I spent the past few days attending the conference on Materialities of Postcolonial Memory organized by the Amsterdam School for Heritage Memory and Material Culture.
The highlights for me were the panels that dealt with media and digital technologies in postcolonial heritage and memory practices. These included papers on historiographies of radio and film such as Nadine Chan’s work on cinema as a tool of colonial education in the British empire, and Carolyn Birdsall’s presentation tracing imperial legacies of radio broadcasting in contemporary installation art. But also also talks on the implications of present-day digitization of colonial archives.
This was the full program and here’s part of the conference description:
Reflecting on the materiality of bodies, objects, sites, ruins, traces and interventions, AHM conference examines the awkward, aphasiac and competing memories of colonial and slavery pasts by bringing together scholars from heritage and memory studies, postcolonial, critical race and performative studies, material culture studies and archaeology, art history, archival and digital humanities studies and other areas.
Donya Alinejad 