The Faculty Club - Seaborg Room (stair access only)
Literary discourses emerging from the trauma of war share characteristics which, in certain ways, reflect or channel the physical landscape of destruction and displacement.
Social rearrangements suffuse narrative, resetting normative hierarchical constructs of gender, age, profession and sexuality; and these parallel - in some ways even encourage - an emerging (eventually, often ephemeral) vision of social good emerging from the necessities of survival.
Chronicling and then disseminating personal experience through publishing, exhibition, performance, etc., allow artists to engage directly with an often equally traumatized public. Artistic expression can also be motivated by a desire for preservation, to be archived, consolidated and eventually used to seek redress from injustices, including crimes of war. Literatures of war from the later twentieth century through to the present consciously manifest as testimony, small ciphers in a larger pursuit for transitional justice, repair and reparation.
In my talk I will introduce some examples of literary “testimony” from early modern Japanese documents written and disseminated shortly after the Ōshio Rebellion of 1837 in central Osaka.
From here quite a leap - to three cities in Ukraine, which I will have visited twice since the start of the full scale war in 2022. There, I have interviewed dozens of writers, artists, curators and art therapists who continue to create, preserve and place in public view new works of art in the face of aggression. I see these efforts in the context of care, acts to encourage dialogues among war-weary communities of wounded, displaced and “average” populations enduring violent conflict.
In addition to examining literary and visual art practices on the ground in Ukraine, I will discuss briefly a project I have initiated with Wajima lacquer craftsmen and with several artists in Kyiv and Kharkiv. This project involves an exchange and “reimagination” through kintsugi repairs of ceramic shards damaged in both the Noto Peninsula earthquake (January, 2024) and the Russian strikes on Ukrainian urban spaces.
Speaker: Robert Campbell, Professor, Waseda University
Moderator: Jonathan Zwicker, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
Admission is free, registration required:
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