The “Replacement” conference includes 5 keynote talks, 36 shorter papers, an art exhibition and three film-showings: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), A Secret (Claude Miller, 2007) and 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015).

Conference at BRAKC: Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community

We gratefully acknowledge the support of BRAKC and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

Argument

In the face of changing family relations in the west, we have moved rather suddenly from one replacement series to another: one or two centuries ago, replacement children were commonplace, as child mortality often led to families naming a baby after a dead sibling; nowadays serial monogamy means that children or adults contend with others both absent and present, whether living or dead. Replacement has effects both across and within generations and signifies both unruly passion and the attrition of passions lost, exchanged or conserved.

Booking

To book your place, see https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/brakc/

Programme

NB All rooms are in 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Thursday 8 december

9-10 registration/coffee room GOR B06

10-11 1st parallels

Group 1a Opener room GOR 322

• Martina Domines Veliki Haunting children in Wordsworth and De Quincey
• Nagihan Haliloğlu Replacement & genealogy in Jane Eyre & Wide Sargasso Sea

Group 1b Family dramas room GOR 324

• Michelle Sherwin The Autobiography of a Haunting: An Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s Paradox and the Absence of Replacement
• Kelli Weston A mother’s ‘choice’: maternity and death in the shadow of cultural trauma

Group 1c Cinematic dehumanisation room GOR B06

• Georgia Panteli Artificial intelligence and synthetic humans: loss and replacement
• Sabrina Schneider The Dissolution of the Self and the Dehumanisation of Time in Bolor, by Augusto Abelaira

11-11.15 brief break

11.15-12.15 2nd parallels

Group 2a Holocaust stories room GOR 322

• Susanne Baackmann Personal Haunting and Cryptographic Writing in Recent Postmemory Work: Hans-Ulrich Teichel’s Writing of Childhood
• Shaul Bar Haim Psychoanalysis and political replacement: A micro-history of a Czech girl in the 1953 coronation events

Group 2b Cultural theory room GOR 324

• Catherine Guy-Murrell The Mater dolorosa: a figure of sorrow
• Sandra Meiri & Odeya Kohen-Raz Bodiless-Character-Films, the Replacement of ‘Object a’, and the Dynamic of Desire/Fantasy in Narrative Film

Group 2c Replacement & haunting room GOR B06

• Susan Bainbrigge Imagination and palimpsestic play in Agnès Desarthe’s Le remplaçant
• Patrizia Grimaldi-Pizzorno Gerty’s hauntology a melodrama of replacement

12.15-1.45 lunch (own arrangements)and late registrations B06

1.45-2.15 Welcome GOR B04

2.15-4.45 FILM: A Secret (Un Secret, Claude Miller, 2007) introduced by Naomi Segal room B04

Friday 9 december

• 9-9.30  registration/coffee room GOR B03

9.30-10.30 3rd parallels

Group 3a Political practice room GOR B06

• Alexandra Kokoli ‘Dying to live’: Pre-emptive Maternal Mourning in Feminist Anti-Nuclear Art Practices and Visual Cultures
• Alison Ribeiro de Menezes From Silhouettes to Ghostly Traces: Replacement and Replication in Lita Stantic’s Un muro de silencio

Group 3b Mother & daughter room GOR G04

• Jenny James Lesbian maternity & de-generational desire in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt
• Katrin Wehling-Giorgi ‘I was afraid that my mother had settled in my body’: Haunting Mothers in Goliarda Sapienza’s and Elena Ferrante’s Writings

Group 3c Law & replacement room GOR B04

• Sarah Trotter Articulating presence & managing absence: representations of replacement in European human rights law
• Sam Ashenden Who is the ‘real’ mother? Replacement, displacement, or multiplication in the contemporary politics of surrogacy

10.30-12 Keynotes: Juliet Mitchell & Naomi Tadmor room GOR B04

• Juliet Mitchell Baby no more: the toddler and its replacement sibling
• Naomi Tadmor Replacement, early modern kinship, and family life

12-1 lunch (provided) + printmakers: Replacement: Personal hauntings GOR B03

1-2 4th parallels

Group 4a Cinematic self-replacement room GOR B06

• James Brown ‘Positively the same dame!’ – replacing oneself in 1940s films
• Monika Loewy Embodying her ghost: self-replacement in Petzold’s Phoenix

Group 4b Lost boysroom GOR G04

• Olivia Noble Gunn Lost Boys in Little Eyolf
• Anthony Rudolf ‘Replacement’ or Replacement

Group 4c Musical children room GOR B04

• Silke Schauder Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Michael Jackson: the dead body at work
• Bonnie Millar Resonances of Loss and Replacement: Spouses, siblings and children in Sir Orfeo and Amis and Amiloun

2-5 FILM: Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) introduced by Laura Mulvey GOR cinema

Saturday 10 December

9.30-11 5th parallels

Group 5a Clinic & culture room GOR B04

• Liz Hughes The Replacement Child and Adoptive Experience: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
• Agnieszka Piotrowska Replacement in Stories We Tell
• Valerie Walkerdine Looking for Laura: Personal haunting and artistic research

Group 5b Spatial replacement room GOR G04

• Marija Dalbello The Metaphysics of Replacement in Text-Image Forms
• Elizabeth Watkins Cartographies of the Replaced
• Deborah Wright Rooms as Replacements for People: The Consulting Room as a Room Object

11-11.30 coffee room GOR B03

11.30-1 Keynotes Jean Owen & Naomi Segal room GOR B04

• Jean Owen Replaced mothers, bed tricks and daughters out of place
• Naomi Segal An eye for an eye or a mile to a mile: versions of replacement

1-2.30  lunch (own arrangements)

2.30-4 6th parallels

Group 6a Child cases room GOR B04

• Christine Anzieu-Premmereur Disorganization and manic defenses in a 7-year old girl after the death of a baby brother and the pathological mourning in the mother
• Jennifer Davids ‘I’ll be him for you’
• Loreta Gandolfi Truffaut’s opus as a trajectory of (ir-)replaceable children, fathers and mothers

Group 6b Death and catharsis room GOR G04

• Michael AmicoWhy is Antigone’s brother irreplaceable?
• Mary Hamer Medea, founder member of the ex-wives club
• Sarra Kassem Death and the transformative effects of mourning in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite

4-4.30 tea GOR room B03

4.30-6.30 FILM: 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015) introduced by Andrew Asibong room GOR B04

6.30-7.30 general discussion & future plans  room GOR B04

8 dinner at The Ambassadors hotel, 12 Upper Woburn Place, WC1H 0HX