The Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication (LDC), King's College London cordially invites you to a talk by Tommaso M. Milani.

Abstract

In this presentation, I analyze Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants in 2015. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, I bring together the notions of affective practices (Wetherell 2012), découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) (Foucault 1986) and multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009). This analytic approach allows me to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualization of three guided tours (two online and one in situ) and politicized commentary on the Memorial’s decision to shelter refugees, this presentation illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time – one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilize political action.

About the speaker

Tommaso M. Milani is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Applied Linguistics and Jewish Studies at Penn State; he is also affiliated to the African Studies Programme and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Before joining Penn State, he held positions at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is currently working on a project about the politics of collective remembering, focusing in particular on the commemoration of the victims of the Shoah in Italy and Sweden. He also collaborates with the Swedish Yiddishist, Sarah Schulman (Dos Nisele Förlag, Stockholm), on a project about Yiddish in Sweden.

Run of events

15:00 -15:30 Coffee/Tea
15:30 -17:00 Presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A
17:00 -          Drinks to follow at a nearby venue (all welcome!)

Please contact Lavanya Sankaran (l.sankaran@kcl.ac.uk) should you have any queries