more-than-human age.
Sonakshi Srivastava graduated from the University of Delhi, in 2020, and is a graduate candidate at Indraprastha University, Delhi, where she researches on the Anthropocene, Phenomenology, and Discard Studies. She was also an Oceanvale Scholar for the Spring-Autumn session at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, where she researched on the history of emotions in Kobo Abe’s novels. She is also a translator, and an award-winning writer.
Her areas of interests include aesthetics and critical theory, memory and trauma studies, animal studies and ethics, food studies, and Indian Writing in English among others.
