Aesthetics and Ethics of the Fragment in Remembering and Forgetting Historical Violence (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Jeanne Devautour Choi

From civil wars to military dictatorships, from global conflicts to racial, religious, or ethnic genocides, historical violence, in its many forms, fractures societies, deepens divisions, and leaves lasting scars on both individuals and communities. If, according to Rilke, “the story of shattered life can be told only in bits and pieces” (Bauman 1995), historical narratives produced in the wake of large-scale traumatic events often read overwhelmingly monolithic. In contrast to the ordered and polished writing of official historiography, whose production and dissemination perpetuate imbalances of power relations (Trouillot 1995) and subsume into a fraught homogeneity individuals’ fragmented lived experience, choosing to write in fragments —a form that constantly draws attention to its constitutive fractures— could be construed as a means to challenge the continuity and completeness embedded in more traditional and linear writing practices. A poetical composition that questions the idea of composition itself, fragmentary writing resists closure and contests boundaries. Privileging indeterminacy over totalization, the fragment arguably expels the figure of the Author by accommodating a polyphony of voices (Ripoll 2002) and ultimately “presents the self as an unfinished work in progress” (Karpinski 2013).


This seminar explores how fragmentary writing can provide aesthetical and ethical means to problematize and disrupt memoryscapes of historical violence otherwise dominated by monolithic-reading narratives. We will address the following questions: How can the stylistic choice of the literary fragment help delineate a more complex and nuanced memory of a collective trauma? In what ways may the ambivalence of the fragmentary form —self-contained and open-ended at once— be productive to inscribe dissonant voices and oblique perspectives into historical narratives from which they are excluded? How does fragmentary forms destabilize the gestures of assigning meaning and consigning to posterity that are conventionally associated to the act of writing itself? To what extent can fragmentary writing inaugurate new ways of memorializing?


We welcome proposals discussing fragment and fragmentation in areas of research such as: memory and postmemory of war and dictatorship; 1.5 and 2nd generation writing of crises and catastrophes; fictional narratives and creative artworks revisiting periods of historical violence; accounts of exilic trajectories; literary and theoretical approaches to fragmented memories and fragmented selves.