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Critics' Forum - 05/27/2006

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  • Critics' Forum - 05/27/2006

    Critics' Forum
    Literature
    www.criticsforum.org

    An Archive in a Footnote: The Legacy Project
    By Hovig Tchalian

    Now that the tumult of events surrounding Genocide commemoration has
    subsided, it is worth taking pause and considering the aftermath.
    The inevitable moment after (especially once the celebrations of May
    28th are also past) brings up the difficult but enduring question-
    "What now?" or, more skeptically, "Is this all there is?"

    An ambitious project, sponsored by the Hamburg Institute for Social
    Research and The Rockefeller Foundation, offers perhaps the most
    satisfying and propitious answer - allowing the act of remembrance
    to outlive the moment of its inception. The Project consists
    primarily of a website (www.legacy-project.org) that, as the site's
    own description puts it, "will build a global exchange on the
    enduring consequences of the many historical tragedies of the 20th
    century."

    In essence, the site archives the various reactions to the
    historical tragedies of the previous century, in the hope of
    preventing their future occurrence, or at least dampening their
    detrimental effects on society. The website's "events index"
    provides a comprehensive alphabetical list of the nearly 25 "events"
    included in the archive-from "African Conflicts," Apartheid, the
    Armenian Genocide and the "Cambodian Killing Fields," through the
    Holocaust and the struggles of "indigenous peoples," to the two
    World Wars.

    Admittedly, the strand tying all these "events" together - the issue
    of social injustice, broadly conceived - is somewhat tenuous. And
    the categorization scheme may be suspect. (What about "indigenous
    peoples" constitutes a set of "events"?) Perhaps a better way of
    linking these various themes together is under the even broader
    theme of remembrance, the complex "legacy" that gives the project
    its name. According to the website, "the Legacy Project offers a
    channel for mutual recognition across generations and geography.
    Through scholarly research and innovative presentation, The Legacy
    Project will create new - and shared - frameworks for cultural
    expressions of loss, drawn from Africa, the Americas, Asia and
    Europe. Our work will help define the language of human loss - its
    forms, its symbols, its grammar. . . . The Legacy Project seeks a
    collective, retrospective reflection on the losses that constitute
    the legacy of the last century."

    The real value of the project - the genuine goal of active
    remembrance and comparative historical study facilitated by the
    creation of a central archive of various human injustices - is
    overshadowed by the quite ambitious but nonetheless diffuse goal of
    defining "the language of human loss," a goal arguably more akin to
    academic studies than to historical reality. The site nonetheless
    admirably achieves its more modest goal of preserving the poems,
    plays, speeches, films, historical commentary, and a host of other
    reactions to the tragedies that have defined our century and the
    prior one.

    Unlike the more strictly historical mission of, say, the Zoryan
    Institute, which carries out the important work of preserving the
    commentaries of Genocide survivors and legal and historical
    documents related to the event itself, the Legacy Project preserves
    the reactions of the generations that succeeded them. By doing so,
    it carries out the equally important work of archiving in one place
    what would otherwise constitute a scattered series of footnotes,
    the "secondary" memory of the historical events that record the
    shock registered in the minds and hearts of more than a century's
    worth of indirect witnesses. In this sense, the website performs
    the much-needed function of commemorating the act of commemoration
    itself - testimony to the enduring will of those who would see the
    tragedies halted and continual fodder for all of us looking for a
    viable answer to the question with which we began, "What now?"


    The selections included on the site are nothing short of
    remarkable. As of the last viewing, the website includes virtual
    exhibitions of "Frank Stella, the Polish Village Series;" "The "Art
    of Afterwards;" and a study of "Echoes of the Guernica." There is
    also a "Virtual Symposium" of Holocaust-related issues, as well as
    the discussions of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The
    site also includes a searchable database of the various literary,
    artistic and film materials included on the site. Excerpts of the
    work of Armenian poet and writer Peter Balakian are represented, as
    are the enigmatic and powerful historico-philosophical ruminations
    of the German-Jewish cultural critic, Walter Benjamin.

    Despite the Legacy Project's sophistication and the breadth and
    depth of its archives, there are nonetheless some glaring omissions
    in its website content. A search for Atom Egoyan or his
    film, "Ararat," for instance, will return no results. And there is
    a noticeable dearth of items about the Genocide more generally.
    Luckily, the remedy is readily available. The website provides the
    following email address for feedback and suggestions: legacy@legacy-
    project.org. What better way to make one's voice heard while
    helping transform the footnotes of the Genocide and other historical
    tragedies into a growing archive that will survive the few weeks of
    their commemoration?


    All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006

    Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
    edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

    You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
    at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
    in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org. To
    sign up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
    www.criticsforum.org/join. Critics' Forum is a group created to
    discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.
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