Witness, Memory, and Recovery: Transnational Approaches to Critical Disaster Studies

AHA Session 53
Friday, January 6, 2023: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Regency Ballroom C2 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Jacob Remes, New York University
Comment:
The Audience

Session Abstract

In the wake of the recent call by Jacob Remes and Andy Horowitz to explore the cultural and power implications of disasters in history, this panel aims to apply a trans-national dimension by looking at how catastrophe reifies the nation, national identity, and State power across as well as within borders. We aim to understand what makes disasters palpable mobilizing forces for state building not only in the spaces that are affected but on a trans-national scale. Even more, we want to understand how non-national witnesses experience and respond to disasters in a foreign space, and how their reaction reproduces or deconstructs certain assumptions about the nation and state power. We believe that a trans-national perspective can reveal similarities across time and space regarding state building, legitimacy, and lived experience in regions that are geographically and ethnically diverse. In addition we find that the transnational frame offers a fuller picture of the extent and limits of “national” disasters.
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