Following the success of its tenth interdisciplinary conference on ‘Time to Remember’, the editors of Skepsi, our postgraduate journal, are calling for articles on the same theme for publication in summer 2018.
Remembering may involve celebration or commeration. In either case, it sometimes seems that the manner in which an occasion is marked has become a ritual, an opportunity to contemplate how things have changed in the intervening years, how we travel and come to terms with and reflect on past events. At the same time, however, we also wonder why and for how long we need to remember. Remembering past events and marking their anniversary is not a simple process: one person’s celebration is another’s commemoration, as the present division between Greek and Turkish Cypriots bear witness, arguably a legacy of violent historical events in the past visited on one side by the other. During attempts to resolve the problem, the need to mark such events in any way has been questioned; some suggest that a more effective way to re-join the divided communities would be for such memories to fade.
Why do we feel compelled to remember once a year events from the past, not only those from our own lives but those which we may never have personally experienced? What are we remembering? Does the act of remembering gradually metamorphose into a ritual the significance of which become hazy? These and other questions can be explored and discussed in the article. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following and their interrelations:
- National and Personal Identities
- Voluntary Memory (conscious commemorating) and/or Involuntary Memory (the traumatic aspect of remembering) which links to the idea of (un)consciousness
- Individuality and Collectivity
- Gender and Identity/History
- Time and Recollection (the need for remembrance/effacement; the relation between time and space)
- Remembering and The Psychological Impact (trauma)
- Belonging and/or Unbelonging (affinity and/or estrangement to a place)
- Historical Commemoration (e.g. the Holocaust memorial)
- The Literary Representation of History
Articles must be in English, between 5,000 and 8,000 words long, and accompanied by an abstract of about 250 words and brief biographical details of the author, both of which may, if desired be included in one file with the article. If quotations from works originally published in a language other than English are included, please observe the following conventions:
- If the works have a published translation into English, the quotations may be either solely from the published translation or from the original language version followed by the published translation.
- If the works do not have a published translation into English, the quotations must be from the original language version followed by a translation by the author of the article.
The closing date for submissions is 31 August 2017. Submissions should be sent as Word files to skepsi@kent.ac.uk