*POSTPONED TO WINTER 2025* Charlotte Schallié, Relational Memory, Shared Authority and Reciprocity in the Making of Barbara Yelin's Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory

When and Where

Monday, February 24, 2025 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Room 100
Jackman Humanities Building
170 St. George Street

Speakers

Charlotte Schallie (University of Victoria)

Description

Roz and Ralph Halbert Lecture 

Charlotte Schallié (University of Victoria)

Relational Memory, Shared Authority and Reciprocity in the Making of Barbara Yelin's Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory 

In this presentation, Charlotte Schallié discusses her arts-based collaborative research with graphic novelist Barbara Yelin and Holocaust child survivor Emmie Arbel. Their work together resulted in two publications, the most recent one being Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory (2023), co-edited with Alexander Korb. Barbara Yelin’s graphic novel expands Arbel’s seven-page witness testimony into a book-length graphic narrative inviting us to reconsider the role of creative practice in gathering and representing living memory. As a published graphic novel, Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory is a multi-genre creation. It is a collaborative piece of scholarship based on mutual care and relationship building, an artistic rendering of a life narrative, and an artwork that documents creative practice as research.

When Barbara Yelin met Emmie Arbel for the first time at the Ravensbrück Memorial in 2019, Arbel conveyed to the artist that she remembered very little “from the war.” In traditional eyewitness testimonies, such memory gaps create significant obstacles resulting in an incomplete oral history document. Yet, in Yelin’s artwork, Arbel’s embodied memories and silent interactions are not just made visible, they are inseparably interwoven into the (hi)storytelling. Dr. Schallié will elaborate on how creative renderings of nonverbal expressions of memories in Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory may challenge our understanding of testimony, agency, and absence.

 

Charlotte Schallié is a Professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights education, community-engaged participatory research and arts-based action research. Together with Andrea Webb (UBC), she is the project co-director of a 7-year SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant entitled “Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education” (www.visualnarratives.org). 

 

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This event will be delivered in-person in JHB100 (170 St. George Street) on Monday, February 25, 2025 at 4 PM.

Sponsors

Roz and Ralph Halbert Lecture

Map

170 St. George Street

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