Literary Re/Memberance
Hosted by the Graduate English Society (GES)
25 April 2025
Western University, Conron Hall (University College, Room 3110)
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University)
Literary Re/Membrance examines memory not as a passive inheritance of the past, but as an active, contested, and often radical practice shaped by histories of colonial violence. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observes, colonialism sought to mutilate, dismember, and reassemble the memories of the colonized in the image of the colonizer. Against this legacy, re-membering becomes a defiant act—one that involves piecing together what has been intentionally fractured and reclaiming memory as a site of resistance, survival, and renewal.
The slash in Re/Membrance signals the necessary adjacency between repetition and repair: between doing again and reconstituting what has been torn apart. The conference centers literary and creative-critical engagements with memory as a restorative and transformative process. It foregrounds work that explores the reclamation of precolonial pasts, the resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing and being, the reconstitution of queer modes of existence, and the revisiting of suppressed ecologies and alternative temporalities.
Bringing together critical scholarship and creative-critical practice, the conference aims to expand research-driven conversations while attending to the lived, imagined, and artistic dimensions of re/membrance. In doing so, it positions memory as a dynamic force that not only confronts histories of erasure but also opens possibilities for resurgence, connection, and reworlding.
Hosted by the Western Graduate English Society (GES) and co-sponsored by the Department of English and Writing Studies (Visiting Speaker's Fund) and the Centre for Theory and Criticism. Additional support provided by the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, the School of Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (SASAH), and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
