Marit van de Warenburg | Between Remembrance and Appropriation: Transcultural circulations of Poetry and Song

Marit van de Warenburg | Between Remembrance and Appropriation: Transcultural circulations of Poetry and Song | Promotor: Prof. dr Haidee Kotze. Co-promoter: Dr Susanne Knittel | Utrecht University, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (funded by the NWO PhD in the Humanities program) | Appointment: 1 September 2022, 4 years

Cultural transmission is occurring all the time: cultural carriers circulate and are adapted to new circumstances and media and, in the form of translations, to other languages. Sometimes, however, cultural transmission is explicitly challenged. Particular reuses of pre-existing cultural carriers are then perceived as illegitimate. Think, for instance, of contemporary debates about cultural appropriation. In such debates, challenges to cultural transmission spark reflections on identity and on who can adopt what heritage. The project “Between Remembrance and Appropriation: Transcultural Circulations of Poetry and Song” analyzes such debates, reframing them in terms of the mobilization of memory. Drawing from cultural memory studies, the project illuminates how groups form different mnemonic attachments to particular cultural carriers, and how different groups subsequently negotiate what should be remembered when reusing those cultural carriers. Using specific contested transmissions of music and poetry from the last decade as a lens to explore contested transmission at large, the project comparatively analyzes transcultural circulations of spirituals and performance poetry–both genres that are closely linked to a specific tradition of African American heritage. By mapping how memory dynamics intersect with public discourse over social and racial inequalities, the project will further an understanding of the complexities of transcultural transmission and how this transmission is linked to collective memory. It integrates insights from cultural memory studies, translation studies and postcolonial theory, and combines close reading and digital corpus analysis tools to analyze the discourse and cultural forms at the heart of these transmissions.