Between the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) and the centennial of Independence (1876), Americans created multiple narratives--individual, regional, and national--depicting the nature and meaning of the Revolution. In a nation created with the stroke of a quill pen in 1776, these narratives significantly fostered national identity, yet also played into antebellum sectional divisions and the outbreak of the Civil War. The fullness and complexity of this process is revealed in texts, material culture, and music. In addition, current understandings of the neurophysiology of memory offer humanities scholars understandings with which to assess memories of eighteenth-century political upheaval and war.
A presentation of the questions arising from writing a fictional version of the lives of Molière and his mistress, the actress Madeleine Béjart, followed by a reading from the manuscript of the novel.
A few years ago, a sister-city proposal partnering Madison with Rafah in Gaza created a perfect example of a dysfunctional public sphere. In part the discourse was so fraught because the discussion was framed as a communitarian one: how might one community forge a relationship with another. With the Rafah sister city discussion as my point of departure, I want to lay the groundwork for a rhetoric that depends less upon notions of belonging and rootedness than it does upon the idea that one will always be at least in part a stranger in one’s home. This exilic sensibility – that when one writes, one speaks both one’s identity and location, but also one’s placelessness and otherness – has become more pronounced, ironically, since the establishment of Israel, a ‘Jewish homeland,’ since that home was established in the face of the near-destruction of the Jewish people in Europe and through the displacement of many of the region’s non-Jewish residents. In my discussion I’ll hazard some guesses about what might happen if we start discussions of the Israel-Palestine conflict not with questions of community, or inclusion, or filiation, but rather with questions of exile, non-belonging, and ethical engagement with others. My hypothesis is that another kind of rhetorical engagement, another kind of writing can change the terms of the conflict, and might make for a more productive (though not necessarily less fraught) discussion not just of Israel-Palestine, but also conflict more generally.
