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.
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