Rites of Return: Poetics and Politics A conference sponsored by The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY and The Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, Columbia University, 10—11 April 2008

Abstract

This conference began with a story. In her opening remarks, co-organizer Marianne Hirsch (Columbia, USA) explained the genesis of the two-day event by narrating her own journey, 10 years earlier, to her parents' hometown of what was once the Austro-Habsburg city of Czernowitz. The trip, Hirsch noted, was one she never imagined she might be able to make. Yet, she said, 'that place had ceased to exist, except in memory'. Despite or precisely because of the indeterminacy of this 'return' to a place she never really knew, the experience exerted a powerful effect. The presumed genesis of the conference, Hirsch seemed to imply, is thus no true point of origin, but might rather be best understood as a generative encounter that derives its signifi cance both from its incompleteness and its transmission. Hirsch's gesture -retracting the seeming closure of return, while offering in its place the open-endedness of narrative -proved representative of the event's interest in disenchanting return. Participants instead insisted on the self-fashioning elements of genealogical work and on the many fi ctions tangled up with 'roots'.Such self-fashioning is fl ourishing, suggested co-organizer Nancy K. Miller (CUNY, USA) in her opening remarks, at a time when archives, family histories and even physical sites possess online incarnations, and when the abundance and accessibility of such resources may incite as many genealogical quests as they answer.Several panels addressed these framing questions of indeterminate return, genealogical self-fashioning and the mediatization of memory. The panelists of the fi rst session, 'Sites of Return and the New Tourism', emphasized the importance of site-specifi city while questioning the notion of return. Focusing on spaces of extreme violence and the museums and memorials built to mark them, their refl ections collectively critiqued easy presumptions about authenticity, ownership and aura. Instead, they articulated what was effectively a joint-statement about the value of such sites as spaces of historical pedagogy.A panel on 'Rootless Nostalgia: New Roots, New Media' seemed to conclude that the concept of return need not even be tied to a physical journey, and may be most evocative