MLK Day Lecture
Reclaiming the 'Site of Memory'
January 08th, 2024
This talk explores the cultural practices of “civil repair” (cf. Jeffrey Alexander) across racialized lines that are built into the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. In dialogue with Toni Morrison’s “Site of Memory” and Edouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relations,” the lecture reflects on the relationality that the commemorative architecture builds up and sustains while reclaiming the right to mourn victims of racial terror in public. It considers how the memorial establishes local and translocal practices of commemoration within the American memorial landscape as it works towards social transformation.
Nathalie Aghoro is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. She is the author of Sounding the Novel (2018) and the editor of The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen (2021). Her current project deals with social justice and situated cultural practices such as the writing, building, and picturing of shared places.
Reclaiming the 'Site of Memory': On Commemoration and Relationality at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice with Dr. Nathalie Aghoro, Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich.
The Event is held by:
AmerikaHaus NRW e. V.
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Monday, January 15, 2024 | 6.15 - 7.45 p.m.
Senatssaal | Main Building | University of Bonn
