Transnational Critique of Mass Violence and the Memory of the Environmental Impact of War
Eneken Laanes (Tallinn), 12 CET, 29 January 2026
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This seminar will approach the question of transnationalism from the perspective of memory studies, which as a discipline has been greatly challenged in recent years by the renewed wave of wars and mass violence in and around Europe. At the core of the development of memory studies in the 1980s and the 1990s was the memory of the Holocaust and Nazism in Europe. In the course of the transnationalisation of Holocaust memory and the multidirectional remembering of other histories of violence, such as slavery, European colonialism, and Stalinist repression, the transnational imperative of “never again” associated with Holocaust memory was extended to other histories of violence. However, the recent new wave of wars has shown that this imperative has failed. What would a transnational critique of violence look like at this historical moment of new mass violence against civilians?
The second part of the talk will focus on the environmental impact of new wars and mass violence, in particular in Ukraine, and on the ability of cultural and aesthetic media of memory to represent the different scales of environmental destruction. It will also highlight how new imperial wars re-member longer histories of slow imperial and colonial violence and exploitation in the region.
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Eneken Laanes is Professor of Comparative Literature and head of the research project “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures” (2025–2029) at Tallin University. Laanes’s research interests include transnational memory, contemporary transnational literature, trauma studies, post-socialist memory cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, multilingualism, visual history, and environmental history. She is the author of Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in the Post-Soviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian; Tallinn: UTKK, 2009). She has co-edited Literature and Mnemonic Migration: Remediation, Translation, and Reception (with Jessica Ortner and Tea Sindbæk Andersen, De Gruyter, 2025), as well as the special issues “Perpetrators, Collaborators and Implicated Subjects in Central and Eastern Europe” (SEEJ, 2023), “Cultural Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies, 2021), and “Entangled Cultures in the Baltic Region” (Journal of Baltic Studies, 2020). She has compiled and critically edited the letters from the Gulag by Raimond Kaugver Kirjad Sigridile. Sõjatandrilt ja vangilaagrist 1944–1949 (UTKK, 2020).
This seminar is part of the “Reclaiming Transnationalism” seminar series, co-organised by Natalya Bekhta (Tampere) within the framework of the “Young Network TransEurope” at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities & the research project “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989” (Research Council of Finland).