Lecture
Remembering and Forgetting in Two Worlds. Writing Histories of Forced Displacement and Submerged Genealogy
- Date
- Thursday 11 December 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.47
For those forcibly displaced, tracing genealogical connection typically represents a tie to the past and a remembrance between two social worlds. Yet, genealogies also constitute a site, or realm, of forgetting. Caught between modes of genealogical visibility and euphemisms that both hide coercion and make the descent of progeny publicly speakable, displaced women appear precariously poised amidst forms of reckoning descent, despite the material clarity of maternity. This talk considers genealogies as lieux d'oubli, sites of forgetting or oblivion. Borrowing Guy Beiner's notion of social forgetting, the talk takes a discontinuous history of Sama women's capture from Tiworo, Indonesia, as the sociopolitical historical background for examining a more cultural and textual history. In the latter, the common theme of women's capture in Sama tales of the past disappeared in the mythistorical openings composed for vernacular historical texts that commemorate Sama unions with the Bugis of Boné. Capture was not exactly absent; rather, as the talk will show, in a process of social forgetting it was euphemized into oblivion.
All are welcome, but please register by emailing: forgottenlineages@hum.leidenuniv.nl
For more information, please see the conference page.
