Irene Kacandes
Future Perfect or New Europeans (24.11.2015)
In this talk, I will review my concept of co-witnessing (Kacandes: Talk Fiction. 2001) and then position us, vis-à-vis some trenchant examples, for a group discussion about the current “refugee” situation: Which stories, which traumas exactly, are in the news? Who is authorizing him/herself or is being authorized to co-witness to those stories? Who is listening? What events and peoples are being left out altogether? And the culminating question behind my title: What is the future perfect—here I obviously mean in the grammatical sense, with a play on the words’ connotations—of that selective co-witnessing (or lack of it)? When such and such will have happened, what will Europe’s future be? A specific component that interests me passionately concerns whether some individuals will be allowed to have become “new Europeans.”
Prof. Dr. Irene Kacandes
Main Research Interests
- Modern Greek Literature
- Narrative Theory
- 20th-Century Cultural Studies
Publications (selected)
- Daddy's War: Greek American Storytelling, Family Memory, and Trauma. A Paramemoir. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
- With S. Denham and J. Petropoulos: A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.