Memory Studies Goes Planetary: An Interview with Stef Craps

Abstract

Stef Craps is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI). He is an internationally recognised scholar whose research focuses on postcolonial literatures, trauma theory, transcultural Holocaust memory, and, more recently, climate change fiction. He has published widely on these issues, including in the seminal Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He visited Warwick to deliver a public lecture and graduate workshop for the Warwick Memory Group in October 2017. In a wide-ranging interview, Stef Craps spoke about present and future directions in memory and trauma studies, the differences between transnational and transcultural memories, the ethics and politics of memory (studies), and the challenges faced by the field looking to the future.

Challenging Binaries and Unfencing Fields

“…This is demonstrated in a lively exchange stimulated by a paradigm article by Bryan Cheyette (2017), in which leading scholars explore what Nils Roemer calls 'the intersectionality of Jewish and postcolonial studies', premised on '[p]lurality instead of singularity ' (2018: 124). Both of these fields deal with memory, and therefore bringing them into dialogue with the burgeoning field of memory studies -closely related to trauma studies and Holocaust studies -is a productive exercise (Roca Lizarazu & Vince, 2018). Perhaps it is a helpful analogy to think of these fields -postcolonial studies, Jewish studies, memory studies, trauma studies -as not fenced in or enclosed but open, wild, 'ill-disciplined' fields with unclear boundary lines (Cheyette, 2009: 1-2).…”