CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Disasters as Cultural Events Sessions

Organiser: Ann Larabee

Disasters as Cultural Events: Nation and Community

Segura, Juan-Carlos (New School For Social Research, USA) TECHNOLOGIES OF DEATH: MASSACRES, KIDNAPPINGS, AND THE BUSINESS OF FEAR: COLOMBIAN VIOLENCE AND THE BODY OF TERROR
In this discussion, I am looking at practices of death that have been striking Colombia for over forty years. I define a set of practices being used in the waging of Colombian local "wars", as technologies of death. Massacres, kidnapping, and looting among others, have been major resources for wealth and power distribution. I discuss the interplay between these technologies of death as ways of shaping bodies of terror and subjects of fear, and their relations with the changing geopolitics of the country. Current internal struggle and displacement are indeed causes of a tremendous social suffering. I aim at describing how these technologies are both tools and ends, and in doing so, I will show how they strive at reproducing violence as the only currency of social struggle, in the sake of dominant groups and the state's struggle to maintain a hold on their control over populations and their productivity.

Giannacopoulos, Maria (Macquarie University, Australia) THE TAMPA: "INCIDENT", "CRISIS" OR DISASTER?
The Tampa Disaster of August 26th 2001 exposes Australia's treatment of refugees as being synonymous with violence: a violence that is primarily created by and rendered invisible through, the discourses of "law". Official sympathy for the events of September 11 was unequivocal. In comparison, sympathy for the 438 people who nearly drowned fleeing oppressive regimes manifested itself in the form of imprisonment. This paper argues that the way in which compulsory detention laws were applied in this case were constitutive of the disaster rather than an effective remedy for it. This allows the ongoing role being played by the Australian Government to be obfuscated by discourses that dress violent legal processes in the so called civilized language of "law". The intersection of the two disasters serves to elucidate this further.

Belton, Benjamin Keith (Florida State University, USA) "THAT PERFECT INSTANT": PLURALISM AND REBIRTH IN THE CHALLENGER EXPLOSION
This paper examines the space shuttle Challenger explosion and posits the creation of a "community of those spared" as one result of that disaster. The role of this formed community in public rituals of sacrifice and in the creation of an iconography of sacrifice associated with the disaster are discussed in the context of Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster , Bataille's work on sacrifice, and Serres' notion of remnants of archaic ritual in modern society. The mass media role in disseminating the iconography that assists in founding such communities born of disaster, and in disseminating concepts of pluralism and diversity through ritual are also examined as a process of creating national consciousness through affirmative culture.

Disasters as Cultural Events: Public/Private Memory

Van Vree, Frank (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) MEDIA AND THE SENSE OF CHAOS
Media, according to David Landes, writing on the history of the eighteenth century, played a major role in the process of rationalisation of western society. Structuring time and space, linking and integrating events from all places into a more or less coherent view of the world and history, the media have considerably contributed to the idea of a structured and controllable 'reality'.However, studying the history of the media up to the present day it becomes clear that this is only one side of the story. Although media actually did reflect a growing tendency to fit events into orderly narratives, the sense of living in a chaotic and unpredictable world did never disappear. How strong this sense was articulated, appeared to depend heavily on political, social and cultural qualities, as the history of the press in the nineteenth and twentieth century shows. On the other hand it should be noticed that even the 'coolest' media are open to the sense of chaos. I will argue that the production and consumption of 'breaking news' on disasters - ranging from exploding factories and flood disasters to economic crashes and child-murder - may well be considered from the idea of 'the everyday sublime'.

Larabee, Ann (Michigan State University, USA) BHOPAL: THE UNION CARBIDE FACTORY SITE AS A PLACE OF WITNESS
In early 2000, the India's Ministry of Tourism advertised for bids to turn the Union Carbide factory site in Bhopal into a tourist site with a memorial, an arts and crafts village, and a technology park "The place where life was destroyed," read the ad in the Times of India, "will become the place where life starts." Still leaching chemicals into the only water source for the surrounding community, the Union Carbide factory site has been the locus for repeated protests, and its gates remain marked with a skull and the words, "Killer Carbide." At the tenth anniversary of the disaster, which has taken thousands of lives and led to severe physical hardship and economic deprivation for survivors, the members of the Bhopal Gas Affected Women's Industrial Organization, marched to the site, planning to destroy it. However, many of their potential supporters had been arrested and the factory was surrounded by police barricades. The protests of the gas widows of Bhopal challenge the idea that spontaneous memorials are death kitsch, therapeutic rituals, or folklore traditions. In fact, the mourners/protestors directly counter the prevailing conventions of "flowers," associated with offerings traditional in funeral rites. The cyclical memorial at the site of tragedy becomes a continuing, active negotiation of life and death, representing daily struggles that are easily overlooked in the Bhopal disaster's transformation into an unfortunate accident on the way to development.

Roseman, Mark (University of Southampton, United Kingdom) PRIVATE NARRATIVES AND PUBLIC MEMORY: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN CHANGING CULTURAL CONTEXTS
Starting from the experience of writing the biography of a Holocaust survivor, this paper explores the way individual memories and narratives are shaped by and interact with the public stories told about the Holocaust. On the hand, it will explore the way the national public contexts of remembering in different countries (in this case Britain, Israel, Germany and the USA) allowed contrasting forms of memories to come to the fore. On the other, it will juxtapose diaries, letters and other sources from the Holocaust years with more recent interview material, to show how individual memory changes over time, not least in response to the changing external environment of public memory.