This essay explores the problem of society’s environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and cultural works to counteract it. It uses the concepts of environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome to argue that our connection to the natural world has been eroded by our severely limited experience of it. Each generation’s perception of what is “normal” in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objective standard. As a result, we forget what we have lost and do not realize the full extent of environmental degradation that has occurred over time. People’s baseline expectations of the state of the environment are constantly being reset to a lower level as they are born into a world with fewer resources and a more degraded environment than the generation before. The essay examines two case studies to illustrate how creative works can play a vital role in reversing these trends and curing our planetary amnesia: The Lost Words: A Spell Book and its sequel The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and What Is Missing?, an interactive digital project by Maya Lin.

The essay explores the roots, growth, and impact of the Mnemonics network, an international collaborative initiative aimed at providing doctoral training in memory studies. Since 2012, Mnemonics has organized an annual rotating summer school centred around specific themes in memory studies. The essay discusses the network’s grassroots origins, the way it operates, its efforts to maintain openness, and the factors that account for its endurance. Acknowledging the challenges of expansion and inclusivity, it concludes by reflecting on how Mnemonics seeks to embody the true spirit of academia by nurturing intellectual growth and fostering collaboration and mutual support.

Dat literatuur kan fungeren als een krachtig instrument voor maatschappelijke bewustwording en verandering is een te koesteren gedachte te midden van de polycrisis die de wereld doormaakt. Als geëngageerde literatuurwetenschapper leek het mij zinvol om in te zetten op het vergroten van de sociale impact van mijn onderzoeksobject én het onderzoek ernaar door het debat erover te voeden en aan te zwengelen via een bijzondere vorm van public outreach. In 2021 nam ik samen met mijn UGent-collega en jurist Eva Brems het initiatief om een impactproject op te starten rond literatuur en mensenrechten. Dat project heeft als doel begeleiders van leesgroepen voor volwassenen in Vlaanderen en Nederland hulpmiddelen aan te reiken om aan de slag te gaan met literatuur waarin mensenrechtenthema’s een prominente rol spelen.

This essay seeks to demonstrate the value of different guilt-ridden and grief-stricken cultural forms and social practices in helping us develop a new emotional literacy to navigate the challenges of environmental breakdown and collective responsibility. It examines three case studies – Octavia Cade’s novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Chris Jordan’s documentary film Albatross and the self-immolation of David Buckel – that illustrate the complex interplay between environmental guilt and grief, showing how these emotions can serve as motivators for positive change and contribute to ecological attunement. The essay emphasises the importance of moving beyond individualised guilt to a collective understanding of environmental responsibility and offers insights into the potential of guilt and grief to drive meaningful action in addressing the ecological crisis.

Working at the intersection of political science, ethnographic sociology, and contemporary historiography, Sarah Gensburger specializes in the social dynamics of memory. In this interview, she talks about her book Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris 2015–2016, which traces the evolving memorialization processes following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, their impact on the local landscape, and the social appropriations of the past by visitors at memorials and commemorative sites. She also discusses her new project Vitrines en confinement—Vetrine in quarantena (“Windows in Lockdown”), which documents public responses to the coronavirus pandemic from different sites across Europe through the creation of a photographic archive of public space. The interview highlights issues around the immediacy of contemporary memorialization practices, the ways in which people engage with their local space during times of crisis, and how we are all actively involved in preserving memory for the future.

De vroege eenentwintigste eeuw zag een golf van literaire teksten waarin de klimaatverandering centraal staat. Dit artikel bespreekt wat tegenwoordig klimaatfictie of “cli-fi” wordt genoemd als een alternatieve vorm van klimaatcommunicatie, omarmd niet alleen door literatuurliefhebbers maar ook door wetenschappers en activisten die tegen de grenzen van het informatietekort-model aanlopen in hun pogingen om bewustwording en gedragsverandering te bewerkstelligen. Bijzondere aandacht wordt besteed aan de opkomende trend van hoopvolle, utopische klimaatverhalen als tegenwicht voor de dominantie van het post-apocalyptische genre, waarvan de effectiviteit steeds meer ter discussie staat.

In a range of environmentally oriented international novels, future cities in the Low Countries have been flooded, with Dutch populations relocated to higher grounds or to floating cities. In contemporary Dutch and Flemish fiction, however, reflections on cities by the water are few and far between. More conspicuously, in the few literary novels that imagine cities under threat from rising water levels, the cities in question are not located on the shore but further inland, gesturing towards other meanings and symbolical repercussions rather than towards an engagement with flooding per se. This article examines two contemporary flood novels: Roderik Six’s Vloed (“Flood”) and Renate Dorrestein’s Weerwater. We approach the floods in these novels in terms of indeterminate allegory, examining the contradictory meanings that can be attributed to the radical upheavals recounted in these narratives.

In recent years, scholarship on transnational or transcultural memory has become more clear-eyed about the limitations of remembering across national or cultural boundaries. The initial euphoria has dampened: critics these days are more likely to draw attention to factors that impede the flows of memory than to naïvely celebrate mnemonic mobility. Even so, contemporary memory research holds on to the ethical potential of transnational and transcultural paradigms of remembrance.

Récemment, la recherche sur la mémoire transnationale ou transculturelle est devenue plus lucide quant aux limites de la mémoire au-delà des frontières nationales ou culturelles. L’euphorie initiale s’est estompée: les critiques de nos jours sont plus susceptibles d’attirer l’attention sur les facteurs qui entravent les flux de mémoire que de célébrer naïvement la mobilité mémorielle. Toutefois, la recherche contemporaine sur la mémoire conserve le potentiel éthique des paradigmes mémoriels transnationaux et transculturels.

Since the end of the twentieth century, strike-capable military drones have rapidly evolved from an ominous near-future technology, seldom discussed outside of science fiction or top-secret military contexts, to a burgeoning multi-billion dollar international industry at the centre of public scrutiny and interest. Meanwhile, the figure of the drone has saturated Western public consciousness to the point that it can be described as a trope. Sparking the interest of artists, writers, and filmmakers, drone warfare has begun to feature in a wide range of films, books, and art installations, and this flood of drone-related media seems unlikely to peter out. To date, however, little academic work has looked in depth at cultural interpretations of drones and the role they serve in fictional(ized) narratives. What is urgently needed to better our understanding of the drone, we argue, is a cultural studies perspective that is able to assess the drone as a fictional, narrative construct, while still taking account of its very real, material consequences for both pilots and victims. This article aims to introduce readers to the nascent field of drone fiction, providing a jumping-off point for future research into the figure of the drone. Here, we explore how drone warfare is mediated through three different drone-fictional works: the semi-autobiographical book The Drone Eats with Me by Atef Abu Saif, the experimental video game Unmanned by Molleindustria, and the short film 5,000 Feet Is the Best by Omer Fast. Through close readings of these varied works, we draw attention to what each particular mode of mediation reveals about the effects of drones on those who work with or live around them.

In this article, we analyse two testimonial narratives written or published by Dave Eggers, an American author, editor, and publisher whose oeuvre shows a marked interest in harnessing the power of narrative to engage in human rights activism. Both narratives focus on the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and at the hands of the state through its response to that natural disaster. Our analysis challenges many of the assumptions with regard to affect that dominate the field of human rights and literature, which often takes for granted the intricate and treacherous process that undergirds a reader’s engagement with testimonial narratives. Affective engagement with the reader is a key feature of Eggers’s works, yet we show how it operates in a way that actively shapes the affective tenets of human rights culture in order to allow the reader to engage with the disempowered on more equal terms.

The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants, all of them leading scholars in the fields of memory studies and/or the environmental humanities, had been asked to respond to the following questions: “What are the implications of the notion of the Anthropocene for memory studies? How, if at all, does the awareness of living in a new geological epoch defined by the actions of human beings affect the objects of memory, the scales of remembrance, and the field’s humanist underpinnings?”

The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities.

Fiction writers who try to do justice to the vast temporal and spatial scales and the enormous complexity of climate change are faced with the problem that the phenomenon exceeds human perception and that it is not dramatic in the traditional sense. In this article we explore the formal challenges that arise when fiction takes on the temporality of climate change by examining three very different novels that seek to capture the geological timescale. We analyze Richard McGuire’s time-bending graphic novel Here (2014), Dale Pendell’s fictional future history The Great Bay (2010), and Jeanette Winterson’s cautionary science-fiction tale The Stone Gods (2007) through the lens of Barbara Adam’s concept of the timescape, Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, and Timothy Clark’s notion of destructive doubles to see what kinds of literary innovations and translations the timescale of climate change has provoked. In doing so, we ponder Clark’s question, posed in his recent book Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), whether humans are constitutionally incapable of imagining the Anthropocene—the new geological epoch defined by the action of humans of which climate change is the most salient manifestation—or whether authors can adequately depict and convey it by disrupting conventional modes of representation. We conclude that while each of the three novels ultimately falls short in this regard, collectively they do chart possible pathways for successful literary treatment of the most pressing ecological threat of our time.

This roundtable brings together a group of academics and artists working throughout Europe to discuss the question of memory in theoretical and artistic contexts at a historical moment highly preoccupied with acts of commemoration and moving memory.

Convened by Charlotte McIvor and Emilie Pine
Participants: Stef Craps, Ghent University;
Astrid Erll, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main;
Paula McFetridge, Kabosh Productions;
Ann Rigney, Utrecht University;
Dominic Thorpe, artist

This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), George Turner’s novel The Sea and Summer (1987), and Jan Zalasiewicz’s popular science book The Earth after Us (2008) all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change. These works can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene—an era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualization—to consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking. Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses. Climate fiction of the future-history variety—which mourns future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass in the first place—presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.

This article compares Dave Eggers’s What Is the What and Invisible Children’s Kony 2012, two recent and much-debated instances of human rights advocacy that mobilize subaltern testimonies. They do so in mutually illuminating ways, as they interact quite differently with the neocolonial discourses that come into play as Western activists and audiences engage with the disenfranchised voices of the Global South. We argue that Kony 2012 appropriates the subaltern’s voice and subsequently reaffirms colonial power relations by evoking a strong sense of the charitable West sympathetically giving to the perpetually inferior and destitute South. Eggers’s use of testimony, by contrast, is collaborative rather than appropriative, and is therefore able to challenge through both its form and its content many of the detrimental neocolonial assumptions and hierarchies that abound in Invisible Children’s campaign.

Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trauma-theoretical study of games has much to offer our understanding of the ways that trauma can be represented, in addition to giving game studies scholars further insight into how games manage to elicit such strong emotions and difficult ethical quandaries in players. We demonstrate this by performing a close reading of one recent and much-discussed game, The Walking Dead: Season One, analyzing how it incorporates psychological trauma in terms of inter(re)activity, empathy, and complicity.

This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave papers, the Northampton symposium and round-table was sponsored by The School of The Arts to coincide with Andermahr’s guest editorship of this special issue of Humanities. Craps, Cheyette and Gibbs addressed five questions during the round-table. Namely, does trauma studies suffer from a form of psychological universalism? Do you see any signs that trauma studies is becoming more decolonized? What are the challenges of a decolonized trauma studies for disciplinary thinking? How does a decolonized trauma studies relate to pedagogical ethics? Finally, where do you see the future of the field? While this edited transcript retains a certain informality of style, it offers a significant contribution to knowledge by capturing a unique exchange between three key thinkers in contemporary trauma studies, providing a timely analysis of the impact of postcolonial theory on trauma studies, the state of the field and its future possibilities. Issues addressed include the problematic scholarly tendency to universalize a western model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the question of the centrality of the Holocaust in trauma studies and the implications of this for the study of atrocities globally; the vexed issues posed by the representation of perpetrators; as well as how the basic tenets of western cultural trauma theory, until recently so often characterized by a Caruth-inspired focus on belatedness and afterwardness, are being rethought, both in response to developments in the US and in answer to the challenge to ‘decolonize’ trauma studies.