From 17 to 19 June, the University of Amsterdam hosted the annual conference by the Amsterdam School for Heritage Memory and Material Culture. This year’s edition focused on “Unsettling Heritage & Memory Futures: Decolonial Trajectories between Crisis & Possibility.”
Elvira Aguilera, FPI-funded doctoral candidate of the Beyond Postmemory Project, presented her paper “Material Heritage in Palestinian Diasporic Fiction: Homes, Objects, and the Afterlives of Dispossession in Enter Ghost.” In her intervention, Aguilera focused on Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost (2023) and the prominence of materiality in Palestinian diasporic Anglophone fiction, given the cyclical practices of dispossession and erasure of Palestinian social and material structures.
Throughout her presentation, Elvira Aguilera engaged with Maldonado-Torres’ account of “coloniality of being” (i.e. the effects of colonial power relations on lived experience, language, and understanding of one’s existence) and proposed an analysis of narrative moments in which human and non-human matter intra-act and become entangled (Barad, 2007), tracing the lived and inherited experience of settler colonialism, the consequences of such coloniality of being, as well as the processes of (post)memorial navigation (Hirsch, 2012) and resistance that the characters pursue.
Elvira Aguilera introduced and analysed an excerpt from the novel, the scene in which Enter Ghost‘s protagonist visits her pre-Nakba family home, as well as recurring references to objects from the characters’ houses, showing how interactions between human and other-than-human matter co-produce memory and identity (Fox and Alldred, 2018).
By drawing on Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action and Ann Rigney’s approach to new materialisms through cultural memory studies, Aguilera’s literary analysis delves into the material traces of Palestinian heritage that “triggers memory by materialising and siting it” (De Cesari, 2019, p. 19), and it shows how these material traces as contested heritage mediate the ongoing operations of settler-colonial power.
