International Conference: Planetary Memory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

The aim of the international conference “Planetary Memory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature” is to engage critically with the ecological, cultural and sociopolitical changes of the Anthropocene and to explore how these changes are remembered by literary texts from across the Anglophone world. It proceeds from the premise that the planet needs to be acknowledged in the Anthropocene as a mnemonic agent in its own right, compelling us to reconsider conventional understandings of memory as a social practice. Most importantly, planetary memory involves new concepts of agency, which acknowledge nonhuman matter as carriers of memory. Planetary memory persistently undoes the conventional binary oppositions between humans and nonhumans, nature and culture, objects and subjects, which underlie many western epistemologies, and thus invites us to give up “the distinction between human history and natural history” (Chakrabarty 2009, 201).

The international conference Planetary Memory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature is dedicated to examining the challenges that planetary memory poses for literary and memory studies. Literature, we argue, provides a particularly powerful site for the exploration of planetary memory; yet, we acknowledge that planetary memory involves a number of representational obstacles, primarily related to spatio-temporal scales, i.e., the planet’s vastness. We are particularly interested in the different textual strategies used to evoke the mnemonic agency of the planet. Such strategies may include literary representations of time and forms of “slow violence” that develop gradually and are neither “spectacular nor instantaneous” (Nixon 2011, 2); representations of the spatial scales that draw attention to the dispersed effects of climate change across different locales; as well as representations of messy eventfulness that capture the emergent and non-causal agency of the planet and that undo narrative sequentiality to reveal “the past’s unrealized visions” (Wenzel 2017, 6). Moreover, the conference will pay particular attention to the materiality of the text, seeking to gauge how it becomes a formative force in foregrounding the peculiar agency of planetary matter.