Autobiographical Performances of Memory

Place: Fulton 201
University of Sussex

A joint Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies and Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research event.

This three-part talk will look at performances of memory in film, writing and oral history. We examine the ways in which the narration of personal memory reveals aspects of gendered social and cultural histories from the post-war period to the UK women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s. We focus on how subjectivity is formed and performed through the construction of narratives of family history, particularly in relation to material objects – photographs, clothes, places, home movies.  Material explored includes Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012) Clothes Pegs, (Thomas, forthcoming) (an autobiographical text on class and identity as recalled through clothes) and interviews from ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project’ (a major oral history project led by Margaretta Jolly, archived at the British Library).

Presenters:

Lyn Thomas (Sussex University), Material Memories: Writing Class Migrant Identity and White Femininity
Lizzie Thynne (Sussex University), Unravelling Family Fictions
Margaretta Jolly (Sussex University), The Sound of Feminist Memory – Sisterhood and After, The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project