(Lecture) Friday, October 22, 2021
7 to 9 pm
Free and Open to the Public
(Workshop) Saturday, October 23, 2021
9 am to 12 pm
Members $25, Non-Members $30
The title, Hospitable Memory, comes from my reading of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who had much to say about ghosts in his concept of hauntology. In this presentation, I pay special attention to the unnamed missing, the buried, silenced, and disappeared. Ghosts are what I am talking about. I wish to remember them in the hopes of giving new meaning to their absences. In my reckoning, ghosts are not only human in nature. Caribou and farm fields, barns and hogs, ancestors and dogs, minks and lynx, landscapes and Paleo Indians—all make their ghostly claims on me.
Like fugitives, they appear in the shadows as dislocated, disturbed, and disrupted entities. They make their unbidden ghostly appearances and arrive on the doorstep of consciousness in a dream or nightmare, as in a dream, or in the headlines of a newspaper. A dislocated ghostly memory may not even be within personal experience, but we are implicated, as in the herd of caribou plunging to their death in Limestone Falls due to HydroQuèbec’s altering of a river for the sake of cheap electricity.
The question about what is preserved in memory and what is effaced, what calls out for justice, and what can be forgotten is my concern. I wish to offer Hospitable Memory so the haunting ghosts may be honored. In my understanding, this is the work of restorative justice. Ghosts who make it their business to remind me of their absence are what this talk is about. The following workshop will give participants an opportunity to explore and come into relationship with their own other-than-human ghosts.
“. . . the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice” – Avery Gordon